UPDATE

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I returned to the UK today to be astonished by private confirmation from within the FCO that the UK government has indeed decided – after immense pressure from the Obama administration – to enter the Ecuadorean Embassy and seize Julian Assange.

This will be, beyond any argument, a blatant breach of the Vienna Convention of 1961, to which the UK is one of the original parties and which encodes the centuries – arguably millennia – of practice which have enabled diplomatic relations to function. The Vienna Convention is the most subscribed single international treaty in the world.

The provisions of the Vienna Convention on the status of diplomatic premises are expressed in deliberately absolute terms. There is no modification or qualification elsewhere in the treaty.

Article 22

1.The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter
them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.
2.The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises
of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the
mission or impairment of its dignity.
3.The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of
transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.

Not even the Chinese government tried to enter the US Embassy to arrest the Chinese dissident Chen Guangchen. Even during the decades of the Cold War, defectors or dissidents were never seized from each other’s embassies. Murder in Samarkand relates in detail my attempts in the British Embassy to help Uzbek dissidents. This terrible breach of international law will result in British Embassies being subject to raids and harassment worldwide.

The government’s calculation is that, unlike Ecuador, Britain is a strong enough power to deter such intrusions. This is yet another symptom of the “might is right” principle in international relations, in the era of the neo-conservative abandonment of the idea of the rule of international law.

The British Government bases its argument on domestic British legislation. But the domestic legislation of a country cannot counter its obligations in international law, unless it chooses to withdraw from them. If the government does not wish to follow the obligations imposed on it by the Vienna Convention, it has the right to resile from it – which would leave British diplomats with no protection worldwide.

I hope to have more information soon on the threats used by the US administration. William Hague had been supporting the move against the concerted advice of his own officials; Ken Clarke has been opposing the move against the advice of his. I gather the decision to act has been taken in Number 10.

There appears to have been no input of any kind from the Liberal Democrats. That opens a wider question – there appears to be no “liberal” impact now in any question of coalition policy. It is amazing how government salaries and privileges and ministerial limousines are worth far more than any belief to these people. I cannot now conceive how I was a member of that party for over thirty years, deluded into a genuine belief that they had principles.

The London Olympics are already achieving the number one aim of the politicians who brought them here, which is making our politicians feel very important indeed.

The media is quite frenetic in its efforts to make us all believe we should be terrifically proud of the fact we are hosting the Olympics, as though there were something unique in this achievement. If we can’t competently do something that Greece, Spain and China have done in recent years, that would be remarkable. Of course the Games will be on the whole well delivered, sufficient for the media and politicians to declare it an ecstatic success. Some of the sporting moments will be sublime, as ever.

But did it have to be in London? We won’t know the total cost of the Games for months, but it will cost the taxpayer at least £9 billion and I suspect a lot more. I also suspect the GDP figures will, in the event, show that the massive net fall in visitor numbers has hurt the already shrinking economy further.

But to take the most optimistic figure, holding the Olympics in London has cost every person in the country an average of £150 per head in extra taxes. That is £600 for a family of four. Actually it is in the end going to be well over £2,000, as of course the money has been borrowed on the never never, and taxpayers are going to be paying it off their whole lives, along with the sum ten times higher they are already paying direct into the pockets of the bankers through their taxes.

The very rich, of course, don’t pay much tax, so they are not worried.

But to take just the figure of £600 extra taxes for a family of four, the lowest possible amount, and not including the interest. Is having the Olympics here really worth paying out £600 for? If Tony Blair had approached the head of the family and said “We are going to have the Olympics in London, but it’s going to cost you £600, would the answer have been from most ordinary people: “Yes, great idea, this is that important to us”?

People are not disconcerted because they don’t see that they have to pay. There is no special Olympics tax, and they pay their taxes in a variety of ways, and individuals are not the sole source of taxation. But this is nonetheless real money taken from the people in pursuit of the hubris of politicians.

I love sport. I hate the corruption of the International Olympic Committee, Fifa and the rest; I hate the vicious corporatism and militarisation of our capital and absurd elitism of the transport lanes; the sport itself I love. But with the economy contracting, and the NHS being farmed out for profit, is it really worth £600 for a family – and many families are really struggling in a heartbreaking way – is it worth the money to have the Olympics here rather than in Paris?

Of course it isn’t. I think many of us will feel an extra pleasure watching the Opening ceremony because it is British. Patriotic pride will surge. It is not wrong to enjoy the spectacle tonight on TV. The corporate well connected and ruling classes will enjoy it in the stadium.

