In explaining why Damian Green was not going to be prosecuted, the Director of Public Prosecutions told us much about New Labour’s corruption of the Civil Service. Not only did the information he had received not endanger national security and not endanger life, but:
“Much of it was known to others outside the civil service, for example the security industry or the Labour party or Parliament”
WHAT? That lets some very large and furry cats out of the bag. Information which was officially classified within the Home Office, and which civil servants were attempting to keep secret from you and me, even by calling in the Police, was available to the Labour Party? I can think of no instance where that would be constitutional.
We need to know urgently, which information was classified and kept secret by the Home Office but known to the Labour Party, and why.
There could be no more graphic illustration of the failure of our politicised civil service to distinguish between the interests of the state and of New Labour.
The same goes in spades for the “Security industry” – the one exponential growth area of the economy under New Labour.
Makes you wonder what the mechanisms are.
Can the “security industry” and/or the Labour Party get classified information on demand?
It sounds more like a single organisation with three names, state, Labour party, security industry, to describe its intersections with power.
The people in control no longer see a distinction between the Labour Party and the State / Government. Witness the employment of McBride as a Special Adviser paid by us rather than the Labour Party, the misuse of Government advertising / “information” budgets for essentially party-political propaganda, ex-Ministers being allowed to go straight into lucrative consultancies with PFI companies, appointment of cronies as Lords, etc. etc.
“Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.”
Craig,
You wrote about the Islamic Jihad Union (appears to be a creation of the Uzbek Security Services and the CIA) in your post of October 13, 2007 here:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/czgkd6
It seems that a current trial in Germany features the IJU as part of the prosecution case; see the Spiegel Online article of 16th April 2009 here:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/crycej
Any comments?
Is the politicisation of the civil service anything new? What about Bernard Ingham?
It’s very worrying. Get ‘your men’ in all the top jobs by hook or by crook. Then, the corruption just filters downwards. I quote DeCamp again – ‘If you can control 3 or 4 key elements of state you will own the system’. His ‘dire warning for all America’ that he made in 1993 has come true. In a few years any dissenters will probably all be carted off. I at least hope I get a prosecutor like in the ‘Sophie Scholl’ movie. A little amusement before I get thrown in a dungeon. I’ve been thinking more and more about those 60,000 anti-terrorist trainees. What the hell is going on there? We all know it is sod all to do with terrorism. They must have a motive to dream it up! As for Obama, if he is such a democrat and a saviour then why hasn’t he done anything on the Patriot Act since he came into office? Their agenda is global government, a cashless society and us being microchipped and nothing less. I bet the controllers figure out a good reason why they don’t need to be chipped though.
In all the very best totalitarian states, one of the parties of the “security industry” is run by the Party (cf. the SS and its Sicherheitsdienst and Geheime Staatspolizei in Nazi Germany) or has as one of its objectives the defence of the Party (e.g the KGB in the late unlamented USSR).
Today’s revelations just go to show how arbitrary is the official attitude to our national secrets. We have had secret documents left on a train, and secret documents carried in Downing Street for cameras to photograph.
The rules on classified documents are established, but how many people responsible for protecting the documents are following those rules? When leaks to the media occur it should at least be taken seriously, however it often turns out that these leaks are deliberate political acts.
I have reason to feel sore about this subject, because I was sentenced to a 20 year prison sentence under the Official Secrets Act for having possession of some unclassified documents, and a document marked “restricted”. This latter document I later discovered had been made obsolete 8 years before my arrest.
Why are politicians immune from the heavy-handed treatment that I received?
It seems as though the following extracts from a speech by Gerald James’s are quite accurate:
This permanent Government consists of senior civil servants, intelligence and security officers, key figures in certain city and financial institutions (including Lloyds of London), key industrialists and directors of major monopolistic companies, senior politicians….
The other area which is key to overall secret control outside Parliament is the Privy Council. It is important to note that all main members of the Cabinet become members of the Privy Council as do leaders and sometimes the deputy leaders of the opposition parties.
The Privy Council allied with the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and the Cabinet and Cabinet Intelligence Unit which is the real control over the security and intelligence services are part of the secret permanent unaccountable Government…..
We have seen from the arms to Iran, Iraq affairs, the Sandline affair and other scandals that politicians and Parliament have little or no control and are more like players in a pantomime put on for the general public and gullible public.
The roots of this sinister power are rooted in history, particularly that of the usurping Tudors. The Privy Council and secret services have developed since then and it is wrong to regard MI5 and MI6 as the sole such bodies. As Douglas Hurd told a Commons Select Committee regarding nuclear proliferation they are but two tributaries of the main stream of intelligence. The communication and eavesdropping unit GCHQ works extensively with the intelligence and security services and with those of other countries including the intelligence services and National Security Agency of USA and with the Services of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Each regularly circumvents domestic laws for the benefit of the others under programmes like “echelon” and agreements between UK and USA. Politicians and civil servants and other leading figures who get out of line can be surveyed or bugged and then threatened, blackmailed, framed up or worse.
