Monthly archives: May 2009

Grand Day Out – Hogg Fever

 in Sleaze by | View Comments

I have had a great sleaze wheeze. The news channels are reporting that Douglas Hogg is defying Cameron over any notion that he should pay back taxpayers’ money used to maintain his country estate, complete with moat, housekeeper etc.

The public have been maintaining this property for decades. Surely that makes it a kind of National Trust property? It is a place I would love to see, as it incorporates parts of the original manor of Margaret Beaufort. She was a fascinating and extremely strong woman who knitted together the alliance that won the throne for the Tudors, whose sole claim to the throne came from her. Indeed, it is arguable she was considered a Queen in her own right.

Anyway, enough of the history. We pay for this place, so let’s go enjoy it. Who is up for a Grand Day Out at the Hogg estate in Lincolnshire? Let’s launch toy yachts on the moat, swim in the pool, picnic on the lawns and look round the house.

If you’re interested, let’s put this out in the blogosphere and see how much interest we can get. We could hire some charabancs. We have been paying for this place for years. Let’s get some use out of it!

View with comments

Who Do We Vote For?

 in The Election by | View Comments

With Euro and local elections coming up, it is tempting to not vote at all. But if we give up on democracy, the alternatives will prove much worse. So please do vote – for change.

My advice is, if you can find a candidate you know to be a good man, you should vote for him regardless of party.

For example, out of the whole country, in the Euro elections I would vote for Rupert Read in the Eastern Region of England. Rupert is an honest and hard working man with a passionate concern for the environment and for the quality of life in this country. He sees the need for a society not motivated solely by greed. He is that rare thing in modern politics – somebody who wants to serve, not to rule.

http://www.rupertread.net/

So look at who your candidates are, not what party they belong to. Give special consideration to whether you have an Independent candidate worth supporting, including some of the Jury Team. Remember people are more important than labels. I would, for example, vote for Bob Marshall Andrews or Malcolm Rifkind in any election given the chance. There are a few more of them in their parties.

Having said that, when it comes to party, this is my ranking of parties in order of preference:

1= SNP/Plaid Cymru

2 Lib Dems

3 Green

4 Respect/Solidarity/SSP

5 Libertas

6 Conservative

7 UKIP

8 Anyone Else

9= New Labour/BNP

I decided neither BNP nor New Labour deserved better than last place. The BNP is a racist party. New Labour is not, but then New Labour is a real and present danger to everybody’s civil liberties, of whatever race. When you think about it, that’s no better.

View with comments

Michael Foot

 in Sleaze by | View Comments

Michael Foot is now 95 years old. He received an unexpected blaze of media mentions last weekend when polls showed Gordon Brown had overtaken him as the “Most unpopular Labour leader ever.”

I confess to a soft spot for Michael Foot. I have only ever had one conversation with him, about Byron. His biography of Byron, “The Politics of Paradise”, is one of my favourite books.

The sad thing is that Michael Foot was perhaps the most honourable man ever to lead a major political party in this country. Foot would never have dreamed of milking his MP’s allowances, or letting anyone else do so. It is totally inconceivable that Foot would have tolerated creatures like McBride and Draper around him. he was not in politics for backstabbing and smear.

The irony is that it was Foot’s innocence of the dark arts we now deplore in politicians, that led to his extreme unpopularity. He deliberately and consciously abjured the media soundbite, in favour of the well made and complete argument that did not fit in a news bulletin. He absolutely refused image makeover. I remember very well that this came to a head when he arrived at a cold Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph wearing a duffle coat. The Murdoch press went crazy, calling it a “Donkey Jacket”. It was at the tiime as big a media sensation as the MPs expenses claims are today.

For Foot, the commemoration was just that: an act of remembrance of the fallen. He had volunteered to serve immediately on the outbreak of World War 2, but been turned down because he had weak lungs. He went to pay respects to the dead of his generation, not to show himself off. If he had worn a £2,000 cashmere coat, as Tony Blair did at the Cenotaph, he would have cut a better media figure. But he would never have thought of doing so.

I have never been a supporter of Labour. For me, Foot and his generation remained infuriatingly romantic about organised labour and blind to the abuses, bullying and fundamental lack of democracy in the trades unions. The public were not so blind, and this is why Thatcher was able to hold support for a viciously over-radical programme of closing down heavy industry to deny the unions their base.

