The independence campaign in Scotland has re-established the reality of public debate and a genuine political community.  Through old fashioned meetings and face to face conversation, combined with social media, people are hearing a narrative which is blocked by the gatekeepers of the mainstream media.  Philipa Whitford, a surgeon, here talks about Labour Tories, Tory Tories and Liberal Tories combining to destroy the very principles of the NHS. You don’t get to hear this on the BBC.

You can skip the first minute, but after that I suggest you listen to every word, very carefully.

Hat tip to Munguin’s Republic

I might have worked out how to post my recent podcast interview by Michael Greenwell

I have fond memories of Borno state, camping beside my LandRover in the cold, crisp early mornings, steam rising from a cup of tea, then the thermometer climbing visibly as the sun got to work.  Fulani herdsmen crossing the horizon under conical hats with their angular cattle, women walking behind, slim and with beautiful posture, swaying as they walked.  The neat homesteads surrounded by fences of beautifully woven millet stalk.  Meals of roasted corn and suya.  I remember the farmer who offered me a drink, then took a tin cup and brought milk straight from the cow, still very warm. The people there are grave and hospitable.

I never one felt in the slightest danger, thirty years ago.  I am taken aback that places I went round then without a care for the British High Commission (I had the agriculture brief, which was an amazing license to roam) are now no-go areas.  The region is mostly dry savannah: the forest area stretching into Cameroon, incidentally, is by no means impenetrable, though it is true the canopy would be a barrier to aerial surveillance.  Very little of it is primary forest any more.

The media now have a new cartoon figure of hate in the bearded, bobble-hatted leader of Boko Haram, and in truth he is a very bad person.  But armed rebellions of thousands of people do not just happen.  It is not a simple and spontaneous outbreak of evil, still less a sign that we must wage Tony Blair’s war on Muslims everywhere.

Nigeria is a country with governance and corruption as bad as anywhere in the world.  A country of billionaires and of near starving sufferers.  A country of pollution and exploitation by big oil, and a happily complicit and deeply corrupt political class.  Nobody disagrees with that, and very few would disagree that there lies the root cause of Boko Haram’s ability to gather support.

If the Nigerian government were to have sent in the army en masse to try to recover the kidnapped schoolgirls, the first result would undoubtedly have been, on all previous experience of the Nigerian army, that hundreds more women would have been raped, this time by soldiers.  Villages would have been looted and people arrested, tortured and killed, more on the basis of extorting money than of looking for suspects.

To be fair to President Goodluck Jonathan he knows this, and he had made the extremely brave decision a year ago to try to deal with Boko Haram by dialogue and negotiation, and call off the military campaign which was making matters far worse.  He drew much criticism for it at the time, particularly from neo-cons, and will be blamed now.  The problem is that things have gone too far to be easily remedied, and to negotiate with the crazed is not simple.

Were I trying to get back the girls, I would operate through the agency of traditional society.  Nigeria’s indigenous institutions are much degraded, but offer more hope than any Western style interventions.  I am not precisely sure which is the appropriate traditional ruler, but I suspect that it is the Lamido of Adamawa, whose immediate predecessor I took tea with on several occasions.  Information on the girl’s whereabouts will definitely be obtainable through the networks of subsidiary chiefs and elders, which still exist, even though their political and administrative power had passed.  It is particularly helpful that in this region these traditional allegiances are linked to Islamic authority.  Adamawa’s territory extends into the Cameroon, and even Chad.

The fact of the old state of Adamawa extending into Cameroon and Chad brings us to the heart of the problem.  Nigeria is an entirely artificial, colonial construct created by the British Empire (and bounded by the French Empire).  Its boundaries bear no relation to internal national entities, and it is huge.  The strange thing is that these totally artificial colonial constructs of states generate a genuine and fierce patriotism among their citizens.  After just my first year of living in Nigeria I had formed a firm view that it would be much better for the country to be split into at least three states, and that Britain’s attitude in the Biafran war, that colonial state boundaries must be inviolable, had been wrong.

Many patriotic Nigerians will be very angry with me for suggesting their country should split up.  It is also worth observing that, not only in Nigeria, many Africans who are, with justice, most vocal in their denouncing of colonialism, are at the same time most patriotic about their entirely artificial nationality, created by the colonial power.

The eminently sensible suggestion to renationalize the railways is one which has very strong popular support.  We have the highest rail fares per mile and at the same time the highest public subsidies per mile in the world.  The concomitant is, that we have the highest return on capital for railway investors in the world too, with the added icing that it is underwritten by taxpayer guarantee.  Renationalisation – without compensation – is the only sensible course, as it is for all the other natural monopolies.

It was sad therefore to see Ed Miliband squirming on television yesterday as he struggled to reassure various neo-con mouthpieces that he did not share the good sense of his backbenchers.  The present system was not working, he said, and we needed to explore new forms of ownership model.  What these were he did not say, but plainly they did not include taking anything back into public ownership.  The most he offered was a tepid concern about the reprivatisation of East Coast, but then he did not exactly not want it to be reprivatized either.

There could not be a more striking illustration of the fact that we do not actually have a democracy in the UK any more; we do not have major political parties offering voters a realistic choice of voter options.  What we have is different sets of prospective managers of neo-con policies on behalf of the ultra-rich beneficiaries of those policies.  The disconnect with voters is such that general election participation rates are in serious long-term decline, a fact which is given insufficient attention.  War criminal Blair’s “victories” were each based on well under half the vote, in three of the four lowest percentage turnouts of electors in history.  So much for the myth of his inspiring charisma.

Unfortunately the people who don’t vote are more inclined to apathy than revolution.  But I remain hopeful that disillusion with the political class will eventually lead to a fundamental change.  But it is also dangerous.  By vacating all of the intellectual space based around the human instincts of altruism, co-operation and sharing, the neo-con parties cede ground that in England can most easily be filled by populists whose projection of yearned for community values is also exclusive and xenophobic.  That is what is happening.  Enter UKIP.  Scotland is much more fortunate in that the neglected field of the desire for communal co-operation has been tilled by the non-racist independence movement in a shared national desire to escape the neo-con trap, which despite party hierarchies has cut swathes through the party system.

