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

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

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

It is my birthday today.

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

A week late, but the mainstream media has finally learnt (not least through my telling them) that it was the Mossad link that was really worrying Whitehall about Fox.

And I have an article in the Mail on Sunday.

The Indie on Sunday story of a Fox-Israel plot against Iran is a great deal more credible than Obama’s announcement of a plot by Iranian used car salesmen to employ the Canadian Mounties to assassinate Justin Timberlake outside the Won-Ton Chinese restaurant in Champaign-Urbana (I may have got some of the details of Obama’s fantasy wrong, but what’s the difference?)

It is now absolutely essential that Matthew Gould. British Ambassador to Israel, answers the questions I have put to him.

Peter Oborne managed to get me on a BBC Radio 4 programme he was guest hosting, Week in Westminster, and presumably due to his involvement I was, for the first time in three years, not cancelled at the last moment. You can listen here by clicking on the first “listen now” button. I am on briefly after about 9 minutes, but it is all worth hearing.

I have repeatedly recommended Oborne’s books The Rise of Political Lying and The Triumph of the Political Class, both essential reading.

Incidentally my single sentence reference to Mossad was edited out, but I think my meaning remains clear.

A mainstream media source has finally plucked up the courage to publish the widespread concern among MOD, Cabinet Office and FCO officials and military that the Werritty operation was linked to, and perhaps controlled by, Mossad – something which agitated officials have been desperately signaling for some days.

“Officials expressed concern that Fox and Werritty might even have been in freelance discussions with Israeli intelligence agencies” write Patrick Wintour and Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian.

As I have been explaining, the real issue here is a British defence secretary who had a parallel advice structure designed expressly to serve the interests of another state and linked to that state’s security services. That is not just a sacking offence, it is treasonable.

UPDATE

It seems to me the questions now starting to be asked about the connection to Israel and possibly to Mossad might well have had a major effect on Fox’s sudden throwing in of the towel. If he did not believe that resigning would stop some further investigation, he might as well have toughed it out over the weekend; nobody has ever accused Fox of being thin-skinned.

The need for answers to my questions to Matthew Gould is in fact now greater, not less.

An interesting and insufficiently explored aspect of the Werritty scandal is the role of Matthew Gould, UK Ambassador to Israel. Gould met with Werritty and Fox at least twice, at a pre-posting briefing meeting in the MOD and at an anti-Iranian conference in Israel. It is quite probable he had many more contacts with Werritty than that. As Werritty’s financiers specifically sought to promote the interests of Israel though Werritty, and it is thought by some within the MOD and Cabinet Office that they may have been acting on behalf of Mossad, these links with Matthew Gould are crucial.

Matthew is a good man, of whom Robin Cook thought highly. I have this morning sent him this email:

My dear Matthew,

Belated congratulations on your Ambassadorship and I do hope that you and your family are enjoying life in Tel Aviv.

I wish to ask you some questions on your role in the Adam Werritty affair. This email and the response will be published on my blog. I appreciate you will probably pass this on to News Department but it seemed impolite to address questions about you to somebody else, and you will need to provide them with the answers anyway. As I am sure you are aware, I can get a number of MPs very easily to ask these questions for me, but I hope you will be so good as to ensure that full and true answers are provided to me.

Anyway, here are the questions. I should like a brief but fully true answer to each individual question:

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

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

I apologise for the long list of questions but you will understand the level of precision I am attempting to obtain and thus most of them require only very short answers.

I would point out that Werritty is in precisely the same position as me; merely a private individual and taxpayer. In asking these questions I am quite as entitled to your attention and time, and to be given information, as Werritty. I trust I will be given the answers; knowing you I am sure you will wish to be open, honest and helpful.

Craig

These are of course exactly the questions which the opposition and mainstream media ought to be asking, but I rather fear they are not. The Cabiner Office “Inquiry” is deliberately not asking.

This information comes straight from a source with direct access to the Cabinet Office investigation into Fox’s relationship with Werritty.

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

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

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

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

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

This has parallels to the Christine Keeler case but is much, much worse.

That the British Defence Minister holds frequent unrecorded meetings in the Ministry and abroad with somebody promoting the interests of foreign powers is much, much worse than a little cash-grubbing. That the person representing the foreign powers is actually present, apparently to all as a ministerial adviser, at meetings of Fox with important representatives of foreign nations is simply appalling.

