One of the endearing features of the British political system is that a constituent can always turn to their MP for help with any difficulties, particularly involving relationships between the individual and any organ of the State. Perhaps remarkably, in the vast majority of cases the MP does indeed do what they can to help.

Now read this reply which an astonished constituent received from their MP, Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of New Labour:

Dear ….

I am very sorry to hear of the immigration difficulties you have been experiencing . I have today written to the Home Office on your behalf and I will contact you again as soon as I receive a response. I am not prepared to make enquires or representations on behalf of constituents with criminal convictions. I have therefore informed the Home Office that if you do have criminal convictions, my enquiry should be considered withdrawn.

If you have not previously disclosed any criminal convictions on behalf of yourself or other individuals included on the same application, please contact me and let me know.

In the meantime if I can be of any further help or assistance in this or any other matter please do not hesitate to contact me again.

Yours,

Harriet Harman

The constituent in question has no criminal convictions or associations whatsoever, but even if they had, that does not cancel your civil rights for the rest of your life, despite Ms Harman. Has she never heard of rehabilitation? Or of wrongful conviction?

This was in fact the third time this constituent had written to Harman on this issue, and the third time they had received this same standard reply. The promised future contact never happens.

New Labour really cares about individuals.

The link between the Glasgow and London bombs now appears to be fairly convincing, particularly as much of the confirmation is coming out of Scotland rather than from the discredited Met. What we have this time appears not to be home grown discontent, but more direct blowback from our Middle Eastern policy. I make no apologies for having noted at the start of this series of events that, while this was likely to be terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists, there were other possiblities and we should not straightaway jump to that conclusion. Those comments caused outrage among those who like to vilify Muslims at any opportunity, as a kind of sanctioned racism.

Now it does appear that Islamic extremists were indeed responsible for both Glasgow and London.

But my question cui bono? was also helpful in pointing out that these terrorist attacks are not only callous and inhuman, but extraordinarily stupid. Islamic terrorism fills those who hate Muslims with unholy glee. You only have to surf the internet for five minutes to prove that. At the same time it sends those of us who try to improve community relations, and it sends the established Muslim communities in the UK, into deep despair. Those in the security, weapons and mercenary industries who make billions from continued War are rubbing their hands and counting the cash.

How religious faith can lead people into such a mix of depravity and counter-productive stupidity is impossible for the sane to fathom, even acknowledging the depths of despair caused by the carnage our country has caused in Iraq. I can do nothing today but issue the anguished cry of the liberal in a brutal, unlistening World.

The only comfort, and this may be wishful thinking, is that the Brown government seems to be handling this all much more sensibly than Blair and Reid, without pushing the melodrama button or making fatuous comparisons with the Second World War. Which is not to say that we do not face yet another attack on civil liberties, but the attempt to stampede people with the psychology of fear does seem less marked. Or is that a false perception?

The wannabe terrorists in Glasgow, and whatever happened in London, fortunately didn’t kill anyone. But terror is often devastatingly effective, as our leaders are lining up to remind us. Here is a good example of devastating terror which caused appalling death and excrutiating injury to the lucky people we liberated in Afghanistan.

‘Up to 80 civilians dead’ after US air strikes in Afghanistan

Witnesses claim a village in British-run Helmand was bombed for three hours after the Taliban attempted to ambush a US-Afghan army convoy

Jason Burke

Sunday July 1, 2007

The Observer

Air strikes in the British-controlled Helmand province of Afghanistan may have killed civilians, coalition troops said yesterday as local people claimed that between 50 and 80 people, many of them women and children, had died.

In the latest of a series of attacks causing significant civilian casualties in recent weeks, more than 200 were killed by coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been killed by Taliban militants.

The bombardment, which witnesses said lasted up to three hours, in the Gereshk district late on Friday followed an attempted ambush by the Taliban on a joint US-Afghan military convoy. According to Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief, the militants fled into a nearby village for cover. Planes then targeted the village of Hyderabad. Mohammad Khan, a resident of the village, said seven members of his family, including his brother and five of his brother’s children, were killed.

‘I brought three of my wounded relatives to Gereshk hospital for treatment,’ he told the Associated Press news agency by phone. The villagers were yesterday burying a ‘lot of dead bodies’, Khan said.

He spoke as American forces in Iraq also found themselves heavily criticised over civilian deaths when eight people died, apparently caught in crossfire from a gunfight between insurgents and soldiers in Baghdad’s Sadr City yesterday. But residents, police and hospital officials said eight civilians were killed in their homes and angrily accused US forces of firing blindly on innocent people. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the raids and demanded an explanation for the assault on a district where he has barred American operations in the past.

In Afghanistan, the civilian deaths caused by US and Nato-led troops have infuriated local people and prompted President Hamid Karzai to publicly condemn foreign forces for careless ‘use of extreme force’ and for viewing Afghan lives as ‘cheap’. The increasingly fragile President has urged restraint and better co-ordination of military operations with the Afghan government, while also blaming the Taliban for using civilians as human shields.

Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, raised the issue of civilian casualties on a four-hour visit to Afghanistan on Friday on which he met the senior Nato commander there, the American General Dan McNeill.

Senior British soldiers have previously expressed concerns that McNeill, who took command of the 32,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan only recently, was ‘a fan’ of the massive use of air power to defeat insurgents and that his favoured tactics could be counter-productive.

‘Every civilian dead means five new Taliban,’ said one British officer who has recently returned from Helmand. ‘It’s a tough call when the enemy are hiding in villages, but you have to be very, very careful,’ he added.

The American general has been dubbed ‘Bomber McNeill’ by his critics.

But Nato has ‘never killed and will never intentionally kill innocent civilians’, its secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, told a conference in Macedonia on Friday. ‘The majority of civilian casualties in Afghanistan have been caused by Taliban suicide bombs and roadside bombs.’

US Air Force Major John Thomas said that, after a long skirmish and under constant fire from the Taliban, troops of Isaf (the International Security Assistance Force), called for close air force support during an operation in Helmand, where the Taliban have been resurgent this year.

‘All enemy positions were destroyed, but after friendly forces surveyed the area, there were reports of some possible civilian deaths,’ Thomas said.

‘The remains of some people who appeared to be civilians were found among enemy fighters in a trench line,’ he added. The level of violence has soared in Afghanistan, with more than 2,800 people – mostly Taliban fighters – killed in fighting this year, according to an Associated Press tally of figures issued in the last few days by Western military and Afghan officials.

A count by the United Nations and an umbrella organisation of Afghan and international aid groups shows the number of civilians killed by international forces was slightly greater than the number killed by insurgents in the first half of the year. My emphasis

In Helmand’s Sangin district, Nato-led and Afghan troops clashed with Taliban fighters on Friday, leaving 15 of the militants dead, said Ezatullah Khan, a district chief. Helmand is the primary area of operations for the British troops deployed in Afghanistan.

There were no casualties among Nato and Afghan troops, the official said.

More than 3,000 British troops have been deployed in Helmand to combat both the Taliban and the drugs trade. Also in the south, two suspected Taliban members were killed while trying to place a homemade bomb on the side of a road in Zhari district of Kandahar province on Friday, said Ghulam Rasool, the district’s police chief.

Three children were also killed on Friday and another wounded when an old rocket they were playing with exploded in Zabul province in the south, said General Yaqoub Khan, the provincial police chief.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2115846,00.html

According to Willie Rae, Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police, there are clear links between today’s Glasgow incident and the London car bombs. He declined to expand further, but I presume he meant more than that both events involved cars and petrol. A copycat crime is, in a sense, always linked to the crime it copies. But Willie Rae is not the Metropolitan Police, with its track record of lying to us, so I am prepared to believe that he knows something more substantial.

I still cannot understand why the Met does not release the CCTV footage of the London suspects. As the suspects must realise that they will have been caught on CCTV, I can’t think of a single sensible motive for witholding it.

It is horrible to me to think of the possibility of terrorists coming out of Scotland’s Muslim communities; I find it really perturbing. Scotland does not have the completely isolated Muslim ghettoes that Labour created in Northern England. Of course, the fact the attack happened in Glasgow doesn’t necessarily mean the attackers came from there. But wherever the bombers were from, and however incompetent they were, their attempt to kill and maim innocent people going on holiday is an act of crazed fanaticism.

Thank goodness the only injured in Glasgow were the attackers, and one member of the public, who is not in danger. Fortunately, amateur does not do justice as a description of these attackers – absolute rubbish comes closer to it. It is worth noting that, if the London car bombs had ignited, they would probably have burnt like the Glasgow car, and almost certainly would not have had the kind of explosive force that the media tried to claim. Gas canisters are designed to withstand fire without exploding; they will eventually vent and the gas flare as it comes out. That is what looked on TV like it might have been happening in the back of the car in Glasgow.

Petrol and gas can be a deadly effective component of a bomb, and even a very small quantity of high explosive would have made the London car bombs potentially devastating. But there was no explosive present – I have held back on blogging on this aspect until I could confirm that fact from my own sources.

So this is not al-Qaeda, and we are not dealing with trained bomb-makers. The Glasgow attack looks like a purely home grown reaction to World events and our role in them. Assuming the London incident really is linked, the same applies. This threat will indeed remain with us until we stop being an acolyte for US foreign policy. Nobody is attacking Ireland – if Western hedonism and culture were the target, Ireland should be in big trouble. The answer is not further oppression at home, which will just exacerbate a sense of grievance.

The answer – or at least a large part of it – is to adopt a foreign policy which accords with the wishes of the majority of the British people, irrespective of the existence of terrorism.

It will take a little time to work out what has happened in Glagow. From eyewitness accounts, this does seem like a definite attack, but an eyewitness on BBC News 24 has just described seeing two men get out of the car and try to torch it with bottles of petrol. The BBC also have a photo plainly showing the car well ablaze on the pavement, under the canopy and pointed towards, but not having penetrated, or apparently reached, the airport doors. This would have to have been taken after the occupants got out as it is very well ablaze. This is hard to reconcile with continued journalists’ reports of the car being inside the terminal building.