When I look at Blair, Brown, Blears, Reid, Blunkett, Smith, Hoon, Straw and the others, it is hard to believe that less than thirty years ago their party was led by somebody as genuine, kind, genial and intellectual as Michael Foot. At least he will never again be mentioned as the “Most unpopular Labour leader”.

View with comments

Wicked Witch Flaunts Her Wealth

 in Sleaze by | View Comments

The rumbled fraudster Hazel Blears has written out a cheque for over £13,000 to the Inland Revenue to pay the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on her taxpayer-bought property. She had avoided CGT by telling the Inland Revenue it was her main residence, after getting the taxpayer to pay her mortgage on the grounds it was her second residence.

Rather peculiarly, she did not post the cheque to the Inland Revenue, but handed it to a Sky News reporter. I know she is a supporter of the privatisation of the Post Office, but this is ridiculous. Plainly this stunt is meant to improve her image. But the sight of a “Public servant” who can at the drop of a hat dash off a current account cheque for over £13,000 is deeply unedifying. For more than half her constituents, that cheque was for more than a year’s income after tax and national insurance. It was nearly three years of the state pension.

There remain some questions. There will be interest and late payment charges due to the Inland Revenue. Has she agreed the sum with them? And has she calculated the sum due correctly? At the time of the sale, the rate applicable was 40%. £13,000 would indicate it was paid on profit of £32,000. But I am told by a Commons staff source the profit was actually “significantly more” than £32,000.

View with comments

Cocaine “Good News” Simply Propaganda

 in UK Policy by | View Comments

Possibly New Labour’s most pathetic “Good news” propaganda story yet has just been shown on the BBC News, on the day that unemployment climbed over 2.2 million.

It had all the proper ingredients for a NuLab “feelgood story”, including exciting video of the Royal Navy in action, and grave looking spokesmen for the law enforcement agenices.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency announced that, due to their tremendous success in drugs interception operations, the price of cocaine in London had risen from £35,000 in December 2007 to £45,000 now – a 30% increase.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8044275.stm

Wow! Obviously all thoe video clips of Royal Navy inflatables zooming about really fill you with pride. What a tremedous success!!

Except that there is not much cocaine actually produced in Basingstoke. Cocaine comes from South America and is a commodity priced in dollars. In dollar terms the price per kilo in London has stayed almost perfectly constant on the figures given, at around 67,000 dollars.

All SOCA are measuring is the collapse of the pound, which presumably is not caused by Royal Naval operations.

Just how stupid do they thnk we are? Why is the BBC broadcasting this story based on a 100% fake premise?

View with comments

Hung By Their Own Chandeliers

 in Sleaze by | View Comments

The latest revelations on MPs’ expenses do more than make absolutely plain that the Tories are every bit as greedy as New Labour. (I am, incidentally, glad to see that after the hammering I gave them yesterday the Tory blogs have today given up their attempt to argue that Tory corruption is somehow less corrupt).

The details of Tory expenses have done a much more important job. They have stripped away any Cameron pretence that the Tories have changed, and have somehow become a party that represents ordinary British people.

Look at the details – upkeep of moats, repair of chandeliers, maintenance of country mansions, manure for the estate, taxpayer coiffured tennis lawns, taxpayer resealed private swimming pools. The Tories rail about abolishing the politics of class and envy, yet palinly their very existence is based upon the defence of the tiny class of the ultra-wealthy from which their political heart is drawn. The mist has lifted and the Tory party is starkly revealed before us in the harshest of lights, as a laager of the upper class.

New Labour may be the most squalid and self-serving of arrivistes. The horribly arrogant, bumptious and self-serving Hazel Blears is a flame haired beacon of semi educated populism, whose desire to please the masses is motivated solely by a primeval urge of personal acquisitiveness. On a one to one basis, the smugly wealthy Tories are actually nicer people to meet than New Labour. They don’t suffer from New Labour’s instinct of rigid authoritarianism to try to secure their rule and access to wealth.

But then they don’t need to.