That we are being so easily misdirected to a narrow cash question – and that the media have followed that misdirection – is ludicrous.

A civil service mole has promised me some insider news about Gus O’Donnell’s planned whitewash of Fox relating to how they will treat Werritty’s finances in the investigation. This entry is being posted 45 minutes after I leave home to meet them, by an unorthodox route and method of transport, to an improbable location. Oh, and neither of us is carrying a mobile phone either. So don’t bother, you’re stuffed.

I remember the gay-baiting student Liam Fox as active in the banning of a Gay Society at Glasgow University Union in the early 1980’s. As President of Dundee University Students Association, which at the time had close ties with our Glasgow counterparts in the Scottish campaign against the NUS, I tried to change their mind, and that was my first memory of the odious little bigot.

Being sick in bed this weekend and paying little attention to the news, I had presumed that Fox’s “ex-flatmate” Adam Werritty was of his own age, a flatmate from students days or impecunious early employment. I also presumed that Werritty had been Fox’s best man back in a similar period. I am surprised to find that the 40 year old Fox picked up the 24 year old Werritty at a meeting in Edinburgh Unversity only ten years ago, shortly after that Werritty moved into his flat, and after they had known each other just four years, Werrity was apparently Liam’s closest buddy on earth and became his best man.

Fox accommodated Werritty in taxpayer funded accommodation and around the best man period was funding him on his MPs expenses – before the “Atlantic Bridge” fake charity wheeze. Fox was found by the expenses scandal investigation to have “overclaimed” over £20,000 in mortgage payments and was forced to pay it back. It is unclear why Fox was not prosecuted. He also charged mobile phone bills of over £17,000 to the taxpayer. There must now be an investigation of how many of those calls were to Adam Werritty.

The fact that when Liam Fox was shadow health secretary, Werritty ran a health consultancy, and when Fox became defence secretary, Werritty became a defence consultant, tells you all that you need to know about this relationship. Tory attempts to fog the big picture by focusing on what exactly was discussed at individual meetings are irrelevant. I commend this Telegraph article by James Kirkup, who deserves a prize for best use of the phrase “by coincidence”.

I came back from Ghana at the weekend specifically so I could speak to the Stop the War rally in Trafalgar Square yesterday. Unfortunately I brought back a collection of interesting diseases and a fever with me, and a cold wet afternoon seemed too unwise. Oh dear, am I losing my edge?

I am an unabashed fan of Ken Clarke, and long have been. He was stating a simple truth when he created a furore by noting that some rapes are worse than others, a truth denied by politically correct feminist idiots who see rape not as what it is – a sordid and vicious crime of violence – but as a metaphysical act, incapble of degree, like the Eucharist. Murders can be aggravated or mitigated, but not rapes. What bollocks, and good for Ken for speaking sense.

He has now quite rightly castigated Teresa May’s claim that cat-owners cannot be deported as “childish”. Actually the frothy mouthed racist bigots cheering on their poster girl are much more dangerous than childish, but Clarke is right again. Doubtless a sacking offence.

Over 55,000 people were deported from the UK last year, and just 112 managed to stay here by using Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights – that is one in every 550 deportees, or 0.18%. Article 8 reads:

Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

How the Tories manage to disagree with that is beyond me. Bunch of xenophobic idiots – apart from Ken Clarke, who as a young man plainly wandered into the wrong party.

To cut through the enormous wave of rubbish that swept the net for 48 hours about Amanda Knox, I wanted to publish the text of the statement she made to police trying to frame Patrick Lumumba. It is evidence of how appalling the media coverage is that I can’t track down through the gush this actual factual text, which the media plainly would want us to forget. Can anyone point me to it?

Here is something you won’t find in any western media. Part of the actual Russian speech or “Explanation of Vote” for their veto of the UN Resolution on Syria. It is worth reading. It is my own translation from the website of the Russian mission to the UN. There will be an official UN translation circulated in New York, but there will not be major differences:

“The situation in Syria cannot be considered without reference to events in Libya. The international community should be alarmed at statements to the effect that the implementation of Security Council resolutions on Libya, as read by NATO, provide a model for future NATO action for the implementation of the “responsibility to protect”. One can easily imagine that tomorrow this “exemplary model” of “joint defence” can start to be introduced into Syria.

