Terrific column by Nick Cohen.

As if to distract us from the thought that Kate Middleton will discover that love is a thing that can always go wrong in the House of Windsor, Buckingham Palace added a Balkan touch to its “fairy-tale wedding”. A man it called “King Constantine of the Hellenes” was in Westminster Abbey. “Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia” and one “King Simeon II of Bulgaria” were included on the guest list, too. And, as if to make Dorothy Parker’s point for her, they were joined by “King Michael I of Romania”.

But while there was a Marie of Romania – queen from 1914 to 1927 – there is no King Michael I. Greece, Bulgaria and Romania all deposed their monarchies, and even after the brutal experience of fascism and communism, no one could persuade their citizens to take them back. Meanwhile, the Palace’s “Alexander of Yugoslavia” not only has no throne, but also claims the title of a country that no longer exists except on old maps of cold war Europe.

The royal family’s willingness to ban Labour prime ministers from the wedding has already told us much about the monarchy’s ideology. After that cheap snub, I hope to hear less self-deluding babble from Labour leaders about the Windsors being “above politics”. If they cannot see that royal rule is a justification for conservatism, surely they must now realise that royals are Tories and their political opponents.

The Windsors’ decision to address deposed monarchs as if they were sovereigns rather than private citizens is, if anything, more revealing. A king is still a king in their eyes. Even if “his” people don’t want him, divine right or dead tradition gives him a presumptuous and ineradicable claim to be head of state…

Great stuff. I wondered as I read the guest list why the descendants of the Tsar had been excluded.

Interesting development.

There appears to be a purge of political Facebook groups taking place. Profiles are being deleted without warning or explanation. In the last 12 hours, Facebook has deleted around 50 sites. The UCL Occupation account is still up for the moment, but for how long we don’t know. It may well be that these groups are technically in violation of Facebook’s terms of agreement, but the timing – on the royal wedding and May day weekend – is deeply suspicious. We don’t know for certain, but this purge of online organising groups could be linked to the wider crackdown on protest by authorities in Britain. Either way, it is a scandalous abuse of power by Facebook to arbitrarily destroy online communities built up over many months and years. Ultimately, the anti-cuts movement in the UK will need to start organising through self-hosted, open source platforms to avoid reliance upon the very corporate power structures we are aiming to challenge.

The post goes on to list the Facebook accounts that have been deleted.

Just as I was reading it, an email arrived from a friend which reported that a local kid

was arrested last night in his home for ‘pre-crime’ i.e. intending to take a loudhailer to London today, and taken to the Police station in Cambridge. He’s now been transferred to the Met, . His video message (Love Police) is silly and at points barking, but must surely be filed under ‘haven’t we got more important / dangerous people whose liberty we should withdraw’.

I was about to write a post about Andrew Marr’s expressions of regret about resorting to a dubious legal method of gagging the media, but found that Charlie Beckett has expressed it better.

Like any citizen Marr had a perfect right to defend his privacy. But as a journalist he must have realised his legal actions would reduce his credibility as someone who can interrogate the powerful and famous about their personalities as well as their policies and actions.

It’s not his fault that the judges (or rather one judge in particular) has decided to extend the power of the the super-injuction to a point where corporations as well as celebs can avoid exposure. But it is his fault that he took advantage of it. (Of course, the Internet has made even the most super of injunctions a fallible tool for suppression but they still keep the facts out of the general public’s gaze – perhaps that’s why Marr was so rude about bloggers.)

Marr now admits that his actions were hypocritical, but I think it’s worse than that and that’s why he shouldn’t really be doing political interviews anymore. He is a very clever man who has written the best ‘straight’ history of British journalism we have. I hope he continues to broadcast as a presenter of programmes like Start The Week and those popular histories of Britain. But he has now lost any pretence to membership of the Pugilist Tribe.

We need people like Ian Hislop and Private Eye who are prepared to be wrong sometimes in their efforts to get to the truth. Yes, the Pugilists may act out of shallow and malicious motives. They may over-personalise attacks and get their facts wrong or out of perspective. But they are more likely to ruffle the feathers of the mighty. And critically, the best of them don’t see themselves as part of authority.

Yep. Apart from anything else, Marr has been critically weakened by this. He’s a talented and thoughtful man but there’s no way he can credibly take on slippery and evasive public figures from now on. The BBC has to drop the AM show on Sunday mornings. Or find someone with untarnished credibility to do it.

From Elliott Abrams.

Bahrain has a Shia majority (once estimated at 70 percent, but probably lower than that now due to a campaign of naturalization of foreign-born Sunnis, especially those who serve in the army and police). The current actions against the Shia community will embitter all its members and decapitate its moderate political, economic, religious, and moral leadership. Future compromises will be far more difficult, and are perhaps already impossible.

