I cannot for the life of me understand the government’s attitude to the Gurkhas’ immigration status. It is an unwinnable political fight in which they have been trounced again, and the Commons defeat today is the most direct personal slap to Gordon Brown, coming immediately after Nick Clegg trounced him on this question at Prime Minister’s Questions.

As in the question of immigration rights for Iraqi interpreters working for the UK, the government has acted ungratefully, against all public opinion, and for no very clear reason.

I am in general an advocate of immigration. But plainly there is much more immigration than the government actually intended. It is a fact that the number of illegal immigrants in the UK is well over a million. I very much support Boris Johnson’s idea of an amnesty to allow them to stay in the UK. I have not heard another viable solution.

But what makes no sense is this. Every time I get on a 207 bus I am immersed in newly immigrant Somali, Sudanese and Russian people, and I appear to be the only person who speaks English on his mobile phone. I am not against that in the least, but if we can absorb these diverse groups with little attachment to the UK, how come we can’t fit in Gurkhas who have a long attachment to this country and have been prepared to die for it?

If the government were taking its stance against the background of a tough immigration policy, that would be wrong but at least it would be intellectually consistent. But to keep the Gurkhas out while letting several million other first generation immigrants in, seems perverse in the extreme.

Jack Straw was sitting alongside Brown in the Commons today. Jack Straw has a deserved reputation as an MP who assiduously cultivates his constituency. I stayed there for four months in 2005 when I stood against him.

I used to line manage the UK’s fifth largest visa operation (in Accra) and so I know my immigration rules. In Blackburn I forged close links with the Muslim community, and a constant theme was their gratitude to Jack Straw for assistance with visa cases. I met several instances of people living in Blackburn who were relatives but not dependants of earlier immigrants, and who told me they had obtained their visas following the personal intervention of Straw when Home or Foreign Secretary. In many of these cases, particularly involving nieces/nephews given settlement visas, I could conceive of no way within the immigration rules those visas should have been given.

Muslim community leaders in Blackburn understood this very well. They were under some pressure from national Muslim organisations to support me because of my opposition to the war in Iraq and to the torture of Muslims – and to oppose Straw for his roles in those things. But they asked me directly how as MP I would be able to help those kind of cases, when I would not be in a key government position like Straw.

I replied that I would be able to help those within the rules by assiduous work, and be able to help in cases of humanitarian concern where rules needed to be bent. But wholesale abuse of immigration procedure would not be something I would do. So they thanked me and did not support me.

So I watched the smirking Straw today. A man who sent hundreds of British soldiers, including Gurkhas, to their deaths in illegal wars. And a man who will not lift a finger to help the Gurkhas, even though he has worked continually to bring more immigrants into Blackburn, for his own political advantage.

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.

For New Labour to have even the faintest hope of a respectable performance at the general election, they must protect their Scottish base against the SNP. This pathetic attempt to smear the SNP as connected to Islamic extremism is a blatant abuse of taxpayers’ money.

It is also desperate. Here is one of the “extremist” comments of Osama which they highlight:

“The aim of Islamic law, contrary to popular belief, is not punishment by death or amputation of body parts. It is to create a peaceful and just society, with Islamic scholars over centuries citing its core aims: the freedom to practise religion; protection of life; safeguarding intellect; maintaining lineage and individual rights. This could be the basis for an Islamic Bill of Rights.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6157961.ece?print=yes&ran

They also criticisng Osama for saying the “Danish cartoons” should be banned. I disagree with Osama on that one, but I also disagree with Nadira and every other Muslim I know on that one. Freedom of speech, sadly in my view, is not absolute in this country – witness the government’s banning of Geerst Wilders. Osama’s view on this is not extreme, it is mainstream.

The real scandal here is not Osama Saeed, who is a good man dedicated to freedom and to bringing Scotland’s Muslim community into its mainstream politics. The real story is the blatant misuse of taxpayer funds by New Labour.

