News

Perused yesterday's Guardian over breakfast, which clearly had to struggle for news fit to print.

The front page story was all about how awful it was that the Home Office was giving gift vouchers to high performing clerks working on asylum seekers. A bit tacky, but I dare say that such incentive schemes are all the rage in the private sector and certainly among the HR consultants whom government like to throw money at. And we should remember that processing asylum seekers in a messy world is always going to be a rather difficult and dirty business.

Thoughts then turned to the Lebanese with their half million Syrian refugees in a population of five million. Or something like that, a huge number relative to the numbers that we let into this country these days, particularly for a relatively poor country. But then I thought that there was something to be said for a regional containment policy, that refugees in one country should, as far as possible be dealt with or otherwise contained locally, in a country near by, rather than being shipped off to the other side of the globe, carrying their sometimes dreadful internecine disputes with them. That a region, such as the Middle East, should look after its own - in this case with the Saudis taking a considerable financial lead, maybe deferring the next tranche of golden Dreamliners until next year. To which the Lebanese might respond that you (that is to say we) exported your Jewish problem to the Middle East after the Second World War, you didn't contain that one - on which my own view remains that we missed a trick when we did not give the Jews what was until recently East Germany, with the then resident Germans being shipped west. Plenty of other population movements of comparable size at the time. A new homeland in the heart of their old - with the only snag being that I am not sure what fair compensation for the Soviets would have been, a snag not helped by their being tricky customers to deal with.

And inside a large article about whether we did or did not provide a modicum of SAS advice to the Indian government as it pondered its options for dealing with the occupation of the Golden Temple at Amritsar back in 1984. While it is not clear to me that the SAS have much track record in operations as large as this one and it is clear that the operation which eventually took place was messy and sanguinary, it does not seem unreasonable that the Indian government should cast about for a bit of advice or that we should offer some. I can see that the Indian press might make something of what is still an issue with them, but why should our own?

All this for the recently increased price of £1.60. Perhaps I had better make more excuses to pop down to Waitrose and get one free on my 'My Waitrose' card, provided that I spend more than £5 - a not inconsiderable discount, but one which does serve to get me into the habit of using the place, which is presumably the idea.