The Tories have taken money off the taxpayer to maintain their inherited grandiosity with the same insouciance with which they used to take money from the serf. The expenses scandal, and the inability of the hoity-toity sneerers to restrain their own sense of God-given entitlement, has just given us an invaluable reminder of precisely who the Tories are.

They have been hung by their own chandeliers.

View with comments

The Breathtaking Hypocrisy of Tory Bloggers

 in Other by | View Comments

David Cameron has taken the sensible line and apologised for the tennis lawn greed of his taxpayer funded toffs.

Sadly, the Tory blogs are not on message, and are concentrating on explaining why it is OK for Tory MPs to do precisely the same things that it is wicked for Labour MPs to do. Particularly risible is their rallying around the obnoxious Michael Gove.

Gove is important to them because he is what passes for an intellectual in the modern Tory Party. He has written books. They are very slim books indeed, despite a large and well-spaced font, but nonetheless they are books. Gove is the Tories’ answer to the BNP, the respectable face of Islamophobia. His books are extended essays in well-turned prejudice.

Gove claims an expertise in Islamic radicalism despite the fact he does not know any Islamic radicals. He writes of conditions inside communities in Britain he has never met in towns he has never visited. He has never sat in a radical Madrassa in Pakistan or on a hillside in Afghanistan, but tells us what he has been told goes on there. He is a thin-faced recycler of the bigotry of others, a dupe for any apostate looking for new position, an engine to make racism respectable. Gove is a smooth-faced fascist.

Gove has “flipped” his second home. He has changed the designation of his second home between London and his constituency, and thus charged the taxpayer to furnish both. The Telegraph has exposed this.

The Tory blogs are outraged at the exposure of their idol. Iain Dale squeaks:

Fraser Nelson has the full story on Michael Gove. He is totally in the clear and if the Telegraph are suggesting otherwise then they had better have very good lawyers.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6214838&postID=1503082829110971606

I am suggesting otherwise, Iain and Michael. I don’t have a lawyer. I look forward to hearing from yours.

Tory bloggers would have us believe that Gove was “different” to the New Labour sleazebags because he was moving for genuine family reasons. Frazer Nelson has written this piece in the Spectator to explain that Gove told him the genuine reasons for his move, but unfortunately it got cut out of his piece at the time:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/3604396/gove-the-full-story.thtml

This is the exculpation on which Tory apologists are seizing to say Gove was in the clear. We have this from Dizzy Speaks:

“it may be difficult to prove that a fiddle was the intent of the switch. Especially if, like Gove, you’re on the record talking about it yonks ago because you really did move”.

http://dizzythinks.net/

Well, except he’s not on the record. It wasn’t published. We have the word of crazed ultra neo-con, and favourite Murdoch commentator, Frazer Nelson. I would take the word of Ronnie Biggs before I took the word of Frazer Nelson. On anything.

But let us look at this. Gove had an existing London residence as second home and claimed to have it furnished by the taxpayer. His family was in the constituency home in Surrey Heath. He then moved his family from Surrey Heath to his London home, and then claimed for furnishing his Surrey Heath home as his family home.

WHY?

If the family furniture came from Surrey Heath to London, why could the taxpayer purchased London furniture not just go in the other direction?

AND

If the move really was for family reasons, why should the taxpayer pick up the tab for family reasons?

AND

The news that the commute from Surrey Heath to London is too difficult, will come as news to over 10,000 of his constituents who do it every day, a great many of whom have jobs more stressed and less flexible than Gove.

It will also come as a shock to the million people working in London whose daily commute is harder than that.

I am glad that the Tory scandals have also been revealed by the Telegraph. But my main hope is that eyes on the internet will have been opened. Tory blogs have been enjoying great popularity as their party is opposing a rubbish government.

What the Gove affair demonstrates beyond doubt is that, should the Tories get in power, those trendy Tory blogs will be even more lickspittle yes-men, purveyors of excuses for the inexcusable, servile followers of uncaring leaders, than NuLab blogs are now.

View with comments

Brutus Acted Alone – Aaronovitch

 in War in Iraq by | View Comments

David Aaaronovitch’s new “conspiracy debunking” book Voodoo Histories is getting an extraordinary level of boosting by the mainstream media. Here are a few highlights from this masterly exposition:

– No government has ever done anything nasty to any of its citizens, ever, unless they were Socialists (including National Socialists) or Islamists. All other government is entirely open and secretive acts do not occur.