The government is giving a coat of greenwash to its decision to smash its emissions commitments by giving the go-ahead to a new generation of huge coal-fired power stations. The propaganda focuses on the idea that 25% (in fact the measure says 20 to 25% and we can guess which it will be) of harmful emissions must be captured and stored.

Or to put it another way, the most atmosphere polluting of all electricity generation methods will be pumping out a massive increase to British carbon dioxide emissions, with a 20% mitigation of that vast increase. The even more pathetic aspect of the greenwash figleaf is the claim that 100% of the carbon must be captured by 2025.

If we continue to increase carbon emissions until 2025, the value of any reduction thereafter will be minimal; the situation is urgent and needs to be addressed now, not in sixteen years time. It also relies on a non-existent – and many would say physically impossible – technology. It would have been less of a punt to claim that in 2025 they will be replaced by nuclear fusion.

The problem is that when you combust coal or oil, the carbon dioxide produced, even when expensively compressed to its maximum. has a volume several times greater than that of the original coal or oil. Ideas that you put it back in the hole it came from do not work. Keeping a gas compressed also involves high pressure containment. The idea that this will happen on a massive scale, and that any significant proportion of fossil fuel emissions can be stored, does not even make credible science fiction.

The UK has both abundant renewable energy resources and is a world leader in the technology to exploit them. The failure of the government to look to a major boost to the nascent renewable energy industry for this next wave of electricity generation, may in fact be one of the biggest disasters of New Labour.

The government has just announced a first quarter fall of 1.9% in GDP.

It is important to understand this. That is not an annual rate of decline. It means that on 1 April 2009 the total economy meausred as GDP was 1.9% smaller than it was on 1 January 2009.

So for Darling’s budget projection of 3.5% decline this year to be true, the average decline over the next three quarters would have to be about 0.5%. Given that we are still on an accelerating decline (the -1.9% quarter follows a -1.6% quarter) that is plainly very very unlikely indeed.

My own Treasury source tells me that they had expected a – 1.5% decline in the first quarter as part of their -3.5% projection for the full year. The Treasury did not have the 1.9% figure from the National Statistical Office in advance of the budget.

So plainly Darling’s – 3.5% figure is wrong. It is worth noting that the IMF came out two days later with the same prediction as me, – 4.1%.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/the_economy_wor.html#comments

The budget not only shows the massive cost to ordinary people of saving fatcat bankers from the consequences of their multiple Ponzi schemes.

It also shows the total politicisation of the Civil Service under New Labour.

The Budget figures on borrowing, tax and spending going forward have been massaged to give the Chancellor political cover, by being based on impossible economic growth projections.

Nobody but nobody believes the Treasury forecast of 1.25% economic growth in 2010 and 3.5% in 2011. The IMF does not believe it and not one respected independent forecaster is so optimistic.

Vince Cable just described it as “Utter fantasy”. Vince Cable is quite correct.

But, as the BBC’s Nick Robinson just told us “Senior Treasury officials say that they stand by these projections.” That the senior civil servants in the Treasury have signed up to impossible projections, to give political support to the Chancellor, is a betrayal of all the values that are supposed to be represented by our Civil Service. What they have signed up to is not in the range of intellectually respectable opinion.

This is not difference of opinion. This is deliberate lying about the country’s economic prospects, by those entrusted with the stewardship of the economy.

Remember these are the same Treasury officials who just six months ago, also with political motivation, projected the fall in GDP this year as, at the top of the range, -1.25%. Just six months later they have radically revised that to -3.5% (which is still an underestimate of the collapse).

The situation is a disgrace, but not an accident. It is a reflection of the relentless politicisation of the senior ranks of the Civil Service under New Labour. Nowhere has that process been more thorough and ruthless than at the Treasury under Gordon Brown. There are now no senior civil servants, in key positions of influence for the budget, who are not New Labour apparatchiks.

Hence this politically motivated forecasting and its execrable quality.

