The last week has seen an outbreak of mutual name-calling between bloggers and the meainstream media, with one of the silliest contributions coming from my colleague Iain Macwhirter, the normally sensible Rector of Edinburgh University.

http://iainmacwhirter2.blogspot.com/

But beyond argument, the Guardian’s ground-breaking work on police brutality in the last week has been a huge reinforcement to the cause of liberty. The democratisation of video capture is something the Police have not caught up with – it is hard for them to blindside the referee now.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/14/ian-tomlinson-assault-film-ipcc

We are used to institutional cover-up and fake inquiries to whitewash the truth, but the blatant nature of much of the corruption is still astonishing. In particular, over eighty per cent of street area in the City of London is covered by CCTV, and at the G20 protest this was supplemented by 83 police video cameras, plus the security services.

If you remember the “Tiger Tiger” attempted car bomb, to give just one example, the video footage was immediately released by the police to the public.

Yet different rules apply when the footage captures police brutality. None of the footage that has proved the police violence, has come from official sources or cameras. Instead we have a series of contradictory lies about whether official camers were not there, not working or had just nipped off to the loo, at the moments police violence was captured by amateurs.

I have no doubt that there are many other instances of criminal police behaviour on the thousands of hours of official video. Those videos are being pored over by police and security services to capture images of individual demonstartors, identify them and add them to their secret security files. In so doing they are deliberately overlooking and most likely deleting evidence of police violence.

We must demand that every single second of the official video of the G20 demonstrations, filmed with public money, is released to the public. Online will be good.

What is secret about video of events at a public demonstration on public streets, witnessed by thousands of people?

The selective use of this public resource to gather “evidence” against demonstrators while ignoring and even destroying that against police, must be halted.

Adolf Hitler today went on record to state that he “Had no idea what kind of stuff Goebbels was publishing.”

Although they shared the same bunker and met several times daily, Hitler was deeply shocked when invading Red Army forces drew to his attention what had been happening.

“There is no place for this kind of thing in politics,” he said: “I came into politics to promote ideas, like lebensraum”.

Mr Hitler further pointed out that he had now taken vigorous action to tackle the situation. He has written to Oberfeldmarischal Gustav Odonellmann to instruct that the Gauleiter’s Guide be amended to specify that the murder of seven million Jews, Poles, gays, romanies and political opponents should be clearly a sacking offence.

Copyright David Irving

Gordon Brown’s attempt to spin out of the smeargate scandal by writing a letter to Gus O’Donnell to demand that writing smears is specifically excluded in the Special Advisers’ Code of Conduct, is ludicrous even by New Labour standards.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/13/email-smears-gordon-brown-letter

The implication is that McBride was doing this because writing stories alleging things about opposition MPs and dildoes is not covered in the code.

Here are some more things not specifically covered in the code, but which now will be specified. The new Gordon Code will say that Special Advisers may not:

– Murder Mrs Irene Tomkinson of Weybourne St, Cromer or any of her children

– Rob banks during office hours or while wearing civil service trousers

– Score goals in football internationals using the “Hand of God”

– eat human liver

– impersonate a Chelsea pensioner for the purpose of pecuniary advantage

– concoct false intelligence dossiers for the purpose of launchng illegal wars and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

I understand that Gus O’Donnell has advised that the last one goes too far and would interfere with the smooth working of government.

The real reform this country truly needs is that “special advisers”, or party hacks (Stalin would have called them political commisars) should be paid by the party, not the taxpayer.

I have today sent the following to Tom Watson MP:

Dear Mr Watson,

This is a formal communication to you in your ministerial capacity. I write as a former senior civil servant and a life member of the FDA.

It appears to me that there is the clearest of prima facie cases that Mr Damian McBride has committed the criminal offence of misconduct in public office. There appears a strong prima facie case also against Mr Charles Whelan.

I believe that you have a ministerial duty to draw this concern to the attention of the appropriate police authorities so that an investigation may be undertaken. No doubt you will wish to consult the Cabinet Secretary, but in the case of a credibly alleged breach of the criminal law, not only of the Civil Service Code, I believe you are also under an obligation to consult the police.

Yours Faithfully,

Craig J Murray

Ends

The criminal case against McBride and Whelan is explained here:

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

Tom Watson has contacted me directly to deny any involvement in the whole McBride/Draper black propaganda caper.

I rather feel that he ought to have noticed what was going on immediately around him. But the evidence implicating him was circumstantial, and my enquiries today of people who know him personally seem to indicate that he is not a vicious character.

So I accept his statement.

