Yearly archives: 2009

Truly Horrible

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Here is a profile of the really appalling man who has been elected in Yorkshire and Humberside to be a MEP (hat-tip to Harry’s Place).

http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/the-real-bnp/Andrew-Brons.php

It is astonishing to me that some ten per cent of any British electorate could vote for this. It makes me truly, terribly sad. It is certainly true that New Labour neglected the interests of ordinary people they took for granted, and were seen to spend more public resources on immigrant communities. That is not an entirely false perception. But the answer is to enfranchise ignored estates and help bring them into the wider community, not to turn towards fascism.

Education is also a major part of the problem, with appalling standards in failed communities and an excessively dictated curriculum that has abandoned much of the traditional liberal curriculum.

New Labour has also overseen the fruition of effectively racially segregated state schools throughout Northern England.

I have not heard even one mention of that appalling fact in all the analysis of why the BNP is making progress. Separate Catholic and Protestant schools in Northern Ireland were a main cause of bonding apart separate communities and inculcating hatred of the “other”. Forcible racial mixing in education – “bussing” – was absolutely key to the eventual success of the civil rights movements in the US. This must be tackled here.

A note on Harry’s Place, through which I found the excellent article linked above. In the post below about the EDP, the proprietor of Harry’s Place posted unpleasant personal comments about my being a manic depressive and my wife an “ex sex-worker”, which description he then justifies by saying it includes belly dancers.

Harry’s Place is a website which has an openly avowed purpose of defending the interests of the State of Israel and of US policy in the Middle East. They have every right to do that, as I have a right to disagree.

But I would make a plea to them, faced with the real problem of this rise in support for the BNP. Concentrate your fire on people who are actual racists and anti-semites. This is really not the time to attack people like me – liberals who believe that Israel has cruelly mistreated the Palestinians. We need to fight the racists together.

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The EDP

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The Eastern Daily Press – known locally as the EDP – is one of Britain’s regional newspapers with surviving real influence. It is said to be still the highest selling newspaper in Norfolk. My grandparents had the EDP delivered every day, plus the North Norfolk News on Fridays (and the Pink’Un on Saturdays). They would never have dreamt of buying a national paper.

It was founded in the mid nineteenth century by the leading Norwich families – the Colemans (of mustard fame), Jarrolds (publishers and booksellers) and the Copemans. There was another family too but their name escapes me. What the Copemans did apart from the paper I am not sure, but they ran the paper literally for generations and produced at least one great editor, Tom Copeman, an inspirational man of a radical turn of mind, In the early 1970s, Tom retired to Sheringham, where he lived three streets from us.

I think I first got to meet the retired Tom at a Third World First meeting when I was about fourteen. He was, I think, quietly amused by my strong desire for justice allied to ignorance of – well, almost everything. We formed an unlikely friendship and I used to visit him on winter’s evenings, sit on his floor,and drink his coffee, chat and learn. I would meet people who to my small world seemed extraordinarily cosmopolitan. (You will laugh at me, but when I went to Chicago at the age of 20, I was asked if I wanted some pizza, and I had never heard the word before)!

I remember Tom telling me he had been sent to Arctic Russian – Murmansk I think – to link with the White Russians and fight the bolsheviks. It had been a complete shambles; they were not equipped properly for the Arctic and casualties had been very high, despite never really working out who they were meant to fight. The terrible futility and suffering of it all had convinced him that wars should only be fought in direct self-defence.

Tom left an imprint on my political thinking which undoubtedly helped me form the broadly liberal views I have stuck with since those days. If it were not for Tom and a few others like him, I would not have been the only person to quit the FCO or security services over what the government has finally admitted is a policy of using intelligence obtained by torture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG4ey3GtbP8&feature=related

All of which I hope leads you to understand why I was a bit hurt to read this in the EDP today:

Mr Murray was appointed British ambassador to Uzbekistan at the relatively young age of 43, and was dismissed from the post in October 2004. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office denied any controversy and said it was for “operational reasons”.

He separated from his wife, with whom he has two children, after starting a relationship with an Uzbek woman whom he met while she was working as a belly dancer in a night club. She followed him when he left Uzbekistan and they married in May.

http://www.edp24.co.uk/content/edp24/news/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnline&category=News&tBrand=EDPOnline&tCategory=xDefault&itemid=NOED07%20Jun%202009%2019%3A07%3A24%3A847

I do trust that, in the interests of balance, the EDP will publish a detailed history of the love lives of all the other candidates for the last seven years.

Sadly, the EDP has become perhaps the most rabidly Conservative paper in the UK. Its coverage of the largest political demonstration the UK has ever seen was, amazingly, even more biased than that of the Sun. The EDP ran an editorial denouncing the “ragbag coalition” of people it characterised as Marxists, supporters of dictatorship, pacifists and swampies. If there are over a million of those in the country, we are in trouble.

I hope the EDP has very deep pockets, because it employs as a columnist the well known libeller, Tory Iain Dale. Dale recently admitted guilt in libelling Tom Watson MP, and cost the Mail on Sunday 350,000 pounds including all costs. I have a notion of how I might find I am able to fund my Norwich campaign…

Iain Dale is of course all over the media nowadays and has become a political force to be reckoned with. In fact, through his EDP column, we can now see what psephologists are dubbing the “Iain Dale effect” for the Tories.