After the next election and once these forecasts are shown for the specious ill-motivated propaganda that they are, every civil servant who signed up to these forecasts must be charged with gross misconduct, sacked, and stripped of their massive index-linked pension.

Not enough has been done to ensure that the bankers who fed fat on their Ponzi schemes cough back their ill-gotten gains after bringing disaster on us all. But the same must apply to the Civil Service too. The Augean stable Brown created must be swept clean of his bullshit so-called public servants.

The debt and borrowing forecasts in the economy are appalling. The announced borrowing of approxiimately $750 billion over five years is already astonishing, but it is predicated on ludicrously inflated economic growth rates.

Nobody outside New Labour believes in the economic growth projections of 1.25% in 2010 and 3.5% in 2011. So in fact the real borrowing figure is likely to be over 1 trillion dollars.

I am poor and I don’t worry too much about money. But if you have any savings, in sterling or invested in something sterling denominated, get out now and get it into euros. The pound is going to fall spectacularly over the next eighteen months.

Just two other points then I’ll forget the budget. For Darling to pretend that 2.5% is a real terms increase for pensioners is a plain lie. Few pensioners pay mortgages, so the large majority do not benefit from the fall in the RPI due to mortgage payment reductions. Food and energy costs feature disproportionately in their budgets, and real inflation for pensioners is well over 2.5%.

The small increase in income tax for the rich is long overdue, but the bastards nearly all have accountants who will help them avoid it.

Nick Clegg is making a very good speech indeed, but nobody is listening. I will post it tomorrow.

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!

If that happens I’ll give £1,000 to New Labour and a further £1,000 to Derek Draper for his website.

At 07.00 this morning, BBC News gave a mention of less than ten seconds to the release from anti-terror questioning of the nine men they still called “terror suspects”. This was followed immediately by a non-news piece on the testing of barriers to protect us from car bombs, which gave the BBC the excuse to show two bomb explosions at 07.03, right at the front of the news. That will take people’s minds off the fact the terror plot was a fabrication, and get them good and scared again!

The BBC gave massive coverage to these innocent mens’ arrest and Gordon Brown’s and Jacqui Smith’s lying statements about them. The real story is the concoction of huge terror scares by politicians for propaganda purposes. But you won’t see it on the BBC.

Only two of the twelve people arrested in dramatic “terror raids” in the North West of England are still in police custody. Nine more were released from anti-terror detention on Tuesday. Their arrest was first headline on all news bulletins and announced by no less than the Prime Minister himself. Sky News is saying that despite the total lack of evidence against them, they are still regarded as a security threat and thus are being deported – thus getting rid of the embarassment of these innocent men being able to talk to the press..

This was the only major UK political blog which had the courage to stand against the manufactured terror panic and false patriotism, and point out that the whole Easter Bomb Plot story stunk to high heaven from the very first minute:

The reasons why these “Terror raids” might be the subject of political timing could not be more obvious. Both Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown were getting a well-deserved media pasting over the outrageous ripping off of the taxpayer for personal benefit through expense claims. The Metropolitan Police were under extreme criticism for their unprovoked killing of Ian Tomlinson.

So this morning, instead of the news headline being the disgraceful fact that the policeman who launched an unprovoked assault from behind on Ian Tomlinson has still not been arrested, the headline is that the police have saved us all from certain death.

Let me be plain. I am not saying that terrorism does not exist. I am not saying that those arrested are innocent. I do not know. I am saying that Brown and Smith’s involvement in operational police arrests, and the fact that less than 1% of those arrested under anti-terror legislation in the UK have ever been charged with anything connected to terrorism, gives me the right to be suspicious of what is undeniably, at the very least, politically very fortuitous timing.

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

There was in fact never any intelligence that there was going to be an Easter bomb plot. And vast expenditure of police and military resources failed to find anything more sinister than sugar, and some photos of Manchester taken by students in Manchester.

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

The mainstream media and the so called parliamentary opposition are determined to keep the vast over-hype of the terror threat going.

