The sentencing of a 15 year old Blackburn boy – 14 at the time he committed his thought crimes – to life imprisonment is grossly inhuman. It is not quite as evil as the decision of the appalling Saudi regime to crucify and behead a child dissident, but it is recognisably a product of the same world view. History books will look back on this era as one of astonishing state cruelty.

As I have posted repeatedly, Islamic terrorism in the UK is virtually non-existent. It has killed precisely one person in the last decade. As a massive security industry employing many, many thousands depends for its very existence on this tiny threat, the work of the government, media and security services in exaggerating the “danger” is unceasing and increasingly desperate. It is based on an endless series of stories of thwarted terrorist plots.

The most famous was the liquid bomb plot which in fact had no bombs and no air tickets, and where the traces of “suspicious chemical” found in baby feeding bottles was Milton baby bottle sterilising solution. Then there was the ricin plot with no ricin, and the Manchester “Easter bomb plot” where the “bomb ingredient” found in a kitchen was an ordinary bag of sugar.

In the event of the absence of any terrorism, the focus has shifted to thinking about terrorism, and the result has been the conviction of a series of fantasists who can be held to “prove” the terrorist threat. Of these the very saddest is the State’s crushing of this young child. He had no bombs, owned no weapons, harmed nobody. He was however the “mastermind” behind the dreaded “Anzac Day Beheading Plot” where jihadists in Australia did… nothing whatsoever. Nobody attacked anybody. Some people texted about it.

Aha! But don’t we realise that, but for the tens of billions we lavish on the security services, somebody in Australia definitely would have got beheaded by someone? It was only the arrest of a schoolboy in Blackburn that prevented beheadings in Australia, just as it was only the execution by drone of two men in a car in Syria that prevented something absolutely awful from happening in the UK, somewhere by someone, somehow. “What they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.”

I don’t understand how stupid you have to be to buy into this stuff. But then I don’t understand what a vicious callous bastard of a judge you have to be to sentence a child to life imprisonment. He is doubtless a very disturbed child and probably very unpleasant to deal with. But he did not harm anyone; pretending he could have is part of the charade of the security state.

I also do not understand why the child’s beheading fantasies get him locked away for life, yet it is apparently OK for the Saudis to behead and crucify anyone they like, and still be grovelled to by the entire British establishment, up to and including the monarch. So far as can be ascertained, the Saudis behead more people than ISIL and for identical reasons, yet I see no Conservative demands to bomb them. One interesting result of the Russian bombings in Syria is that the media are for the first time openly publishing that the CIA and Saudis are funding and arming some of the most dubious combatant groups in Syria.

The power players in all of this, on all sides, are cruel men. Justice Saunders in a British court has just proven that includes the British establishment.

UPDATE

Someone has today amended the Wikipedia entry for T in the Park to reinstate Stuart Clumpas as co-founder with Ellis. That is still not quite true – Clumpas was the founder and Ellis worked for him – but it is certainly much better.

I appreciate this post is of limited interest to most people, but it is curious to me. There is currently a row about a decision to give 150,000 of Creative Scotland’s money to the highly commercial and profitable T in the Park festival. My take on that is that it was a bad decision within Creative Scotland.

The founder of T in the Park was an old university friend of mine, Stuart Clumpas. Stuart ran – with breathtaking brilliance – the entertainments at Dundee University students union while I was President. It seems incredible now, but we had the biggest bands in the country on a regular basis, including the world premier of a Mike Oldfield album, and the Pretenders while Brass in Pocket was number 1, Dexy’s Midnight Runners just as they hit, and much else. Stuart was truly amazing. With his collaborator John Reid he went on to establish an entertainments company – I used to hear these two students cooking up their plans over pints. Within six months they had the biggest nightclub in Dundee (Fat Sam’s), within a couple more the biggest in Glasgow (King Tut’s). Stuart went on to found both T in the Park and the V Festivals. I haven’t seen him since about 1984, rather to my regret. Last I heard, third hand, he sold his festival interests and retired down under.

Anyway, the point of that trip down memory lane is that the current controversy over T in the Park led me to look it up on Wikipedia. I found that, extraordinarily, the T in the Park page makes no mention whatsoever of Stuart Clumpas, and attempts to create the impression that it was founded by its current director Geoff Ellis, who it says “was involved from the start” and “organised the first T in the Park festival”. Well, he did some of the organisation, but only as an employee of Stuart Clumpas, who has been airbrushed from the T in the Park Wikipedia page as though he were a former Soviet leader taken out of the photo.

This is an interesting comment on the integrity of Wikipedia. But it is also an interesting comment on the integrity of Mr Ellis. That Wikipedia page had the unmistakeable feel of a promotional page which has been heavily written and edited either by Mr Ellis or by someone working on behalf of Mr Ellis. And if Geoff Ellis is the kind of shyster who would falsely claim to have founded T in the Park and edit out the real founder, does that cast a light on the morality of the rather dubious 150,000 payment?