If the UK is really not becoming a police state, then the police must demonstrate their independence of the government today by immediately arresting Damian McBride, Charlie Whelan and Tom Watson for the crime of misconduct in public office.

Their offices should already have been raided and sealed, and their computers seized. These disgusting New Labour spin doctors are a cancer attached to the heart of the British government. They pose an infinitely more fundamental threat to British society and values than terrorism does. We can get through the odd bomb attack. We cannot get through the radical corruption of the democratic system.

The Crown Prosecution Service defines the principles of the criminal offence of misconduct in public office:

“The elements of misconduct in public office are:

d) Without reasonable excuse or justification”

http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/l_to_o/misconduct_in_public_office/

Plainly they are guilty as hell. The only possible defence I can see is to say that at the time they cooked up this plot to libel the Opposition they were not “Acting as public officers”. But I do not believe that will wash. They were inside government offices – indeed two of them in the heart of Downing St – in office hours, and communicting with each other on official computers and using official email addresses. I understand that there is no email addressed to Watson, but he is mentioned in the emails, is in charge of the government’s internet straegy and sits in the same office as McBride.

Labour must be hoist with their own petard. They have insisted that the plainly party political dirty work being done by the likes of Brown’s long term creature McBride, is public service. We as taxpayers have been bearing the huge salaries and expenses of hundreds of these vile New Labour hacks for over a decade. They cannot now turn round and claim that what you and I have been forced to pay them to do for the last decade, was not done as public officers. While a tautologous argument that misconduct is evidently not public service, is obviously excluded by reasonable construction of the meaning and purpose of the law.

There can seldom have been a more definite case of misconduct in public office. If the police do not act, it will be an utter disgrace. Even Nixon could not prevent the Watergate burglars from bein arrested.

The behaviour of these vile people is not just a sin, it is a crime. A crime which strikes at the credibility of British democracy. We must demand their arrest.

I criticised Paul Staines earlier this week, but it would be wrong not to acknowledge that he has done a great service here.

.

The mainstream media is in a flurry of excitement over the “Terror” arrests of students in the North West of England. Linked to this is the media feeding frenzy over the resignation of Bob Quick, Scotland Yard’s anti-terror chief. It is important to note that the Quick incident only brought forward the arrests by a few hours. Yet in all the acres of coverage in the newspapers, and all the hype on TV, nobody seems to have noticed the real story.

It was an accident that Bob Quick had his secret document on display as he was photographed entering Downing St.

But it was no accident that he was photographed entering Downing Street.

No 10 is a Tardis-like building which is far more impressive inside than out, and which seems impossibly large. Its secret is that it links straight through to No 11 and, more importantly, through to the huge Cabinet Office building that runs along Whitehall. The Cabinet Office is the central secretariat of the British government and in effect the office of the Prime Minister. The separation of the No 10 staff and the Cabinet Office staff is a polite fiction. The government’s major interdepartmental committees meet in the Cabinet Office, including the sexy Joint Intelligence Committee and its sub-committees. One of the fascinating things about the vast Cabinet Office building is that it incorporates parts of the original fabric of the Tudor Whitehall Palace.

In the first Iraq War I used to hand carry intelligence reports to No 10, and sometimes had to explain them personally to Mrs Thatcher. I never once took one in the front door. In fact I have only ever walked in the front door of No 10 when accompanying a foreign dignitary or attending a party. The front door is for people the government wants to be seen ?” hence the permanent stand of photographers which captured Bob Quick. People arriving to brief on secret matters go in through the back door, or more likely through the Cabinet Office.

So why did the government want us to see that Bob Quick was entering No 10? The only possible answer is that, had things gone more smoothly in the arrest of the “Terror suspects”, the government would have paraded the footage of Quick entering no 10 as evidence that it was really Glorious Gordon and Genius Jacqui who had directed the operation and saved the world – again.

It is very, very wrong ?” it violates the whole spirit of the constitution ?” for politicians to be involved in arresting people. If the police had real evidence that these people are terrorists, then of course they should have been arrested when the Police felt the right moment had come. That moment is when they have sufficient evidence, and are not putting the public at risk by undue delay. That is a technical decision requiring skill, expertise and experience in operational policing.

It is a matter of the criminal law. It is absolutely not the business of Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown. But we know that under New Labour the politicians are deciding who should be arrested and when. We know that for sure because then Home Secretary John Reid said in terms that he decided when the arrests should be made in the farcical “Bigger than 9/11”, (though in the event non-existent), “Liquid airplane bomb plot” case.