Anyway, four people have been arrested, so we should get some answers on this one fairly quickly. At least two of the arrested men were Asian. There is no simple equation between Asian and Muslim but in the UK, and particularly in Glasgow, it does increase the likelihood. Fortunately, on the information so far, it seems nobody has been killed.

Thankfully, whatever is happening, we do not appear to be facing a wave of attacks by sophisticated terrorists with good bomb making skills.

Thanks to Blairwatch for this, which falls into the absolutely too wonderful to be true category.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007290466,00.html

It is of course from The Sun, which generally means it is unlikely to be true, except that the Sun do not insult New Labour unless they have to, and go out of their way to limit that aspect of the damage. Epitomises the oozing sleaze that is NuLab. But why pretend they had a title, when they could have just bought one from Lord Levy?

I am increasingly puzzled as to why police haven’t released CCTV footage of the driver of the vehicle fleeing the scene. The whole Piccadilly area is swamped by CCTV coverage. Normally, you would expect this released, so the public can help with the manhunt. That happened with the 21/7 incidents. It did not happen with Jean Charles De Menezes, of course, because the CCTV footage disproved the police story that De Menezes vaulted the barriers and sprinted through the station.

It does now appear that these were indeed not suicide bombs, and were not professionally made.

London is an extraordinary, teeming, multicultural metropolis. It is a great hub of international finance, politics and intrigue. Extraordinary things have happened in London throughout my adult life. Beneath the surface events are bubbling which most Londoners neither know nor understand.

LONDON

An Italian banker, custodian of Vatican money and secrets, is found swinging under Blackfriars Bridge. Businessmen purchase seats in the national legislature simply for payments of cash. A Bulgarian dissident is killed with a tiny ricin pellet injected from an umbrella. A Brazilian electrician is executed by police on the London underground. The dismembered torso of a small African child floats down the Thames. The country’s most flamboyant businessman, a lawmaker, steals his workers’ pensions and leaves for a yacht cruise. Muslim lads from Yorkshire kill themselves and 67 people on public transport. Etonian mercenaries plan coups in Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea before finding respectability and the jackpot in Iraq. A Russian defector is poisoned with polonium and dies a slow horrible death. Politicians and civil servants concoct a dossier of lies to provoke a war. A girl is arrested for reading out the names of the dead at the Cenotaph, and a man for carrying Vanity Fair outside Downing St. A small black child bleeds to death in a tenement stairwell. Gays die as a nail bomb rips through a pub. The IRA run a long, slow war of death and attrition. Every year, scores of people simply disappear. Homeless people curl up like bundles in neon-lit doorways.

Two remarkable things happened in the last two days within half a mile of each other, at either end of Piccadilly. One, the car bomb, you have probably heard of. The second you probably haven’t.

This is a straight reproduction of a small article from The Metro newspaper, Friday June 29, 2007

“Mossad Spy” Found Dead

An Egyptian financier accused of spying for Israel has been found dead outside his London home in mysterious circumstances. Ashraf Marwan was alleged to have worked for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad during the 1973 Yom Kippur war with Egypt and Syria. He was accused of tipping Israel off about the war. Police said “He appears to have fallen from a balcony. The death is being treated as unexplained.” The 62 year old son-in-law of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was found on Wednesday in St James’s, Central London.

The fact that these two incidents are less than ten minutes walk apart does not make them connected. They may or may not be. But I note this, and the list above, to help those who have difficulty imagining that there is any need to consider any possibility other than Islamic terrorism to explain the apparent Haymarket car bomb. Astonishing things do happen in London.

A good rule is to look at what did happen, not what might have happened. Consider this:

a) Nobody committed suicide. Rather than follow Scotland Yard’s Peter Clarke and speculate that was because the driver lost his nerve, let us admit that it is at least possible that nobody was intended to commit suicide. If suicide was not part of the modus operandi, that vastly increases the number of groups and individuals who might have been responsible.

b) No bomb exploded and nobody was killed. There seems a general presumption that was because the trigger failed, or was defused in time. That is possible, certainly. It could well be so. But there is another possibility that cannot be ruled out yet – perhaps the thing was not meant to explode, perhaps no-one was meant to be killed. Perhaps it was meant to look like a convincing bomb, even like a convincing failed bomb. If you accept that as a logical possibility, that would bring in even more individuals and organisations who might have been responsible. To be up for a bomb scare is very different to being up for a bomb.

Let me be quite clear again: Islamic extremists may very well be responsible. I am not saying they are not. I am saying nobody knows yet. But let me expand a bit on my Cui Bono theme.