– All official inquiries, commissions and judicial investigations in history have been composed of entirely honourable people with no agenda to serve political masters and inspired only by a pure devotion to unalloyed truth

– There was no conspiracy to lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell did not lie and show fake photos to the Security Council. Tony Blair did not lie to Parliament. George Bush did not lie to the American public. Nobody was waterboarded into confessing to the Al-Qaida/Iraq link. The dodgy dossier on weapons of mass destruction was a figment of the imagination of socialists/Islamists/other mad people, and anyway it was all true except they have hid the WMD, so there.

– The Zinoviev letter, Roger Casement’s diaries and the Jacobite order to massacre all prisoners if they won Culloden, were all quite genuine just like the government said.

– There was no St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

– The US had no part in the overthrow of Allende.

– Patrice Lumumba just went away on holiday.

– There was no conspiracy to kill JFK, or if there was, it was the Socialists

– Anybody who ever takes a different view on any of the above is a dangerous lunatic whose views on no subject at all need to be taken seriously.

– Belief in the official narrative is the definition of sanity.

– To defend the official narrative, the establishment needs to employ fat ugly propagandists with greasy hair and incredibly bad complexions.

Oh look, so they do.

Anyway, now I’ve saved you the trouble of reading it, you can buy Murder in Samarkand and The Catholic Orangemen of Togo instead.

View with comments

On Being Happy But Anxious

 in Life by | View Comments

It is 3.42am in London and I have just left Nadira in the Labour Ward of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. The midwife estimated that baby will make an appearance in between two.and eight hours. I am not allowed to stay with Nadira, which seems peculiar, but they will call me back if anything seems imminent. Otherwise I can return at ward visiting hours at ten.

Things started over 24 hours ago, so I had very little sleep last night. I now don’t want to go to sleep unless they call and I don’t wake.

View with comments

BBC Backs Blears

 in Straw Man by | View Comments

An earnest BBC political correspondent has just assured the nation on BBC News that it was “Totally above board” for Hazel Blears to describe the same property as her second home to the Commons authorities to claim allowances, yet to the Inland Revenue as her main home to avoid Capital Gains Tax.

Doubtless this line was dictated by NuLab harridan and BBC Head of News and Current Affairs Helen Boaden. It is bad enough to have the sickening “Within the rules” mantra repeated ad nauseam by NuLab crooks. To have the BBC propaganda machine spewing out the same vomit as fact is not acceptable.

Blears is a fraudster, pure and simple.

View with comments

The Political Parties Are The Problem

 in The Election by | View Comments

I am feeling sickened by the deluge of petty greed exposed in MP’s expenses. It is like lifting a big damp stone and stepping back in revulsion at some of the multi-legged creatures squirming underneath.

Remember, these are largely the same MPs who took us into a disastrous illegal war, who fostered the climate of the Ponzi economc bubble and crash, and then voted to hand their constituents’ money to the bankers. These are the same MPs who have dismantled centuries old liberties and complacently overlooked the return of torture to our public policy.

All these things could only happen because of the degeneracy of a parliament stuffed on all sides with venal careerists and self-servers, with little or no genuine concern for the public good.

How did it happen? We get the MPs our political parties give us. The truth is that the MPs are not decided by the public, but by the party in selecting their candidate.

In 70% of British constituencies, the party selection procedure of just one party actually decides the MP, with a 95% certainty of rubber stamping by a tribal electorate. In nearly all the rest, only the chosen sons or daughters of two of the party mechanisms are offered as a realistic choice to the electorate.

It has taken the expenses scandal to bring home to the British people what should have been obvious from the appalling quality of government. The whole system is broke. The political parties simply are not producing candidates of anything like sufficient quality to sit in the Mother of Parliaments.

Anyone who thinks a simple switch from Labour to Tory will fix this, is a fool. What is needed is a bold initiative to seize the moment and break the hold of the corrupt parties on the political psychology of the nation.

A start would be a “Clean Hands” campaign to force the resignation of the most egregious crooks, and then run “Clean Hands” candidates in the by-elections. Political views would be less important than honesty, independence and good intentions. The campaign for resignations might proceed one MP at a time to concentrate resources, and combine legal and media pressure with street campaigning in the constituency.

