Juan Manuel Barroso, President of the European Union, has announced that “the people that matter” in the UK wish to join the Euro. To make this even worse, he made a direct contrast in the same sentence with “I know that the majority are still opposed”, It is impossible to analyze his words in any way that does not indicate that he believes “the majority” do not “matter”.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5267307.ece

I would like to think this was a slip of the tongue, but unfortunately it is rather an indication of the fundamental belief system of the Eurocrats. In my professional career I attended many conferences with diplomats and others from EU states, at which the role of “the elite” in forwarding “the European project” was a key theme. On scores of occasions I have heard it propounded that “the elites” initiated “the European project” and would always be its drivers. The contempt for the views of the Irish people shown in attempts to enforce Lisbon is a manifestation of a deep-seated anti-democratic tendency.

The irony is that I am a firm supporter of the EU. I believe European unity to be one of the noblest causes of my lifetime, I think free movement of people and trade is wonderful. I think we should join the Euro immediately. But I wish to see a democratic EU, with directly elected representatives (ie not fatguts Barroso) in the lead and subsidiarity genuinely applied.

The EU’s self-appointed “elite” are not the drivers of the process; by engendering well-deserved public hostility on a continual basis, they are a brake on the process. Doubtless UKIP are today grateful for the existence of Mr Barroso.

Jack Straw, so called Justice Minister, denies that he had any foreknowledge of the arrest of Damian Green.

Jack Straw denied directly to the BBC in the documentary “The Ambassador’s Last Stand”, and denied to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, that he had any part in the false accusations laid against me or in my removal as Ambassador for raising human rights concerns. Yet, as detailed in Murder in Samarkand, I have obtained documents in Jack Straw’s own handwriting, directing the process, and he held at least three meetings with Sir John Kerr to organise it.

On being sacked, I very openly leaked a number of government documents concerning UK policy, the use of torture material by our intelligence services, and the government’s attempts to frame me. Most of these documents were classified more highly than the documents leaked to Damian Green, like this one for example:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/documents/Declaration.pdf

Yet when I leaked a number of highly classified documents, openly on the internet with my name and address, did the police come knocking at my door? No, they did not. They consulted Home Secretary John Reid, who consulted Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. They concluded that they should seek to kill the story, and not generate publicity by arresting me.

Does anybody really believe that Ministers decided whether someone as obscure as I should be arrested, but were not consulted on whether Damian Green should be arrested?

Jack Straw is a serial liar. Do not believe him.

There are important similarities between the Damian Green case and that of Sally Murrer. Sally is the local journalist who was harassed, strip-searched and intimidated by local police, because she was given information on the police bugging of a Member of Parliament.

As her lawyer said in court “The measures used by Thames Valley Police against Sally Murrer are familiar in authoritarian states where the police are used to discourage the media from reporting on issues of public interest using confidential sources”.

That is absolutely true. The fact that Sally has been cleared in Court after a defence based on the European Convention of Human Rights is a small fightback for liberty. But her unnecessarily brutal treatment by the police (what possible reason can there be for strip-searching a journalist?), and her ordeal have already done that totalitarian work. She has announced she no longer has the confidence to continue journalism.

The extraordinary thing is the way that the media have failed to give Damian Green, let alone Sally Murrer, the prominence they deserve. Media inattention to startling human rights abuses is of course another characterisic of a police state. Indeed we have been treated to an egregious BBC commentator telling us that, after the Bombay incident, the Indian people are demanding “More stringent anti-terror laws and more powerful anti-terror police, as we have in the UK”.

Happily, the blogosphere reflects the concern of the educated public much better than the once free media. And the isolation of the Nu-Lab hacks and trolls on these issues is startling.

The Conservative immigration spokesman, Damian Green, is not a figure ordinarily likely to elicit much sympathy from me – although Boris Johnson’s call for an amnesty for illegal immigrants was the most sensible suggestion on immigration for many years. But the arrest of Damian Green MP is a constitutional outrage that may finally motivate our supine parliament to stand up to this domineering executive.

When Tony Blair halted the process of law in the BAE corruption case over arms exports to Saudi Arabia, I commented that we had abandoned the principle that no man, however high, is above the law – a principle which we had chopped off Charles I’s head to entrench.

Charles I famously failed to arrest opposition MPs when he arrived at the House of Commons with his soldiers to be defied by the Speaker and find that, as he observed, “The birds have flown”. That attempt was critical in precipitating the country into civil war.

