As I have previously stated, I can affirm that the FCO and MI6 knew that al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber.

I strongly recommend that you read this devastating article by the great lawyer Gareth Peirce, in the London Review of Books. Virtually every paragraph provides information which in itself demolishes the conviction. The totality of the information Peirce gives is a quite stunning picture of not accidental but deliberate miscarriage of justice.

Here is an excerpt:

Thurman had made the Libyan connection, and its plausibility relied on the accuracy of his statement that the fragment of circuit board proved that it would have been possible for the unaccompanied bag to fly from Malta without the seemingly inevitable mid-air explosion. And thus it was that a witness from Switzerland, Edwin Bollier, the manufacturer of the MEBO circuit board, was called on to provide evidence that such boards had been sold exclusively to Libya. Bollier was described by al-Megrahi’s barrister in his closing speech as an ‘illegitimate arms dealer with morals to match’. The evidence he was clearly intended to provide had begun to unravel even before the trial began. Sales elsewhere in the world were discovered, Thurman did not appear at the trial, and the judges commented that Bollier’s evidence was ‘inconsistent’ and ‘self-contradictory’. Other witnesses, they found, had ‘openly lied to the court’. Despite all this al-Megrahi was convicted.

Bollier had been one of the most potentially dubious of many dubious witnesses for the prosecution. But Dr Kochler, the UN’s observer throughout the trial, recorded that Bollier had been ‘brusquely interrupted’ by the presiding judge when he attempted to raise the issue of the possible manipulation of the timer fragments. Could the MEBO board, or a part of one, have been planted in such a way that it could be conveniently ‘discovered’? After the trial, new evidence that would have been at the centre of al-Megrahi’s now abandoned appeal made this suggestion more credible: a Swiss electronics engineer called Ulrich Lumpert, formerly employed by Bollier’s firm, stated in an affidavit to Kochler that in 1989 he stole a ‘non-operational’ timing board from MEBO and handed it to ‘a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case’. Bollier himself told Kochler that he was offered $4 million if he would connect the timer to Libya.

There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes’s findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled ‘cloth (charred)’ by him, but then overwritten as ‘debris’ even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been ‘found’ by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive.

Even if one knew nothing of the devastating findings of the public inquiry in the early 1990s into the false science that convicted the Maguire Seven or of the succession of thunderous judgments in the Court of Appeal in case after case in which RARDE scientists had provided the basis for wrongful convictions, Hayes’s key evidence in this case on the key fragment should be viewed as disgraceful. There is a basic necessity for evidential preservation in any criminal case: every inspection must be logged, chronology recorded, detail noted. But at every point in relation to this vital fragment that information was either missing or had been altered, although Hayes had made meticulous notes in respect of every single one of the hundreds of other exhibits he inspected in the Lockerbie investigation.

The entire article really should be read by anybody with any interest in British or US politics.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/peir01_.html

Thanks to David Rose.

I am watching BBC Question Time, for the first time for many months. I am genuinely astonished at the right wing bias of the panel. That the two “non-party” panel members are Digby Jones and Fraser Nelson shows the determination of the BBC to cover the full spectrum of political opinion from very right to very very right.

That they could not find a single panel member who supports the release of al-Megrahi, or who was prepared to mention that he might well not be the Lockerbie bomber, rendered the whole first fifteen minutes of “debate” otiose

As previously mentioned, I was once invited to be a panelist on Question Time but was cancelled by the BBC at short notice. .The BBC more recently caused a storm by inviting the BNP on to Question Time. I have stood against the BNP in two parliamentary elections – one in Norwich, and one in the very heart of the BNP heartland in Blackburn. Combining both parliamentary elections, as a mere individual I gained just two votes less than the BNP.

Yet, according to the BBC, I am officially banned from politics programmes on the BBC because I have no evidence of popular support for my views, while according to the BBC, the BNP have to be invited because of the extent of the popular support for their views.

The truth is that there is no concept of too right wing at the BBC, while there is a concept of too radical. The one no go area is a questioning of the narrative of the War on Terror.

Fascists are within the pale; sceptics are not.

A friend of mine in MI6 told me earlier this year that for the first time, the Israeli nuclear arsenal is now bigger than the British nuclear arsenal.

Plainly that is of no concern to Gordon Brown, because while he exhibited righteous indignation today at Iran’s attempts to acquire a nuclear weapon, Israel’s large and expanding nuclear arsenal was not mentioned at all. The potential to make a bomb in a few years should bring sanctions; the possession of an illegal arsenal of 162 warheads (in February – probably 165 by now) should not even rate a mention. New Labour have of course been providing heavy water and nuclear components to Israel, with a false paper trail through Norway.

I am very pleased that Brown has put the UK’s nuclear weapons into disarmament talks and has endorsed the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. But with Israel not a party to any of the treaties, and with Brown and Obama refusing to admit even that the World’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal exists, I can only presume they believe that nobody should possess nuclear weapons – except Israel,

At 2am I watched a repeat of Nick Clegg’s conference speech in full on the Parliament Channel. The Liberals and the Lib Dems always had a knack of producing leaders who were liked and respected. Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe, David Steel, Paddy Ashdown and Charlie Kennedy were all among the first rank of effective and charismatic parliamentarians of their day (I am not here discussing the merits of their policy positions or extra-parliamentary activities).

But in Menzies Campbell and Nick Clegg the Lib Dems have produced two total duds. Both have the same leaden delivery and both are self evident preeners with an opinion of themselves which far outstrips their talent. I am not sure I have ever seen any conference speech by any leader of any party as devoid of charisma as Nick Clegg’s was yesterday.