There are plenty of companies – and wealthy individuals – making huge amounts of money from both the War on Terror and its equally ugly sister, the War in Iraq. There has been much speculation that Brown will edge away from both of these. If British troops were to withdraw from Iraq, for example, that could reduce the access currently enjoyed by companies, including Aegis and BAE, to billions of dollars of US government contracts for arms and mercenaries. These companies make money out of killing. Death is their business. Today’s car bomb – and the immediate media presumption it is Islamic terrorism – certainly forces Brown further into the War on Terror. The fact that the Iraq war is the root cause of an upsurge of terror in the UK, strangely does not negate the surge of political support for the War that this sort of incident brings as a reflex reaction from our leaders.

I am not saying it was Aegis or BAE. I am saying don’t be one-eyed about the possibilities. Look at the list of amazing things in London above. Do I really believe that there are wealthy people in London who would stage this sort of thing to protect or further their financial interests? Yes, I do.

It could well be Islamic terrorists. That remains the most probable explanation – but by no means the only possible explanation. It could have been a preparation for an attack on tomorrow’s Gay Pride march. Mossad? Why not? We just don’t know yet. There is also of course the possibility that whoever planted it has tried to make it look like another group, by planted forensic evidence or disguising the driver. Presumably we will see CCTV footage of the driver shortly.

I am also saying that I have first hand experience of the fact that governments lie about who plants bombs. See my posting on Lockerbie below. Read pages 325 to 339 of Murder in Samarkand. Or read Darkness at Dawn by David Satter, or The Quiet American by Graham Greene.

Think.

Whoever was behind the apparent car bomb in London, it almost certainly wasn’t the police explosives experts who made it safe, and we should acknowledge the heroism it takes to do that job.

Peter Clarke, the Met’s anti-terrorism point man, gave a press conference claiming he was not going to speculate, but then doing everything he could to indicate it was an Islamic plot. He referred to other recent cases, including the Barot case, in which night clubs were mentioned as targets, and the use of gas canisters in cars discussed. The one bit of modus operandi pointing another way – the fact it wasn’t a suicide bomber – he was at pains to explain away by speculating that the driver had lost his nerve.

Of course the last time a nail bomb was actually exploded among clubbers in Central London, it was by a homophobic fascist. So it is right to keep an open mind. But whoever did this, the only people who can possibly benefit are the vast and ever-burgeoning security industry of all kinds, and those who want discord between the Islamic World and the West. Unfortunately, the extremists on all sides are strengthened by this incident.

Brown had already made plain he supports further anti-civil liberties legislation. This produces just the kind of febrile atmosphere in which that can be done. The television news is already pushing 90 day detention without charge again.

I am adding this para in response to blogs attempting to say that I am claiming the bomb was planted by the State. I have not changed the above, and plainly it does not say that. In fact, I think that is one of the least likely explanations – in terms of the British State, at least. I have no idea who planted it. I am saying we should not leap to the conclusion it was Islamic fundamentalists. It could be, or it could be other extremists, or interests, who benefit from the War on Terror. The Cui Bono test throws up a number of possibilities.

Reading through Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, and accepting his definitions, confirms that I am a Deist rather than a Theist, Atheist or Agnostic. Except I have days when I go agnostic. I will blog about Dawkins another day.

I mention God because I have no way to prove what I am going to tell you now. I would swear any oath to its truth, but that might not convince you. Actually, I have nothing much left to me now but my reputation for honesty, and nothing to gain by sticking my neck into this one.

From late 1989 to 1992 I was the Head of the Maritime Section of the FCO and No 2 in the Aviation and Maritime Department (for those into FCO arcana, the Maritime Section was headed by a Grade 5 First Secretary and the Aviation Section by a Grade 6 First Secretary). This was the period of the invasion of Kuwait and first Gulf War, in which the Maritime Section, including me, mostly got picked up and deposited in an underground bunker as the FCO part of the Embargo Surveillance Centre. We did intelligence analysis on Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement and organised interdiction worldwide.

In this period I mostly lived in my underground bunker, quite literally, and didn’t get back to the FCO much to keep an eye on the rest of my section. On one occasion when I did, I was told something remarkable by a colleague in Aviation section.

At this time we suddenly switched from blaming Iran and Syria for the Lockerbie bombing to blaming Libya. This was part of a diplomatic drive to isolate Iraq from its neighbours in the run-up to the invasion. Aviation section were seeing all the intelligence on Lockerbie, for obvious reasons. A colleague there told me, in a deeply worried way, that he/she had the most extraordinary intelligence report which showed conclusively that it was really Syria, not Libya, that bombed the Pan Am jet, and that the switch was pure expediency.

I asked if I could see the report, and my colleague declined, saying this was too sensitive and dangerous; the report was marked for named eyes only. That in itself was extremely unusual – normally we would pass intelligence reports freely to each other, signing the register for them.

That is all I know. I never saw the report myself, and I do not know what it said, or why it was so conclusive. I am sorry to say it was such an incredibly busy time, we never discussed it again. I do not know, for instance, whether the intelligence contained an actual admission the charge aganst Libya was fake, or merely evidence that proved Syria did it (a communications intercept, for example). I suspect it will never be made public.