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

But it is obvious from evey internet outlet that has a comment page, that they have lost a large proportion of the men and woman in the street. The government’s desperate fallback position of branding them a security risk and deporting them absolutely without evidence, is a sickening abuse of power and evidence of a continued desire to ride a wave of xenophobia aimed at overseas students.

Being in opposition disguises the fact that the Conservatives are still a deeply split party. The huge divide on Europe actually has a close relationship to their still deeper split over the most important fault line in British politics – that authoritarian/libertarian divide.

New Labour, of course, have pinned their colours unreservedly to the authoritarian mast. We have seen the greatest erosion of civil liberties and parliamentary government since Britain became a democracy. There remain some Tories who are instinctively libertarian, like Rifkind, Clarke and Davis. But as examplified by Chris Grayling’s dreadful parliamentary performance against Jacqui Smith yesterday, many have an atavistic urge to be even more authoritarian than New Labour.

Right at the top of the Conservative Home website today is a video from Fox News supporting torture – arguing in effect that torture works.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2009/04/new-ipsos-mori-poll-puts-tory-lead-at-13.html

The Tory party in the country, and even more so in parliament, would be deeply split by those who are horrified at this trampling on ancient liberties, and those who have bought in to the neo-con agenda.

You can hide that kind of fundamental divide in opposition. You can’t in Government.

So Jacqui Smith has played the terror card in a wild bid to save her job. It is extraordinary she can warn us of grave danger and at the same time look so smug about it. She spoke in the House of Commons of a “Suspected bomb plot” despite the absence of certain key elements normally associated with the phrase “bomb plot”.

Like a bomb.

Or a plot.

This was not pointed out to her, because she was faced by a Tory idiot, Chris Grayling, who believes that the Tories can win votes by being even more resolute looking in the face of danger than Jacqui Smith. And watching less porn.

You might expect a real opposition to ask questions like:

“You told us that a serious bomb attack was planned for Easter, ten days ago. Where then is the bomb? Where are the explosives, the detonators? Are they in the same metaphysical space as the Iraqi WMD?

Instead Grayling taunted her that she had not devised a system which will stop terrorists entering the UK, if we do not know they are terrorists yet. You don’t say. The obvious answer to this is to stop anyone at all from entering the UK, and make everybody here already leave. I suggest we start with Chris Grayling.

When we have the Tories and New Labour in this downward spiral of competitive xenophobic populism, I really despair. Chris Grayling had me thinking for a minute he could be worse at the job than Jacqui Smith. That ought not to be possible.

Meantime we have this from the police:

Manchester’s counter-terrorism unit said most of the searches relating to the terror arrests had been completed and material collected was now being assessed.

“As this complex and detailed investigation continues, officers are sifting through the extensive amount of information so far received to assess its relevance to the investigation,” a spokesman said.

That is police speak for “We’ve found bugger all, but under New Labour legislation we can still hold them another fortnight to pressurise confessions or turn one against the others to make stuff up in terurn for getting out, or we can always bring in a paid supergrass from Pakistan again.”

Please note there are definitively no bombs, no explosives, no detonators, no firearms or weapons of any kind. There was no Easter bomb plot. Whether the men were really dangerous extremists is open to grave doubt at present.

After 12 days of detention the police still do not have evidence to charge anybody with anything.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8008784.stm

One of those days which is totally infuriating. I am blogging to you on a stationary train as I attempt to go to York. The train keeps stopping for long periods because, as the guard keeps saying, “There are three trains in front of us.”

We were due to get the 14.30. However the Central Line was entirely suspended, the District Line had “severe delays” and the Piccadilly Line train we eventually got sat still for a quarter of an hour in Hammesrmith before proceeding at a snail’s pace between long rests. In short, a journey that normally takes about 45 minutes between our home and Kings Cross took 1 hour and 45 minutes, and we just missed our train.