You can’t replace charisma, but there are some things which can compensate for its absence. Heartfelt sincerity is the most important of these. That was particularly lacking, too. The only bit of Clegg’s speech that came across as compellingly believable was when he declared that he wanted to be Prime Minister.

I am sure he does. I want to bat at No 3 for England.

But why? There were two areas where the insincerity was so evident that it made my flesh creep. And they were areas where the Lib Dems should be making the running – on Afghanistan and Trident.

On Afghanistan, Clegg started his speech with an attempt to invoke the glib patriotism of The Sun, with a heartfelt tribute to our boys and girls fighting over there. Except they were, of course being let down by the government. They needed more helicopters and equipment to kill Afghans more effectively, (he left out the last phrase).

We should do the job properly or not at all, Clegg declared in a truly pathetic attempt to appease neo-imperialists and anti-imperialists both at the same time. It was a sickeningly cynical bit of politics from someone who was masquerading as a Liberal.

Clegg spent the entire conference attempting to appeal to Thatcherites by proposing cuts in public spending, including in public service pay and pensions. But on the obvious and largest waste of public money he offered only a completely meaningless formula. There should be “No like for like replacement of Trident”, he intoned with a constipated look on his face that was meant to indicate statesmanship. The remarkably small conference audience duly applauded.

“No like for like replacement of Trident”. How can people who are supposed to be thinking Liberals applaud such a transparently meaningless phrase? What a pathetic ducking of the issue. It could mean that the UK retains and pays for a submarine based offshoot of the US nuclear deterrent, but configured differently. It could encompass Brown’s three submarine proposal. It could mean – and this seems to me the most likely meaning – that we should keep and pay for an offshoot of the US based nuclear deterrent but it should not be submarine based. But as with the support for the occupation of Afghanistan, there was no underlying rationale; just a burning desire to try to appeal to all shades of opinion at once.

I shan’t bother to try to deconstruct Clegg’s “Progressive austerity”, which might be the worst political slogan ever conceived. His abandonment of the Lib Dem commitment to abolish univeristy tuition fees is shameful. To pretend that what happens in Scotland is impossible for England is foolish. To prioritise a pointless nuclear deterrent and an imperial war over social progress and mobility is not, in any sense, liberal.

The problem with an increase in the tax threshold to £10,000 is that, while it does lift the low paid out of income tax, it provides precisely the same cash tax cut to everybody earning £10,000 or over. Someone on £10,000 a year will get exactly the same cash boost as the banker on £5 million a year. Both will get a bigger cash boost than someone on £8,000 a year. How is that progressive?

At the last general election the Lib Dems under the excellent Charlie Kennedy offered a viable, radical alternative. At the coming election they will offer Clegg’s carefully crafted attempts not to offend Tory England. As the party has grown, and as the allowances of public money for MPs’ and MEPs’ staff have created a parisitic army of the paid ambitious, the Lib Dems have become merely slaves to the worship of power. I can think of no reason to vote for a party led by Nick Clegg.

Baroness Scotland has an extremely high opinion of herself, and an extremely low opinion of anybody who might question her. She laughed in the House of Lords at Eric Lubbock, when he was making a perfectly correct point about the burdens placed by the government on the immigration service exceeding the capacity of the staff to deliver.

Lord Avebury: …That seems to be of fundamental importance in deciding whether the Immigration and Nationality directorate is capable of coping with any new burdens that are placed on it, let alone the ones that are specified in these regulations. The Minister may snigger, but this is not a laughing matter.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I am not sniggering. The noble Lord is not right. We have tried extremely hard to deal seriously with this matter. I was merely shaking my head in disbelief

In the same Lords debate on 23 April 2004 Baroness Scotland went on to pooh-pooh the idea that proposed requirements on small employers to check and to keep copies of employees’ immigration status and documents, were difficult or excessive.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal … The employer has then simply to take a copy of the application form or other document proving exemption. That would provide them with their statutory defence and authorise them to employ the person

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldhansrd/vo040423/text/40423-03.htm

She was not at that moment referring to the precise category of immigrant in which her housekeeper fell, but she was to pilot legislation through the Lords which did cover her housekeeper, and to defend the obligations it placed on employers.

Plainly Baroness Scotland would not have been fined £5,000 if she had not done something wrong. Plainly she was aware in general of the legal obligations on employees to keep copies of employees’ immigration status documents, and plainly she did not do this.

Any sin of omission can be described as “Accidental”, like failing to pay your income tax. But coming from the high-handed sneerer who pushed the very legislation through the Lords, of course she should resign.

I do not believe her story that she did check the documents but did not keep copies. The basic document to check is the visa, which states very clearly the position on entitlement to work. Is she claiming she saw but did not copy forged documents? What precisely is she claiming?

There is of course the wider question of our hypocrisy on immigration. Major British cities are heavily dependent on illegal immigrants. Every middle class Londoner has been served by an illegal immigrant in a cafe, restaurant or pub, been inside offices cleaned by illegal immigrants and often had work done in their house by illegal immigrants. I personally have several friends who are illegal immigrants, and several more who are fictional students at fake language schools.

If you look at remittances from workers in the UK back to their families in poor countries, these cash flows would be impossible on the basis of the “official” ethnic community in the UK. Ghana, for example, receives personal remittances which are greater than the country’s exports; the UK is the biggest source. I would put just the Ghanaian illegal immigrant community in the UK at well over 100,000.