But the knowledge has remained with me ever since, and I was extremely sorry at the conviction of al-Magrahi. I do hope his appeal is successful. I am particularly impressed at the upright stand of Dr Swire and other victims’ representatives on this issue.

Last night three more British soldiers died in Iraq.

There are people who can talk with chilling detachment about the deaths of other people. There are even people who can talk this way about the deaths of other people, while they are actively planning to cause those deaths. Peter Ricketts is one such person.

Is he a criminal in a secure unit at Broadmoor? No, he is Sir Peter Ricketts, KCMG, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I just watched him standing alongside David Milliband, as our new Foreign Secretary gave his little homily on taking office.

Ricketts, then Political Director of the FCO, was a major player in the concoction of the lies about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. Ricketts’ minute to Jack Straw of 22 March 2002 is damning.

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/docs/ricketts.pdf

Ricketts defines the problem with public opinion:

we have to be convincing that:

– the threat is so serious imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for;

There is only one possible interpretation of Ricketts letter. He is well aware that the threat is not really that imminent at all.

But even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts…

Nonetheless we must work on

bringing public opinion to accept the imminence of a threat from Iraq

Otherwise the public might get uppity about dead British soldiers. Seeing Ricketts standing next to Milliband reminded me how facile Brown’s spin of “Change” really is. Until we get rid of the people who led us into illegal war on the basis of lies, from not just the Cabinet but the Civil Service, there will be no real change.

For more of those memos between the guilty parties, go to

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html

I spent most of a fun day outside Downing St shouting “Boo!”, and giving a lot of interviews to foreign television media. One very pretty Spanish television journalist interviewed me under the impression I was John Major. I expect some Spaniards tomorrow might be puzzled by Major’s radical views. I rather enjoyed aspects of this. She asked me “What was it like when you left Downing Street, Prime Minister Major” and I replied “I think it was sunny, oh yes.” She looked very confused.

Arriving back home I did a very good, long documentary interview for ITV, this time as me again, then watched the TV. Adam Bolton on Sky News gave a remarkable bit of information – Gordon Brown has been a personal friend of Henry Kissinger for a long time, and the last time Kissinger came to London, Brown and Kissinger spent two hours alone together in 11 Downing St discussing Kissinger’s latest book. That should disillusion those daft enough to believe that Brown’s five year support for Bush’s wars was a aberration forced upon him by circumstance.

Meanwhile Blair, for whom the House of Commons was never more than a vehicle for personal interest, has quit it even sooner than decently possible, so not a penny of the tens of millions of pounds about to flow his way from corporate America will have to be declared in the register of member’s interests.

Beyond satire is Blair’s appointment as Middle East envoy. Blair is the most wholehearted Zionist ever to lead a major British political party – including Balfour. He is at one with the religious right in the United States in having a gut Zionism perversely engendered by fundamentalist Christian beliefs.

Remember, Blair is leaving today because he was forced to announce his departure last summer. Even the eternally supine Labour Party revolted over Blair’s support for the Israeli attack on the Lebanon. Blair is going because he sacrificed his last remaining political capital to block a UN call for a ceasefire. He did this, knowingly and deliberately, to give the Israelis another two weeks to devastate Southern Lebanon from the air.

This is the man who, in the Rose Garden, moved the UK away from the EU consensus and lined us up uncritically with George Bush’s professedly pro-Israeli policies. All that is without counting the buckets of Iraqi arab blood on Blair’s hands. No self-respecting Palestinian representative, of any party or group, should have any truck with Tony Blair.

Blair is the most famous liar in the World, since the Iraqi WMD debacle. Why should anybody trust him as an envoy?

Quentin Davies, former Director of Morgan Grenfell Bank, holder of numerous directorships in addition to his neglected parliamentary duties, has joined the Labour Party.

Davies, who had an undistinguished Foreign Office career ending as one of the FCO’s many hundred First Secretaries, should be right at home with New Labour. After all, under NULab the gap between the extremely rich, like Mr Davies, and both the poor and the middling, is greater than at any time in British history. Mr Davies is right – who needs the Conservatives when NuLab are the best friend unearned income ever had?

Secondly, Davies is a warmonger for whom the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead are not enough – he’s just itching to attack Iran. Doubtless some of his financial interests would benefit from the consequent massive profits to the weapons and oil sectors.

Here is “Genghis” Davies in the House of Commons on 21 February 2007:

Quentin Davies (Grantham & Stamford, Conservative)

Today’s news is extremely good. Does the Prime Minister accept that he deserves genuine credit for having kept his nerve and not withdrawn the troops prematurely, despite the strong pressures on him? We have got to the point today where we are making some real progress. On Iran, while of course diplomacy must be tried, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) is correct that we need to go for tougher sanctions, particularly if we can get them through the Security Council, would it not be utterly irresponsible not to recognise that there is a real possibility that the last thing the Iranians want or would accept is a strong, united and successful democratic Iraq on their borders, and the last thing that they will ever agree to do, whatever the pressures on them, is to give up their enrichment and their nuclear weapons programmes? Do we not seriously have to confront that unfortunate, hideous possibility and plan accordingly?