National Express then told me that our tickets had no validity on another train; they could not even be upgraded. I had to buy new ones at on the day prices, which cost me over three hundred pounds. Now their train is getting later and later. I am only escorting somebody and coming straight back. I shall now miss my reserved train back and have to buy another on the day ticket.

Our privatised train services have good rolling stock and track only because it was funded by massive taxpayer subsidies. . Meantime their on the day ticket prices are almost three times the EU average per mile.

I have foreign visitors who are completely bewildered by how bad our public transport is, how incomprehensible the fare schemes are and in general what a rip-off the system is. I fear we get too accepting.

Back in December, I posted on the appalling Sir Michael Wright, that standing rebuke to the very name of judge.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/12/the_disgraceful.html

I have been hoping he would haul me up for contempt, so I could use the line of Thomas Muir:

“If it be a crime to be contemptuous of you, then commit me for life, for it will be a crime without end”.

Every day for four months a continuous stream of doctors have come to this blog, straight to my post on Sir Michael Wright. They come here from this url.

http://www.doctors.net.uk/forum/viewPost.aspx?forum_id=1&post_id=3574090

Unfortunately, not being a doctor, I can’t get in to see the context of the link. But I am baffled as to how it can remain so prominent on its site that it has sent people streaming here over such a long period. And why are doctors so interested anyway?

If there is a doctor in the house, perhaps they might offer some assistance.

In the budget this week, Alistair Darling is expected to revise his prediction for the drop in GDP in 2009 from -1.2% to -3.4%. This sustains the Brown/Darling record of appalling predictions.

The CBI think it will be worse, at -3.9%. I think it will be yet worse, at -4.1%.

I spent Sunday with friends at the LSE dusting off my economic modelling skills. I should state the obvious, that the LSE is in no way associated with my predictions (though if they turn out wrong I reserve the right to blame their modelling!) It is also fair to say they found some of my methodology unorthodox, particuarly the need for a steady intake of Margaux to fuel the input assumptions.

I project GDP will fall by -4.1% in 2009 and by -1.8% in 2010. The Treasury is leaking -0.1% as their 2010 projection. Given the financial services sector is in shock and manufacturing output down by over 18% in the first quarter of 2009 year on year, I can only presume they are relying on massive expansion in the capuccino and dry cleaning industries.

I have assumed that Darling’s budget this year and next year will be close to fiscal neutrality, with a nod towards belt tightening. He has absolutely no room for fiscal stimulus and with an election in the next 15 months he can’t be too sensible.

But the fiscal position looks awful. I project a budget deficit of a massive 12.4% of GDP in 2009 rising to 13.3% in 2010. By 2011 our national debt will reach 1980s Italian proportions of 118% of GDP. Compare that to the 40% guideline for membership of the Euro.

That prospect will spark a collapse in the pound before mid-2010 leading to escalating interest rates, forced on the Bank of England as the government struggles to raise more money because the pound is such a bad bet. That will undoubtedly mean they will have to go cap in hand to the IMF within the next 18 months, but still will not be able to avoid those higher interest rates.

Inflation will come back, reaching 4.5% by April 2010 and shooting upwards after that to 7.1% by end 2010 and entering double digits in 2011. That will put an end to further quantitive easing. House prices still have a further 11% to fall before nominal prices start to increase from July 2010, but will still be falling in real terms. Unemployment will peak in March 2011 at 3.02 million.

The problem Darling faces is that he has no room for fiscal stimulus, because all the funds that may reasonably be raised have been wasted on the bottomless pit of Ponzi banking.

Because of the corner into which Darling has painted himself, and on the basis that New Labour have no stomach for radical restructuring of the economy and measures such as bank nationalisation, the only thing that would truly improve the prospect would be a radical budget rebalancing – perhaps a 2% increase in total tax yield combined with a 5% cut in public spending, over a three year period. That would reduce a raft of linked problems including interest rates, inflation, deficit and debt burden. It would accelerate unemployment and make the recession sharper, but would on my projections give something of a J curve effect.