The total number of illegal immigrants in the UK is almost certainly well over a million.

Boris Johnson has been the only prominent politician I can recall who has been brave enough to face the facts and call for an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Most of the political class simply prefer to pretend the problem does not exist. The illegal immigrants are not going to go home and you can’t deport over a million people without becoming still more of a police state. The economy couldn’t cope if you did, as British people won’t do many of the jobs involved – like being the sniggering bitch’s housekeeper.

It is indeed anomalous that illegal immigrants can very easily get National Insurance numbers. But it is also a good thing. It is much better for them to be working and contributing.

Baroness Scotland has been revealed as a hypocrite of remarkable proportions. But until their is a serious effort to address the status of our massive illegal immigrant workforce, we continue to be dependent on an entire class of non-people.

In another example of the mad obsession with seeking a delusory security no matter what the impact on liberty, the government is bringing in a screening scheme which means that, at the government’s own estimate, 11.4 million people who come into contact with children will need to obtain a certificate to show that they have no relevant criminal record. This will cost them £64 each.

Statistically the chance of any given child being harmed by someone other than a family member is extremely small – and almost certainly no larger than it ever was. This is an extraordinary, even ludicrous, apotheosis of the idea that the state should attempt to pre-empt all evil.

If we can pull back from the manipulation of fear and the exaggeration of risk, the madness of the scheme is evident. Not only Scoutleaders, choirmasters and football coaches will need to be certified, but so will parents who give a lift to other people’s children to school, and authors who enter schools to chat about their books (including me). If you give a lift to school to a neighbour’s children a few times without beiing certified, you will get a criminal record and a £5,000 fine.

Relatives, of course, are exempt – which as they are statistically by a huge degree the most likely people to harm the kids, only further points up the nonsense.

I hesitated to write that, lest the government has the wheeze of bringing in a certificate you need to be an uncle.

The scheme represents a monstrous new bureaucracy and yet a further radical extension of government databases on ordinary people. It will not stop child abuse at all. To take as one example the recent high profile case of Vanessa George, Plymouth nursery teacher accused of child sex abuse. Ms George could have easily obtained a certificate as she had no prior convictions.

Of the 0.00001% of those coming into voluntary and helpful contact with children, who have a secret motive to harm them, most will be volunteering because that is their only opportunity of access. The man who wants to be a scout assistant because he wants access to molest children is not likely to have other access and therefore not likely to have a record which the check will show up – if he’s daft enough to apply in his own name.

There are already other mechanisms which help stop convicted sex offenders committing crime again. They are not perfect, but you will never stop all evil. The determined criminal will get hold of certificates through aliases or forgery if they really wish, or just snatch kids from playgrounds.

This scheme makes as much sense as would a requirement to produce a certificate saying that you are not a bank robber, before you are permitted to enter a bank. A society that can support this scheme has been firghtened out of its senses. The government seeks to treat everyone as a sex offender unless they can prove otherwise. It is crazy. The effect will be to stigmatise normal relationships with children, to point suspicion at anybody who chooses to interact with other people’s children, and to reduce participation in scouts, guides, sports and many other voluntary activities.

Sooner or later an “Agency” run by some of the government’s business friends will be coining money from running the scheme. It’s an ill wind…

The advantage of a break fron blogging is the chance to give a digested view rather than the momentary reaction to events that blogging encourages. Juan Cole is the only blogger who consistently produces up to the second considered brilliance; but then he has a brain the size of a small planet.

So here are a few well-digested thoughts on the recent ructions over UK/Libyan relations.

It was absolutely right to release al-Megrahi. Every dying person deserves what comfort, pain alleviation and disease amelioration can be provided by the presence of family and by medical treatment. There should be no place in a justice system for the cruel vindictiveness of making a now harmless person die in jail. Scotland and the SNP have shown a civilised example; those who attack them have shown ugliness. There is a secondary but also valid utilitarian argument that to keep al-Megrahi in strict confinement while providing necessary medical treatment would have cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of pounds. to no purpose other than making some vicious people happy.

The Tories have shown their blood-baying, American bum-sucking true colours. New Labour have been caught in their usual horrible hypocrisy, attempting to capitalise on anti-SNP right wing media reaction, while having been deliberately paving the way for the release for years.

Those who believe that al-Megrahi was the Lockerbie bomber. believe he acted on Colonel Gadaffi’s orders. I have neard no-one argue that al-Megrahi acted alone. Even mad Aaronovitch, who loves attacking conspiracy theories, appears to believe that there was a Libyan government organised conspiracy to blow up the plane. So if Gadaffi was responsible, what logic is there in a view that it is fine for Blair and Brown to be pictured smiling with Gadaffi, but al-Megrahi must rot in jail? Who is more guilty, the man who gave the order, or his tool? But New Labour have been doing everything they can to give the impression that Gadaffi is now absolutely fine and rehabilitated, but the SNP were wrong to release his agent. Where is the logic in that?

Jack Straw has admitted that trade was the deciding factor in his agreeing that al-Megrahi should not be excluded from the prisoner exchange agreement. Bill Rammell has admitted that as an FCO Minister he told the Libyans that Gordon Brown did not want to see al-Megrahi die in jail. There is no room to doubt that the UK’s assiduous courting of LIbya saw all kinds of positive signals given quietly on al-Megrahi, whose release was an obvious Libyan demand in the normalisation of relations.