But after you have watched it on TV, ask yourself this question. How much more did you enjoy it than enjoy watching the Beijing ceremony, and was that margin of extra enjoyment something that everybody in the room would have paid out £150 for?

Because they just did.

On Monday 30 July at 11am on Radio 4 there will be a BBC radio programme entitled “Torture in the 21st Century”, presented by John Sweeney. I was interviewed extensively for it, though I don’t know how much of my interview will feature. I shall be in Ghana then and iPlayer does not work abroad, so if anybody has the technical ability to make a sound file and send it to me, I should be grateful.

Britain has still not admitted, let alone sought to redress, its complicity in post 9/11 torture networks, and indeed its continued receipt on a regular basis of intelligence from torture from the security services of, for example, Bahrain. The worrying thing about the disingenuous vapourings of John Sawers, head of MI6, is that he still maintains that torture gets you the truth. It does not. It gets you whatever the Bahraini, Uzbek, US, or whatever government wishes to hear, which is a very different thing.

The Gibson Inquiry into complicity in torture was unceremoniously halted, a total fail like every other stated aim of the coalition government. It has presented an interim report to ministers who have spent two weeks considering the “security risk” of publishing it. This is nonsense as the interim report is purely procedural. It contains recommendations for how a resumed inquiry (ha ha) should conduct its business. Gibson’s interim report contains no reference to any evidence on any cases of torture or on the policy of complicity in torture.

In fact ministers are really stalling publication because they are hoping simply to let the entire notion of an inquiry die away.

This is the response I got from the Gibson Inquiry secretariat on the fate of my own evidence in relation to the interim report:

There was no specific reference to evidence from individual witnesses as we were in the pre-evidence gathering phase prior to being wound up and your evidence was provided to the police in relation to their investigation into the Libyan cases. The Panel has seen your evidence and will ensure that this is included in the handover materials that are to be stored and provided to the next Inquiry as and when it is established.

I am convinced there is no chance I will ever get to testify either in court or to a judicial inquiry. The powers that be in this country have great finesse. They don’t have to do anything too messy to inconvenient witnesses, they just freeze them out.

I am currently reading David Brown’s Palmerston; A Biography.

In 1846 Palmerston had threatened the government of Spain with military intervention if it defaulted on its bond interest payments. Palmerston faced a Chartist candidate, George Harney, at the general election in his Tiverton constituency. At the hustings debate, Harney said Palmerston’s threat to Spain was unjustifiable:

“These Spanish bondholders are English capitalists, who lent some millions of money to the government of Spain, not, as has been represented, because they were anxious to help the people of that country to obtain “Liberal institutions”, but because they were promised a higher rate of interest than they could get at home. That money had been derived from the labour of the English people.”

Harney argued that Palmerston’s foreign policy was simply to deploy the resources of the state to defend the interests of the rich.

The Tiverton crowd greeted this assertion with “immense cheering” and Harney had a clear majority at the show of hands at the hustings, which was attended by most of the adult population of Tiverton. He withdrew from the actual ballot, however, in protest at the extremely limited franchise – only about 600 people in the constituency had the vote.

George Harney, forgotten hero. We could do with him today.

Just when you thought our rulers could not get worse. Obama, taking time out from targeting teenagers for aerial assassination by drone, has surpassed the Bush regime by clamping new and extreme limitations on the right of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to meet the attorneys who are defending them in court. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself to believe this stuff is true as you type it.

At least one attorney has been told he will have no access to his client unless he signs a “voluntary agreement” which accepts that any meetings with his client are entirely at the discretion of the US authorities and not a right.

In another “technical” adjustment, the Obama administration has altered flight rules to allow unpiloted drones to fly over the United States, in places where previously only piloted planes were allowed. There has been no official reason given for the change in regulations, but it opens the way for unlimited aerial surveillance of US citizens, and the eventual sci-fi scenario of citizens being zapped from the air without warning if Obama does not approve of them, just as has happened to hundreds of people in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. That may found far fetched – but so does anti-aircraft batteries on the roofs of London apartment blocks and 17,000 army personnel patrolling the streets of London. Civil liberties have disappeared so fast in the past decade there is no telling where it will end.

Completely unthreatening small child found on aeroplane! More security hysteria! Are tanks needed at Manchester airport? Anti-aircraft batteries for roof of Old Trafford. Etc.

Zounds, the perpetual security hysteria is boring.