There remains a beacon of hope in new media.  Neo-con party attempts to capture this space have failed dismally.  Will Straw founded Left Foot Forward, a blog which has plenty of funding from New Labour and Trade Union sources.  Look at the last ten articles on that blog.  How many comments are there?  An average of less than two comments per article.  The truth is that despite its huge budget, almost nobody actually reads this sterile drivel.  The Tory/Government attempts at an astroturf grassroots movements with “Vote No Borders” was torn apart by social media in hours, and ended by closing comments completely.  Compare the utter vibrancy of Wings Over Scotland.

The transformation of the political space by social media is not happening nearly as quickly as many of us hoped.  But as newspaper circulations plummet and new media participation continues to rise, the process is inexorable.  The independence movement in Scotland has been advancing despite the orchestrated and near unanimous opposition of the UK government, the City of London and the mainstream media.  Social media has been absolutely key to that advance.   I think that Scottish independence can be the catalyst for an eventual much larger and much-needed process of transformation of politics throughout the British Isles.  But we also have to worry that the neo-cons, who did not get our money without being clever, will learn a lesson and look for new ways to hijack or to control the social media.

UPDATE

A gentleman posted an almost instantaneous comment linking to a blog by a senior Department of Transport official which claimed fares in France were higher.  It was completely tendentious in comparing the cheapest possible off-peak tickets with standard French tickets.  I deleted the comment as I suspect, by the speed of its appearance, it was from someone professionally employed to post such things.  If the gentleman wishes to contradict me I shall apologise.

Anyway, I decided to conduct a blind test, genuinely without knowing the result.  I went to book the cheapest possible fare on a train from Ramsgate to Manchester, return, leaving Ramsgate on Friday around 8am and returning on Tuesday around 9am.  This was simply a typical journey for me.  I then decided to check it against a comparable journey from Rouen to Dijon, almost exactly the same distance.

Ramsgate depart Friday 9 May 8.01am

Manchester depart Tuesday 13 May 8.55am

Cheapest Fare 249 pounds

Rouen depart Friday 9 May 8.24am

Dijon depart Tuesday 13 May 9.11am

Cheapest Fare 122 pounds

Incidentally, despite the fact this route uses HS1 and the Virgin Pendolino, the French journey is still an average of 40 minutes quicker for the same distance, as well as under half the price.

I shall see if I can reinstate Bryan’s comment and link now.

Another Update

In fact Bryan turns out to be absolutely genuine, and I am much too jumpy today.

I am not sure this was what Keir Hardie had in mind.

Add together the cities of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Lugansk and you don’t reach the economic output of Dundee.  World domination it isn’t.  Unfortunately both in the Kremlin and on Capitol Hill they, and their satraps, think it is.  Neither side cares at all about the millions of ordinary people in the zone of potential conflict.

The spiral of death in Ukraine is very worrying.  Following the tragic deaths in Odessa, the ball is very much in Putin’s court.  His bluff has very much been called.  We will now learn whether he was stoking clashes in Eastern Ukraine and massing forces on his border in order to give a pretext for invasion – which pretext he now has – or in order to destabilize and intimidate Kiev into moving away from relationships with the EU.

This has been a discussion of the deaf even more within intellectual circles in the West than between Washington and the Kremlin, where at least the Machiavellians understand full well what they are doing.  But their followers either, on the one hand, deny that there are any far right elements on the Ukrainian side or any CIA assistance, or alternatively deny that there are many millions of ordinary Ukrainians who genuinely want to be at peace in their own country and move towards the EU.  They either claim that all the separatists are Russian agents and deny the genuine minority population which yearns for the Soviet Union or Russia, or they deny the existence of Russian agents and special forces in Ukraine, and that most of the Russian nationalists are every bit as right wing and appalling as the equivalent tendency on the Ukrainian side.

First, some history.  The Ukrainian people really do exist.  They have been a subjugated people for centuries, most lastingly by the great Polish-Lithuanian  Empire and then by the Russian Empire.  That does not mean they did not exist.  Consider this: until 1990 there had not been an independent Polish state for over two hundred years, except for a fleeting twenty years between the two world wars.  Yet nobody doubts the Poles are a real nation.  I shan’t start on Scotland again …

None of modern Ukraine was Russian until the 18th century, when the expansion of the Russian empire and decline of the Polish took in these new colonies. As Putin famously remarked, it was called New Russia.  Yes, Vladimir, note it was New.  That is because it was a colony. Just like New York.  Because it was called New Russia gives you no more right to it than the Channel Islands have to New Jersey.  Ukraine had been Russian seven hundred years before its 18th century reconquest, but that population had migrated to Muscovy.

The expansion of the Russian Empire was exactly contemporary with the expansion of the British and American Empires, and other bit players like the French.  Like most of the American, most of the Russian Empire was a contiguous land mass.  The difference between the Russian and British Empires, on the one hand, and the American Empire on the other, was that the Russians and British did not commit genocide of the existing populations.  The difference between the Russian and the British Empires is that the British gave almost all of theirs back in the post-colonial period (a process that needs to be urgently completed). Russia gave back much of her Empire at the fall of the Soviet Union, but still retained a very great deal more than the British.  It is to me inarguable that, in a historical perspective, Putin is attempting to recover as much of the Russian Empire as possible, including but by no means solely by the annexation of Crimea and his actions in Ukraine.

Crimea, incidentally, had maintained its own independent existence as the last remnant of the Mongol Horde right up until the 19th century.  Despite the Russian colonisation of Crimea in the 19th century, it still had a majority Tatar population until the 1940’s, when Stalin tried his hand at genocide on them.  The Tatars were branded Nazis.  Opponents of the Russian Empire are always “Nazis” or “Jihadists”.  The deportation of the Tatars from Crimea was only twenty years before the British did the same genocide to a smaller people in Diego Garcia.  I call for the restitution of both.  Those who call for the restitution of one and not the other are appalling hypocrites.

Equally hypocritical are those who call for a referendum on Russian union for East Ukraine, but not for referenda on independence for Dagestan and Chechnya.  It is an irony insufficiently noted, that in Russia to call or campaign for the separation of any part of the state is a crime punishable by up to 22 years’ imprisonment.  There are over 7,000 people from the Caucasus imprisoned under that law.

There is absolutely no movement among the large minority Russians of the Baltic States to rejoin Mother Russia, because living conditions in the EU are just so much better.  As I have blogged before, it is undeniably true that living conditions for ordinary people in Poland have vastly improved as a result of EU membership, and are much better than in Ukraine – or Russia.