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2007-02-21b.261.0&s=iraq+speaker%3A10160#g276.2

The extraordinary thing is that such an odious, bigoted, violent, vastly wealthy warmonger can feel fully at home in the Labour Party. I think this strange weather might be caused by Keir Hardie spinning. David Cameron should cheer up – his party is better off without this dangerous nutter.

Having explained in the post below why I have been hors de blog combat, here is my lightning take on the week’s events.

Reports on the captured sailors. What a farce! The government appoints a couple of “trusties” to produce reports, and is miraculously exonerated of all blame. We have seem it time and again – Legge, Butler, Hutton – and nobody buys this Whitehall Whitewash any more.

My favourite stupidities – apparently an ultra-sophisticated anti-submarine frigate, launching rubber dinghies, is indeed exactly the right sort of vessel for inshore coastal patrolling, and no mistakes have been made in the shaping of our navy. Also nobody could be found to take a proper decision on whether the sailors could sell their stories, because it was the Easter weekend, and all the Ministers had buggered off, in the middle of a so-called hostage crisis.

Of course, neither of the reports asked the key question – what on earth are we doing there in the first place?

Also this week, Menzies Campbell has somewhat surprised me by making the right decision and refusing to enter a government of war criminals. In a Machiavellian way I don’t think Brown came out of it badly anyway, appearing open. Northern Ireland is a political graveyard for British politicians – it was Blair’s ploy to get rid of the hugely popular Mo Mowlam by sending her there – and Brown’s offer of it to Captain Ashdown – who has just founded a new right-wing “security” think-tank with the Brownites – carried few political risks.

Finally, I don’t think the EU Treaty is bad at all, and I don’t think it needs a referendum. Interesting that Sarkozy so quickly has moved to populist economic nationalism. The treaty is a very small step closer to an effective common foreign policy, and a good thing too. Blair’s rampant support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and for the US invasion of Iraq, illustrate why we need a common European Foreign Policy. So does the excellent European Parliament report on Extraordinary Rendition.

My solution to prevent a future Blair is to split up the UK into its constituent nations, each a full member of a strong, European Parliament led, EU.

Finally, on Blair’s ill-hidden Catholicism, why would the Catholic Church want him? Are they short of mass murderers? Confession must be interesting. When the war criminal does convert, I hope that they make him read out the names of every individual his wars killed, as a penance. They should make him do it at the Cenotaph or in Parliament Square, then we could have the great irony of his being arrested under his own draconian laws. Perhaps a death-bed conversion would more suit Blair’s sense of drama. Go for it, Tony, and don’t keep your audience waiting too long!

I can talk about Salman Rushdie’s honour with a certain earned hauteur, having in the course of my life turned down three honours myself (LVO, OBE and CVO, since you ask). I have never understood why people accept honours when there is so much more social cachet in refusing them.

People in the FCO always imagined I turned them down because of a vague egalitarianism. Actually it is because, as a good Scot, I felt no need to accept anything from a provincial German family notable for lack of intellectual distinction. The Queen asked me, in Warsaw, why I refused, and I replied it was because I am a Scottish nationalist. She replied “Oh good” with a charming smile.

On two occasions I received a very pleasant personal gift from the Queen instead – a solid silver armada dish, and a piece of Linley joinery. This is in practice a much better deal, because with the higher awards, when you die you have to give them back (honest – there is a little label on the back that says so). The gifts, you can sell – and as I am now completely on my uppers, I am going to. Any offers?

I do have one honour – I am an Officier de l’Ordre du Mono.of the Republic of Togo. This was given me by the late President Eyadema, who as far as I know was the only recent Head of State who strangled his predecessor with his own hands. It was for my role in a surreal – and terrifying – peace negotiation with the Sierra Leonean rebels, which will turn up in a future volume of my memoirs. I would have refused the medal, but the FCO ordered me not to as, in the unusual circumstances, it might give unhelpful offence. In thanking President Eyadema, I asked him if the next up was l’Ordre du Stereo. Whether he understood my joke, made in bad French, I don’t know, as he replied, memorably, that I should drink coconut milk to make me piss. That may be a Togolese insult.

Anyway, back to Rushdie. I am afraid I believe that if people wish to insult religion, they should be allowed to. Freedom of speech is vitally important. Those Muslims shouting against him have every right to be offended, and every right to express their view, but must acknowledge Rushdie’s right to express his. If the Muslims are right, Rushdie will get his come-uppance eternally, which should be enough vengeance for anybody. You can’t make eternity last longer by killing someone quicker.

But I am astounded at the decision to give him a knighthood. Why? His corpus of work is just not that good. Midnight’s Children was readable, but a bit formulaic. Rushdie’s prose has all the cutting edge of a damp cloth. Satanic Verses may be shocking, but has little else to recommend it.