The “Iain Dale effect” can be seen most clearly in North Norfolk, where Iain Dale was the Tory parliamentary candidate at the last general election. Look at the council results last Thursday for North Norfolk.

http://elections.norfolk.gov.uk/fla_index.asp

Look at that map. You can immediately see Iain Dale’s constituency. Just join up those two big yellow blocks. Against the trend in the rest of Norfolk and the rest of the region, in North Norfolk there was a swing from the Tories to the Lib Dems of seven per cent and the Lib Dems had a net gain from the Tories of four seats.

That’s the Iain Dale effect.

The Tories of North Norfolk have sensibly dumped him in favour of some fat Norwich solicitor. I do hope he turns up in Norwich North to campaign against me. Could be just the boost I need.

I can’t let that map go without congratulating Brian Hannah on his victory in Sheringham. Brian’s father Joe was my grandfather Henry Grice’s best friend. Joe taught me to cut hay with a scythe, which is much harder than it looks. I shall stop before I drown in nostalgia.

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Election Night Thoughts

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UPDATE

Depressingly, the BNP have won a seat in Yorkshire and Hmberside. Just had ten minutes of Nick Griffin on Sky News. I must say I thought Chris Bryant was very sharp in cutting through the claptrap with his question about who is allowed to join the BNP – people who, according to Griffin, “You look, you know” are “indigenous British”.

I thought William Hague spoke well against the BNP too. Except for this. Every single word Griffin said about upholding our indigenous traditions and Christian culture, and the threat of alien traditions. could have been said by the polish Law and Justice party which the Conservatives are joining in a new far right group, leaving the centre right EPP. In fact their Polish allies flaunt racism more than Griffin. I can’t understand why Hague expresses a decent horror of the British far right, but wants to ally with their European counterparts. (Happily the Tories new far right allies in Poland lost badly tonight).

Great news from Scotland – the SNP are romping away with it. Extraordinary news from Wales – the Tories got most votes. In Wales – that’s not something I thought I would ever see.

Electoral Fraud Alert 3

Following the election results on the BBC and Sky. One very interesting development. While there is a national swing against Labour of about 9%, in Leicester there is a very suspicious anomaly – a swing to Labour of about 6%, according to the BBC.

Now Leicester is exactly one of those places where New Labour carry out concentrated postal vote farming among a patriarchal South Asian community. I spoke there during the 2005 campaign in support of Yvonne Ridley, and spoke to people who had witnessed the same postal vote abuses we saw from New Labour in Blackburn.

I strongly suspect that it will prove that in Leicester the percentage of votes cast by post was extraordinarily high. If anyone has a connection to one of the parties in Leicester, maybe you can get that percentage tonight

See:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/electoral_fraud.html

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/06/new_labour_post.html#comments

We may well see several small but populous urban areas where New Labour buck the trend against them, and I confidently predict that these will directly correlate to South Asian communities plus an unusually high percentage of people voting by post.

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Election Result Prediction

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Here, from the famous back of my envelope, is my predicted result as percentage of votes cast in the UK in tonight’s Euro polls:

Conservative 29

Lib Dem 24

UKIP 17

New Labour 16

Green 6

Nationalists 4

BNP 2

Other 2

Gordon Brown has just done a triumphalist New Labour rally in Newham which was perhaps the most surrealistic thing ever to have happened in British politics. Really, deeply weird.

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The Value of Education

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I am deeply concerned that English and Welsh universities are now taken out of an education ministry and made part of Mandelson’s business and commerce ministry.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=406877&c=2

This is not just an isolated administrative ploy. It reflects an entire attitude to higher education, as valuable only in providing vocational skills for students and marketable inventions to industry.

I am Rector of Dundee University. As this is in Scotland, Dundee is not affected by the specific administrative change, but the same thinking is evident there. In applying for “New Horizons” funding we have to show measurable benefit to the economy.

The wealthiest countries in the World have great universities. It is a complex interaction – the wealth doesn’t just create universities, and universities don’t just create wealth. But economic progress is in part a by-product of learning. Which is not to say that many contributors to economic progress have not been unschooled.

To make conscious commercial linkage a requirement permeating all university life is simply philistine. It is not just that we should cherish our philosophers and expounders of literature – although cherish them we should. It is also that research driven by pure desire to acquire knowledge and understand the world, often produces the most radical results which indeed prove to have economic effects.

The following are extracts from my Rectorial installation address:

A university must be a place of stimulating intellectual debate across not only the myriad topics of academia, but on the issues of the day affecting society as a whole. The best minds must clash and spark, and students must be fully and intellectually engaged. A university must constitute a vast whirring machinery of the mind, reacting to and operating on the wider society of which it forms an integral part. It must be a place of the liveliest and best informed debate, where no subject is out of bounds, or over-respected, or immune from the heat of debate. A university must be a democratic discussion. If it is not that, it is not a university.