Let me be clear to all; Russia’s position with regard to the conflict in Libya in no way stems from any special ties with the Gadaffi regime, to the extent that several States represented around this table had a great deal warmer relationships with the Gadaffi regime than Russia. It is the people of Libya who have determined the destiny of Gadaffi.

Im the view of Russia, in that case members of the UN Security Council twisted the provisions of Security Council resolutions to give them the opposite of their true meaning.

The requirement for an immediate ceasefire instead resulted in large-scale civil war, with humanitarian, social, economic, and military consequences which have extended far beyond Libya’s frontiers.

The no-fly zone resulted in the bombing of oil installations, television stations and other civilian targets.

The arms embargo resulted in a naval blockade of the West coast of Libya, including for humanitarian supplies.

The “Benghazi crisis” has resulted today in the devastation of other cities. Sirte, Bani Walid, and Sephi.

This then is the “Exemplary model”. The world must abolish such practices once and for all.”

This post of mine said almost exactly the same thing, and incidentally is both my most viewed and most linked post this year. The fact is that what the Russians say is precisely true. NATO action in Libya went way beyond what the Security Council had actually authorised, which was a no fly zone to protect civilians, a ceasefire, and negotiations between the parties.

Having absolutely abused UNSCR 1973, plainly NATO was seriously damaging the ability of the Security Council to work together in future, and making quite certain that China and Russia would not for many years agree to any SC Resolutions which might be open to similar abuse. I know the American Envoy to the UN, Susan Rice, and have in the past worked with her and had great respect for her; she was genuinely committed to the fight against apartheid. But her histrionic walkout in reaction to a Russian statement which was both plainly true, and an eminently forseeable result of Amercia’s own rash actions, was just pathetic.

Just a couple of quick thoughts. Firstly, the bailout funds for Greece are not going to put a single penny in the pocket of the Greek people. They are yet further transfers of taxpayers’ money from working people to rich bankers, who again are becoming rich on the basis of obviously impractical investments they made, this time in outlandish Greek government debt.

The EU now makes an evidently sensible proposal for a transaction tax on inter bank dealings – which would raise back from the bankers some tiny proportion of the money we have given them, and discourage a tiny bit multiple gambling transactions. What is truly scarey is the fact that the wealthy, who are taking our money, have the media so tied up in the UK, that the broadcast media condemned this as comprehensively and without question as a party line was reflected under Stalin. I watched many hours of news from mainstream channel to channel, and every person the BBC or Sky interviewed gave a ludicrously apocalyptic warning of the effect of this small measure. Not one supporter was brought on – even though it is a very highly supported measure among economists.

I have said it before, but democracy in the UK is now a complete charade. Our money is sucked away to the elite, and there is no media freedom to reach a mass audience with any view counter to the governing elite, even one supported by nearly every other government in Europe.

Am in Ghana and it has been a bit frantic as I haven’t been here for a few months, so apologise for lack of posts till I get on top of things.

All previous experience indicates that the latest expert estimate of the money spent by the UK on bombing Libya – up to £1.75 billion – will prove in time to be an underestimate.

Yesterday saw the heaviest NATO attack of the entire war, on the very centre of Sirte, leading thousands of civilians to try to flee. They are largely unable to do so because of a cordon of checkpoints set up by their attackers, slowing movement to a standstill and very occasional crawl. This massive bombing was coordinated with what we must now call the Libyan government – the former TNC. That a military action by NATO rationalised as protecting civilians from the Libyan government, ends up with a far greater bombardment of civilians on behalf of a different Libyan government, is too terrible to call ironic. NATO’s mandate to “protect civilians” from the UN actually expires on Friday, so all this week we will see a massive crescendo in NATO bombing of towns before that deadline.

But let us put that cost to the UK in context. The whole world economy is being shaken, and the livelihoods of billions damaged, by the problems of French banks having to write off Greek debt. If as expected Greece repudiates 50% of its debt, the capital written off by French banks will be in sterling approximately £4 billion. The £1.75 billion would make a big hole in that. I am certainly not suggesting that money should have been given to Greece instead of blowing up Libya, I am merely pointing out that this is a significant amount of money to waste in terms of global capital sums.

Remember we did not have that £1,75 billion – we borrowed it from the banks, adding to the international debt crisis and your and my tax burden for the rest of our lives, and our children after us. And remember the UK contributed under 25% of the NATO effort in Libya – total wasted will be pushing £10 billion.