If politicians are going to decide the timing of arrests, then they cannot be surprised or aggrieved if we suspect that the timing of arrests is political.

This was definitely the case in the “Liquid Bomb Plot”. I know for certain from my own sources that in that case the intelligence services believed they had been forced by politicians to act too soon. That was quite widely reported at the time.

The view that John Reid had acted too early appears proved by a complex series of verdicts brought in by the jury. Less than half of those arrested actually were brought to trial. The jury found that three of the accused did have an intention to commit terror, but had formed no definite plan and specifically cleared them of the charge of planning to down aeroplanes with explosives.

Why had Reid jumped the gun? Because the Americans asked him to. With Bob Quick’s predecessor, the disgraced Andy Hayman, giving an official Scotland Yard view that the “Liquid Bomb Plot” was “Bigger than 9/11″ and involved plans to fly up to a dozen passenger jets simultaneously into different US cities, the resulting worldwide front page headlines were a Godsend for Bush in mid-term elections. They also enable the government to permanently ramp up the fear factor by the ludicrous toothpaste and shampoo searches that make flying so miserable.

In the liquid bomb plot do you remember the massive banner headlines ?” the full front page of every single tabloid in the UK -about the evil Muslim mother who planned to blow up herself and her baby along with the plane? There was no media reporting at all when she was cleared and released. The “Suspicious chemical” which police announced they had found in baby bottles was, errr, baby bottle sterilising solution.

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.

It is also the arrest of alleged terrorists from Pakistan, at a time when the government is under both parliamentary and criminal investigation for participation in torture of terrorist suspects in Pakistan. The government has responded by arguing that intelligence from torture abroad is necessary to save lives in the UK. I have no doubt that we will find the government arguing that this “terror plot” justifies their case.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/fco_finally_adm.html

Because of this suspicion, I will be setting a high test for evidence that these arrests really were needed at this time. The accusation is that a bombing campaign was ready for this Easter ?” ie now. If that is true, there must be explosives and detonators ready, or in the very final stages of preparation. We will see.

According to Sky News this morning, police searches so far have discovered photographs of leading buildings in Manchester taken by the students.

I studied Russian in St Petersburg. I have photographs I took of the Hermitage, of the Church on the Holy Blood, of the St Peter and Paul Fortress, of the bridges over the Neva, of the ornate underground stations. I studied Polish in Lublin. I have photographs of Lublin castle, of the main shopping street, of the Catholic University of Lublin…

I have, in fact, photographs of prominent buildings everywhere I ever studied. And photographis in bars and nightclubs.

Why do the police feel the need to feed out to the media the complete non-news of the non-evidence that they have discovered photographs of Manchester in Manchester? Why was it necessary for the Prime Minister to make a statement announcing the arrests? What does that do to the chances of a fair trial? Why was it never necessary to make a prime ministerial statement every time a suspected Irish terrorist ?” and remember they really did blow up the Arndale Centre in Manchester ?” was arrested?

There are many genuine and diligent people carrying out counter-terrorism work in the police and intelligence services, working the old-fashioned way with painstaking accumulation of evidence. They do save lives and they should be applauded and supported. They should be free from political interference and distanced from politicians.

They may have foiled a genuine plot here. If so they must be congratulated. The Home Secretary ?”who has not foiled any plots – should have been briefed after arrests were made, and there should be no room for suspicion that politicians had interfered.

That would have stuck to the cardinal rule of only telling people who actually have to know about an operation – and the rule of not carting around secret documents for no purpose.

The photo leak ?” which could indeed have jeopardised a security operation which may or may not prove to have been vital – was caused directly by the excessive and completely unnecessary involvement of the politicians in policing detail.

A police state is not a state where the police rule. It is a state where there is no distance between the politicians and police.

A police state is a state where a policeman can be caught on camera launching an unprovoked fatal assault from behind, yet not be arrested. A police state is a state where the police raid the parliamentary offices of opposition MPs. A police state is a state where it is the politicians who are making the decisions on who gets arrested and when.

The American tourist who captured on video what may have been the second assault on Ian Tomlinson by the Police, has done us a great favour.

I have been on several demonstrations in Central London in the last few years, and like everyone else who has done that, I have got used to the experience of being constantly filmed. Central London – and particularly the area around Bishopsgate – is fully covered by CCTV. In addition you had at the G20 demonstration scores of police cameramen filming from every vantage point at a demonstration. I have no doubt that on the recent huge Gaza demo I was filmed every step for two miles.