GDP per capita figures for Russia look quite good, but do not give a true reflection of living standards because of astonishing levels of inequality of wealth.  This is very bad in the West, and getting much worse rather rapidly, but is nowhere near as bad as in Russia which is the most viciously capitalist state in the world, made worse by its commodity dependency.  The Russian economy is completely non-diversified, manufacturing and services are miniscule and it is overwhelmingly a raw commodity exporter in energy, metals, grain etc.  That leads to extreme concentration of profit and a lack of employment opportunity.  Combine that with mafia state corruption and you have the oligarchs’ paradise.  Russia is a gangster state.  On top of which, if I were a Russian who campaigned against the Russian government in the same way that I do against  my own, I would be dead.

The desire of ordinary Ukrainians to join the EU one day, and move closer to it now, is understandable and indeed commendable.  It was also the desire of Yanukovich.  Those who claim Western pressure on Yanukovich forget – or choose to ignore – that Yanukovich’s government had actually, quite independently and voluntarily, negotiated the EU co-operation agreement and were on the point of signing it, when Yanukovich was summoned to Moscow by Putin and informed that if they signed the agreement, the energy supplies to Ukraine would immediately be cut off in mid-winter and debt called in.

That is a fact.  It was not illegal for Putin to do that; it was perhaps even legitimate for those who believe in a Machiavellian approach to great power politics.  Yanukovich temporized, between a rock and a hard place.  Ukraine seemed to be at a key moment of  balance, hung between the EU and Russia. The capital being in West Ukraine and overwhelmingly ethnic Ukrainian, pro-EU crowds started to build up.  Then things started to get wildly out of control.

Were western governments encouraging pro-western groups in Ukraine?  Yes, that’s their job.  Did this include covert support? Yes.  Were the Russians doing precisely the same thing with their supporters?  Yes, that’s their job too.  Did the Americans spend 5 billion dollars on covert support?  Of course not.

Victoria Nuland claimed in a speech America had put 5 billion dollars into Ukraine.  I used to write those kind of speeches for British ministers.  First you take every bit of money given by USAID to anything over a very long period, remembering to add an estimate for money given to international projects including Ukraine.  Don’t forget to add huge staff costs and overheads, then something vast for your share of money lent by the IMF and EBRD, then round it up well.  I can write you a speech claiming that Britain has given five billion dollars to pretty well anywhere you claim to name.

The problem is that both the left and right have again, equal but opposite motives for believing Nuland’s bombast about the extent of America’s influence on events.  I have been in this game.  You can’t start a revolution in another country.  You can affect it at the margins.

A military coup you certainly can start.  One thing we don’t really know nearly enough about is what happened at the end, when Yankovich had to flee.  The Maidan protestors would never have caused a government to fall which retained full control of its army.  The army can fail the rulers in two ways.  First is a revolutionary movement among normal soldiers – the French revolution model.  Second is where the troops remain disciplined but follow their officers in a military coup.  The latter is of course a CIA speciality.  More evidence is needed, but if this is the second model, it is unusual for it not to result in military control of government.  Egypt is the obvious current example of a CIA backed coup.

After Yanukovich we had entered the world domination game.  Putin seemed to have lost.  The annexation of Crimea was a smart move by Putin in that game, because there probably is a genuine small majority of the population there who would like to join Russia.  I have no doubt whatsoever that Putin himself does not believe the 93% for a moment.  As I said, the Machiavellian players of world domination are realistic; it is their purblind followers on either side who buy their propaganda.

The Kiev government and the West should have conceded Crimea before Putin moved his troops into it.  The sensible thing for the new Kiev government to have done would have been to offer a referendum in Crimea itself, under its own auspices.  That would have got the most hardline pro-Russian voters out of the country for good. But by that time, everyone had gone into Macho mode, which is where we still are.

None of the remaining provinces would opt to join Russia given the choice.  There is no shortage of existing and historic opinion poll evidence on that.   Crimea was the only province with an ethnic Russian majority.  The Eastern provinces have Russian speaking majorities, but most are ethnic Ukrainian. I base ethnicity here purely on self-identification in census (and, as I have repeatedly explained, absolutely everybody in the former Soviet Union knows precisely what is asked in the questions of Gradzvanstvo and Narodnosch). Just as some Welsh people speak English, some Ukrainians speak Russian but do not consider themselves Russian.  Putin’s frequent references to the Russian-speaking peoples coming back to Russia are as sinister as if we started talking of re-uniting all the English speaking people in the world.

As almost always with colonies, the minority ethnic Russian populations in the East of Ukraine are more concentrated in urban areas.  Hence it has been possible in regional capitals to mobilise gangs of disaffected and unemployed Russian young men (in view of Ukraine’s basket case economy there are plenty), and with a slight stiffening of Russian forces take control of town centres.  There is a significant minority, and possibly a majority in town centres, willing to support.  It is, I think, extremely important to understand that the thugs on both sides are very unpleasant.  I have the particular experience of relations with a lot of Uzbeks, and the incidence of racial attacks by Russian nationalist thugs within Russia itself is absolutely horrifying and almost completely unreported.  The swastika is a popular symbol among young macho men throughout all of former Eastern Europe including Russia.  I absolutely guarantee you that an equally significant proportion of the pro-Russians who have been attacking anyone who tries to show support for Ukraine within Eastern Ukrainian cities, are no more and no less right wing, racist and vicious than the appalling Pravy Sektor thugs included on the other side.  We have plenty within the EU – there is a serious problem, for example, with the official encouragement given to commemorations of pro-Nazi forces within the Baltic states which often have a distinctly neo-Nazi tinge.

Putin’s campaign of controlling the urban centres appears to have gone wrong in Odessa, which is simply too large for the numbers of available young men armed with baseball bats to take control.  The pro-Russians were badly beaten in precisely the same street fighting they had been winning elsewhere.  The culmination of this was the terrible fire and deaths. My expectation is there will not be many women, children or old people among the dead, but also there will not be many non-Ukrainian nationals.  I expect these will prove to have been local Russian young men.

Putin now has a real problem.  His own rhetoric has indicated that he will sweep in and defend these Russians, but there is one thing anyone with half a brain should have worked out by now.  The ruling 1%, the ultra-wealthy, in both Russia and the West are so interconnected with each other that they are playing the game of world domination while trying at the same time to make sure nobody super-rich really loses his money.  Hence the strange obviously bogus sanctions regimes. Real stock market disruption and confiscation of corrupt assets would be difficult to avoid if the tanks start rolling in earnest.  We may be saved from utter disaster by the sheer scale of global corruption, which is a strange conclusion.

