Our three neo-con major political parties have come up with a jolly cunning plan to lift money direct from the taxpayer, in addtion to being paid by big business to promote the interests of big business against the people.

A government inquiry is recommending that £20 million a year in public funding be given to the three neo-con parties. Is there no end to their greed? I suppose the logic is perfect – it will finally cement into our political system the monopoly of power by parties that are arrogantly unrepresentative of the will of the people, knowing that their system, above all by control of the media, locks out any alternative from competing for political power.

I write with certainty that all our three political parties are now neo-conservative, but with great sadness. The Tories became fully neo-con around 1979, New Labour around 1996 and the Lib Dems around 2010. All the parties contain still a minority of resisters, the fewer the longer they have been neo-con. So Ken Clarke is an almost entirely isolated resister in the Tory party, Jeremy Corbyn one of very few left in New Labour, while the Lib Dems still have a few Norman Bakers who have not yet been entirely corrupted by power and money, but you can see the process working on the Lib Dems like acid and their integrity will have been completely eaten through in another 18 months.

Meanwhile, there are some who don’t get it, like poor deluded old bat Polly Toynbee, who still has not worked out that New Labour went neo-con. Yesterday’s Toynbee article has the headline: “Executive pay soars while the young poor face freefall. Where is Labour?” You are a fool, Toynbee. The ex-ministers of the last New Labour government are in the boardroom picking up those massive remunerations and perks you are rightly complaining about. Did you really not know that, or do you just refuse to see?

New Labour is now neo-con, Toynbee. It is fifteen years since Peter Mandelson said that “New Labour is intensely relaxed about the filty rich.” Mandelson and Blair and Hewitt and Jowell and Milburn and Burnham and Reid and Blunkett and the whole lot of them are now filthy rich. Somebody explain this to Toynbee.

But it is an extremely important point that I did not see a single mainstream politician yesterday questioning the obscenity of directors’ earnings rising over 49% last year – from a huge base – when average real incomes were falling. The media was packed with apologists explaining trickledown theory to us. I also noted that the Occupy movement needs to beware of the media appearing to give them coverage, when in fact the media are deliberately picking on people whose hearts, instincts and minds are all in the right place, but who lack media experience and formal education in the ground on which the media places them. The media can then give the impression of debate with the cards severely stacked, to make the view that in fact the large majority of those at home will hold, that executive salaries are obscene and untenable, appear amateur and ill-informed.

The parties do not represent us and their collective membership is falling, as they are now a vehicle for career rather than belief. No wonder they want to pick our pockets to keep up the pretence of democracy.

With impeccable timing, today we have official US government statistics saying that the top 1% of the US population have 17% of the take-home earnings. Their share has more than doubled from under 8% in 1979.

This vast gap between rich and poor, and rich and middling, has expanded fast and is now expanding exponentially faster. I have no doubt figures for the UK would show the same trend.

It also made me think nostalgically of the 7/84 Company and the play they made famous: The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black Black Oil. It had a massive effect on my teenage political consciousness when I saw it on the BBC in June 1974. There is absolutely no way the BBC would ever broadcast such a radical piece now, let alone to a prime time BBC 1 audience.

If anyone needed convincing that they should offer the Occupy protestors full and unconditional support, all doubts should be set aside by the stunning news that the average earnings rise of directors of major companies is 49%.

There is a massive squeeze at present on the living standards of ordinary people, with unemployment rising, inflation rising and salary increases substantially below inflation, plus a whole series of tax increases. Despite the mainstream media, pretty well everybody now understands that this is because their money is being paid straight into the pockets of fatcat bankers by the government. The bankers has already shown they were going to spit in our faces by maintaining the massive incomes of their executives, even at loss makers like UBS.

Those who argue that it should be left up to the shareholders to determine executive salaries are missing the point. The shareholders are, overwhelmingly, other institutions whose executives also benefit from this culture of sickeningly excessive reward, in an orgy of mutually reinforced looting.

What is so striking about this is the absolute fearlessness, the total arrogance of the 1%, safe in their control of the politicians and the power of the state. They seem to think they can trample on the little people forever, with impunity. We are approaching a stage where these people are becoming totally isolated from any bond of communality which holds together a society; are becoming in short the open enemies of the people.

They may find eventually this was not such a wise move, but for now they are so drowned in material consumption they really do not care.

