I shall watch Dispatches tonight to see yet more evidence that New Labour epitomise the takeover of British politics by those simply seeking personal financial gain through promoting corporate interests.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7068820.ece

But none of it compares in horror to Blair’s multi millions, made especially from those whose interests he forwarded in Iraq by the horrible deaths of hundreds of thousands.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1259030/Tony-Blairs-secret-dealings-South-Korean-oil-firm-UI-Energy-Corp.html

If anything can have been more sickening that that, it was Brown’s thwarting of government controls over hedge funds and prtivate equity bubbles that cost ordinary taxpayers billions, put thosands out of work and make a small number in the City of London mega-rich.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/21/gordon-brown-hedge-funds

I cannot for the life of me conceive how anybody in their right mind, other than their corporate backers, can even consider voting New Labour, let alone the working people whose hopes they have betrayed.

As someone who devotes much energy to battling Islamophobia, it is important equally to oppose false cries of Islamophobia whenever any Muslim group is thwarted. Otherwise “Islamophobic” will become a meaningless pejorative just as “Anti-semitic” is thrown at any rational critic of Israel.

Having looked at the dispute over Camberley Mosque, I feel that it is the Bengali community which is acting with gross insensitivity. They wish to pull down a listed Victorian building to build a mosque. I would oppose that were the proposed replacement a mosque, synagogue, church or Tesco.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/surrey/8561342.stm

The old scholl has in fact been in use for many years as an Islamic centre. There is no threat to that. It is demolition of the building which is objected to.

It strikes me that the very large and sturdy building looks ideal for sympathetic internal conversion to make it a better mosque. Failing that, the community can do what anybody else has to do whose needs have outgrown a listed building, and move the mosque elsewhere.

I encountered a similar arrogance and insensitivity from some members of the Muslim community while campaigning on Whalley Range in Blackburn, when I was faced with a demand that a pub close to a mosque be closed down. I replied that the pub had been there for over a hundred years before the mosque.

The deliberate spread of fear and hatred of Muslims by politicians, media and security services is a real problem. But what we must insist is that Muslims are treated both no worse and no better than anybody else.

Now that politics have focused down on the election, I find myself thoroughly demotivated.

There is a substantial percentage of the population who wish to see a very early withdrawal from the occupation of Afghanistan, who want genuinely firm measures against the casino banking economy, who are very sceptical about the direction the European Union has gone, and who do not want to waste many scores of billions of dollars on a nuclear submarine system which can wipe out half the world’s population instantaneously and the rest shortly thereafter.

Yet the great “leader’s debate” will be between three people who all follow the same pro-bank bailout, pro-Afghan war, pro-EU and pro-Trident consensus. The political differences between them are insignificant – they are engaged in a Mr Smarm contest. They are not even good at that – Brown is an aggressive churl, Cameron is comfortable only working alongside his team of fellow toffs, Nick Clegg seeks to avoid offending the establishment consensus at all costs.

Only in Wales and Scotland do any significant number of people have a hope of electing anybody who stands outside the cosy Westmnister consensus on key issues.

To work, democracy must present the electorate with real choices.

Our democracy does not work.

Control Orders remain a cruel act of degradation of people who have never been convicted of anything, utterly incompatible with human rights. Parliament will today vote to renew them again – expect the parties to compete in their gravitas as they underline the threat to our very existence and way of life (sic) from terrorism.

In fact, as has been so roundly denounced by our most senior judges recently, the real threat to our way of life comes from politicians and the security services.

The arguments in this letter are extremely strong:

Open letter to Home Secretary Alan Johnson MP

Dear Home Secretary,

We write to urge you not to renew the control order provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, introduced in haste in March 2005 following the House of Lords Judicial Committee’s condemnation of indefinite detention of foreign terrorist suspects. In the five years of their operation, control orders have attracted criticism from national bodies including the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Justice, Liberty and Amnesty International UK, and eminent international bodies including the International Commission of Jurists, the UN Human Rights Committee and Human Rights Watch. This has focussed on the inherent unfairness of the orders, their reliance on secret evidence, and the devastating impact they have on those subject to them.

Impact

You will be aware (through reports presented during litigation and press coverage) of the severe impact of the orders on family and private life, and on the mental health of those subjected to them. This is acknowledged by Lord Carlile in his fifth annual review of control orders [PDF]. Partial house arrest, confinement to a restricted geographical area, wearing a tag, and the constant need to report, to seek permission, to have visitors (even medical visitors) vetted, and the stigma associated with being targeted in this way, takes a severe toll not only on controlled persons but on their families. Children’s school performance is badly affected by denial of internet access (making homework very difficult), by restriction of visitors, by fathers being unable to take their children out freely, by the disruption and fear caused by frequent house searches, and by children witnessing the humiliation and despair caused to their parents by these measures. The detrimental impact of the orders is even worse since, although in theory time-limited to a year, in reality, renewal of orders means that subjection to these draconian restrictions is endless.

The fact that there have been so few control orders in the five years of their operation ?” 44 in total according to Lord Carlile ?” gives the misleading impression that those controlled must be truly dangerous. But the small number of orders does not necessarily mean that the intelligence behind them is accurate. Not many people were hanged for murder when the UK had capital punishment ?” but a significant proportion turn out to have been innocent.