Who nominated Rushdie, and why? If we really felt the need to create a new literary knight, why not Alexander McCall Smith or George MacDonald Fraser? Both of them are much more original and prolific writers than Rushdie. Both actually live in this country, unlike Rushdie.

McCall Smith, certainly, has devoted a significant proportion of his time and his literary earnings to charity, something one could never accuse Rushdie of. If Salman Rushdie has an interest in life other than Salman Rushdie, it is not readily discernible.

Rushdie simply does not deserve to be elevated above a score or more of other writers in this country who are not knights. I am having dinner tomorrow in Dundee with Phillip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson, both of whom I prize above Rushdie. This is a political, not a literary, award and Muslims have a right to be angry about that. But the answer is a political response, not violence. If Lord Ahmed is genuine, he should jump off the New Labour gravy train.

Tony Blair will quit Downing St on the morning of 27 June. We all recall those stage-managed images of him entering through rapt crowds waving union jacks. Well, it is time for the reverse image as we boo the old warmonger out. I do hope you will join me there. Blair’s leaving will be covered worldwide and it is a great opportunity to get our point across. It was Blair’s support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, against the whole background of the war in Iraq, that led the Labour MPs to boot Blair out. We should remind the World why he has to go.

It needs enough people that the media cannot ignore it – and a determination not to be shunted somewhere invisible.

(I have, incidentally, no idea why the Stop the War Movement is dissipating energy on yet another long traipse in the rain around the deserted parts of Manchester three days previously, which will get no coverage at all.)

I have been determinedly trying to give Gordon Brown the benefit of the doubt. Sadly his strong support for anti-civil liberties legislation seems to leave little room for doubt. The need to maintain the right to demonstrate is another good reason to be there. Military Families Against the War have a permit for the demo.

We have already had a preview of the kind of hagiographic, cult-of-personality type reviews the BBC will be pumping out. When Blair announced his departure a month ago, the BBC produced a montage of his premiership that ignored the anti-war movement, cash for honours, the Mandelson/Blunkett resignations, the Lebanon, the Bernie Ecclestone scandal, David Mills or anything else that might be viewed as negative – or balanced.

Doubtless the Labour Party will have laid on some pro-Brown demonstrators. Let us make sure that those who hate what Blair has done to this country are represented in waving him off.

Be there. Downing Street. 27 June. 10am.

John Humphrys Does the end justify the means? Governments face that question all the time, and the answer is often yes, certainly if national security is threatened in any way. We do deals, we have relationships, with countries and leaders whose behaviour we deplore, especially if there seems to be no alternative. What about engaging in shady activities in the interests of creating jobs in this country? Well, that is the specific question that has been raised again this week with the revelation of the Saudia Arabian arms deal and the allegations that BAe paid massive kickbacks to a Saudi prince to get the contract. Well, Sir Andrew Green knows Saudi Arabia well, he was our Ambassador there for some years, and he’s on the line. Craig Murray is with me, he was our Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan. What’s your view of the deals that have been disclosed this week, they’ll have come as no surprise to you I imagine Sir Andrew?

Sir Andrew Green No, they don’t come as a huge surprise. I wasn’t aware of the detail of course, as these things are regarded as commercially confidential.

Humphrys Does it surprise you, before we move on from that, does it surprise you that Prince Bandar got so much, I mean more than a million [error – billion] pounds apparently in what are being called kickbacks.

Green I think that the allegation is more than that, but no, it doesn’t surprise me, any arms deal in the Middle East has payments for commission, or whatever you like to call it, associated with it. I don’t think there’s any news in that. I think the scale of it is surprising, yes. But, as you say, it’s a case of balancing our national interest against other factors and that’s very much one for the Prime Minister to take.

Humphrys But you, now that you’re no longer a diplomat you’re allowed to say this, what’s your view of it?

Green Well, it’s a matter of judgement, isn’t it. As you know, I’ve dealt with the Middle East for about forty years, and frankly I agree with the Prime Minister on this particular point. He said that our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important to our country, and if you just look at the outlook for the country, if you look at Iraq collapsing into chaos, a confrontation with Iran developing at American behest, anarchy in Palestine, genocide in Sudan, instability in Lebanon, I mean it just seems to me plain commonsense not to have a bust-up with a very influential ally in the heart of the region.

Humphrys Do you agree with that, Craig Murray?

Craig Murray No, I don’t. I certainly regard our relationship with Saudi Arabia as very important, but the idea that you can’t maintain good relationships with a country without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in bribes is a very poor one.

Green That’s not quite the issue though, is it? I mean the issue is whether we should do something that would be extremely embarassing for the ruling family in Saudi Arabia. I mean, the contract having been in place for some twenty years or so, so that the decision before us now is whether to allow that investigation to go forward, or to stop it, which is what the Prime Minister has done.