We have to start somewhere and I suggest target number 1 should be Margaret Moran in Luton South, as a plainly indefensible case.

View with comments

The Alcoholism Con

 in Life by | View Comments

Bloggerheads is down. For a real blogger, that’s like the sun not coming up in the morning, only a great deal more serious. So I have to link to a cache. (Update – site back up, new link).

http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/05/id_like_you_to.asp

I have a very great deal of sympathy for poons and his struggle to break free from alcohol dependency.

http://howtodryout.blogspot.com/2009/04/introduction.html

Poons has realised his life had become a total mess, and I send him my genuine wishes in his brave effort to face up to it and get things together. But I do not beleive in swapping addiction to a substance with addiction to a cult of total abstinence reinforced by group sessions and silly slogans. You won’t see me posting “One day at a time” and “Follow the Twelve Steps”, like other commenters you can see on Poons blog.

And to see the great Tim Ireland posting wussy bollocks about good non-alcoholic beers, is deeply disturbing. There is no good non-alcoholic beer. Drinking it is like watching a football match without the ball.

I admire Tim’s honesty in owning up to being an alcoholic. Actually he is wrong. Part of the cult brainwashing is to convince you that you are always an alcoholic, even when like Tim you haven’t had a drink for a year.

You are not an alcoholic Tim. Alcoholics drink. You haven’t drunk for a year.

Actually I don’t think you were ever an alcoholic, whatever you think. As you know, this blog would not have existed without your help and support, and you have never not been there when I needed you, and you have never let me down. A real alcoholic would have.

I like a drink myself. I got married on Tuesday and drank eight glasses of champagne. I haven’t had a drink since. With friends in the pub I will drink four or five pints. At a dinner party I will have a couple of large whiskies followed by over a bottle of wine.

But I only drink on average on between one and two days a week.

I have drunk more. As a student, I drank every day for months on end. For long periods I drank more than Poons says he has been drinking. But when I had important work to do, or exams coming up, I would simply stop. Those many periods of student months of averaging over five pints a day would make me an alcoholic forever according to the stupid propaganda Tim has swallowed. But it didn’t. I drink when I want and stop when I want.

Poons is indeed, as Tim says, a Man of Courage for admitting and going public with his problems. But courage is not swapping a dependence on alcohol for a psychological dependence on total abstinence and the bullshit that once you are an alcoholic, you are always an alcoholic, like the religous brainwashing of original sin.

Self-reliance is having a drink when you want to and having the willpower and self-respect to stop when you want to.

I have had serious alcoholics in my family. I am not talking without experience.

All of which was said much better by Stan.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155164/?tag=Alcoholics+Anonymous.

View with comments

The BNP “Threat”

 in The Election by | View Comments

Harriet Harman’s latest wheeze is to warn us that querying MPs’ disgusting behaviour will “Play into the hands of the BNP”.

There is an excellent article on the BNP by Jeremy Seabrook in the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/bnp-european-elections-labour

It is absolutely true that under Blair the Labour Party abandoned the interests of the White Working Class. That hasn’t really changed. Bankers can have hundreds of billions from the taxpayers, but the Corus steel foundry on Tyneside can go to the wall.

Seabrook’s evocative description of “forlorn estates of liquor shops covered with chicken wire, leaky drainpipes, semi-wild dogs and tattered flags of St George ?” everything that symbolised the last gasp of a disappearing working class” immediately transported me back to canvassing in Mill Hill ward in Blackburn. There was little political downside to abandoning the “sinks”. Voter turnout among the hopeless voters of Mill Hill was down to around ten per cent. But I found the people friendly and engaging. I was frequently invited in for tea. They did not vote, not because they were stupid, but because they no longer believed it would do any good.

It was quite simply true that vastly more of the huge amount of public money which underpins the economy of Blackburn, ended up benefiting the immigant rather than the poor white community. But these essentially decent white people fully shared the strong British dislike of anything associated with fascism. The BNP only got just over 5% in Blackburn – the same as I got as an anti-war Independent.