I would like to think the awful deaths of the last few days would lead both sides to step back from the brink.  The time has come for a peacekeeping force.  Negotiations should be held urgently to make the Kiev interim government more inclusive of opposition elements from the East – and they must oust the far right at the same time.  The UN Security Council should then send in UN peacekeepers, which must include both Russian and western forces in close integration, to keep the peace while genuine elections are held.  I can see no other way forward which does not risk disaster.

Now the military observers have been released, it might be helpful to clarify their status as an illustration of how both media bias and internet passions on both sides of the Ukrainian conflict obscure the truth.  If you think you get the truth on CNN and BBC you are not paying attention.  If you think you get the truth on Russia Today you are equally not paying attention.

It is wrong to call the men “OSCE observers” in that they are not on a mission initiated and organized by the OSCE.  The casual use of the phrase by almost all the mainstream media is not just incorrect, but culpable in that it gives a deliberate impression of neutrality and authority.

However it is equally wrong to characterize them as “NATO spies”, and they had every right, indeed a duty, to be in Ukraine doing what they were doing.  The purpose of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, of which the Soviet Union was a founding member, is to prevent conflict and improve governance.  (I have a dim recollection that some but not all of the Soviet Socialist Republics, including Ukraine, were individually represented when it was first founded as the CSCE. Ukraine, and of course Russia, has certainly been an important member since it became the OSCE in 1994).

I should say I strongly support the OSCE.  Those who claim it is an American or neo-con front have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.  I was invited to give oral evidence to the OSCE on extraordinary rendition, which I did.  That contrasts with the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee who conducted an inquiry into extraordinary rendition and refused to accept either written or oral evidence from their Ambassador who had just been sacked for blowing the whistle on the subject (Don’t you love Jack Straw and New Labour).  The OSCE do a lot of good work on protecting the Roma, and recently rebuked the French.  Their election monitoring work is first class – if only the UK government would allow them into Scotland.

A key OSCE treaty is the Vienna Document on Military Transparency of 1999.  Under this document, member states notify each other of their forces’ dispositions, and any member state can send verification missions of military officers to any other member state three times a year.

This is not some obscure or obsolete clause which was being used to justify extraordinary snooping in Ukraine.  It is a mechanism in permanent operation.  Russia, for example, sends military observers around UK and US installations all the time, and vice versa.

The whole point of the agreement is to make sure people know and are comfortable with where other people’s weapons are and what they are doing, so as to avoid wars starting by misunderstanding.  This is especially important in times of heightened tension.  So in times of escalating tension or unusual military activity, the agreement specifically allows for increased activity and extra missions to ensure people understand what is happening.  Plainly the disputes for control of Ukrainian military bases and their weapons were precisely the kind of situation where missions were called for.  So the observers not only had a right to be there, they had a duty.

Here am I talking about independence with Michael Greenwell for his excellent Scottish Independence Podcast project.  I always find it a bit painful to listen to my own speaking voice.  I was terrifically conscious of my slight speech defect as a boy and young man.  I never think about it any more, except when I hear myself recorded.  I also appear to have developed a very annoying nervous giggle. If you can put up with all that, I hope you might find the link interesting.

Every half hour BBC News is running a three minute puff piece which is even more sinister for what it hides than for what it says – and By God! That is sinister enough.

“Now the BBC has learned about an alternative No campaign which calls itself No Borders a group determined to rouse the emotions many feel about being Scottish but also British.  Gavin Essler has this exclusive report:”

GAVIN ESLER: “A recording studio on the outskirts of Edinburgh.  A group of musicians putting the finishing touches to a song which they hope could save the United Kingdom”

(Pretty girls caterwauling unpleasantly). The song is part of a new campaign called No Borders.  Their website goes live today on the anniversary of the Union”

(Long speech by Malcolm Offord of No Borders – not a single question asked).

GAVIN ESLER (orgasmic voice): “Here in the very heart of Glasgow in fact almost anywhere you go anywhere in Scotland you’re never far away from our three hundred years of shared British history…. Putting the passion into the campaign to save the United Kingdom is exactly what No Borders say they are about.”

(Another statement from Malcolm Offord.  Still not asked any questions).

GAVIN ESLER ‘The idea is a grassroots campaign to rival that of the pro-independence campaign, based on those who wish to remain in the UK.  A retired care nurse from Glasgow Elizabeth Bashir is one of those who has given her testimonial.

(Pro-union view from sweet old lady.)

(14 seconds to spokesman for Yes campaign – presumably this is BBC “balance”.)

(Pretty Girls Caterwauling Again).

GAVIN ESLER “In the music industry they say you should never rewrite a hit, and No Borders say the Union has been a great hit worldwide for three hundred years.  But others say it might be time to sing a new song.”

Now this long propaganda piece for the No campaign is disgusting in itself for its internal bias, and for the fact that the very much larger grassroots movement the Radical Independence Campaign has never been given any publicity by the BBC (and the failure to reference the longstanding anarchist No Borders movement).  It is not even news – it is two days since “Vote No Borders” was given an even longer bout of free publicity on Newsnight Scotland.

But what makes this propaganda utterly unforgiveable is that Vote No Borders is not a grassroots campaign at all but a government organized campaign which has mysteriously acquired start-up cash of 400,000 pounds with no declared origin.

The registered office of Vote No Borders, a private limited company, is at 24 Chiswell Street, London, EC2Y 4YX . Which is perhaps surprising for a “Scottish grassroots campaign”.  The directors are Malcolm Offord and Fiona Gilmore.

Now pay close attention: Fiona Gilmore is chief executive of Acanchi a PR Consultany which specializes in “Country Branding”.  Its clients include Israel, Dubai, Bahrain and “England”.  Yes, it actually specifies “England” on the company website.  Acanchi also works for DFID – in short, it gets UK taxpayers’ money, plus Israeli and Gulf Arab money.  Are you familiar with the word fungibility?

Malcolm Offord, it turns out, has donated over 120,000 pounds to the Conservative Party plus made personal donations to Michael Gove.  He is the author of the report “Bankrupt Britain” on the Conservative Home website.  In his paper Offord suggests that further cuts in UK public spending should continue to be made  even after the present debt crisis has been passed and urges government to:

“Reform the bloated benefits system of this country to reduce the burden on the state and, just as importantly, boost the growth rate of the country”

And the wee retired care home nurse Elizabeth Bashir?  Well, she’s not quite as “grassroots” as shown by the BBC either.