Let me be quite plain. I do not believe that there was no official footage of the police assault on Ian Tomlinson. Just as the security cameras in Stockwell station and on the train were “Not working” in the Jean Charles De Menezes case, I accuse the Police of subverting the video evidence.

So thank God for that American tourist – and thank God he went to the Guardian rather than to the Police. If unanswerable video evidence had not now been produced, what lies do you think we would now be being told?

A lie can be delivered by innuendo. The so-called “Independent Police Complaints Commission” – whose investigations in this case are being conducted by the City of London Police – had put out a statement saying that “it appeared that Mr Tomlinson had contact with the Police.” If we had not seen the video, what image does that conjure up in your mind?

Mr Tomlinson did not have contact with the Police. He had contact from the Police – they came up behind him when he was just walking down the road, and without warning hit him with a baton. This was in fact Mr Tomlinson’s second contact from the Police – he had already been turned away from his route home by another police cordon, and it is possible he was mishandled there too.

New Labour trolls are active all over the web – including in comments on my earlier post here:

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

We will see more of these attacks on Mr Tomlinson in the next few days, just as Jean Charles De Menezes’ character was slurred (illegal immigrant, drug addict – all untrue).

The claim that Tomlinson died of a heart attack brought on by alcohol is pathetic.

I hope that the family are now getting good advice, and I for one would be happy to donate to a fund for an independent autopsy. Under New Labour we cannot trust the official one.

We also need a radical reconstruction of a police force which thinks it can attack and kill members of the public with impunity, and of the legal framework in which they operate. The legal system has ruled in terms that police may kill people and then may lie about it in court.

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

We have reached the stage in the UK where we need a revolutionary change. We have to sweep out the old order of corrupt politicians whose one guiding principle is to keep their own snouts in the trough: of City bankers who are multi-millionaires from their bubble scams and whose lifestyles and jobs the ordinary people are now supporting by a massive tax and debt burden, while nobody guarantees the jobs of those ordinary people who fund it all.

We have to realise that the end of the centuries old prohibition of torture by agents of the state is of a piece with the freedom of the police to maintain the system of power by fatal force, in both cases without consequence. You cannot separate this brutalisation of power from the illegal war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and thousands of our own soldiers, on the basis of a lie but really to secure oil.

The whole system stinks from the head like a fish. And people are starting at last to understand where the smell comes from.

Having saved the world economy by re-labelling various huge sums of money they are going to print, our glorious leaders have now moved on for another showpiece event in Strasbourg, a summit on the 60th anniversary of NATO.

In the shadow of the ludicrously over-egged G20, they are trying desperately to raise the hyperbole still further, with President Sarkozy declaring that the freedom of mankind is dependent on the outcome of the conflict in Afghanistan.

As NATO is fighting in Afghanistan to keep in power a puppet government whose ministers include the largest heroin barons in the World, whose President’s family are deeply involved in drug smuggling, and which has just passed legislation to roll back the rights of women, including enshrining the right of a husband to force sex upon his wife (or wives, as the legislation in fact specifies but has not been generally noted), it is a little bit difficult to understand how freedom depends upon all this. Especially when a key part of the strategy is an alliance with President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, undeniably one of the World’s worst dictators, who provides the NATO German airbase at Termez and with whom the US is in negotiation to resume its alliance.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/obama_making_yo.html

The occupation of Afghanistan is of course part of the so-called “War on Terror”. It is a good pointer to the flaws in the whole concept, because the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. For every civilian killed by aerial bombardment, for everyone tortured in Baghram, for everybody pushed around by alien coalition forces, there is a reaction of growing opposition to the invasion and increasing support for fundamentalism, especially among the Pashtun population of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The whole conflict is in a dizzying downward spiral which threatens to undermine Pakistan, with highly destabilising consequences for the sub-region.

It is a crazy concept, unless you are in the security or armaments industries, where the last eight years of war have been extremely profitable, just as conflict increased energy prices have been for the oil industry. It is a disaster for the ordinary taxpayer, but a huge and never-ending payday for some.

Angela Merkel has stated that Afghanistan points the way to the future of NATO. To which some may reply that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation plainly has a poor sense of direction. The idea that the way to defeat terrorism is to point the largest conventional forces in the World at it, is plainly nonsense. Asymmetric warfare thrives and recruits just on that mismatch.