Unfairness

Major sources of unfairness are the use of secret evidence and the lack of real advance judicial scrutiny. Permission to make a non-derogating order can only be denied by a High Court judge if the decision to make the order, or the grounds for making it, are ‘obviously flawed’. This, and the lack of input from the proposed subject of the order, would not be such a problem if the review process was not subject to such delays, but at present the full review hearing rarely takes place within 12 months. During all this time, of course, the controlled person is subject to the full rigours of the control order.

The judge may quash the order at the full review stage, but only if there is no reasonable suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities. It is a very low threshold for the Home Office, and is frequently satisfied by evidence that neither the controlled person nor his advocate has had an opportunity to test in cross-examination. This remains the case despite the Judicial Committee’s ruling in June 2009 (in AF and another v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2009] UKHL 28) that the controlled person is entitled to enough disclosure to be able to answer allegations [this is the Law Lords’ ruling from June 2008, referred to above]; the Committee was referring to the amount of detail in the allegation, and not to the evidential foundation for the allegations, which generally remains closed. As Human Rights Watch has observed, the control order regime undermines the right to an effective defence, the principle of equality of arms, and the presumption of innocence.

Cost

Although it would be inappropriate to judge the control order regime by its cost-effectiveness as a principal criterion, it is reasonable to note that implementation of the orders has cost a fortune in litigation; the Joint Committee on Human Rights has calculated that total legal costs from 2006 to date are likely to exceed £20 million (taking into account the costs of legal aid and judicial sitting time), which is almost half a million pounds for each controlled person. Litigation has also seriously diminished the utility of the orders as a tool for controlling and disrupting terrorist activity, to the point where there must be very serious doubts as to their cost-effectiveness (compared with more targeted surveillance and effective use of the criminal justice system).

Reputation

The fact that British citizens and residents can be subjected indefinitely to such extraordinary measures, with no effective means of challenge, contravening in important respects common-law guarantees of fairness as well as Article 6 of the ECHR, has damaged the reputation of the United Kingdom and done irreparable harm to the fabric of justice in this country. In addition, public trust in the security services and the government is eroded, and communities whose co-operation is vital in the fight against terrorism are intimidated and alienated. In the words of solicitor Gareth Peirce, ‘This may affect only a small group of people but in terms of its contribution to what one might call the folklore of injustice it is colossal.’

For these reasons we urge you not to renew this legislation.

Yours sincerely

Mike Mansfield QC, criminal defence barrister, Tooks Chambers

Craig Murray, writer, broadcaster, human rights activist, former British Ambassador

Sir Geoffrey Bindman, solicitor

Lord Rea

Clare Short MP

John McDonnell MP

Victoria Brittain, writer and journalist

Dafydd Iwan, LL.D., President of Plaid Cymru, Party of Wales

Bruce Kent, Vice-President, Pax Christi

Louise Christian, human rights lawyer

Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP

Caroline Lucas MEP

Jean Lambert MEP

Frances Webber, human rights lawyer

Liz Fekete, Institute of Race Relation (IRR)

Carla Ferstman, Director, Redress

Ben Hayes, Statewatch

Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner

Prof. Chris Frost, Head of Journalism, Liverpool John Moores University

Hilary Wainright, Co-editor, Red Pepper

Cori Crider, Legal Director, Reprieve

Paddy Hillyard, Emeritus Professor, QUB

Bob Jeffrey, University of Salford

Amrit Wilson, writer

Dr Richard Wild, University of Greenwich

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Executive Director, Institute of Public Policy Research.

Andy Worthington, journalist and author of The Guantanamo Files

Lord Gifford QC, barrister and Vice-President of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers

Liz Davies, barrister and Chair, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers

Anna Morris, barrister and Vice-Chair, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers

Professor Bill Bowring, barrister and International Secretary, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers

Dr Victoria Sentas, School of Law, King’s College London

Margaret Owen, Director WPD, international human rights lawyer

Phil Shiner, Public Interest Lawyers

Sam Jacobs, Public Interest Lawyers

Daniel Carey, Public Interest Lawyers

Tessa Gregory, Public Interest Lawyers

Moazzam Begg, Director, Cageprisoners

Massoud Shadjareh, Chair, Islamic Human Rights Commission

Aamer Anwar, human rights lawyer

Nick Hildyard, Sarah Sexton, Larry Lohmann, The Corner House

Desmond Fernandes, policy analyst and author

Dinah Livingstone, writer, translator, editor

Tim Gopsill, journalist, Editor of Free Press

Paul Donovan, journalist

Estelle du Boulay, The Newham Monitoring Project

Suresh Grover, Director of The Monitoring Group

George Binette, UNISON Camden

Arzu Pesmen, Kurdish Federation UK

David Morgan, Peace in Kurdistan Campaign

Alex Fitch, Peace in Kurdistan Campaign

Matt Foot, solicitor

Hugo Charlton, barrister

Dr Kalpana Wilson, London School of Economics

Jonathan Bloch, Lib Dem Councillor and author

Michael Seifert, solicitor and Vice-President of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers

Kat Craig, solicitor and Vice-Chair, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers

Khatchatur I. Pilikian, Professor of Music & Art

Dr Alana Lentin, Senior Lecturer, Sociology, University of Sussex

Dr Christina Pantazis, University of Bristol

Professor Steve Tombs, Liverpool John Moore University

Claire Hamilton, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin

Professor Phil Scraton, School of Law, Queen’s University, Belfast

Dr Theodore Gabriel, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham

Dr Jan Gordon, University of Lincoln, Exeter

Dr Tina Patel, University of Salford

Professor Penny Green, Kings College, London

John Moore, University of West of England, Bristol

Professor Joe Sim, Liverpool John Moore University

Dr David Whyte, University of Liverpool

Dr Stephanie Petrie, University of Liverpool

Dr Dianne Frost, University of Liverpool

Martin Ralph, (UCU Committee), University of Liverpool

Dr Anandi Ramamurthy, University of Central Lancashire

Professor Jawed Siddiqui, Sheffield Hallam University

Dr Silvia Posocco, Birkbeck College, University of London

Dr Muzammil Quraishi, University of Salford

Dr Adi Kuntsman, University of Manchester

Professor Lynne Segal, Birkbeck College, University of London

Dr Joanne Milner, University of Salford

Dr Yasmeen Narayan, Birkbeck College, University of London

Professor Scott Poynting, Manchester Metropolitan University

Dr Liam McCann, University of Lincoln

Dr Pritam Singh, Oxford Brookes University

Sophie Khan, solicitor

Simon Behrman

Owen Greenhall

Martha Jean Baker

Russell Fraser

Ripon Ray

Stephen Marsh, barrister

Declan Owens

Rheian Davies, solicitor

Richard Harvey barrister

Deborah Smith, solicitor

Alastair Lyons, solicitor, Birnberg Peirce

Hossain Zahir , barrister

Chantal Refahi , barrister

Anna Mazzola, solicitor

Zareena Mustafa, solicitor

Lochlinn Parker, solicitor

Anne Gray, CAMPACC

Saleh Mamon, CAMPACC

Estella Schmid, CAMPACC

Dr Saleyha Ahsan, No More Secrets-Respect Article 5, film maker

Mohamed Nur, Kentish Town Community Organisation

Abshir Mohamed, Kentish Town Community Organisation

Samarendra Das, filmmaker and writer

Rebecca Oliner, artist

Rebekah Carrier, solicitor

Dr Smarajit Roy, PPC Green Party Candidate for Mitcham and Morden

PM Forbes, The Green Party, Sandhurst, Berkshire

Jayne Forbes, Chair, Green Party

Adrian Cruden, Green Party PPC Newsbury

Lesley Hedges, Green Party PPC Colne Valley

Sarah Cope, Green Party PPC Stroud Green

A Bragga, Green Party PPC for Stroud Green

Graham Wroe, lecturer, Sheffield Green Parry

I sometimes have to seriously query the competence of my publisher. They had a couple of months notice of the radio play of Murder in Samarkand, but Amazon were out of stock before the broadcast even started and now are showing 5 to 9 days dispatch, while I can’t find the book at all on Waterstone’s website.

There would be a good chance that some of the 2 million people who heard the play, casually coming across the book in a bookshop, might buy a copy. But a lady just contacted me having been to five different London bookshops – before she found a copy in Foyles.

Craig

More bullshit from Mandelson.

“To mothball” means “To pretend not finally closed until after the election”.

I do not believe that the UK has a future based on services without a manufacturing base. The consequences of those attitudes are starting to come home to roost. I view it as ludicrous that hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ money can be thrown at banks, but nothing at a steelworks.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23807556-corus-closes-steel-plant-as-lord-mandelson-says-we-wont-walk-away.do#readerComments

This is particularly amusing. The British governemt has responded to my exposure of their attempts to thwart anti-corruption investigations in Ghana. They could not bring themselves to use my name, and sought to denigrate the article as anonymous internet comment. (In fact it was written for Ghana’s Insight newspaper which has been conducting a series of investigations into this matter).

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/02/the_uk_and_corr.html#comments

This is the official British government statement:

Recent allegations circulated on the internet assert that the UK Government is trying to stop Ghanaian anti-corruption investigations. This is demonstrably false and deliberately misleading.

http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/news/fco-views-on-news/

It then details the only anti-corruption abroad prosecution ever brought against a British company, the Mabey and Johnson case (M and J actually did a lot of good in Ghana, but that’s a long and different story).

But then comes the real jaw dropper:

The British Government’s opposition to bribery and corruption is unequivocal: The Foreign Bribery Strategy, launched by Anti-Corruption Champion Jack Straw on 19 January 2010, builds on the government’s anti-corruption work over the past three years and aims to help the UK strengthen its reputation as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. And the new Bribery Bill, making its way through Parliament at present, signals a concerted effort to make the UK a leader in international anti-corruption efforts.

Have these people no shame? Jack Sraw anti-corruption champion? The MP for BAE? The man who has spent 13 years in government fighting for the interests of BAE and shielding them from successive investigations and prosecutions for corruption?