That picture is definitely the “grassroot” Elizabeth Bashir interviewed by the BBC.  There is also an Elizabeth Bashir from Glasgow on Facebook who “likes” Vote No Borders [reference here deleted as it has been pointed out, I think fairly, it was to something probably meant as a joke]. This lady has expensive tastes for a grassroot, her other “likes” are Svarovski Crystal, the swanky Aura club in Mayfair and Faz Collection clothes.  Strangely although she calls herself Elizabeth Bashir, Glasgow and supports Vote no Borders, everything she “likes” which has a geographical location is in London.  It is conceivably a different Elizabeth Bashir from Glasgow, perhaps a daughter, but the coincidence of the Vote No Borders like is very strong.

It took me an hour with google to find all this.  That the BBC continues to propagandise this fake “grassroots campaign” without revealing Offord’s Tory Party credentials, his belief in never-ending cuts in public spending and welfare benefits, and Acanchi being a consultant paid by government to boost the UK image is completely beyond anything that can remotely be described as legitimate.

It is the most abhorrent example of a fake story, entirely contrived state propaganda, being put out by a state broadcaster.

UPDATE

From commenters below: The “Vote No Borders” website domain was registered by Gary Waple, who works in the Prudential Regulatory Authority of the Bank of England!!!! Before that he worked at the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates – that British government and Gulf money connection pops up again.

ANOTHER UPDATE

The Guardian also is pushing it.  Amazing how neither the BBC nor the Guardian noticed who Mr Offord was, or who his fellow director is, or asked where the money came from.  We have a huge responsibility in social media to combat the ultra-powerful combination of the entire mainstream media with the British state, the City of London and their overseas neo-con allies.

I ask every single person who reads this to do what they can do to get this news out – it may open eyes about the BBC, media in general and the hidden hands behind the No campaign.  Feel free to copy and paste anywhere you want.  But please everybody either blog or tweet about it, put it on your facebook page, email people about it or if you can’t do any of those, just tell three people.  The only way we can beat the massed forces of the state and the ultra-rich is by a deliberate and purposeful exercise of people power.  That will never happen unless everybody tries. Do something.  Now. It does not matter where you are in the world.  Knowledge is universal – that is the root of every power the people can hope to have.

FURTHER UPDATE

Brilliant! This post is currently being read by more than one person every two seconds. I hope it’s being read some other places by now too.  Don’t stop, we need much more than that to equal the numbers who will view the execrable mainstream propaganda.

The actions of the Guardian in complying with the demands of the security services to destroy the computers containing Snowden’s revelations were cowardly in the extreme.  There was a principle at stake here.  The existence of other copies elsewhere is not the point.  That does not make the hard drive destruction better, any more than  Nazi book-burning was made OK by the existence of other copies of the books.

Freedom of the press has only ever been won by extremely brave journalists willing to be beaten, imprisoned or jailed for it.  If editors had always given in to legal threat, there would be no freedom of the press now.  That is why the Guardian’s pathetic excuse that it was legally compelled to destroy the hard drives is of the essence. States always have the sanction of law: standing to advance freedom has always meant not being intimidated by law.

I was threatened with the Official Secrets Act if I insisted on exposing the use of intelligence from torture.  I considered and decided it was worth going to jail for.  I published.  Jack Straw backed down.  The difference between Alan Rusbridger and I is that one of us is not an abject sniveling coward.*

The Guardian not only destroyed the Snowden hard drives, but spent an entire month hiding the fact from the public.  They only came clean and published after the arrest of David Miranda led Glenn Greenwald to refuse to keep it quiet any longer.  Remember this is the same newspaper which sent the  young and extremely brave whistleblower Sarah Tisdall to prison rather than protect their source.

Now Rusbridger p0ses as though smashing the computers was an act of defiance.  I couldn’t resist a comment on this appalling piece of hypocrisy in the Guardian thread below that link.

Then something extraordinary happened.  A reply defending the Guardian was posted to my comment, and this reply extremely quickly gathered 232 recommends.  Now the next highest number of recommends for any comment on that thread is just 57.  That 57 recommend comment is on the main subject of the article – the fall in the UK’s rating for freedom of the press.  My comment is tangential to the article, and the reply to it is somewhat banal.  The vastly disproportionate “recommends”  for that reply are as believable as the 97% vote in the Crimea!

There was a time when the Guardian was something more than just another neo-con mouthpiece.  Now its business model depends entirely on racking up internet clicks in the United States and this influences its content.  It has run, for example, over two dozen extremely one-sided articles in praise of the vicious American murderess Amanda Knox.  It seems increasingly devoted to Israel.  I was at the time genuinely shocked by The Guardian’s refusal to publish the true facts of all the meetings between Liam Fox, Matthew Gould and Adam Werritty.

I understand now that Rusbridger is entirely a neo-con tool, and that their efforts with Assange, Snowden and Greenwald were no more than control and channeling, and broke down when that became obvious.

*There are other differences.  I don’t wear a wig, and I was not implicated in promoting and defending Tony Blair.

I only today realized that the “Eeny meeny” rhyme contains the word nigger – despite having said it many times in my childhood.  I really attached no meaning at all to the word then – I though it was just nonsense like “eeny meeny’.  I certainly had no idea it meant a black person.  I had only ever met two or three black people, and did not think of them as any different.

Once I did know the word “nigger” and its hateful sense – probably from TV – I never made the cognitive connection between it and that old nursery rhyme.  Absolutely not until today when I read about Jeremy Clarkson.  I then closed my eyes and said the rhyme.  I was genuinely astonished – and horrified – to find myself saying:

Eeny meeny miney moe

Catch a nigger by the toe

If he squeals let him go

Eemy meeny miney moe

I am quite sure that was the version I chanted as a child when counting out a random choice.  It was just a counting rhyme.  I had as a small child  no associations at all with its meaning, any more than I associated “ring a ring of rosies” with bubonic plague, or “Here we go round the mulberry bush” with pagan fertility rituals.

Clarkson said the rhyme in the context of making the point that there was nothing to choose between two cars, as a way of indicating the choice would be random – an entirely natural context for the rhyme to spring to mind.  Plainly he realized what he had done, and recorded another version.  Clarkson is even older than me.  I might very well have made the same error.  He denies he ever said the word “nigger”.  I can conceive I might have done it without realizing it is there, until too late.  If that sounds incredible, I think it is because you are not taking into account the way children learn and continually repeat rhythmic counting rhymes.