The other thing that would help might be joining the Euro, if we could beg them on bended knee to accept us as a basket case. But the other European countries would be crazy to take us on.

I realise many people find spending cuts unpalatable. But we are in a very bad place. We are there because Brown and Darling failed to regulate casino banking, and then used all our remaining national credit to refund losses to the wealthy gamblers.

The economy is completely screwed – even worse than most forecasters and pundits are telling you, and certainly worse that Darling will admit on Wednesday.

Ayesha Hazarika is the epitome of New Labour’s contempt for the taxpayer. This former professional comedienne and PR specialist is being paid £53,882 pa by hard-pressed taxpayers to be Labour Party “Special Adviser” – or spin doctor – to Harriet Harman, Minister for Women and Equalities and Leader of the House of Commons.

http://www.chortle.co.uk/comics/a/632/ayesha_hazarika

That is just the comedienne’s slary. There are substantial expenses too, like the recent jolly of Harman and her delegation, including Hazarika, to look at gender issues in Ghana. If we accept that Harman needed the taxpayer to send her to look at gender issues in Ghana – which arguably has better gender equality than the UK – did Harman really need to be accompanied by her Private Secretary plus Hazarika plus her constituency secretary? How much did this jolly cost the taxpayer?

http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=160592

What benefit did the taxpayer get from the jolly in general and from Hazarika’s participation in it in particular? Is Harman going to claim her constituency secretary’s fares in her MP’s expenses?

Why does Harman need not just one but two female Labour Party hacks as Special Advisers in highly paid non-jobs funded by the taxpayer? The Foreign Secretary, for example, only has one position, split between two people on a job share. Harman has Hazarika and Anna Healey – any relation?

Salaries alone for Labour Party “Special Adviser” hacks like Hazarika and McBride come to over £6 million a year in salaries alone. That is up from £1.2 million under John Major, which was bad enough already.

They do nothing for the taxpayer. Their job is to burnish their masters’ image, and they are pretty lousy even at that.

New Labour takes the view that the taxpayer will fund unlimited numbers of these hack. We will keep people like Hazarika in her highly paid useless non-job as special adviser to Harman, who herself has a useless non-job. That is an example of just how out of touch New Labour really are. They care for nothing except their own power, positions and patronage. Which is why we do not care for them.

This will annoy those who occasionally accuse me of being a closet Tory, but I have long been a fan of Malcolm Rifkind. He was the first junior minister I worked to in the FCO when I was on the South Africa desk. Apartheid was in its last throes and we were trying to kill it off. Rifkind was genuinely horrified by apartheid. But South Africa was high on Thatcher’s personal agenda and to say she was uncommitted on apartheid would be kind to her. She insisted, for example, that the ANC was a terrorist organisation. Rifkind worked away beneath her in a way that can only be described as cheekily subversive, under the benign soggy shield of Geoffrey Howe.

Anyway, I have remained a fan of Malcolm Rifkind. He made some of the best speeches on the Iraq War. I debated notionally against him at the Cambridge Union a couple of years ago, but I don’t think either of us disagreed with a word the other said, and we had a very pleasant couple of glasses of champagne together on the train back to London.

He has now made a thoughtful speech on nuclear weapons reduction, bits of which are reproduced in the Telegraph.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/5172912/Nuclear-weapons-can-no-longer-be-justified-even-by-Cold-War-warriors.html

If we are to succeed in stopping the ridiculous and massive waste of money and resources on Gordon Brown’s obscene determination to replace and upgrade the Trident missile system, we need to make common cause with the growing number of Tories and senior military men who see the stupidity of it.

With massive pressure on the government, and on Jacqui Smith in particular, I can tell you what will happen next. The government will play the terrorism card, just as it did last weekend.

The Great Manchester Easter Bomb Plot was a bit of a damp squib. It is only a week ago, but it seems an age, since Gordon Brown told us he had foiled “a very big terror plot” and we had dramatic police swoops and the arrests of twelve “Islamic Extremists” in the North West. Eleven of them are still held without charge.