Meanwhile, there was an incredible 29% of all votes cast by postal ballot in Blackburn. This was over twice the national average, and I believe the highest percentage in the country. As part of New Labour’s plan to maximise the value of their postal ballot vote farming through patriarchal power structures in immigrant communities, these postal ballots were by law mixed with secret ballots before counting, so it was not possible to record any discrepancy between postal and secret ballots. But I learnt from tellers that they looked to be “over 90%” for Jack Straw. (See Murder in Samarkand p. 365). That means Straw only got about 30% of secret, non-postal ballots.

These postal ballots came almost entirely from the Muslim community, and almost entirely went to Jack Straw. So he doesn’t need the white people of Mill Hill.

The mainstream parties exaggerate the electoral threat from the BNP because it is in their interest to do so. The astonishing thing is that the BNP do not have more support from the politically abandoned poor whites of this country. That is a reflection of the British people’s fundamental decency.

What is needed now is a politics of fairness and concern, of work and the dignity of labour, and which respects the values of liberty and toleration that still appeal to working class people as a fundamental part of their British heritage. The Labour Party can never again stand for that. New Labour never did. A radical political realignment is beginning to take place in the UK. How men of goodwill should try to influence that for the better is a grope in a forest rather than a march down an open road at present. I hope a track may be found soon. But getting rid of Brown, Harman, Mandelson and this terrible government is an obvious priority.

View with comments

Telegraph – Only Occasional Hit on Barn Door

 in UK Policy by | View Comments

The inane editorial staff at the Telegraph continue to throw away through poor targeting the great story they have purchased. They insist on leading on political targets who have not really done anthing wrong. Yesterday it was Gordon Brown and his cleaner. Today it was Phil Woolas and his panty-liners, which seem to cause the boys at the Telegraph some behind the bike sheds sniggering. Woolas claims he deducted the non-eligible items on the receipts from the claims. I used to do this myself – when travelling on business I would regularly submit restaurant receipts and deduct the wine on the claim form.

Given that the system is rotten and MPs were allowed food, cleaners etc which they should not have been allowed, Brown and Woolas did nothing with fraudulent intent.

The problem is that there is genuine wrongdoing here which I believe is criminal, and which the Telegraph just mixes in with the panty sniggering trivia. The morally disgusting and quite astonishingly ugly Margaret Moran is a prime example of the switching or flipping of second home to be able to claim expenses.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5298395/Margaret-Moran-Second-home-flip-paid-22500-dry-rot-bill.html

How Moran was able to claim on a second home which was neither in London nor in her constituency, I do not understand at all. But plainly her designation of a house in Southampton as her second home was purely to claim the renovation costs on an existing family property. Moran joins Jacqui Smith and Baroness Udders in the clearly criminal category, however supine Commons staff may be.

These people are self-serving scum. I am truly sick of being told on the mainsteam media that MPs are underpaid; that they are principled and talented people who could be earning much more elsewhere.

That may have once been true, but it is no longer. The vast majority of MPs are talentless career hacks. More than three quarters of them have never once voted against their party whip. Very few of them have ever had a proper job. The standard of blogging by the tiny minority who bother to keep a blog, is well below the general standard of political blogging in the UK. £68,000 is a perfectly fair reward for these drones. Some of them are more deserving of a jail cell.

View with comments

Ten Thousand New Recruits for the Taliban

 in Uncategorized by | View Comments

There has been no respite in the last five years in US bombongs killing civilians in Southern Afghanistan. The country’s legendary fierce nationalist resistance of all invaders is sufficient in itself to explain the continual heavy fighting. But the rejection of Western values is made certain, when the most obvious display of those values is the continued indiscriminate mass killing of civilians.

The 120 civilians killed by US bombs in one Afghan village this week, is what happens day in and day out. It is a slightly larger death toll that ordinary, but the most unusual feature is that it got at least a tiny, tiny bit of media coverage in the West.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hvWEqwq3CrRvaQCmt21MfoYhjZJQD9811D1G0

Meantime a humanitarian disaster is unfolding as the Pakistani army and air force boms and shells its way into the Swat Valley. This has no military value – the Taliban have left a rearguard to inflict maximum casualties, but have mostly already drifted up into the mountains. But it has displaced a million people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees today. How many have been killed by bombs and shells, we do not have any idea at present.