Naturally I hope that version of the nursery rhyme is never used again.  There can be few things harder to eradicate than ancient playground chants, but parents and teachers must explain why it is wrong if they hear it.  I don’t know if children still use it.  But while we may deplore attitudes of the past, we have to exercise wisdom in dealing with people who were products of a very different environment.  Like Clarkson.  Oh, and me.

Which leads me to a further thought.  I am pretty sure I had no concept of people’s colour as a small child, and the following I know for certain. My elder children attended a primary school in Gravesend in which a little over half the children were Sikh.  By age seven, they had absolutely no conception of any racial difference between themselves and any others in their class.  It is a slender piece of evidence, but I am generally fairly convinced that racial difference is a taught construct.

That Israel has become an apartheid state is so self-evident that it is impossible to put the fact back in the box.  Sky News’ Sam Kiley said it a year ago, and that was almost as surprising as Kerry’s rush of honesty.  A state which has hundreds of laws defining the rights and obligations of its different groups of citizens by their ethnicity, enforcing zoning and separate education and public service provisio, and even limiting the right of defined ethnic groups to live with their spouses, is a state which can be characterized by no other word than Apartheid.  Israel’s claims to be a democracy exactly echo the similar claim of apartheid South Africa.

I am however delighted if the neo-con plan for a “two state” solution is now dead, because that plan was precisely the same plan that South Africa had for its “Bantustan” reserves for black people.  The only difference being that Israel has been much more vicious, herded the indigenous population into much smaller and less viable areas than was allowed to the “Bantustans”, subjected them to appalling economic blockade and then continually ripped away more and more of their small amount of land on a daily basis.

The difference between apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans and the “two state solution”, is that the Israel version is, incredibly, even worse, even more evil.

As in South Africa, the ONLY acceptable solution for Israel/Palestine is freedom and majority rule. People of goodwill should never again be sidetracked into pursuing the kind of apartheid solutions being pushed by Tony Blair.

Five years ago I knew almost nothing about Freemasonry except that it is believed to be often a vehicle for corrupt fixes between businesses and the various arms of government, which I suspect is very probably true.  But what Freemasons did, or believed in, I had really very little idea.  Writing my book on Alexander Burnes required me to learn a great deal, because the Burnes family were not just very active Freemasons but had a profound international influence on the organization.

My conclusion about Freemasonry is that it became widely established as part of the spirit of rational enquiry that informed the eighteenth century enlightenment.  It had the same motivation as Unitarianism, which thrived around the same time  – it was striving towards a form of Deism that allowed people to move towards a belief in God while abandoning the obvious irrational mumbo-jumbo of Christian miracles and the divinity of Christ.  There are obvious parallels with the French revolutionary cult of the Supreme Being.  It was therefore very friendly to other monotheistic religions and looked to provide a kind of lowest common denominator religious synthesis.  The whole project was then dressed up in a great deal of “secret” ritual borrowed from crafts guilds.  That Freemasonry was so successful in aristocratic and educated circles was simple because it was they who also propelled the Enlightenment.

As time went on, for most members it became just a club to make good business contacts – the commitment of “brothers” to help each other in a secret society including a lot of the wealthy was originally well-intended but obviously bound to become a conduit of corruption. Most members would probably, from about 1820 on, have been very surprised by my analysis of its intellectual and religious origins.  They probably still would be today.  It’s just a club for most.

But what I was surprised to find, and of this I am certain, is that Freemasonry’s insistence that all members were equal, of whatever colour and creed, played a very important role as a counterweight to the increasing nineteenth century British Empire philosophy of racial superiority and religious and cultural arrogance.  Freemasonry actively helped turn the tide among the governing classes and directly impacted the increasing anti-colonial beliefs of the British governing classes from the 1920’s on.  A very high proportion indeed of British colonial administrators and officers were Freemasons.

We have a caricature view of Rudyard Kipling now; he was by no means the apostle of Imperialism he has somehow become in popular belief.  I know his soldier’s dialect writing is annoying.  I find it helps to speak it out loud.  But although it is sentimental, his poem The Mother Lodge does contain the germ of a very real truth about the impact of Freemasonry on the British view of race in India.  We’d say ’twas ‘ighly curious, An’ we’d all ride ‘ome to bed,
With Mo’ammed, God, an’ Shiva, Changin’ pickets in our ‘ead.  The same was true in Egypt, at least.  Remember many lodges operated on a far higher social level than the one described in this poem, and those too were mixed.

I appreciate this posting is going to annoy pretty well everyone.  Oh well.  No, I am not a Mason.

Humour me and read it out loud:

The Mother Lodge

There was Rundle, Station Master,
An’ Beazeley of the Rail,
An’ ‘Ackman, Commissariat,
An’ Donkin’ o’ the Jail;
An’ Blake, Conductor-Sargent,
Our Master twice was ‘e,
With ‘im that kept the Europe-shop,
Old Framjee Eduljee.

Outside — “Sergeant!  Sir!  Salute!  Salaam!”
Inside — “Brother”, an’ it doesn’t do no ‘arm.
We met upon the Level an’ we parted on the Square,
An’ I was Junior Deacon in my Mother-Lodge out there!

We’d Bola Nath, Accountant,
An’ Saul the Aden Jew,
An’ Din Mohammed, draughtsman
Of the Survey Office too;
There was Babu Chuckerbutty,
An’ Amir Singh the Sikh,
An’ Castro from the fittin’-sheds,
The Roman Catholick!

We ‘adn’t good regalia,
An’ our Lodge was old an’ bare,
But we knew the Ancient Landmarks,
An’ we kep’ ’em to a hair;
An’ lookin’ on it backwards
It often strikes me thus,
There ain’t such things as infidels,
Excep’, per’aps, it’s us.

For monthly, after Labour,
We’d all sit down and smoke
(We dursn’t give no banquits,
Lest a Brother’s caste were broke),
An’ man on man got talkin’
Religion an’ the rest,
An’ every man comparin’
Of the God ‘e knew the best.

So man on man got talkin’,
An’ not a Brother stirred
Till mornin’ waked the parrots
An’ that dam’ brain-fever-bird;
We’d say ’twas ‘ighly curious,
An’ we’d all ride ‘ome to bed,
With Mo’ammed, God, an’ Shiva
Changin’ pickets in our ‘ead.

