Politics

With the Labour Party Conference coming to Manchester shortly I think even a literary blog can turn a little political. Harriet Harman was interviewed on Andrew Marr's BBC show this morning, and she talked about how foreign policy was more important now to the public after having previously seen as the preserve of (I paraphrase) Queens, ambassadors and foreign secretaries. Andrew Marr, as crap as ever, failed to take her up on this. As anyone with any knowledge of anything but the most recent political history would know, the majority of crises in British government - Suez, the Falklands, Westland, the Irish Question, India - have been foreign, and Iraq is just the latest of these. Her naive popular-culture view on things, that if something's not happened in the last 6 months it doesn't count, deserved a little more robust questioning from Marr, don't you think? Needless to say, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.