We must be unapologetic that a University is about much, much more than training to get a job. The over-emphasis of vocational training bedevils higher education. Of course your career is important; but you have the entire rest of your life to be a slave to it. You don’t have to start now. The student who concentrates purely on his future career leaves here equipped for only a small part of life. I learnt vastly more in discussions with people of other academic, social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds in bars and kitchens, and from private reading, than I ever did in the lecture theatre. In my formal university learning I acquired skills of logic, analysis, ordering and debate. A University Education must teach you to think, not just to stack widgets. And that is true across every one of our disciplines ?” as relevant to nurses and dentists as to lawyers.

I went on to quote at length Professor Lindsay Paterson of the Univeristy of Edinburgh:

The first premise is to insist on the emancipatory potential of intellectual, serious, theoretical and difficult learning. If secondary schools and universities are not about that, then they are barely worth having. “Relevance” is something we learn with experience, and experience can only be experienced, not taught; we cannot judge relevance unless we have already grasped the principles of a system of understanding. In particular, therefore, vocational courses are not what initial education should be about. They are about training for specific jobs. Where they are not best done on the job itself, learning from the accumulated wisdom of more experienced colleagues (whatever the line of work), they presuppose a body of theoretical knowledge and understanding that ought to be engaged with first. Practice without theory is blind.

… Second, since the building of an efficient economic system ought never to be an end in itself, but only the means to such goals as building a fair, democratic and culturally enriching society, an equally important premise has to be that programmes of general liberal education are better at preparing people for life as decent citizens than any other kind of learning. That was something which the old radicals understood well. You could make citizens for the new era of mass democracy by equipping them with the cultural capacities which the aristocratic or bourgeois ruling class had acquired through their education. Citizenship was not something to be segregated into discrete programmes, but should permeate many types of study ?” literature, history, geography, politics, science, religion.

And I then added this on the situation in my own univeristy:

I am entirely with Professor Paterson, but it is fair to say that almost all the contributions I have heard from others within the governing bodies of the University have been tending to the opposite, with an increasingly narrow vocational focus. The need for students to get a job on leaving has always been there. The lack of grants and the tuition fees paid by some of our students add to the pressures. But my generation graduated into a labour market with three and a half million unemployed and few opportunities. But the idea that our university experience should be solely about finding a job would rightly have been laughed out of court. People are marvellous things, so much more than simply machines for economic production. Indeed, I would say that is the aspect of them that has the least to do with a university.

Placing the universities in England and Wales under Mandelson devalues learning and is symptomatic of a mechanistic approach to the interaction between education and the economy, where the relationship is in truth organic. For New Labour to treat the universities as just an adjunct of commerce does not surprise me, because never have we had a less intellectually distinguished government.

This must be overturned.

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Craig Murray

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Statcounter shows me that hundreds of people in the UK are coming to this site this morning after googling “Craig Murray”. I am not sure what prompted this. When I appear on TV or publish an article in the national press, that normally brings on a spate of a few dozen. This is much bigger. Anyone have any idea what might have sparked it?

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Norwich North

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I have been coming under a lot of pressure from the Greens who want me to stand aside for them in Norwich North.

This from Norfolk Blogger:

A few lies being spread about the Norwich North By-Election

A few lies are starting to be spread to various websites and blogs which seem to be emanating from the Green Party. So it seems it is right to out these lies in to a factual context.

1) The Greens did not win the popular vote in Norwich North. They came 4th across the whole constituency which includes far more than just the four Norwich Wards.

2) Norwich North is NOT on the same boundaries as Norwich City Council. Half of Norwich North is made up from parts of Broadland District Council, an authority that has no Greens elected.

It seems that the Greens, so keen to position themselves are showing that facts shouldn’t get in the way of misleading the electorate.

http://norfolkblogger.blogspot.com/2009/06/few-lies-being-spead-about-norwich.html

That is not just fourth, it is a very distant fourth, with the Tories miles ahead. A strong independent candidate is needed to stop a simple swap of Labour for the Tories, which won’t improve anything.

I am standing to give the voters a chance to reject all the political parties and put an honest man into parliament.

I will not put my snout in the trough. I have proved I am not motivated by money by giving up an extremely lucrative career as Ambassador on principle in opposition to our complicity in torture.

I am not just a single issue candidate. The sleaze of the expenses scam is not the entire problem. It is a symptom of the situation, where we have very low quality MPs who are just hacks to party machines. These MPs were sleepwalking into the economic disaster of the unregulated casino economy and the banking crash. These MPs have voted through the wholesale erosion of our civil liberties. These MPs voted us in to an illegal and disastrous war that has increased the fundamentalist threat.

I am born and bred in Norfolk and there is hardly a lane in Cawston or Drayton I haven’t cycled down. I know the estates of Hellesdon.

I hope that we shall channel people’s resentment at the corrupt careerists who run our parliament and political systems.

We are going in Norwich North to start a movement for reform that will bring in a flood of Independents at the following general election. It’s a Norfolk movement for people power. We are going to start on Mousehold Heath working for freedom against a corrupt London, just like old Robert Kett.

Only this time, we are going to win.

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Euro Porn

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Here is a photo of something really disgusting at Silvio Berlusconi’s luxury villa.