One of the ways I stop myself getting over-depressed in periods whent I am skint is to make plans for what I will do with money when I have some. At the moment I am looking at mounting solar panels on my roof.

I intend to put up 12 panels producing 3000 kWh per year, at an initial cost of about £7,000. This will produce an income based on the feed-in tariff of about £750, index linked, on official statistics, and probably a little more as Ramsgate is one of the sunniest part of England, and my roof faces perfectly South with a 32 degree pitch. This works well for me as a personal investment – hard to get an index-linked and safe return over 10% nowadays.

This is of course because the feed-in tariff, at over 40p per kw/h is far greater than the current economic cost of generation (the gas turbine power station we have just built in Ghana, for example, produces at a full cost of about 10p per kw/h).

BUT we are going to produce ourselves over half the electricity we use. What is more a whole new industry has been kick-started. In getting quotes I have been besieged by local firms, all based within a few miles from here. That is an awful lot of people employed, paying tax and not claiming benefits. With this artificial stimulation of demand, the price of solar panel installations has plummeted as production savings kick in. In three years the cost per kw/h has halved. I will not be surprised if it halves again. As fossil fuel costs continue to rise, this will become a fully economic way to produce electricity. The kick-starting of that process by the feed-in tariff is a rare example of the government creatively stimulating the economy to promote economic growth and employment.

The government has put countless billions in bailouts and guarantees into propping up rich bankers and protecting them from the consequences of their uselessness at their job. Quantitive easing has given them a further £225 billion. Think of this. That £225 billion has been used to subsidise useless bankers by giving them good money in return for junk assets they had invested in. Not a single penny has found its way to anybody else but a banker, as increased bank lending has not happened.

Quantitive Easing has been described by paid apologists of the 1% as neo-Keynesianism, reflating the economy. Utter bollocks. It is a transfer of wealth to rich bankers, paid for by everybody else as high inflation. But what if the £225 billion created by quantitive easing had really been used in a Keynesian way, for public works?

What if it had been used to insulate everybody’s home, to give everybody solar panels, micro wind turbines, and heat pumps? What employment and growth would have been created then? What if we had built high speed railways and the Severn barrage?

No – they just gave the cash to the fatcat bankers. The solar feed-in tariff is the only measure of government economic stimulation I can think of. The Conservatives wish now to abandon it, on ideological grounds.

Canon Dr Giles Fraser is being forced from his job for the dreadful sin of actually acting as a Christian.

I was sent this recently; different church, same shit.

I am some kind of confused deist myself. I was recently told what I am sure is an old joke, but it struck me as very true:

God looked down at the sufferings of man, turned to the Devil, and said: “The plight of man moves me to compassion. I will send them Religion for consolation.”
“Good idea,” said the Devil, “I’ll organise it.”

I am not blogging about the EU summit. It is pointless. It will of course produce a communique to reassure the markets. It makes no difference.

The economic system in which most of our readers live is little to do with capitalism. The value of goods traded is an insignificant fraction of the flow of funds around the world, much of which relates to either bets on the future values of goods, or bets on the consequences of the vectors of financial flows of which the bets themselves are a part.

The whole edifice is based not on a market for exchange of goods and concrete services, but on an astonishing matrix of state enforced legal instruments creating an extraordinary pile of paper money produced by states, but ultimately worth nothing real. This legal framework was designed to shift the great bulk of this wealth from people who actually work for a living to a small financial elite, most (but not all) of whom create little or nothing real.

If the state compelled everyone to play a pyramid scheme, then you could keep it going for decades. As the system started to reach inevitable collapse, the state moved in with bank bailouts and quantitive easing, both of which simply moved yet more money from ordinary people to the super-rich. In fact the last three years have seen the biggest transfer of resources from poor to rich in human history.

It cannot last, and whether it is Greece or Italy or Spain which is this week’s fashionable media focus is irrelevant. In making these vast levied and leveraged transfers of resources from poor to rich, states have exhausted the capacity of their people to actually pay them. That is true all over Europe, the UK and US. The currency crises are a tiny symptom of a very large impending crash.

That is why I am not blogging about today’s EU meeting or a specific statement of the US Federal Bank Chairman. They are all pissing into the wind that is shortly to be a tornado. I expect before I die I will see a genuine social revolution. I expect that, as always happens, middle class liberals like me will start by being elated by it, and end up being shot by those who seize on the change, to take their turn to use the power of the state to corner resources for themselves.

