What comes out to me from the “Black Spider letter” correspondence of Prince Charles published today is how utterly obsequious Tony Blair and New Labour ministers were to him. No sign whatsoever of radicalism from the former “People’s Party” as they fell over to ingratiate themselves with the heir to the throne. I rather enjoyed Charles quite sharp tone to Blair.
I am fundamentally opposed to the existence of the monarchy. It will hopefully be replaced by a better system, but no human system is perfect. Given that we have a monarchy at present, you will perhaps be surprised to learn that I do not see anything wrong in Charles’ letters, which put forward views which are much what we would have expected him to hold. Of course there is interaction between the monarchy and government, and of course we should get rid of this hereditary element. But Charles’ lobbying is hugely less damaging and pernicious than the corporate lobbying I witnessed throughout my Whitehall career. At least Charles is not lobbying them for corporate advantage and giving large political donations at the same time.
While in my view he did nothing wrong in writing the letters, he and government are both very wrong in arguing they should be private. It is when it is secret that such attempts to wield influence between two branches of government – and monarchy is a branch of government – can be most simply perverted to ill ends. That such publication will not occur again because government has legislated to keep it secret, is an example of the privileged arrogance that prevents this from being a genuine democracy.
Altogether not that big a story and it gives Rusbridger and the Guardian the chance to pose as radical. I find the fact that what is published is so anodyne and unobjectionable rather suspicious – what has not been published? Rusbridger is of course the editor who complied enthusiastically with a GCHQ instruction to smash the Snowden hard drives. The existence of other copies does not justify this any more than it justifies book-burning.
By coincidence, a very worthwhile article by Michael Gillard that had been excised from the net has recently been republished, setting out how Rusbridger in 2002 conspired with Andy Hayman of the Met to bury an investigation into police corruption, including the burglary of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. By a further coincidence I was having a pint with Laurie Flynn in Sandy Bell’s four days ago.
Hayman went on to be the promoter of the stream of lies about the murder of Jean Charles De Menezes and the publicist of numerous fake terrorist plots, before having to resign in a scandal involving nubile police officers at public expense in tropical islands.
Rusbridger and his extraordinary wig go on and on as a pretend opposition outlet, their reputation much dented by recent hysterical unionist output which exceeds the Daily Express. But Rusbridger’s continued usefulness to the establishment is not in doubt. The pose of publishing the most harmless of Prince Charles’ letters does little to help a threadbare disguise.
A key adviser to Thatcher,on the Poll Tax,has been made up to a lord purely so that he can fill the roll of junior Scottish minister at the Scotland office.
They can’t get all the Lords into the chamber at once as it is. There’s 800 of the buggers! And the bloody roof’s leaking!
I think this marks the official declaration of Great Britain The Banana Republic.
“This is true of other countries. It was true of Libya (one of the best socialist countries the world has ever known) until NATO whowed it what democracy is all about. It appears to be true of North Korea, another country without a Rothschild central bank. So stories are made up to discredit it the latest being about a top general being publicly executed with anti-aircraft weapons for falling asleep at a meeting.
It does not mean these countries will not be taught what the western concept of democracy means, unfortunately. When justice eventually prevails Gaddafi, Saddam and Ceausescu will not go down in the history books as tyrants, but as those who opposed the tyrants.”
Could the Emonences do something to clear the shit from their own stable – I’m too busy working – I daresay the useless idiot has no problem with taking my taxes to pay his pension from the state that he so despises.
Chuka Umunna steps down due to intense media pressure.
Look out for the manufactured sympathy for him, and his eventual leader bid as the saviour of the Labour Party.
His US handlers will be so proud.
“Tyranny is wont to occur not less but more frequently on the basis of polyarchy [rule by many, i.e. oligarchy or democracy] than on the basis of monarchy.” (St Thomas Aquinas, “On Kingship”). Modern examples: (1) Away with the Kaiser and in with the Weimar Republic, and thereafter Hitler. (2) Away with the Tsar, and in with Kerensky and thereafter Lenin. (3) Away with 20th century Muslim kings and in with Ba’ath, neo-Communist or Islamist dictatorships (I wonder how many Iranians would prefer rule by the Shah – one Iranian told me that the 1979 Islamic revolution is now referred to as “The Big Mistake” – yes, it was rather, wasn’t it.)”