View image

Italy is agog with the publication by El Pais in Spain of pictures of naked people during romps at Berlusconi’s villa. Personally, I find war criminals (and that is a photo of Blair on holiday in the villa) much more disgusting than naked girls. I think you would have to be pretty nuts not to realise that Berlusconi is living a dream playboy fantasy, but I don’t regard that aspect of Berlusconi as hugely harmful, except for the fact that he has been abusing state resources to subsidise it.

What is appalling is the man’s racism. He says things as Italian Prime Minister that even the BNP do not say in public. I watched him this morning on EuroNews making a European Election campaign speech. He said:

“How do I feel when I see all these non-Italians walking around Milan? When I look around Milan, I think I am in Africa!”

this kind of inflammatory racism is unacceptable from a European Union head of government, and if the EU cannot find some means of sanctioning such behaviour, then it is not an institution which brings the civilising benefits which its proponents claim.

Turnout at the EU elections has been abysmal throughout Europe, with 12% voting in Slovenia. Given that the European Parliament has – and this is a good thing – steadily increased its powers vis a vis the Commission and Council, particularly through co-decision and co-initiation, the lack of interest is alarming.

So too is the xenophobic turn of European politics. Sarkozy today effectively said “No” to Obama’s lobbying for Turkey to join the EU. Berlusconi’s racist rhetoric would not be unusual in many EU states, among parties who are going to win their national EU elections.

Still more alarming, even Berlusconi is not right wing enough for David Cameron’s Tories and they have allied themselves with some truly horrible nationalist parties from Eastern Europe.

I was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw heading the Embassy’s political and economic sections. I speak Polish. I can tell you definitively that the Kaczynski’s Law and Justice Party – the British Conservative’s now main ally in the EU parliament – consists of a large number of anti-semitic and ultra-conservative Catholic crazies of the worst kind. I actually know these people, and they are miles to the right of the BNP.

Kaczynski continually condemns anti-semitism in public. You might ask yourself why he has to do that. One prominent member of his party (and of ther Sejm) once walked out of a lunch with me in Warsaw where a girl from the Adenauer Foundation was also present, because she was Jewish. I have heard casual anti-semitism from components of Law and Justice which you would not believe.

I cannot believe the Tories are not aware of this. Chris Patten, Ken Clarke and others have been ridiculed by Tory toadies like Iain Dale for warning strongly against the Conservatives’ new European Alliance. What does it tell you about Cameron’s Tories that they do not care?

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The Most Undemocratic Government For Over A Century

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Led by Lord Mandelson, whose titles now include “First Secretary of State and Lord President of the Council”, there are now seven members of the Cabinet in the House of Lords. Gordon Brown is bringing in his unelected cronies to rule us.

This is an incredible step back in time for British democracy. It is the most Cabinet Ministers from the unelected House of Lords for over a century.

My first thought was that it was the most ministers from the House of Lords since the government of Lord Salisbury was defeated by the Liberals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil,_3rd_Marquess_of_Salisbury#Lord_Salisbury.27s_First_Government.2C_July_1885.E2.80.93February_1886

But incredibly, I am pretty sure that Gordon Brown’s government is less democratic than Lord Salisbury’s, because several of Salisbury’s ministers, like Lord Randolph Churchill and Lord Hamilton, were sons of peers and actually elected to the house of Commons. I haven’t checked it, but my suspicion is that this is the most undemocratic Cabinet since the Liberal Unionists walked out on Gladstone in the 1870s.

This really does defy belief. This is the Labour Party?

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I Am Standing in Norwich North

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There is to be a by-election in Norwich North. I shall be standing as an independent, anti-sleaze candidate.

Dr Ian Gibson was a good MP, and has done the honorable thing – unlike so many others – by standing down as an MP now. As it happens, my lifelong friend and best man, Marcus Armes, used to work as Ian Gibson’s assistant.

Norwich North is very much home ground for me. I come from just outside the constituency. I am one of the Norfolk Scots! (My father was posted to Norfolk in the RAF, married a local Shannock girl, and stayed). I was born in West Runton and went to school at Sheringham Primary and Paston. I was on the executive of the North Norfolk Liberal party in the days when that constituency stretched into Norwich, including Hellesdon. I am a lifelong Canaries fan.

I believe that parliament needs people of independent mind who try to do what is right, and who are not in it for the money. I sacrificed an extremely lucrative career as a British Ambassador, for the princiiple of opposing British government collusion with torture. I have a proven record of putting principle before money or party.

I know Norwich and its people and will always work honestly for their good.

I will live in the constituency. I will take only take the barest necessary travel expenses to help me do the job, and publish instantly any claim. I will guarantee to keep my expenses to less than 50% of the average, and hopefully still less.

The sleaze of the expenses scam is not the problem. It is just a symptom of the situation, where we have very low quality MPs who are just hacks to party machines. These MPs were sleeping into the economic disaster of the unregulated casino economy and the banking crash. These MPs have voted through the wholesale erosion of our civil liberties. These MPs voted us in to an illegal and disastrous war that has increased the fundamentalist threat.