I was Head of the Foreign Office Maritime Section when the Berlin Wall came down, and shortly afterwards was First Secretary Political at the British Embassy in Warsaw. I recall all the policy papers on the future of NATO, as the opposing Warsaw Pact evaporated. The question the papers all tried to answer was “How do we find a new role for NATO?”. The prior question “Is NATO needed any more?” was never asked. At that time the consensus was that the future focus of NATO would be on drug-smuggling, though how you stop drug-smuggling with tanks was something about which my scepticism was not entirely ill-received. (It is worth noting – and I am no Tory – that dissenting opinion was welcomed and discussed in the thirteen years I worked in the FCO under the Tories. Under New Labour dissent very quickly became viewed as disloyalty).

Throughout the 90s NATO then moved into a situation when Eastwards expansion became, in itself, the raison d’etre of the organisation. There was so much work to do in ensuring that all the Eastern European militaries could communicate in English, share radio frequencies and fire the same ammunition as their Western NATO colleagues, that there was no time for any thought as to why we were doing it. But even before Putin came to power, the signs that we were stoking nationalism in a now encircled Russia became clear.

Then 9/11 and the War on Terror solved the existentialist gap. NATO became the more respectable wing of the “coalition of the willing”. Ironically, as in the early 90s it had been positioning itself as an anti drug smuggling organisation, NATO presided over and protected the great ever opium harvests and heroin production levels in human history. It expanded into Central Asia. Under the NATO Partnership For Peace alrrangements, British troops trained Uzbek forces in marksmanship before they carried out the Andijan massacre.

Now here we are, with a real disaster unfolding in Afghanistan – a state which failed because the Cold War was fought there by proxy over twenty years, with the US fostering the very fundamentalist forces it now is losing to. And NATO, having drifted into this mess, declares sonorously that this is its future.

Ironically, President Obama made some more hopeful progress while in London by agreeing with President Medvedev to restart talks on nuclear disarmament. Compare that to Bush’s apparent eagerness to kickstart a new arms race, which suited Putin’s authoritarian agenda just fine.

But Obama’s new disarmament initiative points up still further the utter folly of New Labour’s plans to spend £120 billion on a replacement of the Trident nuclear weapon system, thus adding massively to mankind’s capacity for self-destruction at a time when the UK is broke, and when we need to be spending many. many times more than we are on renewable energy.

I am a harsh critic of Russia’s government, which has no respect for human rights or democracy. But Russia is not the Soviet Union and we d not need to face it in terms of massive blocs and mutually assured destruction. The time for the British nuclear deterrent is gone. And so is the time for NATO.

STOP PRESS

Added into comments by Alba, and making my point perfectly: “The US today has signed an agreement with the butcher of Uzbek people to transit goods through Uzbekistan”.

There can be no doubt that, at the G20 protests, at times the police were unnecessarily violent towards non-violent protestors. Yet at other times they were puzzlingly non-violent towards inexcusably violent protestors.

I postulated that one explanation might be that the small number of “protestors” who were theatrically and irrationally violent, were not actually protestors at all. I could think of other explanations, but no better ones, as to why police would not arrest a small, isolated and outnumbered group who were attacking them with sticks.

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

There is a website called Harry’s Place which exists to promote New Labour and a particularly virulent and sometimes openly racist strain of Zionism. That website has this morning put up a post called “Craig Murray Latest Lunacy”, where they assert that even to imagine that our security services might employ agents provocateurs is a symptom of madness.

It is not that Harry’s Place have a naive faith in their political masters. It is rather that they are engaged in a cynical attempt to manipulate public opinion. What do they expect us to believe that 4,500 people at MI5 actually do for a living, and why is it Top Secret?

Amid all the pomp and hyperbole of the G20 summit, Gordon Brown said something that was actually true.

“Today’s decisions, of course, will not immediately solve the crisis.”

Unfortunately that statement is just as true if you omit the word “immediately”.

The outcome of the summit was exactly as I predicted, with everyone claiming they had “won”. I can leave Brown his ten days of reflected glory. As the economy plunges again thereafter he will look pretty silly.

Brown has told the truth before, when he said his economic policies had “Brought an end to boom and bust.” He was telling the truth about the boom bit.

The media are going full volume now to churn out lies that policemen attempting to treat the dying man were pelted with bottles. The blogosphere is attempting to fight back with the truth – with the exception of the mainstream media’s favourite bloggers, Iain Dale, Derek Draper, Alex Hilton and Paul Staines. Which is of course precisely why they are the mainstream media’s favourite bloggers.

There is an important eyewitness account here:

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Death-in-the-City

Justin has also an interview with an eyewitness:

http://www.chickyog.net/2009/04/02/sky-news-not-learning-lessons/#comments

All of which leads me to resurrect this bit I wrote in a comments thread in reply to someone asking why I hadn’t mentioned the possibility of agents provocateurs:

There was a fascinating and drawn out scene outside the Bank of England yesterday when a distinct group of some thirty were attacking the police, one hitting the police with a long pole. Prominent was a group of young Asian lads.