The invoice for “Free Tickets” from KLM/Air France Flying Blue

Taxes and surcharges Adult

Total including taxes and surcharges : £ 2,394.16

I fly around the world a great deal and had never tried to use any of the “airmile” type benefits I had accrued. As I kept receiving tempting brochures and internet offers, I decided to use my 420,000 Flying Blue miles on taking the family to Martinique for a holiday.

Flying Blue had been bombarding my inbox with a promo. I was stupid enough to invest an hour into trying to book this online. This is the bill I was presented with at the end for these “free” flights.

The taxes I can understand as they are passed on by the airline, but the “Carrier Imposed Surcharge” of 372.28 per person is simply an airfare. I phoned up Flying Blue to query this and was told it was a “fuel surcharge”.

It was stupid of me to believe I was actually going to be able to get what all that promotional material seemed to offer. On the face of it this is just a simple tale of Craig being gullible. But I can’t help feeling that the pointlessness of all those brochures and emails, of the rigmarole of your membership card and points accumulation and statements, all to attempt to sell you something you didn’t particularly want, by deceit, says something about the lack of values of straightforwardness in modern society. Or something.

Anyway Flying Blue is a confidence trick, and if this saves someone else the time and disappointment of bothering with it, that would be a good thing.

I am very sorry that President John Atta Mills of Ghana has died today. He was a good and straightforward man whose Christian faith was absolutely central to the way he conducted himself. He completed the task of making Ghana a meaningful democracy, by taking the NDC completely away from the politics of fear and intimidation. While I thought his Presidency a little too conservative and non-dynamic, there are much worse faults. His country should be grateful for his period of calm and consolidation. I think calm is how he will be remembered; there are much worse qualities.

Ghana has been lucky in having John Kuffour and John Atta Mills as Presidents in its democratic era, and is further lucky to have John Mahama, whom I know well for fifteen years and greatly respect, to step in now as President. It has been my peculiar chance in life to get to know nearly all the senior Ghanaian and a great many of the senior British politicians personally. There can be no doubt that the Ghanaians are a great deal more impressive.

In a few months the Presidential election will be between John Mahama and Nana Akuffo Addo. Either one of them is worth six of David Cameron.

I sincerely hope that President Mills finds his place in the heaven he believed in so completely.

This is a trailer for an extremely important documentary by Michael Andersen. The complicity of NATO and EU governments with the Karimov regime is one of the clearest glimpses of the evil motives that lurk behind the reasonable image that western politicians strive to portray. The complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring these facts is terrifying.

As NATO intensifies its logistical transit through Uzbekistan, as Britain increases training for the Uzbek military and secret services and looks to further arms sales, please bring this documentary to the attention of everyone you can, in any way that you can.

The appearance in the trailer of Pierre Morel, EU Special Representative for Central Asia, is noteworthy. He really is one of the nastiest men in Europe, with not even the slightest pretence of any concern for human rights except as a bureaucratic box to be ticked. What is the real interest of this arch European powercrat? You will hardly be surprised to hear it is Central Asia’s oil and gas.

One of the most important diplomatic developments in the last year – not mentioned anywhere in the lamestream media – has been the westward shift of the Government of Azerbaijan. Under hereditary President Aliev, son of Putin’s ex boss and mentor in the KGB, they had seemed the closest of Russia’s allies. But I noted a few months ago that remarkably on Syria they were voting with the U.S. and against Russia at the UN Security Council. Now they have agreed that an EU hydrocarbon pipeline can pass through their waters in the Caspian – thus negating Putin’s blocking move when he effectively annexed part of Georgia.

Germany now sees the eventual transit of Turkmenistan’s and Uzbekistan’s gas through Ukraine and Poland and into the Nordstream project, while bypassing Russia, as a tantalisingly close prospect. The furious courting of Central Asian dictators is therefore viewed as an unbounded success, and mangled corpses and tortured women an irrelevancy – along with the probable extinction of the sturgeon and other inconveniences. No wonder Morel looks self-satisfied.

I do hope the Central Asians who suffer grinding poverty and terrible repression will one day understand all this, and once they have their freedom will not forgive.

Following the humiliating result of the Oval Test, I have been given a secret look at the England selectors’ preliminary thoughts for the second test line-up. This is the probable team.

A. Strauss
J. Smuts
J. Trott
P. W. Botha
K. Pietersen
L. Voortrekker
M. Prior
N. Robben-Island
B. Afrikaaner
R. Apartheid
E Terre Blanche

12th man: N Mandela
Coach: Andy Flower

Andy Flower has commented that he would love to give jobs in the England team to more English people, but unfortunately they are all scroungers caught in a benefit culture (c. I. Duncan-Smith).