I will be genuinely independent of any party, and work only for the interests of the people of Norwich. I will be a thinking MP.

I rather doubt that an honest man can get elected. But I think the voters deserve a choice beyond the tired old parties. So we will give it a try!

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Gobsmacking Defeat

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The media don’t quite seem to be picking up the absolutely incredible scale of the collapse in Labour’s vote. Staffordshire County Council is quite simply incredible. Previously a Labour Council, including Stoke and other big industrial areas.

New Labour have lost 30 of their 32 seats on the Council!!!!!!

http://moderngov.staffordshire.gov.uk/mgElectionResults.aspx?ID=5&V=1&RPID=653075

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Not Dead Yet

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And nor is Gordon Brown.

For the medics among you (and a lot of doctors visit this site, for some reason) I am on Coartem, Ciprolex and paracetamol. Am typing with one hand as I have a drip in the other.

Raised from my sickbed by the sound of Michael White and Fraser Nelson on Sky News. (Must get someone to move the TV so I can see them. On the other hand…) If all the mainstream media can dish up is opposing arseholes, I need to say something.

First up is to note the absolute New Labour meltdown in the local council elections. This is almost a complete wipeout. In Lincolnshire, New Labour lost 17 of its 21 seats. (Excellent Lincoln council elections website which was updated in real time all night).

http://www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/elecresultshome.asp?catid=2221

Look at the graphics. In this whole county vote, Labour fell into third place with just 11%! It is worth looking in detail at the graphics because you see that the Tories got well less than half the vote but three quarters of the seats, The Lib Dems got 19% of the vote but only five seats. A strong case for proportional representation – and a reminder why self interested Tories will fight it.

In Bristol, New Labour lost 8 of the 9 seats it was defending. Bristol elects one third of its seats a year, but the Lib Dems still managed to take overall control of the council – a good response to those who try to terrify people into voting New Labour lest they “Let the Tories in”.

Thanks to Bristol Blogger for his brilliant marathon stint.

http://thebristolblogger.wordpress.com/

In Central Bedfordshire New Labour did not win even one council seat. It is a new council, so direct comparison is difficult.

But from the three overnight counts, New Labour lost 85% of its councillors! I don’t think even the 1920’s Liberals went through this sudden a massacre.

Now to the really unpleasant subject. James Purnell. Fraser Nelson, the crazed neo-con with whom nobody in his home country agrees, praised Purnell (and Blears) in unequivocal terms as a “Great reforming social security minister”.

Purnell’s instincts towards social security were precisely those of Norman Tebbit, only mingled with less compassion. He attempted in effect to reintroduce the Victorian distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, opposition to which was one of the founding motives of the Labour Party. Like Blair, he had no left wing beliefs, but saw the takeover of a moribund Labour Party as a simple career opportunity.

John Prescott’s description of ‘Not so much a Blairite as a careerite’ is apt, except it misses the fact that the two are synonymous.

http://www.gofourth.co.uk/campaign-for-labour-not-the-leadership

There has seldom been a more obvious lie than Purnell’s claim in his resignation letter not to be interested in the leaderhip. If it were true, why say it? (Actually there was a more obvious lie, in Caroline Flint’s interview with Sky News denying that she had ever discussed with anyone giving Gordon the heave-ho. When that woman lies, she starts babbling at a quite incredible pace. I thought they were playing her at the wrong speed).

Purnell is positioning himself for a leadership election after the coming disastrous general election. The interesting thing is that very many of his Cabinet colleagues obviously think he might have a chance. A dozen of them have been interviewed (remember I have been stuck immobile listening all night) and every single one has gone out of their way to stress how much they like James Purnell, what a good friend he is, how they respect him as a minister. They have all parroted the same line, that they simply do not share his judgement in this matter – as though it were a minor difference opinion.

It is not a minor difference of opinion. With the party facing the road to oblivion, Purnell has, purely for career interest, stabbed his leader and his party in the back at the worst possible time. Ordinary Labour members, including the councillors who have virtually all lost their seats, are spitting blood at Purnell. Prescott can spit blood at Purnell because he has no further ambition. But all those cabinet ministers who are still desperately ambitious, are still being desperately nice to Purnell.

Interesting, eh?

This is another example of how MPs have failed to notice that the Westminster village is not the only place that counts. No matter how much the Woodwards and Milibands may want to suck up to Purnell, the activists will not forgive him or Blears, especially during the hard slog of opposition. And the days when New Labour’s “elite” MPs could ignore the views of their constituency activists died a month ago.

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Craig Murray Is Unwell

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No, I really am. I think it could be malaria again, which would be about the seventh time. I feel rotten and when I sat down to blog, I had some great ideas. But now I can hardly see the keyboard, and the ideas seem wrong – like the one about using cats to run COBRA. Going to bed and calling the doctor. Probably is malaria.

Will blog later today if feel better. Meanwhile here are some much better sites to look at:

http://postmanpatel.blogspot.com/

http://nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggerheads.com/

http://www.chickyog.net/

http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/

http://subrosa-blonde.blogspot.com

http://theorangepartyblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/dark-and-dangerous-hospital-pfi-con.html

Just what comes to a fevered mind so don’t be insulted by exclusion.