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/theres_good_mon.html

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/more_lord_scumb.html

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/07/law_lords_back.html

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/06/bae_corruption_1.html

The man who broke anti-treating laws in his own election?

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/06/jack_straw_shou_1.html

Jack Straw is a the epitome of the corrupt New Labour machine politician. Now for some news from genuine anti-corruption champions:

As part of its continuing efforts to press the UK government to stop

turning a blind eye to the corrupt activities of British corporations

abroad, The Corner House this week joined Campaign Against Arms Trade

(CAAT) to request a judicial review of a recent controversial plea

bargain that would let arms manufacturer BAE Systems off the hook for

alleged bribery in several European and African countries.

Nicholas Hildyard, for The Corner House, said of the decision by the

UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to allow the deal:

‘Plea bargains should only ever be entertained when companies have

really come clean. BAE has not. Once again, an SFO decision has

reinforced the UK’s reputation for letting big companies get away with

bribing.’

He added:

‘The SFO’s blatant disregard for the rule of law is damaging lives and

democracy abroad. We are undertaking this action in solidarity with all

those affected.’

Lawyers acting on behalf of The Corner House and CAAT wrote to the SFO

Director on Friday 12 February to signal their intention to request the

judicial review of the SFO-BAE settlement.

Under the SFO settlement, announced on 5 February 2010, BAE would plead

guilty to minor charges of ‘accounting irregularities’ in its 1999 sale

of a radar system to Tanzania for which the SFO proposed it should pay

penalties of 30 million pounds sterling. The SFO would not bring charges

relating to alleged bribery and corruption in BAE’s arms deals elsewhere.

The basis for the legal challenge is that, in reaching this settlement,

the SFO failed properly to apply prosecution guidance (including its own

guidance). In particular, the plea agreement fails to reflect the

seriousness and extent of BAE’s alleged offending, which includes

corruption and bribery, and to provide the court with adequate

sentencing powers.

The groups also argue that the SFO has unlawfully concluded that factors

weighing against prosecuting outweigh those in favour.

Kaye Stearman, CAAT’s spokesperson, says: ‘It is in the public interest

that BAE should not be let off the hook.’

The groups’ lawyers also requested that the Serious Fraud Office delay

applying for court approval of its settlement with BAE Systems. If it

does not do so, the two groups will seek an injunction against the court

application.

Iraq Inquiry not going too well then…

One of the tinier income flows of the “security industry” amongst the billions of cash they have made from the War on Terror, is the money they get from television punditry. This is a double whammy as they get paid to stoke up the climate of fear on which they thrive.

Sky News have had two different security “experts” on in the last ten minutes, both assuring us how deadly serious last night’s incident on Emirates was, and that the police response was “Proportionate” and necessary. The Sky presenters repeated the mantra of proportionate action too.

Complete bollocks. Common sense seems to have gone out of the window completely. I don’t know exactly what Al-Qaida teach their potential bombers in the Yemen. Apparently they don’t teach them that you can’t blow up commercial explosive without a detonator, in the case of the underpants bomber. The UK authorities apparently believe they also don’t tell them not to let the flight crew know about the bomb, before the plane takes off.

According to “security expert” Chris from Bolton, the men may have been making a joke among themselves which the cabin staff overheard. Something like “Did you remember the bomb Jim?” “Don’t worry it’s in the hold”.

The authorities are very keen to introduce suspect profiling, to make sure Muslims get worked over. Here is a clue for suspect profiling: terrorists don’t tell you about the bomb in advance.

It is a sign of the terrible decline of Britain’s “democratic” system that figures as insignificant as Hoon and Hewitt should ever have held political office. The only reaction I have to this “crisis” is that it is a reminder how deeply unattractive are the entire New Labour cast being paraded before us.

Is this attack on Brown motivated by revulsion at endless war on weak countries, at the attack on civil liberties at home, at the incredible amount of debt loaded on ordinary people to bale out the bankers, at the widest ever gap between rich and poor in this country?

No! They talk only about the chances of Labour MPs and the thousands of other Labour hacks sponging off the taxpayers, to keep their jobs and their noses in the trough. It is not about policy at all, or anything that benefits you or me. It is about New Labour politicos’ personal access to money and power.

You are all a bunch of troughing, hypocritical, war criminals. Fuck off New Labour, all of you.

I was interested to see that I have probably met Farouk Murtallab. He was a pupil at the British School in Lome when I used to visit it quite frequently from 1998 to 2001, because I had consular responsibility in Togo for most of the staff and some of the pupils.

Farouk’s “Training” in Yemen has immediately focused US and UK military attention further on the country. Yemen, like Somalia across the strait, does urgently need more attention – but not of the military kind. They require a major international effort to end crippling poverty, in support of a conflict resolution drive that must shun political, religious and ideological preconception. It would have to be a genuienly UN led affair.

It would be nice – but otiose – to think that the obscenely wealthy clique that runs Saudi Arabia would be far-sighted enough to provide the necessary funds. That won’t happen, or if it did there would be so many Saudi strings as to make conflict resolution impossible. It is also worth noting that the activities of Somali pirates in disrupting the shipping lanes are contributing to the poverty in Yemen.