I recognised them because I was crushed up hard for a good while against the same bunch of young Asians outside the Israeli Embassy a couple of months ago, where again they were being inexcusably violent.

The very strange thing was that, plainly from Sky’s overhead cam, the Police had the ability to isolate and snatch this group of obviously violent individuals, and the police would have had my support in doing so. But they didn’t.

So who are they?

My prediction of the police tactics – written before the protests started – seems to have been entirely accurate and almost certainly the direct or indirect cause of this death:

“Each demonstration will be split up into several separated groups. Each group will be tightly corraled, penned in with barriers in an uncomfortable crush that feels threatening to those inside. Occasionally groups will be shuffled between pens. Most demonstrators will not be allowed to the destination point to limit the appearance of numbers at the rallies. Once it is over, people will be kept corralled for several hours, with no refreshment or (this is critical and no joke) toilet facilities. The tactic appears designed to create confrontation as people try to get out of penned areas to hear the speeches they came to hear, to escape the crush or just to find a loo. At the same time the argie-bargie thus deliberately sparked is confined to small numbers the police can contain.”

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

Sadly there is no kind of inquiry under this government in which the public will have the slightest trust.

There was a 5% chance that it would fall to the UK to host this particular G20 meeting, but the timing of it plays to Brown’s obsession with being cast as the man who saved the World. As we plunge into depression, I can guarantee you that come next year people will see that it made no difference. It also will not fulfil its primary purpose of getting Brown re-elected.

As I explained yesterday, the final communique will have been agreed some time ago between senior officials (believe me, it used to be my job), so the media’s playing along with the “suspense” of whether agreement will be reached is rubbish. Brown said as much in Downing Street yesterday: “When the communique is released to you tomorrow, you will see that…”

Which doesn’t rule out some grandstanding by politicians looking to win votes at home, and there is a 0.1% chance that will lead someone to refuse to sign it, but don’t hold your breath. It will contain something for every leader to hold up as “their” negotiating victory. The negotiating officials understand that need very well; it will be a beautiful and pointless construct.

Brown’s vanity is enormous. I still have many friends in the FCO,and staff in the UK Mission to the European Union (UKREP Brussels) were horrified to receive an instruction from the FCO to ensure that the situation when Gordon Brown was obliged to hear a speech against him in the European Parliament from MEP Daniel Hannan, could not happen again. No. 10 reasoned, quite unrealistically, that other EU leaders would not want to suffer potential embarassment the same way, so there should be wide support for such a measure.

This was unrealistic because, while there may be some sympathy in the unelected Council of Ministers, it would be the elected European Parliament which would have to make any procedural changes. There is institutional tension between the two bodies, and to convince MEPs that they cannot criticise members of the Council of Europe in their presence, is an impossible task.

So our poor men and women in Brussels duly put out some feelers and found that, not only was there no sympathy, but nobody else thought that anything bad had happened. Wasn’t this democracy? Isn’t parliament for debate?

Of course, the Westminster one isn’t, with Brown only swanning in for half an hour a week for Prime Minister’s questions, half of which are planted and rehearsed, and the whole chaired by an outrageously biased pro-New Labour Speaker.

Anyway, my friends in our mission in Brussels consoled themselves that Prime Ministerial pique would die down, and with the G20 summit keeping Brown frenetically busy in London, the whole thing would be forgotten. But no! As they opened their offices at 8am Brussels time this morning, there was a missive from No 10, demanding to know what progress has been made. An affront to the great Gordon is an affront to the great Gordon. It cannot go unpunished. Even if the Dear Leader is busy saving the world, there is always time for such vital detail.

There has been an astonishing hype in the British media for the last fortnight around the “Riots” which have been predicted for the G20 summit for the last two weeks. It is a fortnight since the first “Riots” newspaper billboards appeared in London. The news bulletins yesterday were dominated by the boarding up of shops and by earnest “security consultants” advising that people in suits are likely to be attacked.

The BBC reported fears that demonstrators would “Create unrest” in the capital.

Actually they won’t create unrest. What they may do is manifest the unrest that already exists in the capital.

The entire torrent of demonisation of protest is part of a process of limiting the area of legitimate debate to the tiny gap that exists between the Labour and Conservative parties, with all other ideas portrayed not just as illegitimate but as disorderly and threatening. That governs the opinions which journalists are allowed to express and the selection of voices heard on the media. It is the intellectual equivalent of playing a game of cricket confined to the square, with the outfield behind the ropes.