It is five days now since Nina and Mikel Malyshev were “disappeared” – I have no doubt by the Uzbek security services – during their deportation to Uzbekistan by the UK Border Agency.

I had hoped that they would be detained for a couple of days and then released after signing a confession that they had been misled by evil people like me and that President Karimov was the great father of his nation. But unfortunately this is now looking far more sinister, particularly as we know that they were taken past passport control at the airport without their arrival being registered. I fear they may have simply disappeared forever and the Uzbek government will deny all knowledge they ever arrived.

The British government denies all responsibility. This from the UK border agency, who sent them back to Karimov:

“These individuals were removed on Friday after they refused to leave voluntarily. “The UK Border Agency carefully considered their cases and several different judges agreed in the courts that they did not need the UK’s protection.”

The British Embassy in Tashkent have told the family they have no responsibility for the Malyshevs.

The UK Border Agency deported the Malyshevs on 21 October. At 6am on 22 October they phoned their relatives in Port Talbot to say that they were alright, they had been met at the plane by a representative of the British Embassy and escorted through the airport, bypassing passport control, security checks and customs. They expected to be put on a bus to their former home in Zarafshan. They never arrived in Zarafshan and have disappeared. The British Embassy say they did not send anybody to the airport to meet them.

The fake British official was without doubt from the Uzbek security services. Nobody else could get airside at Tashkent – including, incidentally, the British Embassy who do not have airside access.

I gave written evidence to the Malyshevs’ asylum appeal. I specifically stated that if deported the Malyshevs would be picked up at the airport by the security services. The Home Office stated this was not true, and my knowledge was out of date.

It is not acceptable for the British government knowingly to deport people to probable torture in Uzbekistan, and then refuse to find out what happens to them. The government refuses to check up on the Malyshevs’ fate partly because it does not care what happens to them, and partly because it wants to continue to claim there is no problem and continue to deport others to Karimov.

Please raise this with any group you know, and get as many people as possible to write to their MPs. Amnesty members try to get them involved. Please repost this as widely as possible on the web. The Malyshevs may still be alive in a cell or gulag. We need to find them.

UPDATE

Mikel Malyshev has just phoned his sister – so the good news is that he is alive. But he did not appear able to talk freely and when asked if he was OK replied “Yes and No”. He was not alone – other voices could be heard – and seemed very nervous. He was not with Nina and could or would not say where she was.

Gus O’Donnell’s report deliberately omitted evidence that Werritty and Fox were scheming with British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould to prepare the diplomatic ground for a military attack on Iran.

O’Donnell listed two meetings between Fox, Werritty and Gould. But he left out a key meeting of the three, before Fox became Secretary of State for Defence, while Fox was still in opposition. The fact that the three had met before casts a whole new light on their three subsequent meetings, of which O’Donnell mentions only two.

This is what O’Donnell says of one Gould/Fox/Werritty meeting, in para 6 of his report:

This leaves a meeting between Dr Fox and Matthew Gould, the then UK Ambassador Designate to Israel in September 2010. I understand that this was a general discussion of international defence and security matters to enable Mr
Gould better to understand MOD’s perspective of the security situation in the Middle East. Mr Werritty was invited to attend as an individual with some experience in these matters. As a private citizen, however, with no official locus, it was not appropriate for Mr Werritty to have attended this meeting. Dr Fox has since acknowledged this.

It is a lie by omission for O’Donnell to leave out the fact that the three had met up before. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has refused to answer the following questions:

When and where did Gould meet Fox and Werrity while Fox was shadow Defence Secretary?
What position did Gould hold at the time?
There are very strict protocols for officials meeting and briefing opposition front bench spokesmen. Were they met?
In what capacity was Werritty there?
What was discussed and was the meeting minuted?

This is the FCO’s official response to my questions:

Mr Gould’s meeting with the Defence Secretary was arranged by his office as part of his pre-posting briefing calls. Mr Gould was not aware of likely attendance at that meeting in advance; nor does he recall the nature of any introductions made.

As noted in the Cabinet Secretary’s recent report, this was a general discussion of international defence and security matters to enable Mr Gould better to understand MoD’s perspective of the security situation in the Middle East. No classified material was discussed at this meeting.