By popular demand, more photos of Nadira here.

http://www.bloggerheads.com/nadira/gallery.html

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Remember, Freedom Is Worth Dying For

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In the UK, we are understandably preoccupied with the fact that so many of our elected representatives are personally corrupt in terms of filling their own pockets, and appear not to be particularly distinguished or inspiring people. I actually do not believe the oft-repeated mantra that they all went into politics with good motives.

This country has been through a terrible decade. We have launched illegal wars on others, to further the economic interests of a wealthy class, and unleashed death, mutilation, poverty and grief upon millions in foreign lands. In so doing we made ourselves hated and then disliked the fear of retribution. We have substantially circumscribed our own liberties, hard won by our ancestors, and not cared because we were seduced by a dream of limitless wealth and ease. That bubble inevitably burst and proved to be based on an economic lie. Ordinary people will be paying for bailing out the extremely wealthy, for generations.

So extreme frustration is justified. But today, on the twentieth anniversary of the massacre of Tiananmen Square, we should remember that freedom is so important it is worth dying for.

That has never been a remote concept to me. I have several friends who have died struggling for democracy in Uzbekistan in the last seven years. I also still believe that the Second World War and the fight against fascism was a noble and necessary defence. Like many of my generation, there are close relatives I never got the chance to know because they gave their lives for democracy then. My mother’s only brother, for one. My grandparents never really recovered.

Today in China numerous websites, twitter, Flickr, blogger, livejournal and much else is closed down to try to prevent Chinese people from seeing any remembrance of Tiananmen. This blog was blocked there already, as it is is Uzbekistan and several other countries.

About half as many people as died at Tiananmen, died at Andijan in Uzebkistan, also massacred as they protested for democracy, just over five years ago.

When I was in Uzbekistan, the official line I was given by Jack Straw’s FCO was that Uzbekistan was following the “South East Asian Model” whereby economic liberalisation was bringing about social shifts and the development of a strong middle class, which would eventually lead to democracy. The existence of the model was not a nonsensical argument, though in Uzbekistan there was not any actual economic liberalisation, which invalidated the argument against criticising the regime.

In China there has been economic liberalisation. But precious little sign that this has led to real democratic development or even toleration of dissidence.

In those diaries, Zhao called the massacre of peaceful demonstrators at Tiananmen Square “a tragedy to shock the world”, and clearly stated it could have been averted, had any of the party leadership sided with his view that the demonstrators should be permitted to protest or otherwise be peacefully dispersed. The violent crackdown remains to this day one of the great signs that liberalization of China by trade and engagement has been a moral failure.

http://www.casavaria.com/cafesentido/2009/06/03/2891/china-still-seeks-to-hide-what-happened-at-tiananmen-square-20-years-ago-video/

The greatest sign of lack of progress over the last twenty years, is the Chinese government’s attempts even today to deny what happened at Tinananmen Square, and its Herculean efforts to prevent its population from knowing about it.

Two decades ago the air was heady, communism was tumbling everywhere, apartheid was vanishing, freedom seemed possible. We are left with a sense of ashes in the mouth. In China, the repression in Tibet and of the Muslim Uighurs – the latter a far less fashionable cause in the West – continues undiminished. But even toleration of dissent is not increasing, and there seems no end to the totalitarian desire to control what the people may know.

China may be moving towards capitalism pretty quickly. It is not even looking in the direction of political freedom.

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New Labour Postal Ballot Fraud NOW in Blackburn

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I posted recently about the monumental scale of postal ballot fraud organised by New Labour in 2005 in Blackburn.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/electoral_fraud.html

I have irrefutable evidence that this is happening again, and New Labour are engaged yet again in criminal electoral activity in Jack Straw’s constituency.

Michael Poultney, New Labour sub-agent for the North West Region Euro Election, has written to the Electoral Commission to complain that the rules governing the discarding ot torn ballots inadvertently favour the BNP.

http://www.blackburnlabour.org/blog/Torn-postal-ballots-advantage-the-BNP.html

In doing so, Poultney reveals he has been looking at the postal ballots and seeing how people voted.

I have noticed that a few postal voters have cut or torn their ballot papers only submitting the portion of each paper in line with their marked X.

But party scrutineers are specifically banned from seeing where the “marked X” is when postal ballots are opened.

The rules on this are very strict and could not be clearer. Nobody is allowed to see how the postal ballots are cast until they are counted with the others – not least because at the opening of postal ballots, they are accompanied by signed forms identifying the voter.

This is the rule on opening postal ballots. It could not possibly be clearer:

candidates and agents should not make any attempt to see how any individual ballot paper is marked, nor make any attempt to take notes on how ballot papers are marked. In any event, all ballot papers will be kept with the voting side face down and so it will not be possible to see how the postal voters have voted

http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/electoral_commission_pdf_file/0003/71661/2009-EPE-Candidates-and-Agents-GB-WEB.pdf

See Chapter 5 para 15 of the Electoral Commission’s Guide.

How then did Poultney know where the vote was on these ballot papers?