The infuriating thing is that New Labour actually did the right thing in their dealings with the Libyans. Jack Straw’s positions and Gordon Brown’s message were the right ones. But a combination of fear of the United States, a right wing populist media instinct and a desire to attack the SNP has led New Labour to tyy to hide the truth – and try so badly as to bring down more media scorn than if they had just come out and supported the release in the first place.

Al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber. The scandal is not that trade deals and the realpolitik of relationship normalisation led to his release. The scandal is that trade deals and the realpolitik of relationship normalisation were what led the Libyans to hand him over in the first place – very much in the way their ancestors had given hostages to Imperial Rome. His family were richly rewarded, made wealthy for generations by his acceptance of the role of sacrificial lamb, and there was the hope that he would be acquitted. That he was convicted on very dubious evidence shocked many, especially Dr Jim Swire, representative of the victims’ families, who followed the evidence painstakingly and has never accepted al-Megrahi’s guilt.

Syria was responsible for the Lockerbie bomb. But in the first Iraq war, we needed Syria’s support, while Libya remained a supporter of Iraq. Lockerbie was a bar to our new alliance with Damascus, so extremely conveniently, and with perfect timing, it was discovered that actually it was the Libyans!! Anyone who believes that fake intelligence started with Iraqi WMD is an idiot.

It haunts me that I had a chance to read the intelligence reports which, I was told by a shocked FCO colleague in Aviation and Maritime Department where I then worked, showed that the new anti-Libyan narrative was false. I say in self-defence that at the time I was literally working day and night, sleeping on a camp bed. I was organising the Embargo Surveillance Centre and I was convinced that a watertight full physical embargo could remove the need to invade Iraq. I was impatient of the interruption. I listened to my colleague only distractedly and did not want to go through the rigmarole of signing for and transporting the reports I hadn’t got time to look at then. Events overtook me, and I never did see them.

Which is not to say the Libyan regime was not a sponsor of terrorism. It was. It just didn’t do Lockerbie. It did indeed supply Semtex to the IRA. I have an obvious sympathy with the victims of IRA bombing, and their desire to obtain compensation.

But think of this. Why just Libya?

Is the United States offering to pay compensation to the tens of thousands of victims of CIA sponsored insurgents in Central and South America? Are we and the US going to pay compensation to the victims of UNITA? Are we going to pay compensation to the victims of British made cluster bombs in the Lebanon? Are we going to pay compensation to the victims of Executive Outcomes? Are the Americans going to pay compensation to the Russian and Uzbek victims of Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the days when he was a US sponsored terrorist? I could go on for a week.

Ultimately, negotiating with “terrorists” and “rogue states” has to be done. The strange thing is that New Labour’s Libyan policy has been one of its genuine successes – and makes a nonsense of its argument that we could deal with Saddam no other way. There should be more human rights emphasis in the relationship, but the apporach has been basically the right one, just as it was right to settle with the IRA, and just as it is long overdue to settle with the Taliban.

On a rare occasion when this government has shown wisdom, it appears ashamed of it.

There is a theory in Holyrood that “King Nuke” Brian Wilson’s support for the proposed 550 MW wind power project on Shetland, is based on a desire to see wind power terminally discredited by this over-large scheme.

Of Wilson’s motives I have no view – he was a good man forty years ago at, and immediately after, Dundee University, but like so many his morals appear to have been skewed by contact with Tony Blair.

But wind power needs to generate in serious units like 550 MW if it is to have a real impact on the future of British energy policy. Interestingly, if the Viking project can really be built for £800 million as stated, that is only twice the cost of installing conventional gas turbine plant – and the gas turbines will burn their construction cost again in fuel inside five years, while the fuel for the wind turbines is free.

I confess to having little time for the anti-wind turbine lobby. There are environmental consequences to any energy generation, of course, inclusing wind turbines. All human activity impacts the environment. But compared to the environmental costs of extracting and combusting fossil fuels, the impact of wind turbines is much less damaging.

Yes, you have to join them with roads and cable ducts. Of course that has an impact on the environment – as does mining and smelting the steel, etc. But I am not a fan of closing down human activity altogether to end our environmental impact. Nor is there a great deal of evidence that birds suffer wholesale massacre. The construction will but scratch the surface of the Shetland wilderness – there are no dams flooding valleys, no mountains being moved. That the wilderness should remain pristine for the benefit of occasional sightseers from the cities – who actually never really visit, they just like to think it is there – is not a major priority.

So I hope Viking, and as many other wind projects as possible, speed ahead. Which is why I am furious at the government allowing the closure of the Vestas blade factory on the Isle of Wight. Any amount of public money is available to bail out casino banking young sharps in the City of London – even though it has put us in debt for generations. But it would be “Wrong” to help our too small stake in the wind turbine industry, according to “Lord” Mandelson.

Meanwhile, the taxpayer has been heavily subsidising the nuclear industry for my entire lifetime…

Returning to Norfolk has re-awakened my fury at the government’s abandonment of much of our coastal defences, as impractical and too expensive. Yet the East Coast is full of reclaimed land, around Kent, North Norfolk and the whole of the Fens. We were doing it for centuries armed only with picks, shovels and buckets. The obvious response to the government’s miserable policy is “tell that to the Dutch”. Infuriatingly, erosion on the Norfolk cost is being increased by the Crown Estate dredging sand offshore – to sell to the Netherlands government to improve their coastal defences.