Unfortunately, the West seems to have forgotten that policy responses other than military force exist, so what we will in fact see is an attempt to solve Yemen’s problems by killing more peole with drones.

Many of Somalia’s problems also arise from Western military destabilisation of regimes they don’t like. The idea that this would lead to a regime they do like is self-evidently foolish. Disastrous poverty and starvation appears viewed by the West as a price worth paying for their negative achievement.

Paradoxically, we ought to be killing more people off the coast of Somalia. The problems of piracy in the shipping lanes is becoming a real drag on trade that damages many poor countries. Terms of engagement for the EU and other international navies have to be varied to allow for much quicker resort to lethal force. The UK should follow the example of France, which is mounting guns and putting armed commandos on its flagged merchant ships in the region. Extirpating pirates is not only permissible in international law, it is an obligation, and quite rightly so.

A number of readers of this blog have a starry-eyed view of those raking in ens of millions of dollars in ransoms, viewing then as noble dispossessed fisher-folk, turned Robin Hood because to fight the evils of pollution and global warming.

Bullshit. They are well-organised criminal gangs, centrally controlled and supplied and operating with clear tactics and their own terms of engagement, who receive training and logistic support from white mercenaries based in South Africa. This is information I have gathered in Africa, directly from those genuinely involved in the actual local fisheries industry, whose livelihood is being ruined by the pirates.

As I have recently explained with regard to Iran, it is essential to the whole world that the principle of free passage for shipping is maintained without undue interference by coastal states, be it by government or non-governmental actors. The costs to the entire world economy of allowing that principle to slip, would be enormous.

“It’s hard to put into words how bad I feel right now. I’m in my 40s now and I’ve been at Corus since I left school. I’m a single parent with a daughter at university and one at home. Of course they are worried – and so are thousands of other families. I fear the future. I’ve got a mortgage to pay and I’m worried that I’ll end up losing my home.”

Michael Shepherd

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8395891.stm

Had he been a banker, of course, he would keep his job, benefiting from 150 billion pounds of taxpayers’ moner actually paid out and the surety of a further 700 billion that the taxpayer has “agreed” to stump up to underwrite his job if necessary. If he were a banker, he would still get his multi-million pound bonus and his daughters’ lives would be gilded.

I am typing this on a keyboard which was not made by a banker. It rests on a desk which was not built by a banker. I am sitting on a chair which was not made by a banker, which rests on floor tiles not made by bankers, resting on a concrete and steel reinforced floor not built by bankers in a house of similar construction. I have to hand a sausage sandwich – the pigs were not reared by bankers and the wheat was not grown by bankers, and a cup of coffee – the beans were not grown by bankers, the milk was not from banker raised cattle, the water was not purified by a banker, the sugar cane was not cut by a banker. The clay was not dug by a banker nor the kiln fired by a banker. None of it was brought to this spot and assembled or constructed by a banker.

Bankers act as middlemen for the finanical transactions that enable people working with real goods to process the flows of payment. They also enable corporate entities to gamble, most of those gambles coming down to a bet on the future value of real goods. For this they get a cut.

Fair enough. But as a simple man, it is hard for me to understand how these enabling middlemen are infinitely superior to the people actually doing things in the real economy, to the extent that the middlemen may never be allowed to fail. It also looks pretty plain that, if they failed and went bust because they were no good, new paople would step in to do the same job, as they have for thousands of years.

There is no rationale beyond power, influence and a corrupt political system that sees hundreds of billions of pounds from ordinary families pumped in to keep failed bankers very rich, whereas not even the 0.0003% (that tiny fraction is 50 million pounds) of the bank bailout money paid out so far, can be spared to keep Corus going on Teeside through the downturn.

Nobody in Whitehall will give a second’s thought to Mr Shepherd’s daughters. Their dad is only a steelworker. It’s not like they’re bankers or anything.

Travelling around West Africa by road, I still very frequently cross old British Bailey bridges. I cannot understand why we are continually being bombarded with news of the plight of the bridgeless people of Workington, and that the army has not been deployed to put up a Bailey bridge or its modern equivalent.

The Army must have bridging capacity. I recall, for example, that when we were holding armoured brigade exercises in Drawsko in Western Poland in 1996, a plan to take some tanks into Warsaw for PR purposes was scuppered by the fact that none of the bridges would take a British main battle tank, and it was rightly deemed not worth the cash to throw them up for a PR exercise. But I can’t believe that even this government is so incompetent that the army cannot get over a river. Or is all our bridging capacity being deployed to facilitate the movement of opium and heroin for the drugs warlords of the Karzai government?

The Quilliam Foundation, which receives very large amounts of public money, has decided that a good use for some of its funds is to take libel action against me. The lawyer’s letter from Clarke Willmott insists that I pay damages to the directors personally, rather than to the Foundation. Interesting.

Download file

Anyway, the lawyer says that the Quilliam Foundation has indeed filed accounts. I shall reply asking the lawyer for a copy of said accounts. Interestingly the lawyer claims that a Mr Ed Jagger had contacted me to say thiswas untrue. In fact, to my knowledge I have never had any contact with Ed Jagger.