NATO members are at the absolute heart of the world financial crisis. The colossal squandering of incredible – and in some cases unaccountable – sums in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are fundamental to the lack of fiscal control in these economies. Not a single media pundit has mentioned it.

Even the most serious minded attempt to explain curved space and black holes leaves me vaguely puzzled. And I had never understood Einstein’s contention – presuming that he made it – that nothing could move faster than light. Why? It appeared to me more of a theological statement than a measaured fact. Why? Of course, I can see it has ramifications for our observation of the universe, but why should it not be possible? I have wondered about this article of faith from time to time.

Now CERN have apparently measured some sub-atomic particles moving a bit faster than light. How jolly clever of them. I still don’t understand why they should not have been able to do that, and don’t feel anything much has changed now they have. What do we need now to adjust in our understanding of the universe? I just went to the Post Office, and it was still there.

Yes, I know Bonnie Tyler is singing “night”.

Peculiarly enough, if I thought that the Palestinian attempt to gain recognition at the UN would succeed, I would probably oppose it. I don’t think the “two state solution”, where the Palestinians are overcrowded, walled in, divided up and deprived of economic viability and of water, is any solution at all. I remain firmly in favour of a single secular non-racist state in which all the current inhabitants of Israel/Palestine, including recent settlers, are welcome as citizens.

But as a tactic to isolate diplomatically the US and Israel, to show Obama for the lying Zionist puppet he is, and to reveal starkly the bullying and mendacity of US foreign policy, I think the statehood bid had been brilliant. With the US denying the most basic rights to the Palestinians, while supporting dreadful and cruel regimes in Yemen and Bahrain, any credibility which their Middle Eastern policy may have had is now completely buried, in the most public way. It is going to be even harder for wealthy and corrupt Arab elites to follow the US line, and will risk still greater reaction from their own people if they do.

This is a good and healthy day for the international community, where a harsh light is thrown on crawling things – including Obama.

It is a year since I wrote a detailed post about my being banned by the BBC. At the time I wrote that article, I had genuinely forgotten that, during the last of my (once frequent) BBC News appearances, 10 Downing St had called and demanded I was taken off. I just came across this account, which I wrote at the time it happened.

(The point about vehicle excise duty is that at the time those British seamen were captured by Iran, they were officially in process of boarding a ship to do a customs check on vehicles it was carrying).

There is an excellent article in the Daily Telegraph about the PFI disaster, about which I have been warning from since I started blogging. The public sector will be crippled for a generation by the need to shovel enormous amounts of taxpayers’ money directly into the financiers’ profits – that super profit, in addition to a normal builders’ profit, being split between banks and construction companies.

Gordon Brown takes much of the blame for PFI, but like everything that shovels taxpayers’ cash to big business, all of our major parties have bought into it, or more accurately been bought up by it.

It does not tug the heart strings like the health service, but I came across PFI when in the Foreign Office. We in the British High Commission were paying extremely high private sector rents in Accra for accommodation for an ever-increasing staff, most of whom were visa related. We owned land, and it would have been obviously cost-effective to build our own housing. In fact rents were so high, that the capital cost of building would be saved in well under four years.

My proposal was well received, but I had to then submit to the Treasury a cost comparison between government funding and the Private Finance Initiative. This assumed an opportunity cost on the government money invested at an extraordinary annual rate – about three times the Bank base rate at the time.

Even so government finance worked out far cheaper than PFI – so then an “efficiency factor” was introduced into the equation, from memory of about 12%, which supposedly represented some magical way that private sector management was more efficient than public sector. Just what this was quantifying when build costs, land value, finance costs, opportunity costs and maintenance costs were all already stipulated I have no idea.

In short, the thing was a transparent ideological fix. In fact the efficiency factor was the opposite of the truth, because the PFI route limited us to a couple of particular builders who could organise the PFI, and whose capital cost was more expensive by over thirty per cent than other builders, without the banking hook-up but who could have done the job.

I dropped the project in disgust.

The idea that by giving private companies and bankers huge extra financing profits from public sector capital investment, you can deliver more cost effective public services, was always self-evidently nuts.

PFI is, like the banking bailout, a further example of the way the political class use the power of the state to transfer money from ordinary people to the super rich.