There are offshore wind farms planned around here, including on the shoals off Sheringham. It seems to me that there must be a tremendous opportunity to combine major new coastal defences with renewable energy capture through wind, tide, wave and current. This is the kind of major and imaginative public works project, like building the Hoover Dam, which adds to the investment capital of a nation and provides jobs and economic activity as we enter serious recession.

Last Wednesday, the day before the by-election, I had my first ever encounter with a bailiff – and highly unpleasant it was.

As it happens, I was not the target. I had rented a large house in Norwich to serve as a campaign HQ, and for the rest of the summer as a haven while I crack on with my next book, Sikunder Burnes. The bailiffs were after the landlord of the property.

The debt in question had started at £700, and is disputed by my landlord. I don’t know the rights and wrongs, but he had lost what he says is but the first court skirmish. His creditors had immediately set the bailiffs upon him. One consequence of this was that a £700 debt had grown to £2,700 with court, legal and bailiff costs added.

The bailiff himself was a large man, with the build and manner of a night club bouncer. To call him aggressive would be unfair, but intimidating and extremely pushy would be fair. The landlord, of course, was not around.

The bailiff introduced himself as a “High Court enforcement officer”. But close inspection of his paperwork indicated that he worked for a company named “High Court Enforcement Group Ltd”, as opposed to working for the High Court. All of his paperwork bore the stamp “High Court Enforcement Group”. I could find nothing with the stamp or signature of an actual judge.

He told me that he was entitled to remove all the contents of the house (which I had rented furnished). I told him I was not satisfied with his paperwork. A standoff of several hours ensued, and eventually a policeman was called. The policeman said the bailiff’s warrant was valid, and this did indeed entitle him to remove all the contents of the house.

I am still not convinced the polceman was right. My brother, who is also a polceman, had told me that I should not accept anything other than a Notice of Distress signed by a judge or court official. This bailiff had nothing signed by anyone other than his own company, though the paperwork did refer to a supposed judgement of a court. But the local policeman was backing the bailiff up.

What was even more extraordinary was his apparent entitlement to remove all the contents of the house. This is a distinguished old place, and there are several individual items each worth more than the debt. The total value would be many, many times the value of the debt. Presumably there was a commercial incentive for High Court Enforcement Group Ltd to take away as much as possible, irrespective of the actual debt.

In the end, I managed to argue past 6pm when the bailff knocked off, and the next morning the landlord arrived with the cash.

But I must emphasise how unpleasant the experience was. I am not accusing the bailiff of doing anything wrong, but he was plainly chosen because he was of a very large, shaven headed, bulging muscled, physically intimidating type. Nadira and baby Cameron were alone in the house when he first came.

For a private company to be allowed to call itself “High Court Enforcement Group Ltd”, and effectively try to pass itself off as an arm of the High Court, must be wrong. I cannot understand how paperwork stamped and signed only by a private firm can be sufficient to enter a home and remove its contents, whatever the policeman said.

In The Trials of Oscar Wilde, Peter Finch gives a brilliantly moving portrayal of the poet. One of the strongest scenes, which has remained with me, is when the bailiffs move in on Wilde’s home to enforce a warrant sale after his legal losses.

I am horrified that we treat debtors still with comparable 19th century brutality. Presumably a great many of the bailiffs’ targets are comparatively poor people. The threatening invasion of homes and ripping out of family belongings must tip many over the edge. It is worth noting that many of the items removed by bailiffs from the poor will be exactly the sort of things – televisions, garden ornaments, dinner services – that MPs were buying in highest quality on the taxpayer.

This way of dealing with debt truly is a barbarous survival, and must be ended.

Jack Straw just made a most hypocritical statement in parliament in which he nobly said “I accept full responsibility” and then proceeded to claim he and the government had been perfect, but a lot of other people had been useless.

He was talking of the brutal murders of French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/04/french-student-murders-bonomo-ferez-sonnex

Now we will never stop all murder. The killers did it, not Jack Straw. We will never stop all crime. But, as with the case of Baby Peter, in this instance there had been frequent contacts with the authorities in which the authorities ought to have intervened. One of the killers, Sonix, should have been in jail for several different reasons, and was not in jail only because of an extraordinary string of institutional failures.

Except that Straw just explained the institutions did not fail at all. New Labour has been in power for twelve years, so there was “No problem of under-resourcing”. It was instead a catalogue of individual mistakes by everyone except New Labour. It was all due, said Straw, to “Poor judgement and poor management within the probation service and individual failures within the Metropolitan Police and Prosecution Service”.

Yep. Probation officers, policemen, prosecutors, completely useless, the lot of them. Jack Straw’s system is perfect. But you just can’t get the staff nowadays. But Jack told us he had already acted. He had sacked the head of the London Probation Service.

This is the antithesis of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. You sack a middle level civil servant as a scapegoat and explain it was all their fault.

Straw went on to outline Gordon Borwn style lying statistics of the extra resources that had been put into the services involved. But everyone knows that “extra resources” in public service go into exercises to determine centrally ordered performance targets, which themselves change emphasis with the tabloid headlines. You then have to design all the forms to measure the targets and all the accountants to cost resource spend per target measure achieved. Often there are artificial internal market procedures to monitor and administer too. Loads of accountants for that. And the people at the sharp end find career progression much more dependant on internal form filling ability than on the activity where you interact with the real world you are meant to affect. Then there is the constant pressure not to put people in jail, the jails being too full – for the most part with non-violent offenders, mental health cases and drug addicts.

The serious point of all this is that New Labour continually takes it on itself to blame civil servants for system failings. New Labour did everything good, but are nothing to do with anything bad, as if they had not been in charge for the last twelve years.