Terror quiz for man who took photo of police car
A man was detained as a terrorist suspect for taking a photo of a police car being driven erratically across a public park.
Malcolm Sleath, who is chairman of his local park society, was stopped by two officers and told he had breached Section 44 of the Terrorism Act.
Full story,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1170374/Terror-quiz-man-took-photo-police-car.html
Unfortunately circumstances do not allow me to leave this filthy little stasi state that the UK has became.
Neil
Bernard Ingham, yes, same thing but on a MUCH smaller scale and comparatively amateur.
‘Politicians and civil servants and other leading figures who get out of line can be surveyed or bugged and then threatened, blackmailed, framed up or worse.’
Sure, and google arund to see what happened to some good American Drug Enforcement Agency operatives that tried to go public with some revelations. They got the treatment of like 80 year sentences on trumped up charges. Just imagine being them now. Sitting in a cell with your life basically over because you were honest and doing your job. Doesn’t bear thinking about. I don’t doubt we are all being monitored now. Under anti-terrorist laws of course.
As for ‘or worse’ look what happened to this guy. He was ‘framed up’ before getting it too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._O%27Neill
Yes, they sorted John O’Neill neatly: gave him a job with an office in the WTC, then blew it up.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/view/
Quoting Jaded: “Sitting in a cell with your life basically over because you were honest and doing your job. ”
There are perhaps hundreds, even thousands, of us in this same situation throughout the UK. Remember, not all gulags look alike – especially when your constituency MP happens to be a senior gvt figure.
And, if I may add Craig, this rabbit warren goes very deep. The Clapham omnibus folks would be horrified at the extent. This isn’t just about the civil service. But you already knew that 😉
Well just fancy that!
What a coincidence that that decision is finally made this week of all weeks … !
Just when they’re letting the Self-confessed Guilty-as-Hell NuLabour criminals off the hook!
No charges!
No arrests!
No offices raided!
How amazing!
What a coincidence!
What outrageous double-dealing, rule-bending, law-breaking, police- , lawyer- and politician- CRIMINALS !!!!
To what depths have they dragged our country down!
How shameful for a once-libertarian-Socialist Party to have created a surveillance State worse than the Gestapo or the Stasi.
And, don’t object.
They ARE worse than the Gestapo or the Stasi.
Just because their targets aren’t a particular race doesn’t make them any better.
How many high walls, locked gates and illuminated fences in UK are patrolled by armed guards with vicious dogs?
What goes on behind those enclosures?
Who are the victims?
Don’t bother waking up, Britain!
It’s already too late!
LEAVE while you still have the chance!
What we are experiencing is an accelerating and very sinister transformation in our political culture which has been proceeding much more rapidly and visibly since 9/11, but which has in fact been in progress for much longer. The unease which I and I am sure many others posting here feel is poignantly expressed in a fascinating and sobering book I’m currently reading ?” “They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45″ by Milton Meyer (University of Chicago Press, 1955). The author ?” an American Jew of German descent ?” spent a year in Germany shortly after WW2 endeavouring to discover why so many ordinary Germans had supported the Nazis. One of those he talked to ?” a highly educated academic ?” said:
“What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider… The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about ?” we were decent people – and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated….. by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us…..
“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted’, that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’…..must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing…..Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
“You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone…..you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
“That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father…..could never have imagined.”
Yes, I agree completely, we are already deep in ‘The Matrix’ without even realising it. That movie was a big warning to all of us, complete with hidden passport 9/11 shot that some folk with knowledge put there for us. The message for me was that we are all ‘The One’ and need to take our red pills pretty damn quick and wake up. Quite something that the same guys made ‘V For Vendetta’ which is a scenario we are rapidly heading towards.
Brilliant, anticant. It’s drip by drip. Even if it ends ‘badly’ for them and they get caught out such as the video of Ian Tomlinson, a precedent is set.
What we need is dynamic action from everybody but not action that tightens the noose round our necks. Mass peaceful demonstration at local and national level, refusal to vote next year ……..
test
One hope for liberty was introduced by Blair I believe, which was the statutory protection of whistle-blowers.
As long as it was for the public’s interest:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6106326.ece
How would Orwell sum up that secrets are good, and truth is bad, in the 1984 novel?
I wonder if it has anything to do with the apparent increase in the pejorative term ‘do-gooder’ which is bandied about by the mouth-breathers in the last year? It’s as though truth is becoming an anathema to justice; or am I being paranoid, and only hearing the things that suite my prejudices?