That is the law, and plainly Poultney – and very probably the Blackburn returning officer – has broken the law. I know from experience as a candidate in Blackburn that if you are not New Labour, you certainly won’t get to see how postal ballots are cast. The local returning officer is, of course, the New Labour chief executive of the New Labour borough council and the people actually opening the ballots are employees of the New Labour borough council.

Anybody who thinks that deep political corruption begins only at Westminster is a fool.

UPDATE

In response to New Labour commenters trying to defend this, look at Poultney’s letter quoted above again and read it carefully.

I have noticed that a few postal voters have cut or torn their ballot papers only submitting the portion of each paper in line with their marked X.

It is obvious that he has been looking at a number of ballot papers, and knows where the X is and that they have torn the paper in line with it – ie, rather than for example tear the paper in half a good way below their X. So he is definitely looking at who postal voters are voting for, (and not just the BNP voters). That is simply illegal – you can’t spin it away.

For goodness sake, New Labour have had Blackburn councillors jailed for postal vote fraud. The place stinks of corruption. The ex council leader, Lord Taylor of Blackburn, has just been suspended from the House of Lords for corruption. Stop acting all innocent.

UPDATE 2

Having been exposed, Poultney has now hurriedly added this lie in comments after his letter:

I have not referred to marks made by voters, only to the ‘official mark’. This is an icon at the top of the ballot to ensure that it has been printed properly. This is completely different from the marks made by voters to indicate their choice of candidate.

As lies go, that is completely unconvincing. Poulter wrote originally:

I have noticed that a few postal voters have cut or torn their ballot papers only submitting the portion of each paper in line with their marked X.

In that sentence, “their” plainly does refer to the voters, and we all know what “Their marked X” refers to on a ballot paper. On top of which, the official icon he now says he was referring to is not an X.

Michael Poultney. New Labour electoral cheat and transparent liar.

.

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PMQs A Damp Squib

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This is not one of the many blogs that gives a regular critique of PMQs. But this is an exceptional week.

I thought that Cameron’s performance was weak – well below his normal form. Interestingly, the quotes read well enough when Sky flashed them on screen, but his delivery was peculiarly hollow. Cameron today eschewed humour, which he is good at and to which Brown reacts like a bear tormented by bees. Cameron instead seemed himself unusually ponderous and his points were all obvious party ones. Brown’s divided backbenchers therefore rallied around him with instinctive tribal loyalty.

Cameron really should have used one of his questions to recite the government’s manifest failings, particularly on the economy and civil liberties. It would have given some substance to his call for an election.

Clegg was not a great deal better, though he should stick to the line that New Labour is finished and the choice is now between the Tories and Lib Dems. For the first time in a generation it sounds believable, even if greeted by yells of derision from New Labour in parliament. I strongly suspect it will seem still more believable on Monday.

Brown actually performed pretty well. It was the same old line about getting on with the job, and he was plainly uncomfortable over Darling, though he did manage to talk of him as though he were still alive. But he really gave very little impression of being under pressure and managed to put in a confident performance with no signs of ill temper. Cameron and Clegg really let him off the hook here very badly indeed.

But the overall effect of today’s PMQs was to make the theatre of parliament seem completely irrelevant to the real political drama happening at the moment.

Which is the lesson of the last month, and has to be changed if we are to be any kind of meaningful democracy.

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When Ministers Vote With Their Feet

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When Ministers vote with their feet, we should be allowed to vote with our ballots.

Gordon Brown is plainly now devoid of all moral authority, and despite the volatility of public opinion and its ever increasing tendency to be caught in waves of emotion, the coming New Labour electoral massacre will only get worse the longer he hangs on.

Hazel Blears’ announcement today is the most stunning act of treachery. The treachery to Gordon Brown is vast. She timed the announcement for just before a Prime Minister’s Questions, where everybody was already anticipating there might be one of those great parliamentary moments when it becomes clear that he no longer has the confidence of the House – and the Commons could thus recover just a tiny bit of its reputation as a democratic forum.

All Cameron has to do today is point to the New Labour benches behind Brown and open with the insouciantly delivered “Are you quite sure it is wise to show your back to those people?” Gordon will return with his leaden pre-written line about working to save the economy for hard-working families, and be lost.

Indeed, it is hard to know at present whether the nation finds the meltdown of Susan Boyle or the meltdown of Gordon Brown more fascinating. Are they perhaps related?

But Hazel Blears’ treachery is far worse than to Gordon Brown. That can be forgiven, as he was about to sack her anyway.

To announce a political resignation from the Cabinet on the very eve of a national election, is an act of betrayal of her own party so extraordinary that I really can’t think of any precedent. Here, I think the hideously ambitious right wing populist Blears may have miscalculated. A lot of New Labour activists, not to mention MEPs and councillors, who lose their seats this week, will not easily forgive her.

Becoming leader of New Labour is hopefully going to become irrelevant to government, but nonetheless that is where Blears sees her future, as witness her campaign for deputy leader. She was the most enthusiastic propagandist in the government for the “war on terror”. I found her lies to parliament on the situation in Uzbekistan especially galling, but plenty of others have reason to dislike her.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/10/hazel_blears_ma.html

Blears continually talked up the BNP, and often seemed to argue that the way to combat them was to steal their rhetorical clothes.