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Is that it Abe, is that the best defence of the monarchy you have,next you’ll be citing Dieu et mon droit,as a fact.
Tell me Abe how many people have died under the monarchy through the ages,at the will of a king or queen,at least a president can be voted out.
As for Iran, its president Hassan Rouhani,studied at a college in Glasgow,and appears to be more liberal than Ahmadinejad,though it’s the Islamic regime rather than the presidential regime that’s changed Iran for th worse,in my opinion.
I’m wondering how I, as a bi person, would find freedom and equality in this supposedly egalitarian Lybia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Libya
Just a reminder of how well the Party Mr Goss is currently infiltrating on behalf of Ghadaffi (and his old WRP chums) is doing.
http://leftunity.org/election-results-2015/
“I’m wondering how I, as a bi person, would find freedom and equality in this supposedly egalitarian Lybia:”
If you can’t spell the name of the country properly, not much.
Time for the badger option;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13137835
I’m volunteering as a marksman.
Katie Hopkins is backing Tristram Hunt…
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/05/15/katie-hopkins-predicts-next-labour-leader-tristram-hunt_n_7289608.html
God, I’ve always wanted to shop at John Lewis, but never got past security…
By e-mail from War on Want
Today we commemorate the Nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’), when over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in the process that led to the declaration of the State of Israel. Now, 67 years later, the Nakba is ongoing:
Over 5 million Palestinian refugees are still fighting for the realisation of their right of return to their homes, a right which the State of Israel continues to deny to them. 1.6 million Palestinians live as second-class citizens in the State of Israel. Over 50 Israeli laws have been enacted since 1948 that directly or indirectly discriminate against the indigenous Palestinians who were able to remain after the Nakba. Nearly 2 million Palestinians live under an Israeli military siege in the Gaza Strip, without freedom of movement or reliable access to clean water, food, medicine, electricity and other basic needs. Everyone in Gaza is vulnerable to Israeli military attacks such as the bombardment in the summer of 2014 when over 2,000 Palestinians were killed, hundreds of whom were children. More than 1.7 million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, closed in by Israel’s illegal Apartheid Wall and settlements which are proliferating at a frightening pace. Nearly 6,000 Palestinians are held as political prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centres, where torture is widespread. Many are held in administrative detention, without charge or trial. Despite these seemingly insurmountable challenges, Palestinians continue to struggle for justice, asking grassroots movements around the world to take action using boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel until it complies with international law.
War on Want continues our campaign targeting G4S for its complicity in the abhorrent system of Israeli arrest and detention. G4S, a British multinational company, has since 2007 provided security systems and other services for Israeli prisons and detention centres holding Palestinian political prisoners.
Last year at their Annual General Meeting, G4S executives were forced to respond to protestors demanding answers, and were pressed to come clean on whether they will renew their contracts with Israeli apartheid. G4S’s comments show that the company is feeling the heat from our campaigns, so now is the time to turn it up!
On 4 June G4S will be holding its Annual General Meeting at the ExCel London Centre. Stand with us at this year’s AGM to #StopG4S!
Come to our protest outside the G4S AGM on 4 June. Details on time and location are on facebook! Tweet about the campaign using the hashtag #StopG4S, and direct your questions and demands to @G4S_UK. Sign up with War on Want to receive updates on the G4S campaign and other BDS work we are involved in.
Best wishes,
Ryvka Barnard
Global Justice Campaigner
p.s. Keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming report ‘Arming Apartheid’ covering the UK-Israel arms trade!
Nafeez Ahmed – War crime: NATO deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure
May 15, 2015
The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, writes Nafeez Ahmed. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on Gaddafi himself. Since then, the country’s water infrastructure – and the suffering of its people – has only deteriorated further.
/..
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2869234/war_crime_nato_deliberately_destroyed_libyas_water_infrastructure.html
“Juteman
15 May, 2015 – 3:53 pm
“I’m wondering how I, as a bi person, would find freedom and equality in this supposedly egalitarian Lybia:”
If you can’t spell the name of the country properly, not much.”
LABIA.
P Charles’s Mummy and the ruler of Bahrain.