Never mind, our caring government can always make those nasty thoughts of reality melt away:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/blog/2007/08/longterm_memory_gets_wiped.html
I think I had the same problem Jimmy. Strange! Craig, from yesterday evening unless I cleared my browsing history and then refreshed the webpage I could not see updated posts on your blog. I’ve never had such a problem before.
Jaded
Strange that your browser should have started caching content by itself. But nothing’s impossible in my experience, and there’s usually an explanation.
CTRL+F5 in any browser does a “refresh-override-cache” in other words it goes back to the remote server for the very latest content, instead of using your local cached copy.
HTH
A depressing but unsurprising aspect of Meyer’s book is that almost all the people he talked with were unrepentant about their support for the Nazis because, although they deplored the bad things that happened [“but what could we have done about them?”], Hitler had done some good and necessary things for Germany. If he had won the war, they would still have been ardent Nazis ?” and they were all ‘nice’ people.
And that, surely, is the point. Most people, whatever their politics and however wrongly they behave, are ‘nice’ and ‘decent’ people ?” at least in their own estimation. They do what they do “for the best”. Don’t we all? Like Thatcher, they will say “There Is No Alternative”. This is the alibi for the fatuous ‘War on Terror’.
Frank Furedi ?” one of the most perceptive writers about today’s politics and society ?” says in his books “The Culture of Fear” and “Politics of Fear” that by perpetually stoking up peoples’ apprehensions, even when this is done with the best of intentions, the authorities have created a more docile and passive population over the past decade. As Daniel and Jason Freeman point out in their book “Paranoia: the 21st Century Fear”, paranoid responses are more common in society now than they used to be. Even when people are angry, and do demonstrate, they project paranoid fear on to their adversaries by demonising them and crediting them with evil intentions and powers they don’t actually have. This is very evident when you peruse the blogs, which are saturated with wild allegations, bad temper and [often childish] abuse.
What to do? I agree that a non-violent revolution is needed and I think the internet has a big role to play in this ?” as recent events demonstrate. But I strongly disagree with Ruth about not voting: a campaign to organise tactical voting in key marginals would produce a big difference in the election results.
They came for the communists and I said nothing because I am not a communist. They came for the trade unionists, and I said nothing because I am not a trade unionist. They came for the Jews, and I said nothing because I am not a Jew….then they came for me and there was no one left to speak.
anticant: “I think the internet has a big role to play in this”
But its days may be numbered, at least in its current form.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22410.htm
Some interesting comments as well.
Well that hasn’t happened yet, so let’s make the best use of it we can while it’s still there. As Burke said, evil triumphs when good people do nothing.
Anticant:
But I strongly disagree with Ruth about not voting: a campaign to organise tactical voting in key marginals would produce a big difference in the election results.
My point is that (nearly?) all parties will follow exactly the same agenda dictated to them by those who really control policy, which I believe emanates from the the inner recesses of the Privy Council.
My belief is that the UK became bankrupt in the early 90s and all sorts of illegal activities were embarked upon to rectify the situation including secretly selling arms to both sides in embargoed countries etc.
Because the economy is still and has been so fragile with the looming economic crisis the government has put in measures to restrain the population ready for deep depression to prevent civil disorder and revolution. Any government in power will be put in a position to implement repressive measures for the ‘good of all’
So I really cannot see any point in voting. Voting to me is nothing more than promoting the illusion that we live in a democracy and that is what those who control policy want us to think.
Well, Ruth, we shall just have to agree to differ. Not voting makes you even more responsible for whatever ensues – passivity is a Pontius Pilate-like choice.
I’ve voted in every general election since I was first eligible to do so in 1950. Maybe I’m fortunate in having a really excellent constituency MP who works extremely hard for everyone who seeks her help [and doesn’t claim for a second home]. As the seat may be marginal next time, I believe she deserves my personal support – especially as her main opponent will be a New Labour gravy training person [also currently an MP] who i don’t want to see back in the House.
We need to vote away from the big three. Maybe UKIP or Green. As i’ve said before the most serious problem is a lack of real citizens in this country and the system that breeds this ignorance and apathy. It might take a while, but if nothing changed UKIP and Green would eventually become like the big parties we have now. Get an alternative party in power, deal with the banks and do the ‘Education, education, education’ that Blair didn’t deliver.
‘Jaded
Strange that your browser should have started caching content by itself. But nothing’s impossible in my experience, and there’s usually an explanation.
CTRL+F5 in any browser does a “refresh-override-cache” in other words it goes back to the remote server for the very latest content, instead of using your local cached copy.
HTH’
Thanks for trying to help, but it didn’t sort my problem out. As Jimmy did a test post as well it would seem it isn’t an isolated issue.