Jack Straw’s “I accept responsibility” before going on to deny it ad nauseam was too sickening for words. New labour have become a parody of themselves.

Constitutional Reform is in the air. I thought I might set out what I would wish to see. I could write a book – indeed I have been thinking about doing so – detailing the reasoning behind my prescriptions, but I thought that at the very least this should provoke some thought:

Independence for England, Scotland and Wales.

A United Ireland.

Each of them Republics.

Written constitution.

Bill of Rights.

International law automatically incorporated in domestic law.

Fixed term four year parliaments in the lower chamber.

100% elected upper chamber, one third elected every two years.

All elections by single tranferable vote.

Elected President for 7 years with ceremonial role.

Prime Minister chosen from lower chamber.

Powerful parliamentary committees which can compel witnesses and evidence.

Local Income Tax.

Minimum 80% of all local government spending to be be locally funded – 100% in wealthier regions.

Local government to decide local law on social issues (in conformity with equality provisions of national Bill of Rights) – eg alcohol and enternainments licensing laws, legality of drugs, euthanasia, prostitution.

No public money for any political party (ie no special advisers, subsidies etc).

Now I doubt there is anyone else who agrees with the entire prescription…

The situation developing on the Korean Peninsula is close to the fulfilment of the nightmare scenario. A genuinely crazed regime, controlling a serf population, is on the verge of acquiring viable weapons of mass destruction.

It must be stressed that North Korea is not there yet. It is one thing to create a static nuclear explosion. It is quite another to miniaturise the mechanisms down to warhead size, with a viable trigger and reliable delivery system. It is understood North Korea has enough material for about five warheads. Its missiles are erratic. It has no missile ready mechanism.

How to deal with North Korea is an extremely difficult question. It has a regime which is completely despicable. Wishing it would behave well is pointless. Evidently the attitude of China – which appears still to see the continuance of the regime as preferable to the consequences of its collapse – will be crucial. There is no good solution. I am sorry to say that I tend to the view that least evil may have been done if we had not offered palliative aid to save North Koreans from the consequences of a disastrous form of communism.

Put harshly, if we had let large numbers of North Koreans starve to death, at some stage – and I realise a very late stage – the remnant would realise the regime wasn’t doing such a good job after all and string the Dear Leader up. That would have been horrible, but less horrible than the possibility of a war with nuclear elements which could engulf the whole peninsula and have the potential to become at least a US/China proxy conflict.

But I want this morning to concentrate on just one aspect of the problem in relationship to what the UK can do. That is to point out that the Trident missile system, for which New Labour are committed to buying an incredibly expensive replacement, thus smashing the Non-Proliferation Treaties – is absolutely no use whatsoever.

A casual observer dropping in from Mars would look at the UK’s massive nuclear arsenal, compared to the size of the country and its economic problems, would look at New Labour plans to replace our nuclear arsenal with something still more massive, and conclude that Gordon Brown was much more of a crazed militaristic nutter than the Dear Leader. And perhaps the martian might have a point.

Those who argue for Trident 2 no longer make a public case that we need to be able to obliterate Moscow, St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg. They tend rather to emphasise that we need to be able to deter rogue states which acquire nuclear weapons.

But now we actually do have the hawks’ favourite scenario playing out before us, and what use is our massive nuclear arsenal in this situation? Have you seen a single commentator refer to our Trident missiles as a factor? Of course not. They are, in point of fact, the most expensive chocolate teapot in the world, and quite possibly the universe.

Indeed, where are our Trident missiles targeted this morning? Do they still point at St Petersburg, Moscow and Ekaterinburg? Have they had the Pyongyang coordinates fed in? Two of our Trident submarines will be at sea today. What are their instructions? The truth is, the question is the world’s most expensive irrelevance.

The problem with deterrence theory is that you cannot deter a madman, particularly one who is going to die very soon anyway and may think a mass immolation sounds glorious. Let us look at the ultimate worst case scenario. North Korea somehow gets five warheads onto missiles, and fires them – let’s say at Seoul, the US and Japan. So this really is the worst case scenario, let’s say in two or three cases neither the missile nor the warhead malfunctions. The result is hundreds of thousands dead and environmental devastation.

Do we then obliterate North Korea with nuclear weapons and kill tens of millions of people and create untold further environmental damage?

North Korea poses the problem of asymmetric nuclear warfare. It may soon possess a very small number of low quality nuclear missiles, but is potentially mad enough to use them. That madness means that our possession of vastly more and vastly superior nuclear weapons does not deter. North Korea has the potential to be the nuclear State equivalent of the civilian suicide bomber, who can inflict casualties on the most sophisticated army in the world. We have got some understanding of the dilemmas posed by asymmetric warfare. What we have here is just vast difference of scale; the asymmetry remains.

Let me be plain. I am not predicting any of these disastrous outcomes. I am running through the very scenarios that are used in theory to justify the spending of huge sums in my taxes, and those of my children and grandchildren, in government borrowing mind-blowing money to acquire Trident 2.

North Korea shows just how pointless that is.

Having been defeated by the Gurkhas in the Courts and in the Commons, having fought against rights for Gurkhas for years, Gordon Brown is now doing a photocall with them and with Joanna Lumley in the hope of getting good publicity out of his climbdown.

Not only is Gordon Brown sick, he thinks we are all stupid.