“They just don’t want to do this kind of hard physical work”, said Flower, “English people are too obese and can’t get up for an 11am start. They don’t have the skills and they don’t have the work ethic. They can only play cricket if it’s on their Playstation. That’s why the England team finds it more viable to employ South Africans. We are much more hard working and effective.”

Blair’s latest attempt at rehabilitation is a discussion tomorrow at Westminster Central Hall with the Archbishop of Canterbury on the place of religion in society. A vexed question, but given that Blair believes God OK’d the invasion of Iraq and the resulting million deaths, not one that can usefully be discussed by this charlatan.

You can protest at Westminster Central Hall from 4pm tomorrow. Should be a lovely day for it. Bring own rotten tomatoes.

Those coming from Central Asia, Bahrain, Qatar or Saudi Arabia to the Olympics, interested to see what life in a democracy feels like, will find it seems exactly like life at home in their dictatorship. 17,000 soldiers will be glowering over the venues, checking identity documents, stopping and searching. The mlitary will occupy residential buildings, be buzzing overhead, rolling down the streets and patrolling the river. There will be missiles on land, sea and air, though nobody knows what the threat is that this is supposed to counter.

What will make our dictatorship resident visitors feel especially at home is the contempt for the ordinary citizen. Not only will they have the military all over them and be subject to frequent stopping and questioning, they will be expected continually to get out of the way of their betters. Special VIP lanes on the road will allow officials to sweep by, while normal citizens will simply have to sit in gridlock and stew. Who cares? The military will stick missiles on your roof if they wish. What they are going to shoot down, and which bit of London it will land on, is not to be questioned.

Here in Ramsgate we are losing our regular train service to London completely for the duration. All the HS1 trains are being commandeered to run a shuttle service between Ebbsfleet and Stratford. 22 trains a day from Ramsgate are simply cancelled. Slow trains are available, but a journey normally 70 minutes will become – at the fastest possible – 2 hours and 35 minutes. A large number of commuters will simply be unable to get to work anything like on time, and have to spend door to door over seven hours a day in travelling as well as their working day. Nobody was consulted. Quite a few don’t yet know – there has been no determined effort to tell people. Leaflets are available in the ticket office if you ask for one.

But the leaflets might as well just say, “You are fucked, and we don’t care”.

The extra 3,500 military personnel it was today announced will be used at the games cover a shortfall in Group Four personnel. Group Four were providing 4,000 paid staff and 6,000 unpaid volunteers. It is the unpaid volunteer numbers which are short by 3,500.

Most people are not stupid. They may volunteer happily for sport or for charity, but to work for nothing to make tens of millions of pounds of profit for Group Four as it exploits them, plainly does not have universal appeal. Those 2,500 who have volunteered to work for nothing for G4S are the idiots in this story. How gullible can you be?

Bob Russell, MP for Colchester, today in parliament made the excellent point to Teresa May that Group Four (or G4S as they now call themselves) should not be employed because of their role in aiding and abetting Israel’s illegal activities in the West Bank and human rights abuse there. With breathtaking chutzpah Teresa May replied that it was this kind of valuable international experience that made Group Four the right company to provide security for the games.

Which brings me back to my point at the start. Those visiting from oppressive regimes will feel absolutely at home. That is the one and only thing you can trust Teresa May to ensure with grim efficiency.

Cameron’s favourite dictatorship, Bahrain, has jailed human rights activist Nabeel Rajab for three months for tweeting that pro-regime demonstrators were being paid. Total silence from western governments. Meanwhile two pro-democracy demonstrators have been shot dead in Saudi Arabia. More total silence from western governments. At the same time, those governments want us to believe that the massive arms shipments being sent by Saudi Arabia to promote a Syrian civil war are in support of democracy. Even the mianstream media appear to have worked out there is a problem with this narrative.

You expect the Tories to be stupid. It is their nature, as John Stuart Mill pointed out. But the disruption by New Labour of radical reform of the House of Lords is about career advantage and a total absence of genuine political belief. Which is precisely what Blair brought to New Labour. Tomorrow he makes his Labour Party comeback speech at Highbury – to a closed £120 a ticket dinner. Says it all, really.

Total membership of political parties in the UK has declined, very steadily and inexorably, from about 3.3 million in 1968 to about 500,000 in 2010. That is even worse than it sounds because of course the population grew substantially in the same period. That is one of the fascinating facts in this report by Democratic Audit.