This will be mirrored in the physical constraints placed on demonstrators today. The Metropolitan Police now have a well rehearsed system for dealing with such events. Each demonstration will be split up into several separated groups. Each group will be tightly corraled, penned in with barriers in an uncomfortable crush that feels threatening to those inside. Occasionally groups will be shuffled between pens. Most demonstrators will not be allowed to the destination point to limit the appearance of numbers at the rallies. Once it is over, people will be kept corralled for several hours, with no refreshment or (this is critical and no joke) toilet facilities.

The tactic appears designed to create confrontation as people try to get out of penned areas to hear the speeches they came to hear, to escape the crush or just to find a loo. At the same time the argie-bargie thus deliberately sparked is confined to small numbers the police can contain.

As for the G20 summit itself, diplomats designated as “Sherpas” will already have worked out and agreed between all participants the draft of a bland communique. It will be all things to all men and enable everyone to claim victory. Brown will tell us he saved the World again.

I am in favour of fiscal stimulus of the Keynsian kind, with public spending and jobs helping boost demand in recession. The problem is that Obama and Brown have conflated that idea with massive bail-outs to the bankers, which is a completely different thing.

No amount of banking regulation will compensate for the fact that we have created a position where the financial services industry is featherbedded above all others. It has no downside. Success brings individual rewards on levels you and I can only dream of, while failure means you and I will pick up the tab with – on average – 14% of our total personal wealth donated to the bankers so far.

The bank bailouts have been the biggest transfer of funds from the poor to the rich in human history. That is a fundamental and an irrecoverable disaster. We are going to get a depression whatever this summit does.

The real interest of this summit will take place in the behind the scenes meetings. It won’t be mentioned in the official communique, but China, Brazil and Russia, quietly egged on by France, will be chattering about replacing the dollar as the currency of note. It is China, which has a lot of eggs in the dollar basket, which is pivotal here.

Britain is nowhere near its climate change targets on renewable energy. In fact it is so far out as to be laughable. Climate change ought to be high on the agenda. But here there will be a divergence between public support for existing agreements, and behind the scenes talks which will focus on how to use the recession to excuse relaxing the targets.

Of all the issues the public are demonstrating about today, climate change is the one where the G20 will be most shameful and most hypocritical.

The appalling lackey “Sir” Stuart Bell MP was popping up all over the media yesterday attempting to divert attention from Jacqui Smith’s ripping off of the taxpayer. His first tactic was to claim there was a hunt for the mole who had leaked the information about Jacqui Smith’s expenses. Not one reporter in our grovelling media had the sense to ask hm whether this spending of our money should not be public anyway. To diminish any public feeling of gratitude to whoever leaked the information about Smith (in fact without payment) Bell was making “Off the record” the ridiculous claim that the informant was demanding £300,000.

But Bell’s really breathtaking claim was his fallback on the cover-all excuse of anti-terrorism. Bell argued that if information about MPs expenses were released, that could help terrorists. For example if they knew which MPs habitually took taxis.

Obviously a grave danger – we wouldn’t want Osama Bin Laden inserting subliminal messages into Jacqui Smith’s porn videos now, would we?

If I were married to Jacqui Smith, I would probably watch a lot of porn too. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Meantime I see the police have arrested some teenage “Terrorists” in an “anti-terror raid” in Plymouth to foil “an attack on the G20”. They have discovered “explosives, weapons, imitation firearms and extremist literature”. Why do I suspect these to be knives in the kitchen, fireworks, a toy gun and something by Kropotkin?

By and large, it is better to protest without making anything go bang. It scares cats.

Like so many harumphing political commentators, I am feeling really sorry now for Sir Fred Goodwin. So here is a nice song to cheer him up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI2k6aseNqg

So now the government are training a Stasi of 60,000 selected nutters to spy on potential terrorists. The government is still trailing in the opinion polls, so we have Home Secretary Jacqui Smith taking a break from filling in expense claims on her sister’s home, to warn us a terror attack is “Very likely”.

Listen up everybody. You have more chance of winning first prize in the National Lottery than you have of being killed by a terrorist. On average, each year in the past decade approximately 150 people drown in their own bath in the UK. On average, each year in the past decade approximately eight people are killed in the UK by terrorists. One death is too many, but it is one of the very least likely ways you might die. Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith are trying to panic you for political reasons. Your kettle, your stepladder, a kitchen cupboard falling on your head, all much more likely to kill you than a terrorist. Terrorists do exist, but they are much, much less dangerous than your staircase.