If I (and the Company House website) am wrong in saying that Quilliam had not filed accounts, of course I apologise without any need for a lawyer. However it makes very little difference to my view on Quiliiam. To save Clarke Willmott a search, here is part of an earlier article I wrote about them and their attack on a fellow blogger:

My own view is that those who have adopted religous fanaticism – for whatever religion – display an absence of good judgement.

Ed Husain is by his own account a former religous extremist. He is one of the leaders among those who realised that, having tried to make a mark in the world through religious fanaticism, they can make more money and career progress by turning traitor on their former beliefs and colleagues, and jumping on the anti-Islamist gravy train.

Both the original fanaticism and the high profile and lucrative betrayal are evidence of a sociopathic character.

Husain is now a wealthy man. The government set him up in the Quilliam foundation and has thrown more than £1 million of taxpayers’ money at it. He is in great and lucrative demand on the mainstream media.

The Quilliam Foundation is the branch of New Labour tasked with securing the Muslim vote and reducing British Muslim dissatisfaction with New Labour over the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. If they wanted to do that whith New Labour money, that would be their own business. But I object fundamentally to their doing it with my and your money.

The party political nature of the Quilliam Foundation is shown in their astonishing and completely unbalanced attack on Osama Saeed, a prominent SNP candidate and a friend of mine. They try to portray him as an Islamic extremist.

If Osama is an Islamic extremist, then I am a Blairite

.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/new_labour_corr.html

I might add that, for an organisation set up ostensibly to advocate Western values, they have a very shaky grip on free speech. Apparently they have Michael Gove, Douglas Murray and other Tory pro Iraq and Afghanistan war neo-cons onboard as well as New Labour.

My post about the accounts is here.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/11/public_money_go.html

I will amend it when I get back to London to reflect their claim that they have in fact filed accounts. I can’t do that here as to add to an old entry triggers a site rebuild which is not practical on my very slow African internet connection.

Hat-tip to MPACUK. UPDATE – Quilliam have filed their accounts since I wrote this. They are now in compliance.

Interesting to note that, contrary to the law, the government “War on Terror” neo-con propaganda vehicle The Quilliam Foundation has failed to file any accounts for the last three years (or indeed ever). This despite receiving a great deal of taxpayers’ money, mostly to remunerate its cossetted directors.

This from the Companies House website

THE QUILLIAM FOUNDATION LTD

PO BOX 60380 35-50 RATHBONE PLACE

LONDON

WC1A 9AZ

Company No. 06432342

Status: Active

Date of Incorporation: 20/11/2007

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Company Type: PRI/LTD BY GUAR/NSC (Private, limited by guarantee, no share capital)

Nature of Business (SIC(03)):

7484 – Other business activities

Accounting Reference Date: 31/03

Last Accounts Made Up To: (NO ACCOUNTS FILED)

Next Accounts Due: 20/09/2009 OVERDUE

http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/e473a907f36923b62b946aa6bc8ba453/compdetails

How do you feel about grants of public money being given to a private company whose address is a PO Box and which does not have accounts?

(UPDATE: Amended in response to comment from Control below, with thanks to Charles)

David Cameron has just ratted on his much trumpeted commitment to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. The argument that the Treaty is now ratified, does not in fact preclude a referendum. It is perfectly possible to resile from an international treaty; a referendum on whether to resile would be perfectly feasible, but Cameron has not the stomach for that fight with the EU.

To cover his retreat he unleashed a cloud of rhetorical proposals which have no pactical effect. A “referendum lock” law covering future treaties could simply be undone by any future government, but more practically would be unlikely to be invoked as the Lisbon Treay is designed to allow for amendment, to obviate the need for ratification of further treaties or formal ratification of the amendments,

But more importantly, the “Sovereignty Law” is a non-starter. If it had any meaning, it would require us to resile from the Lisbon, Nice, Amsterdam and other treaties in which sovereignty was given up (or “pooled”, as pro-EU jargon has it,) We cannot simply declare that the UK courts are not subject to the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights, or that the British govenment is not bound by the majority voting provisions of successive EU treaties, without resiling from the treaties that say otherwise. And if we are prepared to do that, the whole argument for not having a referendum on Lisbon fails.

The pretence that the German Constitutional Court sits above the European Court of Justice is a shameful lie. The German Constitutional Court has in fact never tried to strike down a ECJ ruling, a European Commission ruling, or an EU treaty provision. The Cameron ploy is not so much smoke and mirrors, as an effort to hide in a steaming heap of bullshit.

I do not for one second think he believes it himself.

It seems that Cameron is just a shifty snake oil salesman like Blair. Now there’s a shock.

This video is rather more fun

http://voteforachange.co.uk/page/s/nextstop

Iain Dale has an interesting interview with Michal Kaminski. I think Iain should be congratulated for asking all the right questions, rather well. It is not his fault that Kaminski was dissembling wildly in his answers.

http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2009/10/exclusive-my-interview-with-michal.html

I knew Kaminski slightly when he was a young political activist in the late 1990s. I was at the time First Secretary in the British Embassy and much concerned to identify the new political leadership, untainted by Communist mindset, which might bring Poland into the European Union. I should say that the Embassy had a group of young Second Secretaries who were absolutely brilliant in this. William Elliott, Anna Clunes, Andy Smith and Dominic Meiklejohn were amazingly talented; I tried to take credit for their work!