Full oft on Guv’ment service
This rovin’ foot ‘ath pressed,
An’ bore fraternal greetin’s
To the Lodges east an’ west,
Accordin’ as commanded
From Kohat to Singapore,
But I wish that I might see them
In my Mother-Lodge once more!

I wish that I might see them,
My Brethren black an’ brown,
With the trichies smellin’ pleasant
An’ the hog-darn passin’ down;
An’ the old khansamah snorin’
On the bottle-khana floor,
Like a Master in good standing
With my Mother-Lodge once more!

Outside — “Sergeant!  Sir!  Salute!  Salaam!”
Inside — “Brother”, an’ it doesn’t do no ‘arm.
We met upon the Level an’ we parted on the Square,
An’ I was Junior Deacon in my Mother-Lodge out there!

I might add in clarity that I honour the various  peoples who struggled against the Empire, and who still struggle against Empires today.  I by no means denigrate their achievement.  But there is no doubt at all that the demise of most of the British Empire (sadly it hasn’t all gone yet) was hastened by the fact that the majority of the British governing classes had come themselves to believe the colonies should be free, certainly by 1945 and arguably sooner.

Unfortunately since about 1975 public opinion has been moulded into a rigid neo-conservative mindset, and neo-imperialism increasingly looks like the old variety.  If you didn’t live through it, it must be hard now to believe that the British “elite” once held quite left wing opinions, and of course some ideologically motivated would wish to deny it as not fitting their model of society.  But it was so,

When I stood against Jack Straw in 2005, I wanted to confront him with open debate about my eye witness to torture and extraordinary rendition, after he lied to parliament continually and repeatedly about it.  I was however, despite being a candidate, not allowed to participate in any of the candidate’s debates, including that broadcast by BBC Radio 4, and the debate hosted by the joint churches in Blackburn cathedral.

I went to see the Dean of the Cathedral about my exclusion.  He said something quite extraordinary – “Look, Craig, you are leaving after the election.  We have to live in this town.”  He was scared of retribution. That sounds wildly improbable, but it was supported by much other experience.  I agreed to short term lets of two shops for my campaign headquarters (there is no shortage of shops to let in Blackburn).  Both cancelled when they discovered I wished to campaign against Jack Straw – one specifically told me that they would like to help, but feared trouble from the council.  When I eventually succeeded, the landlords made the point that they lived and had their businesses outside Blackburn and this was their only asset there, so they couldn’t come to much harm.

Under electoral law a candidate is entitled to the use of schools and community centres free of charge for electoral meetings, but despite dozens of efforts I was never once allowed this.  It is a serious and specific electoral offence for a candidate to provide free food and drink at public meetings – “treating” – but the Straw campaign did this on a very large scale, and both the police and returning officer took no action when I complained with sworn affidavits of evidence from eye-witnesses.  Postal ballot fraud was extraordinarily blatant, with the same authorities determinedly looking the other way.  I could not even get them to look at why thirteen postal ballots were cast from one single unoccupied flat.

The point of which is – I know how Cyril Smith did it.  It was a different category of crime he was committing, but I have seen how in these Lancashire towns like Blackburn and Rochdale the authorities collude together so comfortably to cover up the crimes of the local big man, be it Cyril Smith or Jack Straw.  It may seem quite incredible that everybody knew in Rochdale and nothing was done, but having tried to challenge Straw in Blackburn, I know precisely how it worked.  The entire political culture of industrial Lancashire is deeply rotten, and ought to be a source of deep shame.

Cyril Smith was merely a symptom, not the cause.

I have maintained ever since the independence referendum date was announced, that the EU election results would boost Yes support into the lead.  I am very confident that will prove a good prediction.

Today’s Sunday Times opinion poll on European election voting intentions gives:

UKIP 31

New Lab 28

Cons 19

Ldem 9

Green 8

A win for UKIP will not only remind Scots that England remains in thrall to very right wing politics tinged with racism.  It will also make plain to Scots that the only way to be sure to stay in the EU is to be part of an independent Scotland.  No professional career diplomat seriously believes the EU would expel Scotland, even though a tiny minority of European politicians occasionally like to threaten it would, for their own domestic purposes.

A massively greater risk is the crazed Little Englanders dragging the UK into leaving the EU.  UKIP are rampant.  The Tories are terrified of them, and have a risible position that after the next election they will renegotiate Britain’s membership, then have an in-out referendum.  In fact there really is no chance that all the other member states will unanimously agree to Cameron’s demand for changes in treaties that were excruciatingly difficult to gain unanimity for in the first place.  In several instances EU states would be unable to agree without a referendum, a can of worms nobody wants to open.  Cameron’s renegotiated settlement can never happen, so the Tories’ European figleaf only has a couple more years to go before expiry date.  Then the English will want to leave.  A majority of English voters already do want to leave.

The difference between English and Scottish voters on the EU is not a myth.  Lord Ashcroft regularly commissions polling data for the Conservative party on a much greater scale than anything the newspapers do.  Newspaper samples are typically around 1,000.  Ashcroft’s are around 20,000. His first quarter survey in 2014

All things considered, do you think that the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union? (Sample 20,058)  (excluding don’t knows etc)

Wales England Northern Ireland (WENI)

Yes 49

No 51

Scotland

Yes 60

No 40

That is a huge difference, and shows one clear reason why Scotland needs to be an independent state with its own foreign policy.

I trace this strong popular support for the EU in Scotland back to the early 1980’s.  Thatcherism was devastating the economy, there was negative public investment from Westminster, and the only available jobs were on EU regional development funded projects like the A9 upgrade and Dundee City airport.  I remember the big blue EU hoardings at those sites, and it was like a breath of sanity amidst the English Conservative wreaked havoc.

Scottish EU support is also part of our open, internationalist outlook.  We have no desire to rebuild barriers between ourselves and the vast European cultural social and economic space.  We are not fearful or resentful of those foreigners.  We want the EU itself to be more outward looking and porous too.

New Labour are not going to win the next UK general election.  In the last six UK general elections, the governing party has gained an average of 6.5 percentage points in the twelve months preceding the general election.  New Labour are at their polling zenith – which is not at all high – and about to decline.  The Tory/Clegg disaster is coming back to the UK in 2015.

Though when New Labour are committed to cut benefits more than the Tories, and given their record on bank bailouts, NHS privatization, academy schools, PFI, university tuition fees and the numerous other disasters New Labour visited upon us – not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan and extraordinary rendition – I cannot understand the brainless tribal loyalty that makes anybody believe New Labour would be any better anyway.