All of which has cemented the notion that the Pakistani government is a murderous US puppet in the minds of the inhabitants of the North of the country. The cause of the rash Pakistani Army action is US goading.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/hillary_and_pak.html#comments

We can see the massive exodus of wretched people. We cannot be sure of the civilian casualty figures; but we can be sure that this week has recruited 10,000 more fighters to the Taliban cause. That is a disaster.

Both the US bombing and the Pakistani army assault are equally products of Obama’s policy of trying to crush the discontents of Central Asia by brute force. Obama’s meeting with Zirdari and Karzai this week – two of the most corrupt men in the world – was meant to highlight his grip on the region. I fear Afghanistan and Pakistan will be the defining disaster of the Obama Presidency.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=22023

View with comments

Swatting A Fly

 in The Book by | View Comments

Charles Crawford’s continued efforts to get someone to pay attention to his dull blog continue to centre on me. He wishes to challenge me to a public debate on diplomacy and ethics.

http://charlescrawford.biz/blog.php?single=940&articleid=940

If you search YouTube you can find some 40 videos of me speaking at various places. Not one of the videos of me was posted by me. I have more invitations to speak than I can accept, and have regularly sold out some big venues like the Edinburgh Book Festival. I can’t see any videos of Charles on YouTube.

Charles’ repeated challenge is a bit like Sheringham FC challenging Manchester United to a match, and then complaining they won’t take them on.

Anyway, I suppose I had better humour the poor old chap. One should always respect one’s elders. We had better do it soon before he drops off the perch. But it is less simple than it sounds. “Diplomacy and Ethics” is, as he suggests, a fascinating theme, but any debate needs a defined subject which crystallises the area of disagreement so as to allow for clear choices, and reduce the chances of a dull dance around definitions. A debate between just two people also offers difficulties of format to make sure they really interact.

You also need a venue and an organisation. We have one kind offer, but the venue is somewhat small.

Maybe we should go for the room at the RGS where the Burton/Speke debate was arranged. Or – and this might be fun – the Locarno room at the FCO!

View with comments

What Links Expenses and Torture: New Labour’s Total Immorality.

 in UK Policy by | View Comments

It is good that details of MPs expenses have got out. I am sad if they were sold rather than leaked in the public interest, but they should have been available, unredacted, anyway.

Having said that, the Telegraph has made a massive pig’s ear of its big scoop. It majors on Gordon Brown paying his cleaner through his brother. That sounds to me unwise of Brown, but really not a huge front page story. I am not convinced Gordon Brown fiddled anything.

On the other hand, Hazel Blears changing her official second home designation three times in a year, in order to get the taxpayer to pay for furnishing all her homes, is simply crooked. As are Hoon’s multiple home arrangements. Jack Straw only paid back his “accidental” excessive claims for mortgage and council tax after the Freedom of Information Act ruling that expenses would be published. The Telegraph throws away the really crooked transactions in the odd phrase.

Straw’s expenses are particularly interesting. He has lived in a series of London government mansions ever since 1997. The taxpayer pays for his Blackburn flat, but his real home is his £1million plus Cotswolds property. Just where Straw gets all his money is an interesting question. Some real investigative journalism into Straw’s relationship with his bagman, Lord Taylor of Blackburn, and the peddling of influence for the defence industry, would be more interesting than anything the Telegraph reports today.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/more_lord_scumb.html

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/theres_good_mon.html

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/jack_straws_cor.html

But I am struck by the continued government mantra of “It was all within the rules”, which Harriet Harman is being trotted round the television studios to spout this morning. Harriet has the job because she hasn’t made dodgy claims. She is old money. Her family don’t even notice the odd £100,000.

But this idea that it is OK to stretch the rules to the limit – with no worry whether it is right or wrong – is not a minor point. It is done for advantage, so it is immoral, not amoral.

It is an issue which has been heavily on my mind since I gave evidence on ministerial complicity in torture to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights last week. Nobody except me and possibly Cranley Onslow showed any horror at torture. There was instead a discussion on the finest details of whether there was any possible way this may be declared legal, “within the rules”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF9spgagSHI

Even on an issue like torture, right and wrong seems to have disappeared completely from our national political discourse. Is it any wonder they are fiddling their expenses?