The good citizenry of London and Cambridge will not be grabbing their pikes and muskets today; but they should. The arrest of Damian Green for doing his job of opposing the executive is a step too far in rolling back centuries of democratic achievement. The pretext is the excessive desire of this government to keep all public information secret, and prevent the taxpayer from finding out what has been done in their name and at their expense. This is the most secretive, as well as the most authoritarian, government of the modern era.

I can comment with more authority than most in saying that civil servants now have a duty to leak: the official narrative is now so often far from the truth across the whole field of government, that if civil servants do not leak there can be no informed democratic debate. To arrest an opposition MP for finding out what is really happening is a grim, grim move.

Yet more depressing correspondence with my publisher today – it really is getting me down. The publisher has an understandable fear of facing malicious and extremely expensive litigation under British libel laws, which exist to protect the reputations of the wealthy and the powerful. As my entire purpose is to expose unsavoury truths about the wealthy and the powerful, I really do not see how we are going to solve this.

I have no fear of libel action myself as I am confident in the truth of what is after all the story of my own life. So we may need to cut out the publisher.

I would be grateful for any practical advice on other publishing options. For example, can you really make it into Waterstones and Amazon if you publish on Lulu? What options are there for electronic publishing that work? I am also likely to need help from someone with genuine expertise in formating for publication – I have looked at the instructions on PDF creation, page numbering, chapter headings etc on Lulu and its all way beyond my ability.

You can comment below or email me at [email protected].

An astonishing outburst of New Labour pique after the ousting of their acolyte Ian Blair from the Metropolitan Police. If it was a “Tory Plot” as the Guardian screams, the Tories are to be roundly congratulated.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/03/blair.conservatives

Blair presided over an unprecedented politicisation in which the police saw it as their job to wildly exaggerate the terrorist threat and actively support the attack on civil liberties. He presided over the disgraceful spreading of lies about Jean Charles de Menezes. And he is widely viewed within the Met as personally corrupt. There has been remarkably little coverage in the media for the allegations of his giving out contracts to his own connections. A formal investigation into this, currently in progress, is believed by many in the Met only to be chipping into the tip of an iceberg.

The sickening thing about the current turmoil is that there is a class of spiv which makes money on the movement whether the market goes up or down. So of the very many hundreds of billions of public money “made available to the markets” already around the world, several billion have already lodged in the pockets of these parasites, who feast on the labour of the poor.

Here is one. Paul Myners, Director of GLG Partners. GLG is a hedge fund (which is what ultra posh people call a bookies). GLG has made a massive killing from short-selling recently, including of Lloyds TSB and Bradford and Bingley.

Oh yes, one more thing. Myners is also a good friend of Gordon Brown, is a Labour Party donor and the chairman of the Guardian Media Group. The Guardian, you will have noticed, is very much cheerleading in favour of you and I funding from our shallow pockets massive bailouts that will hugely benefit companies like GLG and put yet more of our money into the pockets of creeps like Myners.

The Guardian is dependent on trust funds set up by the CP Scott Trust. This is why, for example, when the GMG papers lost £50 million in a year they could still give a £175,000 bonus to New Labour acolyte, best friend of the ultra-dodgy David Mills, and notorious nylon wig wearing Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=35177&sectioncode=1

The interesting thing here is that the CP Scott Trust specifies that the Guardian must maintain the liberal values of its founder. Yet it has continued to support a government which the vast weight of liberal opinion in the UK believes to be the most authoritarian of modern times. This government has rolled back centuries of fundamental civil liberties and engaged in illegal war abroad while feeding lies to its own population. The Guardian still urges its readers to vote for Myners’ and Rusbridger’s pals. Rusbridger has of course been rewarded for this betrayal with a great many more than twenty pieces of silver.

I guess now I definitely still don’t get invited to speak about my books at the Guardian Hay on Wye Book Festival.

I have tried this appeal before, but it seems to me there is a very strong case that the trustees for CP Scott have been acting ultra vires in supporting through their newspapers the most illiberal of governments. This really is worth testing in the courts. Are there no liberal lawyers out there willing to try it pro bono?

Seriously.

“Partly, I’m angry that there is so little anger around me at what is being done to our society, supposedly in order to protect it,” said the 76-year-old in an interview in Waterstone’s magazine.

“We have been taken to war under false pretences, and stripped of our civil rights in an atmosphere of panic. Our lawyers don’t take to the streets as they have done in Pakistan.

“Our MPs allow themselves to be deluded by their own spin doctors, and end up believing their own propaganda.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/3053367/John-le-Carre-Britons-have-been-stripped-of-civil-liberties.html

Meantime two items from our too good to be true department:

In his dangerous job the MI6 spy’s identity needs to remain a closely guarded secret.

So you can imagine his surprise when, during an interview with the national broadcaster, his carefully chosen disguise of a fake moustache failed him spectacularly.