Life is complicated sometimes. Kaminski certainly was anti-Semitic. He was also a very personable and polite young man. Let me try to explain this paradox.

When Alexander Kasniewski defeated Lech Walesa to become President of Poland in 1995, Kaminski was one of the right wing activists involved in lobbying the media to publish stories stating that Kwasniewski’s grandmother was Jewish. That accusation became the focal point of the entire election campaign. The Kwasniewski camp felt unable to reply that the ethnicity of Kwasniewski’s grandmother was immaterial; in fact, they went to great lengths to produce documents and witnesses to show that she was not Jewish. That fact is crucial to an understanding of the depth of anti-semitism in Poland. Even Kwasniewski felt unable to face it down electorally.

Living in Poland for four years, I was continually shocked by the casual anti-semitism I encountered. One day I was going to lunch with Kasia Krause (now a diplomat at the Polish Embassy in London). I said to the kindly old Polish lady in the Embassy who fixed my appointments:

“Oh Kasia, that’s great, she’s really lovely”.

The old lady replied

“You do realise she is Jewish, don’t you?”

It would be a lie to say that I encountered casual anti-semitism every day. But I did so often enough to be severely worried – and often from very nice people who did not otherwise have weird opinions. Anti-semitism was absolutely endemic in the Polish Catholic Church, and still is. There has been no serious attempt to eradicate it, despite the odd rap on the knuckles for Walesa’s priest Father Jankowski or the rabid crowd at Radio Marija – Kaminski’s most important media support. It is worth noting that whilst within the Polish Catholic Church, the conservative Polish Pope John Paul II had always been considered a far liberal.

I should add that a young black British businessmen reported to me that being spat at was an almost daily occurence.

The strange thing is that I adore Poland, and Poles, and Polish culture. I was ever so happy in my time there. There are reasons for the development of this deep-seated racist strain which are historic. There is a limit to how far you can blame individuals for adopting attitudes which are widespread in their culture; and without understanding you cannot change attitudes. Which brings me back to Kaminski. Much as he tries to hide his past, for the present I do not think we should rule out that he really has changed his views, after being exposed to wider cultural influences (like Iain Dale!)

There undoubtedly remain, however, many really nasty anti-Semites in the political grouping in Poland around Kaminski. I still think the Tories will regret this alliance. It is a wonderful irony that Kamiski is a strong advocate of the Lisbon Treay, which rather obviates the reason for the Tories to have shot themselves in the foot with their weird alliances.

A key part of Poland coming to terms with its anti-semitism will be an acknowledgement of what Polish people did to Jews in or just after World War II. Iain Dale’s questioning about the Jedwabne massacre is actually important. This was one of a number of massacres of Jews by Poles, but there were also hundreds of individual murders of Jewish survivors who inconveniently resurfaced, and perhaps tried to reclaim their property.

Poland must come to terms with all of its history, not just the heroic bits. Poland suffered terribly for three hundred years of near continuous foreign occupation. It was moved about physically on the map, sometimes disappearing, and emerged an artificially placed and artificially ethnically homogenous nation. Of course it was screwed up and nationalistic. Of course Kamnski is screwed up and nationalistic. Poland is slowly getting better. Who knows? Maybe Michal is too.

There are times when I feel a total disconnect from the mainstream media. Political commentators appear almost universally to have concluded that George Osborne’s speech yesterday was a success, that he has “Grown up” or “Come of age”. Am I alone in thinking that Osborne sounded like a petulant public school prefect? I spent the entire speech thinking “arrogant little shit”, and I would be astonished if quite a few other people did not hink so too.

The incessant repetition of “We are all in this together” struck me as amateur in both concept and delivery. It also brought the thought that multi-millionaires like Messrs Cameron and Osborne are rather less “in it” than ordinary people. If that were not true, of course, he would not have needed to insist so hard on the opposite. The fact that the rich may have to wait up to five years for exemption from inheritance tax seemed to me less than a huge sacrifice on their part: in contrast to public sector workers, who are expected to take a pay freeze, and working people who are expected to retire later – both to finance the massive subsidies paid to bankers. The Conservatives are no better than New Labour in seeking to hide their determination to let bankers’ obscene salaries and bonuses continue, hidden behind a smokescreen of hypocritical rhetoric.

You may be surprised to learn that personally I believe that the public sector should be kept to below 40% of GDP, which is to say that it should be cut by over 25%. That makes me more radically anti-state than the Tories. There is a huge amount of waste in public expenditure, especially in local government.

My solutions are more radical. The local government system suffers from a disconnect between provision and finance. It is admministered locally but financed centrally. Your council tax only accounts for a tiny percentage of the council’s expenditure, so the ability to relate performance and provision to cost is lost on the taxpayer/voter. At least 80% (100% in wealthy areas) of all local services, including education, should be funded through wholly variable local income tax. National income tax would be correspondingly reduced and council tax abolished. Up to 20% central government subsidy might be paid to poorer regions.