We are not aware of any record of the meeting having been taken. This is quite normal for routine pre-posting meetings of this kind.

Mr Werritty was also present at an earlier meeting Mr Gould had with Dr Fox in the latter’s capacity as shadow Defence Secretary.

The conference which both Mr Gould and Mr Werritty attended in Israel in February this year was the latest in the series of annual Herzliya Conferences. A programme and other documents related to the conference can be found on the Herzliya Conference website. As noted in the Cabinet Secretary’s report, Mr Gould also attended a private dinner with the Defence Secretary, Mr Werritty and senior Israelis in the margins of that conference, at which there was a general discussion of international affairs.

Why were the facts in bold omitted from Gus O’Donnell’s report?

The programme is worth looking at: nobody could accuse the Herzilya conference of balance in its agenda or its participation.

But to return to the detail. The FCO is quite wrong to describe Gould’s meeting with Fox as a “routine pre-posting briefing meeting.” This is in fact another deliberate lie. Brieifngs for even the most senior Ambassadors on their pre-posting briefing tours are not normally at Secretary of State level. Liam Fox did not meet any other British Ambassadors to give them pre-posting briefing. And when an Ambassador does call on the Secretary of State for Defence, there would always be a private secretary in attendance in case any action points arise. Not only was there no private secretary, but I am told by an inside source this meeting was not in Fox’s office but in the MOD dining room.

Not a “routine pre-posting briefing meeting” at all then.

O’Donnell omits the Herzilya Conference but includes the dinner. Again, what O’Donnell says is quite extraordinary to any FCO insider:

6 February in Tel Aviv. This was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK Ambassador was present.

The idea that the Secretary of State for Defence can have, together with the British Ambassador to a country, a “Private dinner” with officials of that country is just plain nonsense. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office refuse to say who the “Senior Israelis” with Fox, Gould and Werritty were. They also refuse to say who paid for that dinner.

My information is that the reason that dinner is characterised as “Private” is that it included senior Israeli military and Mossad representatives and that the subject of discussion was preparing the diplomatic ground for a military attack on Iran.

Matthew Gould is British Ambassador. He represents this country at all times and every utterance he makes on diplomatic or policy questions to an official of his host country is “official”. We are entitled to know:

Who paid for the dinner?
Which senior Israelis were at that dinner in Israel on 6 February 2011 with Gould, Fox and Werritty?
What was discussed?

O’Donnell omits the fact that Gould, Fox and Werritty were plotting from before Fox became Secretary of State. O’Donnell mentions only two of the four meetings between all three that we know about. He separates those two meetings by seven paragraphs, does not mention Gould by name at the second reference, and gives deliberately false characterisations of those meetings. This is misdirection on an epic scale.

Werritty visited Iran to meet opposition groups while Gould was serving in the Embassy there. Atlantic Bridge, the Fox-Werritty fake charity, was operating in the US when Gould was serving in the British Embassy in Washington with specific responsibility for US-Iranian relations.

Both O’Donnell and the FCO have listed only meetings at which Fox, Gould and Werritty were all three present. They have refused to say how many times Gould met Werritty without Fox, or how many telephone conversations or written or electronic communications there have been between Gould and Werritty.

I started this investigation on a tip-off. The FCO’s confirmation that Gould met Werritty and Fox while Fox was still in opposition confirms that some of what my informant says is true. An overwhelming mass of circumstantial evidence and the government’s lies, misleading statements and refusal to clarify some very simple facts, leaves me convinced that the truth has been found.

Werritty received such large amounts of Zionist lobby funding because he was, with Fox, promoting an attack on Iran – an agenda in which Matthew Gould had got himself wrapped.

Mikel and Nina Malyshev were deported back to Uzbekistan on Friday evening. At 6am Saturday morning they telephoned relatives and said that they were met in Tashkent at the plane steps by a representative of the British Embassy, who escorted them from the airport, bypassing passport control and security checks. They were about to be put on a bus to their former home in Zarafshan.

But they never arrived in Zarafshan and there has been no word of them since. The British Embassy say categorically they did not send any representative to meet the plane. That fake British Embassy representative was almost certainly from the Uzbek security services.