I do not believe for one second that Blears wishes to return to grassroots politics as she claims. But happily, I think for the rest of her life she will get what she pretends to want.

Maybe she should give up on politics and take up property speculation. Now there’s something she’s good at.

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Jacqui Smith Has Thrown In The Towel

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Given her husband’s viewing habits, I do hope she washed it first…

UPDATE

No, that joke does not mean that I believe the porn claim was the most important bad thing about Jacqui Smith. It wasn’t even the worst thing about her expenses.

I have been working more or less full time for five years now against the systematic abuse of human rights and rollback of Civil Liberties in the UK. This ultra authoritarianism was by no means initiated by Jacqui Smith, and I fear it will not in the least be changed by her departure, unless by some miracle we get Bob Marshall Andrews or Andrew Mackinlay as Home Secretary (and they are about as likely to be appointed as me).

But this news does bring some light at the end of the tunnel, in that it is plainly a symptom of New Labour’s disintegration, which is proceeding in a remarkable fashion. I think a stong part of the public mood is indeed a dislike of the over-mighty state. I remain optimistic that I will not ultimately bequeath my children a country in which liberty is disappearing, despite this terrible ten years.

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The Independent: A System of Outdoor Relief For The Idle Rich

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On the very rare occasions I see a copy of the Independent, I am always vaguely perplexed that it hasn’t gone out of business yet. Any paper that can employ Robert Fisk, but still be mind-numbingly dull, is doing everything wrong. Almost all of its journalists are third rate. Try to name off the top of your head something, not by Robert Fisk, that you first learnt of as sourced to the Independent?

But it is the truly abysmal quality of its columnists which I find positively enraging. They seem to be a collection of people the editor might have met at a social function at a minor public school in Surrey.

Bruce Anderson is the worst kind of saloon bar bore, convinced of his own authority. I am not a violent man. If Tony Blair were to walk into the room now, I would merely harangue him vigorously. But something about Anderson’s immense air of self-satisfaction leads me to wish to know just how spongey it would feel to dri ekistans-notorious-dictator-and-married-into-one-of-the-nations-wealthiest-families-but-her-bitter-divorce-could-derail-americas-war-on-terror-now-she-tells-her-story-for-the-first-time-578321.html”>http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/she-is-the-jetsetting-daughter-of-uzbekistans-notorious-dictator-and-married-into-one-of-the-nations-wealthiest-families-but-her-bitter-divorce-could-derail-americas-war-on-terror-now-she-tells-her-story-for-the-first-time-578321.html

That was just disgusting, and Dejevsky and the editor should have been sacked. What next:

” At home with Eva Braun. Is she just a misunderstood girl who bakes pretzels for the man who loves her?”

But for sheer empty-headed uselessness I give you Sarah Sands. This column is quite possibly the worst bit of writing anybody has ever actually paid for:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sarah-sands/sarah-sands-when-the-going-gets-tough-the-cheap-get-going-1693505.html

Who would think that worth publishing? Who is she shagging, or related to? What a column:

“Graduate employment is very high this year. The thing my wealthy friends do is to work for nothing for a few years, to worm their way into the company. But that might be hard for the poor. Poor dears, whay do they do? Another of my friends – did I mention he was very wealthy – hadn’t got a job, so he used some of his money to set up a language college and employ poor people as tutors. Clever him!”

“We’ve got pots of money, so my teenage son and his friends can afford villa holidays all by themselves! But villa owners won’t hire out to teenagers! That is a major social problem”.

I don’t blame Sands – she plainly can’t help being an unpleasant drivelling arsehole. But what fuckwit of an Editor thinks that is worth commissioning? Absolutely anybody can immediately find literally thousands of more interesting and apposite articles, for free, on blogs.

Finally I bring you the creepy Dominic Lawson, full time propagandist for the Security Services. This family failure had so many advantages in life, that had he the slightest hint of talent he would have been doing something more high-powered that feeding the MI6 line to a failing newspaper.

A great man of the people, our Dominic. He thinks that what people want to read about today is jolly anecdote concerning Lord Lamont quoting Winnie the Pooh at the Garrick Club:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-politics-should-be-more-like-a-gentlemens-club-not-less-1694538.html

I appeared on a Radio progamme with Lawson a few years ago. He said that he was reliably informed by government sources that I was not telling the truth and that the UK did not receive intelligence from torture. He also said that I had no evidence that the intelligence from Uzbekistan came from torture, or that the CIA was employing torture.

The British government have finally admitted they use intelligence from torture, as shown in Phillippe Sands’ and my own evidence sessions before parliament. The US government has admitted the CIA was employing torture.

It is also thus proved that Dominic Lawson is just a paid liar for the establishment.

With its clear editorial line against the Iraq War – and I should mention Joan Smith as a decent columnist – the Independent had a chance to make it. But employing a gang of rambling nutters as columnists, apparently in the interests of political balance, has destined it for the bin. I do hope that other editors will learn the lesson from the fate of the Indie, and not employ any of these idiots.

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