Me 'old mate' Dr. Kim Howells

Journalist Mehidi Hasan, in his New Statesman blog of 4/11/09, wrote about former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells's 'seeing sense' in his comments about possible withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan. Howells's comments included:

'It would be better, in other words, to bring home the great majority of our fighting men and women and concentrate on using the money saved to secure our own borders, gather intelligence on terrorist activities inside Britain, expand our intelligence operations abroad, co-operate with foreign intelligence services, and counter the propaganda of those who encourage terrorism.~....Sooner rather than later a properly planned, phased withdrawal of our forces from Helmand province has to be announced. If it is an answer that serves, also, to focus the minds of those in the Kabul government who have shown such a poverty of leadership over the past seven years, then so much the better

There were 5 initial comments that followed his blog:

Jane H. Are you anti-war or pro-Taliban???
Hasan. Anti-war. Is that too difficult for you to understand?
Jane H. Easy to understand. Hard to believe.
Chris. Jane H, your comments are silly and pointless.
Martin Archer. Seems to me to be a well-reasoned few sentences of an article from Mr Hasan, Jane Harrison. When I think about the loss of the soldiers shot to death in such a treacherous way, the withdrawal that Kim Howells seems to be advocating is the only sensible course. Foreigners do not seem to be wanted by the Afghan people. Our general values have little in common with theirs and when it gets to the preciousness of kith and kin we cannot impose our 'enlightened' ways over their 'benighted' ones. Kim Howells I knew some 30 years ago, and, although people can change, I suspect that he has come to this opinion in all honesty.

(End of comments)



I was, as an apprentice compositor in the late 1970s, a student at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (CCAT), which later became Anglia Polytechnic University (where I completed a first-class honours degree in English and History as a mature student c.2000) and has since changed name again to Anglia Ruskin University. I attended, as a component of my course there, a weekly social sciences class taught by Kim Howells, who was then completing, I understand, his PhD thesis on an aspect of the S. Wales mining communities[1]. He was a laddish teacher and popular and I remember attending a party at his Cambridge flat with wine, cheese and bread and an air rifle, which he laughingly fired from his window into the curtains of the open window across the way. LOL. Kim is now the chair of Gordon Brown's Intelligence and Security Committee.



[1] Howells, K. (1979). A view from below : tradition, experience and nationalism in the South Wales coalfield, 1937-1957.