Western Hypocrisy Going Naked in the Middle East
May 14, 2015
By Stephen Gowans
The dictator of Bahrain—who, with the help of Saudi troops and tanks, ruthlessly crushed an Arab Spring uprising that demanded a representative democracy—is spending a leisurely day, today, in Britain, one of the world’s oldest parliamentary ‘democracies’, visiting a horse show with his fellow parasite Queen Elizabeth II. Britain is neck deep in the undemocratic campaign to topple the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, amply assisted by Saudi Arabia and other tyrannies of the Persian Gulf, who have provided arms, training and money to al-Qaeda and other Sunni religious fanatics to wage jihad against the secular, anti-sectarian, anti-imperialist, and anti-Zionist government of Assad. Assad must be toppled, the misnamed Friends of Syria aver, because he is a dictator who thwarted an Arab Spring uprising.
/..
https://gowans.wordpress.com/2015/05/14/western-hypocrisy-going-naked-in-the-middle-east/
They can’t get all the Lords into the chamber at once as it is. There’s 800 of the buggers! And the bloody roof’s leaking!
I think this marks the official declaration of Great Britain The Banana Republic.”
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Yep, the reforming of the House of Troughers aka Lords was first mooted in 1904,yet over a century later zero,nil, nada has been done about it.
The bloated British parliament is huge compared to India’s and India has a population around the 1.2 billion mark.
Only the Chinese carry more dead weight, than the UK in their parliamentary house.
The gap between rich and poor in Britain,during the Tories second term will be wider than it was when Charles Dickens,was chronicling the gin parlours,opium dens and dank slums of the Victorian era.
Privatisation low public spending and corporate domination,of all aspects of economic and social activity by transnational companies, with huge turnovers will answer to no one under Tory rule except their share holders.
“I think this marks the official declaration of Great Britain The Banana Republic.”
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Yes but importantly are they fair trade bananas.
rofl, nice one.
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You do know that in some parts of our most democratic Enggeeeerrrrrland if you so much as advertise you are bi/poof/homosexual/on the other bus/etc. you will get you tiny head kicked in and left to drown in your own blood.
What is the compunction with the flamboyant flaunting of; I am bi/homosexual/etc?
Why can you not remian as comfortable in your skin as the rest of us; carry on without ramming our “sexual identity/self image/who we are” down the others throat?
If you keep quiet probably you will have a whale of time there.
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The most disgusting torture outfit in the world, that under the tutelage of the US SIS and the cats paw the zionistan had transcended the art of the death of thousand cuts. Its standard operating procedure included raping the males with a Coca cola bottle with the pressed caps with cerated edges. Use of animals trained to rape the detainees, inserting all manner of objects into various orifices of the detainees, ………….. included was the Apollo chair/device that literally tormented the detainees to irrecoverable mental break down ……..
No need to distress the contributors with even more graphical tortures.
Needless to point out that there are those whom would like to relive the good old days of Shah and his time in Iran, after all it was not their anus getting ripped apart.
Makes me sick to see the historically ignorant specimens to sit in judgment and pontificate about matters that they have no knowledge at all.
The suggestion that the House of Lords should be replaced by a chamber made up of representative chosen by lot from the whole population by Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty in their book The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords (2008). That would give significant political power (although not an absolute veto) to a body made up of average citizens.
Hopefully the upcoming trial of former Libyan Islamic Fighting Force leader Abu Khattala will answer some of the problems caused by the 9/11 fiascoes.
According to my research, he led the murder of Yale student Suzanne Jovin who was attempting to tip off Washington in her senior thesis that Osama bin-Laden was again planning to attack the WTC, this time with hijacked air liners, piloted by suicide bombers.
The judge in the case, another Yale graduate, has obliged the FBI through his delays of the trial to release 90% of the evidence that it has on the terrorist, and making it to provide it to the defense – which has resulted in it having no less than three defense lawyers, experts in capital cases, to defend him against the death penalty.
At least the Bureau is throwing the book at the bastard, and one can only hope that it includes her murder too.
“Ben Bradshaw, BLiar and Iraq War supporter and member of the Henry Jackson Society thinks Umunna’s withdrawal from the leadership race is ‘tragic’ and he is ‘very sad’ that Chukka has chucked it in.”
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Yes Mary Chukka chucked it after realising his private life would no longer be private.
As for Blair,he took us to five wars in all ,Iraq Yugoslavia,Sierra Leone,Afghanistan and back into Iraq.
That amounts to more wars in fewer years than any British ruler,either royal or common before him.
But we voted him out Abe are you listening,we couldn’t do that with a royal.
At the time it was said Blair wanted to go into Burma and Zimbabwe as well.