Why has the King taken this disastrous path? Clearly he has been urged and pressured to do so by his Sunni neighbors in the UAE and especially Saudi Arabia. The contempt for Shia and Shiism in Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly a key factor here, and the Saudis were concerned that an uprising by Bahraini Shia could spread across to the Shia in their own oil-rich Eastern Province. But the actions being taken in Bahrain now make it far more likely that this will be the outcome: Saudi Shia who see the Saudi government repressing Shia in Bahrain will become more, not less, embittered toward their own government. The Saudis also worried about opportunities for Iran to meddle in Bahrain and ultimately in Saudi Arabia itself. But here again, the policy being followed will only create new chances for Iran by assuring enmity and political volatility in Bahrain.

So the path being followed is disastrous. Perhaps it is not too late for outside figures to try to open a dialogue between the Government of Bahrain and the Shia community, but for that to work the King and the royal family must stop the persecution of the Shia leadership. As of now, they seem intent on crushing the Shia and eliminating all hope of a constitutional monarchy where the majority of Bahrain’s people share with the King a role in building the country’s future. If the King does not change course, he is guaranteeing a future of instability for Bahrain and may be dooming any chance that his son the Crown Prince will ever sit on the throne.

Yep. Bet the Iranians can’t believe their luck. They have such fools for enemies.

Krugman on The Austerity Delusion.

But couldn’t America still end up like Greece? Yes, of course. If investors decide that we’re a banana republic whose politicians can’t or won’t come to grips with long-term problems, they will indeed stop buying our debt. But that’s not a prospect that hinges, one way or another, on whether we punish ourselves with short-run spending cuts.

Just ask the Irish, whose government — having taken on an unsustainable debt burden by trying to bail out runaway banks — tried to reassure markets by imposing savage austerity measures on ordinary citizens. The same people urging spending cuts on America cheered. “Ireland offers an admirable lesson in fiscal responsibility,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, who said that the spending cuts had removed fears over Irish solvency and predicted rapid economic recovery.

That was in June 2009. Since then, the interest rate on Irish debt has doubled; Ireland’s unemployment rate now stands at 13.5 percent.

And then there’s the British experience. Like America, Britain is still perceived as solvent by financial markets, giving it room to pursue a strategy of jobs first, deficits later. But the government of Prime Minister David Cameron chose instead to move to immediate, unforced austerity, in the belief that private spending would more than make up for the government’s pullback. As I like to put it, the Cameron plan was based on belief that the confidence fairy would make everything all right.

But she hasn’t: British growth has stalled, and the government has marked up its deficit projections as a result.

On March 21, David Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote an interesting piece from Libya that posed the key question about all the new revolutions brewing in the Arab world: “Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it fundamentally a tribal civil war?”

Yesterday Tom Friedman tackled the question.

This is the question because there are two kinds of states in the Middle East: “real countries” with long histories in their territory and strong national identities (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran); and those that might be called “tribes with flags,” or more artificial states with boundaries drawn in sharp straight lines by pens of colonial powers that have trapped inside their borders myriad tribes and sects who not only never volunteered to live together but have never fully melded into a unified family of citizens. They are Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The tribes and sects that make up these more artificial states have long been held together by the iron fist of colonial powers, kings or military dictators. They have no real “citizens” in the modern sense. Democratic rotations in power are impossible because each tribe lives by the motto “rule or die” — either my tribe or sect is in power or we’re dead.

It is no accident that the Mideast democracy rebellions began in three of the real countries — Iran, Egypt and Tunisia — where the populations are modern, with big homogenous majorities that put nation before sect or tribe and have enough mutual trust to come together like a family: “everyone against dad.” But as these revolutions have spread to the more tribal/sectarian societies, it becomes difficult to discern where the quest for democracy stops and the desire that “my tribe take over from your tribe” begins.

Friedman’s conclusion is that most of the remaining Middle East countries are mainly tribes with flags. in which case the prospects for democracy are, well, dim. He sees the Iraq experiment as just that — an experiment to see if an artificial country created by the straight lines on an imperialist’s pen can re-engineer itself into a democracy ruled by consent. “Enabling Iraqis to write their own social contract”, he writes, “is the most important thing America did”.

It was, in fact, the most important liberal experiment in modern Arab history because it showed that even tribes with flags can, possibly, transition through sectarianism into a modern democracy. But it is still just a hope. Iraqis still have not given us the definitive answer to their key question: Is Iraq the way Iraq is because Saddam was the way Saddam was or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is: a tribalized society? All the other Arab states now hosting rebellions — Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Libya — are Iraq-like civil-wars-in-waiting. Some may get lucky and their army may play the role of the guiding hand to democracy, but don’t bet on it.

Yep.