If voters were paying 15% of their income in tax to the local authority, they would take much more interest in local government, and wonder why they were paying for over-inflated and almost completely useless social services departments, and why the deputy manager of the leisure centre was on £85,000 pa. I can think of no single change which would lead to a more radical reduction of government expenditure.

The other major change would be smaller, leaner public services which simply go on with delivering the service direct, with minimal administration. This is the opposite of what the Tories would do. In particular, we need to cut out the whole complex administration of “internal markets” within the public services, where vast arrays of accountants and managers spend their wasted lives processing paper payments from the government to the government.

Let me tell you a true story which is an analogy for the whole rotten system. As Ambassador in Tashkent, I had staff from a variety of government departments – FCO, MOD, DFID, BTI, Home Office etc. In addition to which, some staff sometimes did some work for other than their own department. This led to complex inter-departmental charging, including this:

I was presented with a floor plan of the Embassy building, with floor area calculated of each office, corridor and meeting room. I then had to calculate what percentage of time each room or corridor was used by each member of staff, and what percentage of time each member of staff worked for which government department. So, for example, after doing all the calculations, I might conclude that my own office was used 42% of the time on FCO business, 13% of the time on BTI business, 11% on DFID, etc etc, whereas my secretary’s office was used ….

I then would have to multiply the percentage for each government department for each room, lobby and corridor by the square footage of that room, lobby or corridor. Then you would add up for every government department the square footages for each room, unitl you had totals of how many square feet of overall Embassy space were attributable to each government department. The running costs of the Embassy could then be calculated – depreciation, lighting, heating, maintenace, equipment, guarding, cleaning, gardening etc – and divided among the different departments. Then numerous interanal payment transfers would be processed and made.

The point being, of course, that all the payments were simply from the British government to the British government, but the taxpayer had the privilege of paying much more to run the Embassy to cover the staff who did the internal accounting. That is just one of the internal market procedures in one small Embassy. Imagine the madnesses of internal accounting in the NHS. The much vaunted increases in NHS spending have gone entirely to finance this kind of bureaucracy. Internal markets take huge resources for extra paperwork, full stop.

The Private Finance Initiative is similarly crazy; a device by which the running costs of public institutions are hamstrung to make massive payments on capital to private investors. What we desperately need to do is get back to the notion that public services should be provided by the State, with the least possible administrative tail. The Tories – and New Labour, in fact – both propose on the contrary to increase internal market procedures and contracting out.

All of George Osborne’s vaunted savings proposals yesterday would not add up to 10% of the saving from simply scrapping Trident. Ending imperial pretentions is a must for any sensible plan to tackle the deficit.

The Tories have adopted one plan I advocated in Norwich – tax breaks for start-up firms. One of the reasons for the failure of British entrepeneurship is our insistence on taxing firms even as they struggle to first establish themselves. George Osborne has only proposed a two year break on employment taxes – I propose a much more radical five year exemption from all taxes – but at least he has noticed the right problem.

All state personal payments should be means tested. It is time to slaughter the sacred cows of the welfare system. Lloyd George’s old age pension saved us from the horrors of the workhouse system and brought a sense of entitlement and dignity to working people, but after precisely a hundred years it is time to move on. Peculiarly, if all state benefits are means tested, it will remove the stigma. Many pensioners, including some close to me, take the basic pension but refuse to apply for income support. If all state payments were made through a single income tax assessment procedure, the stigma problem could be tackled. So would the nonsense of the Duke of Westminster’s entitlement to a state pension and child benefit, and the billions spent in recycling money to and from the middle class via the state.

There would still need to be a cut-off age at which the State no longer expects people to work -though retirment should be voluntary, not compulsory for those still able and wanting to work. Here the Tories are insensitive. It is a national disgrace that the difference in average life expectancy between districts in the affluent South of England, and inner city areas in our older industrial cities, can be as much as twenty years. In parts of Glasgow men struggle to live to retirement. There is also the law of unintended consequences here – any increase in retirement age will bring an immediate and major increase in those claiming incapacity benefit, the Tories’ favourite bugbear. The solution is to make it easier for people to continue to work voluntarily, and means test all payments. But the entitlement to retiire at 65 should remain until the benefits of increasing good health have reached all workers, not just Tory voters.

I hope that offers some food for thought. I also hope that it does something to remove the continuing misimpression that I am left wing….

Just a few random facts to help people remember the great tradition of New Labour in supporting ordinary working people:

Tony Blair is chraging between £100,000 and £200,000 per speech – while for just an extra £180, attendees can have their photograph taken with him.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6850868.ece

Baroness Scotland paid her husekeeper just £6 per hour.

The visa in the housekeeper’s passport had already expired (irrespective of whether it was genuine or not) before Baroness Scotland claimed to have seen it.

A friend in the FCO has told me that the French proposal for a cap on bankers’ bonuses, against which Gordon Brown fought furiously in the EU, G8 and G20, suggested a limit of 8 million euro per banker per year. Brown said this was too restrictive. Brown will announce to great fanfare in Brighton instead a system where bonuses are delayed and paid part in shares (which saves the bankers 22% in income tax).

These changes are meaningless as the bankers are rather well placed to borrow against their delayed bonuses and shares, and can just up them to defray the cost of doing so…