I gave written evidence to their asylum appeal stating that any returned asylum seeker would be picked up by the security services at the airport and be in extreme danger. The Home Office told the court this was not true and there were no human rights problems in Uzbekistan. The court accepted the Home Office view.

Having callously deported the Malyshevs to join the lists of the “disappeared” in Uzbekistan, the British government now repudiates any further interest in their fate. The British Embassy in Tashkent has told their relatives in Wales that they are Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and not their responsibility.

The truth is the British government knew perfectly well what would happen to the Malyshevs, and was lying to the court in saying that this would not happen. The coldblooded brutality of the government’s behaviour is stunning. President Karimov’s support for NATO operations in Afghanistan is placed at a far higher value than human life.

The barefaced lie about Gadaffi being killed in the crossfire bodes ill for the openness, transparency and good government we can expect to see now in Libya. But today I am worrying about the effect on our society of human death as entertainment. I have never been an apologist for Gadaffi, but if his regime tortured and murdered, the remedy is not to torture and murder him – even the Nazis were given due process.

This murder is becoming the norm. It was a NATO air strike which took out Gadaffi’s escaping convoy and first wounded him. Two days ago two teenage sons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical US/Yemeni cleric executed without trial last week, were executed by a US drone attack as they had dinner. They were aged 16 and 19. They had committed no crime I can find alleged against them. There has been no publicity.

All this killing brings triumphalist politicians smirking on our screens. We seem to have become as dehumanised as ancient Rome. Little human pity is expressed for the way Gadaffi was killed – indeed there is notably less media reflection of pity or revulsion than there was at the (at least judicial) hanging of Saddam Hussein. Is that a measure of the descent into bloodlust barbarism in our society? The complete lack of empathy towards the traveller families being torn from their homes at Dale Farm is part of the same brutalism towards “the other”. Why don’t we go the whole way and have them eaten by lions in the ring?

History shows that bloody appetite once aroused feeds upon itself. We have already had Defence Secretary Hammond on Sky News today positing NATO action now against Syria, while the current US proto-pretext for attacking Iran – the fantasy plot against the Saudi Ambassador – is as believable as Gadaffi’s death in the crossfire.

More death is on the way, to keep the circus going. Then the crowds may not notice there is no bread – no jobs, and their earnings and income eaten up by huge state enforced transfers to the bankers, whether by bailouts or “quantitive easing”.

Quantitive Easing is the best con of all for the ruling classes. In the UK, the £225 billion of printed money to date under quantitive easing has been – every single penny – given to the bankers. Good money for bad, used to buy up the junk bonds which the bankers bought in their terrible investment decision making, and for which fake assets they had awarded themselves many, many billions in personal bonuses. They are rescued from the consequences of their disastrous judgements by the Bank of England printing (in old parlance) new, good money to buy the rubbish they invested in. The result – more rounds of huge personal bonuses for celebrating bankers!! Hooray!!! For you and I, stagflation.

30 months ago, when I explained that Q.E. was another huge transfer to the bankers and predicted it would lead to stagflation, I was widely ridiculed across the web. Now we have the stagflation and everything I predicted has come to pass.

All of which you would normally expect to make people pretty unhappy at the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.

Quick! More War! More Militarism! More Blood! More Executions! More Victory for Democracy! Keep the Peasants Happy!
Get a Move On There! Come On!! Come On!! More Blood!! More Blood, Quick, Damn You!!

UPDATE

You are not alone. On the average of the last three hours, 900 people per hour were reading this article and fifty others are at this moment reading this, invisibly alongside you. Those who understand what is happening are not given a mainstream media or political voice, but we are more than you may think. Don’t feel alone in your perception of the tricks of those who govern us, and leave a comment so we can start to feel each other’s support.

NATO were wrong to bomb Libya and kill so many, but that does not make Gadaffi a good guy. He was not – he was cruel, avaricious, and a dictator and really was mentally unbalanced – I speak as someone who met him.

What I now hope for is that civil war ends in Libya and in short order there are genuinely free and fair elections, in which all who wish may participate, to elect the government the Libyan people want. I hope that NATO country interference in Libya now ends and that no commitments are made over Libya’s mineral resources until an elected government is in place to make them.