As the secret trial of Aung San Suu Kyi proceeds, there is a hopelessness in the lack of any serious response from Western governments, and the week-kneed bleating of regional leaders in ASEAN. There is scarcely a ripple in the British blogosphere.

It is difficult to get a media handle on Burma. It does not fit with any of the prevailing narratives. There is no Islamic dimension . There is no continuing communist dimension. There is not even an internal ethnic divide. It is simply a question of a military dictatorship hanging on to power for the personal profit of its leaders, and its own institutional entrenchment. The military now absorbs an astonishing 40% of the country’s wealth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8050262.stm

The people of Burma already suffer from spiralling poverty. The international community should agree on a complete ban on all imports from Burma. The military will only give up their hold on power if dictatorship is impoverishing them. Of course this means more hardship for the population – but many of them are at subsistence already.

Possibly New Labour’s most pathetic “Good news” propaganda story yet has just been shown on the BBC News, on the day that unemployment climbed over 2.2 million.

It had all the proper ingredients for a NuLab “feelgood story”, including exciting video of the Royal Navy in action, and grave looking spokesmen for the law enforcement agenices.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency announced that, due to their tremendous success in drugs interception operations, the price of cocaine in London had risen from £35,000 in December 2007 to £45,000 now – a 30% increase.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8044275.stm

Wow! Obviously all thoe video clips of Royal Navy inflatables zooming about really fill you with pride. What a tremedous success!!

Except that there is not much cocaine actually produced in Basingstoke. Cocaine comes from South America and is a commodity priced in dollars. In dollar terms the price per kilo in London has stayed almost perfectly constant on the figures given, at around 67,000 dollars.

All SOCA are measuring is the collapse of the pound, which presumably is not caused by Royal Naval operations.

Just how stupid do they thnk we are? Why is the BBC broadcasting this story based on a 100% fake premise?

The inane editorial staff at the Telegraph continue to throw away through poor targeting the great story they have purchased. They insist on leading on political targets who have not really done anthing wrong. Yesterday it was Gordon Brown and his cleaner. Today it was Phil Woolas and his panty-liners, which seem to cause the boys at the Telegraph some behind the bike sheds sniggering. Woolas claims he deducted the non-eligible items on the receipts from the claims. I used to do this myself – when travelling on business I would regularly submit restaurant receipts and deduct the wine on the claim form.

Given that the system is rotten and MPs were allowed food, cleaners etc which they should not have been allowed, Brown and Woolas did nothing with fraudulent intent.

The problem is that there is genuine wrongdoing here which I believe is criminal, and which the Telegraph just mixes in with the panty sniggering trivia. The morally disgusting and quite astonishingly ugly Margaret Moran is a prime example of the switching or flipping of second home to be able to claim expenses.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5298395/Margaret-Moran-Second-home-flip-paid-22500-dry-rot-bill.html

How Moran was able to claim on a second home which was neither in London nor in her constituency, I do not understand at all. But plainly her designation of a house in Southampton as her second home was purely to claim the renovation costs on an existing family property. Moran joins Jacqui Smith and Baroness Udders in the clearly criminal category, however supine Commons staff may be.

These people are self-serving scum. I am truly sick of being told on the mainsteam media that MPs are underpaid; that they are principled and talented people who could be earning much more elsewhere.

That may have once been true, but it is no longer. The vast majority of MPs are talentless career hacks. More than three quarters of them have never once voted against their party whip. Very few of them have ever had a proper job. The standard of blogging by the tiny minority who bother to keep a blog, is well below the general standard of political blogging in the UK. £68,000 is a perfectly fair reward for these drones. Some of them are more deserving of a jail cell.

It is good that details of MPs expenses have got out. I am sad if they were sold rather than leaked in the public interest, but they should have been available, unredacted, anyway.

Having said that, the Telegraph has made a massive pig’s ear of its big scoop. It majors on Gordon Brown paying his cleaner through his brother. That sounds to me unwise of Brown, but really not a huge front page story. I am not convinced Gordon Brown fiddled anything.

On the other hand, Hazel Blears changing her official second home designation three times in a year, in order to get the taxpayer to pay for furnishing all her homes, is simply crooked. As are Hoon’s multiple home arrangements. Jack Straw only paid back his “accidental” excessive claims for mortgage and council tax after the Freedom of Information Act ruling that expenses would be published. The Telegraph throws away the really crooked transactions in the odd phrase.

Straw’s expenses are particularly interesting. He has lived in a series of London government mansions ever since 1997. The taxpayer pays for his Blackburn flat, but his real home is his £1million plus Cotswolds property. Just where Straw gets all his money is an interesting question. Some real investigative journalism into Straw’s relationship with his bagman, Lord Taylor of Blackburn, and the peddling of influence for the defence industry, would be more interesting than anything the Telegraph reports today.

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

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

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/jack_straws_cor.html

But I am struck by the continued government mantra of “It was all within the rules”, which Harriet Harman is being trotted round the television studios to spout this morning. Harriet has the job because she hasn’t made dodgy claims. She is old money. Her family don’t even notice the odd £100,000.

But this idea that it is OK to stretch the rules to the limit – with no worry whether it is right or wrong – is not a minor point. It is done for advantage, so it is immoral, not amoral.

It is an issue which has been heavily on my mind since I gave evidence on ministerial complicity in torture to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights last week. Nobody except me and possibly Cranley Onslow showed any horror at torture. There was instead a discussion on the finest details of whether there was any possible way this may be declared legal, “within the rules”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF9spgagSHI

Even on an issue like torture, right and wrong seems to have disappeared completely from our national political discourse. Is it any wonder they are fiddling their expenses?