Murray Well, I spent most of my career in Africa and working on Africa. In Africa very poor people have their lives ruined by the fact that their governments are extremely corrupt, and that hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of aid money, donor money and commercial money are kicked back to the rulers by Western companies. How can we deplore corruption in Africa when we are actively participating in it in Saudi Arabia? And how can we say the rule of law applies to everybody in the land, if the Attorney General can say, as he did, that in this case the national interest outbalances the rule of law. The national interest can’t outbalance the rule of law in this country, nothing can outbalance the rule of law, not even the Crown.

Humphrys Isn’t this the point Sir Andrew, aren’t we saying “Don’t do as we do, do as we tell you to do.”

Green Well, first of all I don’t think you can draw a comparison between the countries of Africa and those of the Middle East.

Humphrys Really, why?

Green Well, first of all, there are very many countries in Africa and the situations are different in each. I think the key to taking a view on a particular country is actually to know about it, and the Middle East is quite different. There are very few people in Saudi Arabia who are actually in poverty. It’s not a question of the people suffering, they’re all quite reasonably well off.

Humphrys It’s the principle that we’re talking about here.

Green Well, the other principle is that you have to take the World as you find it, and you can only operate within the situation that you find within a particular country and a particular region.

Humphrys Is that the case when you have a Prime Minister who says that he’s a liberal interventionist and he wants to change the World?

Green Well, you would have to put that one to the Prime Minister. What I am saying is that on this issue, where he decided the balance of interest was not to proceed, I think he’s right in terms of our national interest, I think he’s right in terms of the counter-terrorism point that they have made quite a lot of, and they are not wrong to do so, and people often forget that Saudi Arabia itself is the first target of Al Qaida, the same organisation which threatens us so seriously. And we need hard information on those people involved, on their networks, on their movements, and the Saudis are interested to help. And that…

Humphrys That’s an important point surely, Craig Murray. If we are threatened in any way then we have to take help where we can get it, however distasteful it may be.

Murray I think there have to be limits, at the end of the day, to what you do.

Humphrys What, even if national security is at stake?

Murray Yes, because our security in the long term isn’t helped by promoting injustice, and the regime in Saudi Arabia is not a democratic one and is a tyrannical one which uses torture very freely and has even tortured British subjects in the past: that can’t be in our long term interest to assist.

Humphrys I am afraind, sorry Sir Andrew, we have to stop it there. Craig Murray and Sir Andrew Green thank you both very much.

One of Blair’s outrageous parting shots has been to call for increased regulation of the press; seeking to further control what, in fact, has largely been a compliant rather than “feral beast”.

His full speech is truely perverse.

The Independent, one of the very few publications to adopt a critical position on Blair’s foreign policy, today hits back on their front page. Other reactions are summaried here by the Guardian.

Meanwhile, The Times has raised the attractive, if unlikely, possibility of an extradition bid which might serve to bring our soon to be ex-Prime Minister to justice in another European state.

Thanks to Chuck intervening with the BBC more succesfully than me, the link below now works! The BAe discussion is at the end of the final segment.

Many thanks to Clive and the server team for getting us up and running again after a persistent attack, probably not politically motivated, that had us off for some thirty six hours until yesterday afternoon.

On Saturday morning I had a sharp exchange of views on the Radio 4 Today programme with Sir Andrew Green, former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, over the BAe corruption scandal. John Humphrys was moderating.

I thought it brought out the arguments very well, and also for me illustrated precisely the ways that my thinking diverges from standard FCO thinking, thus explaining much of what occurred to me in Uzbekistan.

Sadly I haven’t been able to post a link or transcribe the interview because this segment of the programme is missing from the BBC web record of the Today programme. Here is the link to that: our interview was 8.55am. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/saturday.shtml (I presume that link will only work this week).

I have phoned the Today programme, and filled in the BBC website online forms to report a fault. Neither elicited a reply. If anyone else has time to try to nudge the BBC on this one, it might do some good.

I wondered how the Guardian would react to my criticism of their editorial staff on comment is free. What they appear to have done is leave the article up, but remove links to it from the front page and the Comment is Free page. So there is no way 99.9% 0f readers will know it is there.

It was only posted at 6pm last night, and articles posted long before it are still listed in cif as “Latest”, but this one has been removed. The only way anybody visiting the site could find it would be to go to Comment Is Free then Index, then M, then Murray, then choose it. The Guardian can therefore claim they didn’t delete it – just made it impossible to find if you didn’t know about it.

So this link still works –

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/craig_murray/2007/06/reids_new_best_friends.html

The remarks in question come in a comment I added at the end of the thread.

The Guardian has removed any reference to the article from the home page and cif listings, so there is no way anybody visiting the Guardian today knows it is there.

So I am asking everybody with access to a blog or site to post the above link over the course of the next week, to defeat the Guardian’s attempt to cut off dissent at its abandonment of its liberal tradition.

We have now mirrored the Guardian page just in case they do now scrub the original

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/CiF/reids_new_best_friends.html

Please post a comment after it – it would not take many more posts for it to reappear in the list of featured articles in the “Most commented” section. I presume that is driven by an automatic software.