But I fear that future NATO power interference, starting with the elections, will be less obvious than the mass killings, but in the end even more damaging, and that Libya’s resources and its finance will be handed over to the big corporations lock, stock and barrel. Those who trumpet this as a triumph of “Liberal intervention” are going to have to show a great deal of progress very quickly, if they claim it outweighs the many civilians NATO killed in Sirte and elsewhere – if you believe such a stark utilitarian equation of dead children for democracy can ever have validity.

Mikel and Nina Malyshev’s family have been told by the UK Border Agency that they have been moved from Yarls Wood to an undisclosed location before deportation to Uzbekistan tomorrow. The UK government continues to refuse to acknowledge the terrible human rights situation in Uzbekistan in general, or the fate that awaits the Malyshevs in particular. No reply has to date been received to a fax to the European Court of Human Rights asking for a suspension.

Please take action – contact your MP, and contact William Hague and Teresa May. The UK government cannot be allowed to continue to pretend that it does not know about the human rights situation in Uzbekistan.

Please repost this and my appeal yesterday on any website on which you can.

UPDATE

Could someone kindly give Amnesty International a call and see if they will urgently contact the British government on this one? They have run cases recently against Uzbeks being deported back from the Ukraine and from Kazakhstan. I have to dash to a meeting on another asylum case.

Atlantic Bridge’s web presence has disappeared, as has the Charity Commission’s report on it when it had its charitable status removed. Indeed it has proved rather hard to glean information on this Fox/Werritty vehicle: it seems that William Hague was a member as were, according to Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donell, not just Fox but the two junior defence ministers Werritty met. So this shady fake charity with undisclosed finance sources really was running British foreign and defence policy.

With thanks to my informant, it appears the domain for the Atlantic Bridge website was listed to a Mr Michael Pearsall of 15 Broomfields, Longfield, Kent DA3 8BW. Now what can anybody tell me about him? The contact email for the site registration was [email protected]. Presumably that email address relates to Fox’s portfolio of health before he was switched to defence? If he didn’t make any money from his worngdoing, isn’t it strange how these business consultancies and donation seeking organisations linked to him reflected his official portfolio at the time?

So Michael Pearsall, Peter Stock and ukhealthgroup.com. Let’s get digging!!

Further involvement of the British state in the callous ruining of lives today. Mikel and Nina Malyshev have been taken to Yarlswood Detention Centre and will be deported to probable imprisonment and torture in Uzbekistan on Friday 21 October.

The Home Office continues to insist in asylum cases that there is no human rights problem in Uzbekistan. But no serious authority outside government doubts that Uzbekistan is one of the worst human rights abusers in the world. Unfortunately the lives of Mikel and Nina Malyshev are to be sacrificed to the British government’s agreement with the Karimov regime to provide transit for supplies to the British military in Afghanistan.

It is noticeable that, since the current British government came to power, no government minister or official, nor the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, has made a single reference to Uzbekistan’s terrible human rights abuses, including over 10,000 political prisoners, absolutely no free media or assembly, banning of all opposition parties, millions of children used as forced slave labour and torture and extra-judicial killing on a massive scale.

In fact such is the British government’s enmity towards the people of Uzbekistan I am afraid that Mikel and Nina will be sacrificed without a thought. They have been living around Swansea for years as valued members of the local community. They have not claimed state benefits and have done much voluntary work. Nina’s daughter is today in labour, brought on early by her mother’s detention. The total number of Uzbek asylum seekers in the UK is in the low dozens, escaping the cruelest regime on earth. I understand and share indignation at fake asylum seekers, but we should be deeply ashamed at our vicious attitude to genuine cases like this.

Please send messages to your own MP, to William Hague and to Teresa May, via this website. You may help save a life.

You may also wish to send a message to their own MP, Hywell Francis, who yesterday refused to help, saying “Haven’t I done enough already?” Not just cruel but lazy with it.

Hillary Clinton starts an official visit to Karimov on Sunday to mark the resumption of US arms supplies to Uzbekistan, which were suspended after the massacre of 800 pro-democracy demonstrators in Andijan in 2005.

Anti-Gipsy is the last socially acceptable racism. Even regular commentators on this blog chip in on Dale Farm posts with “They fly tip and make a terrible mess” “They nicked stuff from my local pub” “They just laid a quarter of an inch of tarmac straight on the soil” and other ethnic caricatures. “They” steal children too, no doubt.