Two excellent comments, one from Gerard Mulholland posted on the BBC website:

For 30 years we -under both Labour and Tory governments- combated serious, organised US-financed Irish terrorism.

We lost 3000 civilians and 2000 soldiers.

We had car bombs.

We had truck bombs.

We had pub bombs.

We had shopping-centre bombs.

We had letter-box bombs.

We had shoot-outs.

We had sieges.

We were mortared.

We didn’t panic.

Nu-Labour are panic-stricken wimps, stampeded into unbelievable panic.

They stir up fear and dread.

Stupid Al Qa’ida nutters aren’t the enemy.

Nu-Labour is.

One from Anticant on this website

I’m old enough to remember the Blitz in WW2, when 40,000 people were killed in a single year. They [my parents’ generation] just got on with their lives and said “sod it” when a bomb fell. They didn’t scare themselves witless with phantom plots and plotters like this daft lot, who resemble kids at hallowe’en giving themselves cheap thrills with pumpkin bogies.

Yes, there IS a threat – but this government doesn’t seem to have the least clue as to what it actually is. They can’t see that they are a large part of the problem, not the answer. That is what really scares me.

Yesterday, as I often do, I took the 207 bus from Ealing Common to Shepherds Bush. Coming back again, I decided to make a survey of something I had noted many times.

Of those who could not have been too old or too young to pay, only 17 of the 42 people I managed to watch touched in an Oyster card on the bus. Now the remaining 25 could have had pre-bought paper tickets or travelcards, but I very much doubt that many of them did. I never see any significant percentage of passengers at a stop use one of those machines.

I hate Bendy Buses. They are a disaster in terms of road safety. Not only have they maimed or murdered hundreds of cyclists, but on numerous occasions when I have tried to cross on a little green man I have had to negotiate my way past thirty metres of bendy bus parked right across it.

On top of that there is evidently a widespread perception that it is OK to ride them without paying. I should say that I have never seen one of London Transport’s claimed random ticket inspections.

I do not approve of fare-dodging. Public goods need to be financed. And these completely inappropriate monstrosities need to be off our roads sooner rather than later.

In May 2008 Hicham Yezza, an IT technician at the University of Nottingham, was arrested, together with student Rizwaan Sabir, in a well-publicised anti-terrorist swoop. They had downloaded al-Qaida material from the US Department of Defense website as part of Sabir’s academic work on terrorism.

Disgracefully, they were reported to the police by Nottingham University. The abandonment by British universities of any idea of academic independence is one of the unsung tragedies of our recent history. Our universities have become factories for churning out ever increasing numbers of “vocationally trained” graduates into a market with far less graduate jobs than the supply. Such research as is undertaken is tightly targeted, measured and constrained in terms not of human knowledge but of such state concepts as economic and social impact.

In the panic to be seen as helpful to the government, Nottingham University turned in these two Muslims, presumably on the basis that if you were planning to commit terrorist offences, then openly studying terrorism at university would be a good cover.

Actually, as far as I can tell no recent terrorist has had a proper qualification in terrorism from a British university. Surely, given the government’s obsession with vocational training as the purpose of university education, that is something the government must seek to remedy?

The ludicrous nature of the arrests quickly became apparent even to Nottinghamshire Police, and after an unpleasant six days in cells and the permanent shredding of their reputations, the men were released. Disgracefully, there has been no public apology from Nottingham University.

Just as with the face saving alleged “discovery” of child porn on the computer of the innocent “terrorist suspect” the police shot in Leyton, lo and behold Nottinghamshire Police discovered that Yezza was a criminal after all. He was an illegal immigrant!

Yezza has now been jailed for nine months for “securing avoidance of enforcement action by deceptive means”. As he was working and studying at Nottingham University under his own name, the deception is not apparent. But a formal jail sentence for an illegal immigrant in this country is extremely unusual. Yezza was not part of the criminal underworld and if he had applied properly his immigration status would in all probability have been able to be regularised. It is very hard to believe the judge was not motivated by the original slur of terrorism. This must go down as yet another striking example of Islamophobia in this country.

The government refuses to put a figure on the number of illegal immigrants in the UK. Academic estimates tend to put the figure around 800,000. It is generally agreed that aound 1 in 25 Londoners is an illegal immigrant. Having much professional experience with immigration and close personal links to a number of immigrant communities, I would put the overall figure much higher, at around 1.5 million. But to take even the lower estimates, can you imagine the chaos if we started to jail illegal immigrants for nine months? The singling out of Yezza is appalling victimisation.