Both the Guardian and the Times have posts on Gallup’s Co-exist Index 2009.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6242313.ece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/may/07/muslims-britain-france-germany-homosexuality

The Times headline emphasises the more positive finding that Muslims in the UK identify more strongly with British institutions than do the rest of the population. The Guardian goes for the more sensational but still very important finding that British Muslims are much less socially liberal than French and German Muslims.

If you read the whole report, rather than the Gallup press release, you find many other more interesting bits of information in a worldwide survey. For example, the least tolerant (or as I would put it the most bigoted) people in the whole world are Israelis. On page 14 of the report:

Israelis are the least likely of the populations surveyed in the region to report they always treat members of other faiths with respect and are among the least likely to feel they are respected by others. They are also the least likely to agree that most religious faiths make a positive contribution to society

You can download the full report here:

http://www.muslimwestfacts.com/mwf/118249/Gallup-Coexist-Index-2009.aspx

Of course, what Gallup’s opinion survey cannot tell you is why the groups surveyed hold their opinions. But we should not pretend that the extreme intolerance of homosexuality by British muslims is not a problem.

I reject the reports attempt to distinguish between “Eros and Demos”. (p30)

Although European Muslims not only accept but also welcome the freedoms, democratic institutions, justice, and human rights that characterize their societies, their perceived lack of integration is often explained by their rejection of liberal, sexual mores. Some researchers point out that the greatest differences between Muslims and Westerners lie more in eros than demos. In other words, the Muslim-West gap rests on differences in attitudes toward sexual liberalisation and gender issues rather than democracy and governance

Here the report pulls its punches. The questions asked frame differences in terms of attitude to sexual practices. It does not ask key questions like “Should a woman have the right to vote as she wishes irrespective of the views of her husband or father?”, or “Should a wife obey her husband in all things?,” or “Should a husband’s career take precedence?”.

Those questions would be much more useful in terms of determining whether there are gender issues which stray over from the realm of Eros to the realm of Demos – and I strongly suspect there are.

One of the worst things to happen to British democracy – completely deliberately by New Labour – is the coming together of the patriarchal system of British Muslim communities with the introduction of mass postal voting. If anyone pretends that the result has not been fraud on a massive scale and the effective disenfranchisement of Muslim women and subordinate males through loss of the secret ballot, they are a complete fool. The survey does nothing to illuminate this aspect.

But it is worth noting that several other religious groups display as much intolerance as the Muslims. I don’t think you would find sexual tolerance any better among Lodon’s numerous “Charismatic” christian groups, for example.

With all those caveats, the report has year on year shown much greater coincidence between socio-gender attitudes of Muslims, compared to the rest of the population, in Germany and France than in Britain. Ghettoisation is a huge problem in the UK, but I am not sure it is any less in Germany. What France does much better than the UK is integrated education. Tony Blair’s obsession with Faith schools was a disaster on every level. In Blackburn I witnessed apartheid – all white schools within a mile of all Asian schools. The truth is that Labour have fostered separate Muslim communities for a generation as a secure vote bank. The result is a disaster for social cohesion.

UPDATE

A comment below by Jungle points out that the different ethnic background of British Muslims may be in large part responsible for the differences in attitudes to French and German Muslims, due to the preponderance of Pakistanis here.

In fact that had been my initial reaction too, but I partially rejected it for the following reason. If you look at the same survey for 2007, the results and the differences between British and European Muslims are almost identical. But the 2007 survey, unlike the 2009 survey, makes explicit that poling was carried out only in capitals – London, Paris and Berlin. Inside London itself, Britain’s Muslim community is very ethnically diverse, with for example a very large and well established Turkish and Turkish Cypriot community, a big pre-evolutionary Iranian committee etc. We almost forget they are “Muslim” because they are so Europeanised. The Gallup methodology makes plain that Turkish and Iranian were among the languages used for interviews. The fact they still did not find one British Muslim prepared to tolerate homosexuality is therefore significant – they were not only interviewing Pakistanis.

Yes, I am sure ethnic differences are a factor. But they are not the only factor; and even if they were, they would not make the attitudes any more cceptable.

On Thursday 30 April, this blog had 2,849 unique visitors. That brought the total number of unique visitors for all of April to precisely 74,000. The chances of that being an exact thousand are, of course, just one in a thousand.

Which set my mind thinking on the following incredible coincidence of numbers in recent news headlines. I wonder if we might make a film about it, like that really boring one “The Number 23” with Jim Carrey. We could call it “The Number Nil”.

Number of People Dead in the UK in the Great Pig Plague – Nil

Number of people charged in Gordon Brown’s Manchester “Very big terror plot” – Nil

Number of responsible caring parents of Madeleine McCann – Nil

Number of the 117,000 people stopped and searched by police in 2007/8 under section 44 of the Terrorism Act, who were then convicted of a terrorism offence – Nil

The trebling in a year of the number of people stopped and searched under anti-terror laws, is another example of the massive growth and abuse of police power under New Labour. Nobody was convicted of a terrorist offence after being stopped and searched. 0.06% were charged with a terrorist offence. Just under 1% were charged with a non-terror related offence.

In London the police have been using these stop and search powers to set up cordons, particularly on tube stations in high immigrant areas. The idea is that if they search enough immigrants they are bound to find a few carrying drugs or knives, and it helps them meet their New Labour arrest, charging and conviction (clearup) targets.