Watching the violent ethnic cleansing in Essex live on TV this morning was a heart-wrenching experience. Councillor Tony Ball, leader of the authority conducting the ethnic cleansing, a Murdoch star, explains that his action is popular. I have no doubt it is. It would be popular in Basildon if the council hung a black man from the council flagstaff every day. No doubt the smug little bigot is a happy man this morning.

Those who justify breaking up family homes, destroying a community and disrupting childrens’ schooling, on grounds of narrow legality and planning law, have to answer this narrow legal point too. The attack (for such it was) on Dale Farm this morning was carried out by riot police with no participation of bailiffs. At least two female inhabitants, both travellers and permanent residents at the site, have needed hospital treatment. The police smashed down fences, both internal and external to the site, which the High Court had specifically said were on the site, legally owned by the travellers and could not be destroyed by the bailiffs. Where does that illegal act of destruction sit with the narrow legalistic defence of this racist attack?

Murdoch News this morning gave the gist of the police’s legal defence. Police had “Intelligence” of a “stockpile of items to be used as weapons”. They therefore had had to storm the camp in the interests of public safety. This necessitated the breaking down of the High Court protected fences as an emergency measure to save lives. All of which is a transparent pretext, a flouting of the law by the police much worse than any law the travellers’ flouted, because the police breaking of the law resulted in violence and injury. The weapons stockpile of course does not exist.

Let me state once more the key facts. Although situated in a greenbelt, every inch of the travellers’ site was brownfield land, previously occupied by a scrapyard. Satellite photos prove that the travellers did not expand at all onto green land. The reason they did not have planning permission is that multiple applications for planning permission have been rejected, and the reason they have been rejected is that Basildon Council are racists. A nice Tory builder would undoubtedly have been allowed to shoehorn countless houses onto this ex-scrapyard. The travellers do own all the land they were on.

What harm were they doing? None. What was their crime? Their ethnicity. All the else is legalistic camouflage of the type that states have used to pursue ethnic cleansing everywhere. Ethnic cleansing is always enforcing the law in the eys of the state which carries it out. That is rather the point.

My mole told the truth – the delay was the reformating of a four page A4 report (merely 2,700 words) to spread it super-thinly over ten pages, using line spacing, large font and paragraph breaks.

It is a work of breathtaking insouciance. It brushes over Werritty’s meetings with other defence ministers on the pretext that, as this was in the context of Atlantic Bridge, that makes it OK! In fact, that is precisely what makes it unacceptable.

It also mentions only the Fox-Werritty meeting with Matthew Gould, UK Ambassador to Israel, in the MOD and fails to mention that they met him at least once again in Israel, or to answer a single one of the questions I asked about how this meeting was set up or what other contacts Gould had with Werritty.

The statement that the Cabinet Office were unaware of Werritty’s existence is a downright lie. Also interesting that it makes no mention of other government departments, particularly the FCO. And no mention at all of Werritty’s Israel Lobby funding or Mossad.

This is less whitewash, more transparent bollocks.

My investigation continues…

The Guardian has for the last ten hours had an over-optimistic live blog entitled “Liam Fox Report Published.” Four hours ago the BBC told us rather hilariously the delay was caused by technical difficulties putting it on the Cabinet Office website. I bet the photocopier is jammed too.

A Murray Mole has struck again!! What was already a very sparse report on very narrow terms of reference had huge chunks hacked out of it by Number 10. The result was so obviously pathetic that it is being bulked out with guff and waffle, large font, line spacing and paragraph breaks.

I kid you not.

British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould has refused to answer my questions about his relationship with Werritty. With multiple Whitehall sources having pointed first me and then the Guardian, Times, Mail and Independent to a link between Fox-Werritty and Mossad, this refusal is unacceptable. Just what was the Ambassador’s relationship with Werritty and how much did he know?

This is the reply I received to my questions to Matthew Gould:

As the Prime Minister made clear in the House of Commons on Wednesday, the matter is being looked into by the Cabinet Secretary who is producing a report. We are working with the Cabinet Office on this and cannot prejudice its outcome by commenting in advance.

But I was not asking Gould for opinions, but rather for a series of simple facts. Knowledge of the facts of the case cannot prejudice a report – unless the purpose of the report is to be extremely selective about the facts allowed to come out.

These are the questions I put to Matthew Gould:

You are widely reported in the media to have met Mr Werritty with Liam Fox at a meeting in the MOD before your posting to Tel Aviv.