But the Great Easter Bomb Plot lacked any bombs. Or firearms. Or detonators. They have found some photographs of Manchester and a small quantity of sugar, which we have been assured can be a component of an explosive.

The police will be under huge pressure now to come up with something else. Household bleach would be good. Or even better a confession from one of the teenagers held without charge and interrogated for over a week now, who may be persuaded to turn evidence against the others.

Expect an announcement this weekend, to move the news agenda on from Ian Tomlinson. And expect a statement from Jacqui Smith by Monday at the latest. It will go like this:

Grave terrorist threat foiled – could have been massive atrocity – imminent threat – constant vigilance – reliable intelligence indicates – communication intercepts – photographs of potential targets – possible explosive ingredients – bollocks – bullshit – bollocks.

Then expect all the “opposition” MPs to rally round and sing the national anthem, and Jacqui Smith to be saved until David Blunkett comes back in the summer reshuffle.

So the second post mortem shows that Ian Tomlinson did not die of a heart attack, but of an abdominal haemmorhage. A policeman has been interviewed under caution for manslaughter.

If that American tourist had not captured on video one stage of the unprovoked police assault on Mr Tomlinson, the original falsified post mortem report of heart attack would have stood. So would the Metropolitan police statement that they had “No contact” with Mr Tomlinson.

Let us catalogue the lies we have been told by the authorities in this case:

Lie 1 – There was no police contact with Mr Tomlinson

Lie 2 Mr Tomlinson died of a heart attack

Lie 3 Protestors rained missiles at police rescuing and treating Mr Tomlinson

Lie 4 There were no CCTV cameras covering the assault on Mr Tomlinson

Lie 5 There were CCTV cameras, but they were not working

There may be more.

This is an echo of the numerous appalling lies the police told in the Jean Charles De Menezes case, which led to the astonishing ruling that the police are allowed to lie, even on oath, by the worst judge ever to sit in England.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/12/the_disgraceful.html

It is the whole police philosophy of violence towards dissent, and dehumanising tactic of “kettling” people, that killed Mr Tomlinson. To charge a single individual will not be sufficient.

The government pathologist who carried out the original post mortem must be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. He must also be struck off by the General Medical Council.

The police spokesmen who told the lies that there was no police contact with Mr Tomlinson, and that protestors threw missiles at police treating Mr Tomlinson, must be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice.

The senior police officers in charge of devising the “kettling” tactics and cordons at the G20 must be charged with manslaughter.

The responsible minister, Jacqui Smith, should resign.

In explaining why Damian Green was not going to be prosecuted, the Director of Public Prosecutions told us much about New Labour’s corruption of the Civil Service. Not only did the information he had received not endanger national security and not endanger life, but:

“Much of it was known to others outside the civil service, for example the security industry or the Labour party or Parliament”

WHAT? That lets some very large and furry cats out of the bag. Information which was officially classified within the Home Office, and which civil servants were attempting to keep secret from you and me, even by calling in the Police, was available to the Labour Party? I can think of no instance where that would be constitutional.

We need to know urgently, which information was classified and kept secret by the Home Office but known to the Labour Party, and why.

There could be no more graphic illustration of the failure of our politicised civil service to distinguish between the interests of the state and of New Labour.

The same goes in spades for the “Security industry” – the one exponential growth area of the economy under New Labour.

The disgraceful episode of the arrest and taping of Damian Green hs been brought to a close. It is another shameful episode in New Labour’s attack on civil liberties.

The most important point is that all of the information leaked by or to Damian Green should have been public in the first place. That it was classified is symptomatic of the politicisation of Home Office officials under New Labour.

I have already written much in support of Mr Green. But for now, I will again ask the question: why did we see this police action against Galley and Green, where there is still no investigation into Damian McBride for the offence of Misconduct in Public Office, of which he looks to me as guilty as can be?