That’s the spirit always be ready to fight to the last drop of other peoples blood.
“Juteman
15 May, 2015 – 3:53 pm
“I’m wondering how I, as a bi person, would find freedom and equality in this supposedly egalitarian Lybia:”
If you can’t spell the name of the country properly, not much.”
LABIA.
==============================================
What about Lesbya as a compromise? 🙂
In all seriousness Libya was not perfect. Neither is North Korea. It is just that if you have an economy that works without US input it makes that country very vulnerable to being hit with the latest weapons at NATO disposal.
But you have to remember Gay rights have been around for less than 50 years in this country. I guess they were widely practised clandestinely by those inclined. Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for homosexual practices in this country with Boysie (Lord ALfred Douglas) in the late nineteenth century. Wilde was a great playwright.
I read De Profundis when I was an apprentice and was very moved by the narrative. Beautifully written, as all Wilde’s work was. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is brilliant.
Such people as Alan Turing and Lord Montagu (still alive at the age of 88) faced serious legal consequences for being gay as recently as the 1950’s.
John Goss
15/08/2015 5:09pm
I agree, “De Profundis” is a most extraordinary work of art.
At least it wasn’t burned in an attempt to extinguish it from the world, like Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Now that did cause a fuss.
Kind regards,
John
The mastermind of that 1950’s witch hunt against gays was the Home Secretary, Scottish Tory David Maxwell Fyfe.
Remember, Remember…The rivers of Blood from last summer’s Slaughter in Gaza –
‘Like spilled blood’: 1st ever Gaza film festival rolls out red carpet among ruins
“When we were looking for locations to screen the films we arrived in Shujaiyeh in eastern Gaza City, a large part of which was turned to rubble. We stood there next to the destroyed mosque, surrounded by destroyed homes in every direction, and became clear that it was the right place to hold a film festival focused on human rights,”
Saud Aburamadan.
http://rt.com/news/258953-gaza-film-festival-war/
P.s. John S-D.. lovely Short video here, different But.. – Dead Can Dance – De Profundis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5ENuFmMcYA
Lysias
15/05/2015 5:48pm
How about that lovely man James Anderton, former Chief Constable of Greater Manchester?
In 1990, a writer named David Britton published a novel in the UK entitled Lord Horror. In it, among many other controversial passages, he placed in the mouth of a character, speeches by James Anderton regarding homosexuals, except that he modified the speeches to refer to “Jews” rather than homosexuals. The book was banned by a magistrate on the grounds of obscene anti-Semitism, seized and incinerated. It remains banned today.
Kind regards,
John
As a young idealist in the late ’70’s, I sent a letter to the Lymbian embassy, asking for a copy of The Green Book. For our younger readers, this was before the internet, and all learning was by dead tree.
I received a nice parcel in return, full of interesting material.
Even in those days, the parcel had a sticker on it saying ‘opened and re-sealed by the ‘something’ services’.
THe FBI has continued to have me under surveillance, though I have not been apparently classified as gay.
Today, The Guardian reported about the Bureau using license plate recorders to transform its operations in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
I went to Napa, California in August 2009 to help take care of my ex-girl’s son after he was injured in a motorcycle accident.
His accident proved much less life-threatening than I expected when he managed to put us up in a villa in a most exclusive area, Silverado, which required a car that he provided so that we could pretty much take care of ourselves.
It got even stranger when I was left alone with the car on several occasions, living about equidistant from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Healdsburg, Califoria, the home of nuclear weapons designer Thomas Reed which I was most interested in because of America’s development of Star Wars.
The only trouble with the set up was that I was never inclined to go there, just sending my time, reading Reed and Danny Stillman’s Nuclear Express.
Just posting this to give others an idea what the Bureau was doing with the program against totally innocent people.
And this is the guy who’s going to disentangle the UK from the ECHR and install the British Bill of Rights.
God help us.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HAqyf7a4xFM
I agree with many of the reservations expressed about the monarchy. The fact remains, though, that an elected head of state would certainly have more power, by the very fact of having gained the popular vote, thereby having a substantial power base; the Windsors, paradoxically, must tread very carefully because of their ambiguous position. I also think it’s naive to assume that any ordinary person would want to run for the office of head of state or be capable of doing so without being a politician or having strong political connections.
The monarchy is a strange institution yet looking around the world I’m not sure I can see a better way.