1) Was this part of your official series of pre-posting briefing meetings?
2) Who organised the meeting? Was it organised by another official, eg in Heads of Mission Section (if it still exists) or the geographical department?
3) At what stage did you know that Werritty would be in the meeting?
4) How was Werritty introduced to you?
5) Who did you think that Werritty was? In what capacity did you believe or presume or were you told that Werritty was at the meeting?
6) Was there any aspect of the discussion which you would normally view as classified? If so at what classification?
7) Was any note made or minute or letter written as a result of what transpired at that meeting? Did any other action arise?
8 ) What was the classification of any note, document, minute or letter arising from the discussion at that meeting?
9) Had you ever met Werritty before?
10) You and Werritty reportedly both attended an anti-Iranian conference in Israel, as did Fox. What contact did you have with Werritty at that conference or in its margins? What did you discuss?
11) Please list the total number of occasions on which you have met, corresponded with (including email), or spoken by telephone with Werritty.

I am willing to bet the report gives almost none of these answers. As it is apparently due out in the next half hour, let me remind you what my outraged Cabinet Office source told me a week ago had been stitched up in advance:

Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary, has fixed with Cameron the lines of his investigation to allow him to whitewash Fox. This will be done by the standard method of only asking very narrow questions, to which the answer is known to be satisfactory. In this case, the investigation into Werritty’s finances will look only at the very narrow question of whether he received specific payments that can be linked directly to the setting up of specific meetings with Fox. The answer is thought to be no; that is what Fox was indicating by his extraordinary formulation to the House of Commons that Werritty was “not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income”.

So O’Donnell will announce that Werritty received no specific money for specific meetings with or introductions to Fox.

But the deal between Cameron, Fox and O’Donnell is that O’Donnell will not address the much more important question of who funded Werritty and why. Having claimed there was no wrongdoing, O’Donnell will say Mr Werritty’s finances are private and should not be made public. It was on that basis that Werritty agreed to give financial details to Sue Gray in the Cabinet Office yesterday.

The Cabinet Office will only look for direct evidence of a little grubby money-making for introductions to Fox. But what is actually happening is much worse and much more serious. Who paid for Werritty’s eighteen overseas trips with Liam Fox and his stays in exclusive hotels in the World’s most expensive destinations? What does he live on?

The answer is that Werritty is paid by representatives of far right US and Israeli sources to influence the British defence secretary. It has been discussed within the MOD whether Werritty is being – knowingly or otherwise – run as an agent of influence by the CIA or Mossad. That is why the chiefs of the armed forces are so concerned, and why there is today much gagging at the stitch up within the Cabinet Office.

Newspaper revelations may have caused O’Slimebag to deviate the tiniest bit from this formula. but I am willing to bet this is still basically the stitch-up we will see,

I am ganuinely glad to see Gilad Shalit go home, and to see so many Palestinians reunited with their families. In conflict resolution we tend to refer to such events as “confidence building measures”, and there is no doubt that prisoner releases have to be a part of any eventual solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. But this is hardly an unprecedented event – I can remember three or four similar ones, with no long term effect. Still, on balance a good thing.

I find the wall to wall media coverage so laughably one-sided that I am surprisingly relaxed about it. Anybody likely to be paying the slightest attention to a news channel is going to know some background on the Israeli occupation and the plight of the Palestinians, so the ludicrous one-sidedness of the BBC and Sky News is much more likely to provoke derision than to have the desired propaganda effect.

I had the peculiar thought this morning that the crazed extremism of the Netanyahu government, with their walls and accelerated settlement building, may not be a bad thing in the long term. Another year or two of this kind of land grab and a two state solution will become patently impractical, and unacceptable to all Palestinians. As someone who has always favoured a single, secular democratic state in Israel/Palestine, I am hopeful that the two state idea, which is a Zionist trap into which well meaning but despairing liberals fell, will lose support when it becomes clear that the proposed Palestinian state is becoming an ever shrinking, increasingly disconnected series of tiny waterless and resourceless bantustans.

It is my birthday today.

Here is a picture of Tilda Swinton which I lifted from Mondoweiss. It is apparently from a photoshoot for the November 2011 edition of Vogue. Good for her, and here is a small parcel of praise to counter the avalanche of hate which will shortly be launched at her.