View with comments

Muslim and Other Religious Attitudes, and British Society

 in UK Policy by | View Comments

Both the Guardian and the Times have posts on Gallup’s Co-exist Index 2009.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6242313.ece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/may/07/muslims-britain-france-germany-homosexuality

The Times headline emphasises the more positive finding that Muslims in the UK identify more strongly with British institutions than do the rest of the population. The Guardian goes for the more sensational but still very important finding that British Muslims are much less socially liberal than French and German Muslims.

If you read the whole report, rather than the Gallup press release, you find many other more interesting bits of information in a worldwide survey. For example, the least tolerant (or as I would put it the most bigoted) people in the whole world are Israelis. On page 14 of the report:

Israelis are the least likely of the populations surveyed in the region to report they always treat members of other faiths with respect and are among the least likely to feel they are respected by others. They are also the least likely to agree that most religious faiths make a positive contribution to society

You can download the full report here:

http://www.muslimwestfacts.com/mwf/118249/Gallup-Coexist-Index-2009.aspx

Of course, what Gallup’s opinion survey cannot tell you is why the groups surveyed hold their opinions. But we should not pretend that the extreme intolerance of homosexuality by British muslims is not a problem.

I reject the reports attempt to distinguish between “Eros and Demos”. (p30)

Although European Muslims not only accept but also welcome the freedoms, democratic institutions, justice, and human rights that characterize their societies, their perceived lack of integration is often explained by their rejection of liberal, sexual mores. Some researchers point out that the greatest differences between Muslims and Westerners lie more in eros than demos. In other words, the Muslim-West gap rests on differences in attitudes toward sexual liberalisation and gender issues rather than democracy and governance

Here the report pulls its punches. The questions asked frame differences in terms of attitude to sexual practices. It does not ask key questions like “Should a woman have the right to vote as she wishes irrespective of the views of her husband or father?”, or “Should a wife obey her husband in all things?,” or “Should a husband’s career take precedence?”.

Those questions would be much more useful in terms of determining whether there are gender issues which stray over from the realm of Eros to the realm of Demos – and I strongly suspect there are.

One of the worst things to happen to British democracy – completely deliberately by New Labour – is the coming together of the patriarchal system of British Muslim communities with the introduction of mass postal voting. If anyone pretends that the result has not been fraud on a massive scale and the effective disenfranchisement of Muslim women and subordinate males through loss of the secret ballot, they are a complete fool. The survey does nothing to illuminate this aspect.

But it is worth noting that several other religious groups display as much intolerance as the Muslims. I don’t think you would find sexual tolerance any better among Lodon’s numerous “Charismatic” christian groups, for example.

With all those caveats, the report has year on year shown much greater coincidence between socio-gender attitudes of Muslims, compared to the rest of the population, in Germany and France than in Britain. Ghettoisation is a huge problem in the UK, but I am not sure it is any less in Germany. What France does much better than the UK is integrated education. Tony Blair’s obsession with Faith schools was a disaster on every level. In Blackburn I witnessed apartheid – all white schools within a mile of all Asian schools. The truth is that Labour have fostered separate Muslim communities for a generation as a secure vote bank. The result is a disaster for social cohesion.

UPDATE

A comment below by Jungle points out that the different ethnic background of British Muslims may be in large part responsible for the differences in attitudes to French and German Muslims, due to the preponderance of Pakistanis here.

In fact that had been my initial reaction too, but I partially rejected it for the following reason. If you look at the same survey for 2007, the results and the differences between British and European Muslims are almost identical. But the 2007 survey, unlike the 2009 survey, makes explicit that poling was carried out only in capitals – London, Paris and Berlin. Inside London itself, Britain’s Muslim community is very ethnically diverse, with for example a very large and well established Turkish and Turkish Cypriot community, a big pre-evolutionary Iranian committee etc. We almost forget they are “Muslim” because they are so Europeanised. The Gallup methodology makes plain that Turkish and Iranian were among the languages used for interviews. The fact they still did not find one British Muslim prepared to tolerate homosexuality is therefore significant – they were not only interviewing Pakistanis.

Yes, I am sure ethnic differences are a factor. But they are not the only factor; and even if they were, they would not make the attitudes any more cceptable.

View with comments