That is just one of a large number of PDFs that comprise the total report. It is well worth reading and it reinforces the argument, consistently made on this blog, that democracy has failed in this country.

There is one constituent of a genuine democracy that the report does not seek to measure, but which I think could usefully be quantified by political scientists. That is the degree of real choice being offered by the political parties. I am sure that this has very substantially declined as well. There is no real choice on offer nowadays between the various neo-con parties. The differences on the timing and depth of cuts in public services, on continued privatisation of health services, on Trident nuclear weapons, on Afghanistan, on the money men who control the politicians, are miniscule. Only in Scotland do voters have a genuine choice of a different direction, and they take it.

This is a direct consequence of the other trends the Democratic Audit does measure. They show that the parties are more than ever, and constantly more, not avenues for popular participation but the domain of a political class and controlled by a wealthy “elite”. It is no wonder that they all have the same programme of promoting the interests of that elite.

The day after the announcement that air defence missiles are being stationed around London to guard the Olympic stadium from the Luftwaffe and the army will be coveing the turnstiles from armoured vehicles, we have the arrest of six Muslims, three of them in Stratford, for yet another famous “terrorist plot”. The Guardian reports this as a “pre-planned operation”. You betcha.

What scares me so much is that is blindingly obvious what kind of society we are becoming, but so many people refuse to see it.

Henry Sheilds as me and Nathan Ives Moiba as Colonel Isaac in One Turbulent Ambassador, on until 10 July at the Lyric Hammersmith.

One Turbulent Ambassador

Believe it or not, I haven’t actually seen One Turbulent Ambassador yet, largely because I am on the wrong continent. But there is a very interesting interview with Robin Soans about the play by the Cambridge academic Scott Antony in Exeunt.

I rather liked this judgement:

History is a strange and fickle creature,’ smiles Soans, ‘at the time of his demise Craig Murray was a figure of ridicule, and Tony Blair cast him out as a traitor. But he’s now a rector of a university and addresses student rallies and appears on television and talks really very intelligently, while anyone of discernment has no time for anything Tony Blair has to say at all. Virtually everything says he’s ludicrous. So much of what he said was duplicitous, and underhand, and not even approaching the truth. And that’s just seven or eight years and history has already done a volte face.

But some of it is a bit tough for me to read, like this:

The students and Jessica said I think you’re emphasising the heroic side of this man, rather than the shitty things he’s done to various people and the trail of misery he’s left in his wake.

But then as the great man himself said

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion

I am on tenterhooks for some honest feedback. There are I think only three performances left. If you can catch one, please do leave your impressions here.

The hopelessness of New Labour as a vehicle of change is underlined by their fixation with “judge-led” inquiries into anything that crops up. Remember the Hutton whitewash? Will a senior judge really recommend the fundamental reform of casino banking in the City of London and the careers of the banking squillionaires he undoubtedly knows so well at his club, lodge and golf course?

Which of these best describes most senior judges?

a) A fearless crusader for truth and social justice with unimpeachable morals and the intellectual stringency of a great philosopher

or

b) A very well paid establishment figure with an authoritarian streak who got his position from Jack Straw or his predecessors by very carefully in his career never stepping out of line with the very powerful.

Frankly, it makes no difference at all whether politicians or judges conduct the inquiry into banking practices. It’ll be the same old whitewash. Andrew Tyrie MP happens to be one of the very few decent people in parliament. But if he does chair the inquiry as Cameron proposes, be sure the forces of control will rapidly close over his head.

I didn’t bother to watch the Bob Diamond select committee appearance yesterday. In fact, I have come to terms with the (to me) shocking fact that I now believe our political system to be so corrupt that our horribly and increasingly unequal society will eventually, and rightly, be changed by extra-parliamentary means. Probably not in my lifetime, but one day. I never imagined I would end up believing that.

The political blogosphere will buzz today with parliamentary debate on the banks. It seems obvious to me that parliament is not going to do anything against the financial services paymasters of the politicians.

Parliament is irrelevant.

Following on from yesterday’s post, here is a tiny everyday example of those shared US/Israeli values Dianne Feinstein was on about.

Courtesy of the Guardian.

Meanwhile another 47 people are killed by a truck bomb in Iraq and over 200 maimed. A slightly larger toll than usual in a single incident so it actually made the media here, but again in Iraq such violent death is an everyday occurrence. That is over ten years of fear, carnage on an unthinkable scale, dire poverty and destruction of basic services. I bet the Iraqis are extremely grateful for the peace and security Blair and Bush brought them.