About eight years ago, a young actor bought me lunch in New York while I was on a speaking tour of American universities.  He wanted me to tell him about torture and extraordinary rendition,and in particular precisely what I had witnessed personally.  He wished to get authentic, first hand, hard information.  He was interested in the characters and motivations of the people who supported and administered the torture policy, and I recall he was struck by my telling him that some of them were nice people who I had known for years.  He had a very gentle persona.  His name was Mark Ruffalo.  I am sorry to say that, having been living in Uzbekistan and Ghana, I had never heard of him.

I have no recollection of how that lunch came about or who organized it.  I think it was just on the itinerary my American publisher gave me.  My impression was that Ruffalo’s purpose was to inform himself politically, rather than prepare for a role or anything professionally oriented.  I had almost forgotten about it until I read today’s profile in the Guardian.  There is often much scepticism about the sincerity, roots and durability of celebrity activism. I merely wish to point out that in Ruffalo’s case, his is very genuine and very well grounded.

Can anyone work out how to find the rest of this article?  Am I being particularly dense today?

https://archive.org/details/jstor-110439

Incidentally the date of January 1 1830 in the listing is entirely erroneous.  Yes, I know I can go to the British Library of Royal Society and look at the print version, but I don’t live in London and am trying to avoid that,

I am pleased that Simon Ostrovsky has been released.  He is a decent journalist, who back on 30 October 2007 did a very good piece on Newsnight about the terrible child slavery compelled by the state in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan.  They had done some secret filming in Uzbekistan, which took much courage.

There was however one strange thing about Ostrovsky’s film.  I was called in to the Newsnight studio in the morning to do a pre-record piece on what I had witnessed of this terrible system of cruel forced labour.  I also recounted how I had reported it to government while I was Ambassador there from 2002 to 2004, but the British government had refused to take any action, as had the EU.

But none of my interview was shown in the programme, nor was I mentioned.  Instead a New Labour minister was interviewed and he was allowed to say, unchallenged, that the film was absolutely shocking and the British government had no prior idea this was happening; they would now look into it etc.  Needless to say they still did nothing, nor has anything ever been done to have child slave cotton banned from the UK.  Why do you think Primark is so cheap?

I do not know whether Ostrovsky had any editorial control over the decision to cut the interview which proved the New Labour minister was lying through his teeth.

I should start by saying that I deeply regret, and have always regretted, the support for Hamas amongst Palestinians.  I view Hamas as a nasty organization espousing an unpleasant and narrow version of Islam, and far too ready to turn to violence.  I regret the passing of the secular minded and sophisticated wide culture of the urbane Palestinian elite of my youth.

I understand that Palestinian willingness to embrace the limiting certainties of Hamas is due to the appalling pressure caused by decades of unspeakable violence and repression by Israel, the squeezing of Palestinians into ever-shrinking over-crowded reservations, the killings, the continual unrelenting humiliation, the deliberate destruction of all economic base.  I understand Hamas won support through social programmes.  I understand the extreme corruption of the Fatah leadership, where some seemed to do very nicely out of the disaster that repressed everybody else.  I understand the role of Israel and the US in promoting the initial growth of Hamas to weaken the Palestinian cause.  My regret is that they succeeded.

Personally I doubt that this latest Hamas/Fatah rapprochement will last any longer than the previous ones.  Even for a people in the direst situation, there will always be self-seeking sociopaths emerging as leaders.

But even with all that, the appalling smug reaction of Netanyahu is sickening.  Israel at no stage had the slightest intention of entering any meaningful peace process, stopping settlement building, or reducing the dispossession and discrimination suffered by Arabs of all sorts within Israel itself.  The World’s most vicious and unrelenting theological and racist state continues to be just that.  The United States was not in any sense genuinely involved in abetting a peace process; it was managing the process of genocide of the Palestinians, drawn out over decades, just conducted with enough disguise to allow the mainstream media to pretend it is not happening.

I do not like Hamas, but they remain morally superior to Netanyahu on every conceivable measure.

The Wayback machine has shown that there is a scintilla of truth to Aaronovitch’ claim, in that one single one star review was posted before his procured five star reviews arrived.  But it also shows that four one star reviews, which arrived no earlier than a larger number of five star reviews and appear equally genuine, were deleted by Amazon. No five star reviews were deleted.

I therefore contacted Amazon’s press office to ask for their reaction to Aaronovitch’s admission of posting fake reviews, and asked who initiated the deletion of his poor reviews.  They asked me to put my questions in writing by email.  This I have done.  Answer came there none.

To [email protected]

Re: Voodoo Histories

“Something like half of all book sales are now made through Amazon, and when you find a book on Amazon it is accompanied by reviews from “readers” who give it a 1 (lowest) to 5 star rating.  So, almost before my book was published, the first 1-star reviews started to appear, from people who had never read it. After a week, even I wouldn’t have bought it.

There is only one thing you can do in this situation. You ask every friend and family member to go onsite PDQ and 5-star your baby. You get your frauds to balance off their frauds. Ce n’est pas magnifique, mais (grâce à Amazon) c’est la guerre.”

These are my questions:

1) Do you agree it is a reasonable practice for authors to persuade friends and family to post favorable reviews on Amazon? Do you agree with Mr Aaronovitch’s implication that Amazon’s policy forces authors to do this?

2)  A wayback archive search shows that in fact a number of poor reviews of Voodoo Histories were deleted by Amazon.  Did Mr Aaronovitch  contact Amazon to initiate these deletions?

3)  In fact, the poor reviews deleted were not, with a single exception, posted any earlier than similar quantities of five star reviews.  Why was it decided to delete several one star reviews and no five star reviews?  Who took this decision? Was it in any way motivated by Amazon’s own political sympathies? Was it motivated by a desire to boost sales?

4) Now Amazon has been informed by Mr Aaronovitch that the five star reviews were procured, will it be taking action to delete these early five star reviews, particularly those posted on the very day of publication?

5) Do you agree that Mr Aaronovitch’s boasting in the Times of his action in procuring false reviews for Voodoo Histories may, if Amazon will not decry it, encourage other authors to do the same?

I would point out to you that Mr Aaronvitch has himself put these matters into the public domain by publishing his actions in The Times.  It therefore makes no sense for Amazon to refuse to answer any of these questions on the grounds of Mr Aaronovitch’s privacy.

Craig Murray