The hapless spy, known only as ‘John’, had been trying to discuss the role that MI6 played during inteligence operations.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3042969/MI6-agents-cover-slips-during-BBC-interview.html

A delegate to the Republican National Convention gave a TV interview enthusing for a war with Iran. Mr Eugenides takes up the story:

A few hours after that clip was filmed, our galactically smug hero took a girl back to his hotel room and slipped off his clothes in anticipation while she mixed them a couple of drinks…

…and when he woke up, his catch had made off with $120,000 of swag, including his $30,000 watch – yes, I’ve typed that correctly – a $20,000 ring, and jewellery and accessories worth tens of thousands of bucks.

http://mreugenides.blogspot.com/

An excellent article from Peter Hitchens in the Mail.

There is no such organisation as ‘Al Qaeda’. The spooks know this, Cabinet Ministers know this and so do the ‘security correspondents’ who so readily trot out the spooks’ point of view on our broadcasting networks.

Of course, there are terrorists, and there are also fantasists, fanatics, low-lifes and camp followers who plot and attempt horrible things. Some of them even call themselves ‘Al Qaeda’ these days because they have learned that this is a good way to scare us.

But, while they are a menace, they are not as big or as organised a menace as the Government likes to make out.

The State and the vainglorious bureaucrats of the ‘security’ services need to pretend that the terrorists are a tightly organised and terrifying threat, to make themselves look big as well ?” and to help them get hold of new powers to snoop on us and push us around.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1055560/Its-creepy-plotters-rule-really-scared-of.html

The most vital distinction in Western politics today is not between left and right, but between the authoritarians in office and libertarians who resist.

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage ?” such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.

The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain’s green agenda and could encourage further direct action.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cleared-jury-decides-that-threat-of-global-warming-justifies-breaking-the-law-925561.html

I have been worrying about the serious deterioration of civil liberties in the UK for five years now, but a small incident last night convinced me we are living in a country that must be classified as “Not free”. I was travelling to the theatre on the tube, and the large majority of passengers were shrouded by copies of either London Lite or the London Paper. Some thirty copies of each banner headline screamed shrilly its message of fear through the train: “Five Suicide Bombers on the Loose in London!” “Jet Terror Plot!” “Terror Jury Holiday Farce Resulted in Acquittals!”

The propaganda, which reflected uncritically the briefing the Security Services and Home Office have been manically pumping out since the non-existence of the “Bigger than 9/11” jet plot was confirmed, was so stark and so divorced from any connection to the truth, that I am convinced we are already in effect living in a totalitarian state where the government controls the population through fear with brutal efficiency and with absolutely no regard to the truth. The government had contrived to turn a major blow for its “War on Terror” scaremongering into a vehicle to ramp up that scaremongering.

The Lite told of there still being bombers around from the “Jet Terror Plot” and gave no indication whatsoever that the jury had decided the jet plot did not exist. Indeed it claimed shamelessly that the three terrorists convicted of conspiracy to murder had been planning to bring down planes – a direct lie.

The London Paper was still more worrying, because it put detail into the line the odious security service spokesman Frank “Goebbels” Gardner has been pumping out on the BBC: juries are unreliable. It said that the failure to convict in the trial was due to interruptions for a holiday for the jurors and because of an injury to a juror in a golf accident. The clear trend of the briefing coming from the government is towards the abolition of jury trials in terrorist cases: Diplock courts.

Meantime in London two men are on trial for “terrorism” because they attended a demonstration at the Uzbek Embassy against the hideous Uzbek regime, at which red paint was thrown at the Embassy to symbolise the blood of Karimov’s many thousands of victims. Such protest as paint-throwing should, I think, be illegal, but given events like the Andijan massacre of many hundreds of peaceful demonstrators, I have huge sympathy for those who undertake civil disobedience in the Uzbek case. It has nothing to do with terrorism, but under the notorious Section 58 of the Terrorism Act there is real danger of conviction and heavy sentences.

These are critical times: all good men and women must fight hard against the closing in of the system upon us.

.

Brilliant article here by septicisle

http://www.septicisle.info/2008/09/crying-over-spilt-liquid.html#comments

The Guardian’s Larry Elliott has written an excellent piece on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I particularly like this passage:

But if the big financial institutions cannot – unlike, say, a car company or an airline – be allowed to founder, they also cannot be allowed to conduct themselves in the same way as companies where there really is a risk of failure. Congress will undoubtedly demand tougher regulations for the activities of US banks in exchange for bailing them out, and rightly so. If ever there was a time to bring in controls on the ability of banks to create unlimited amounts of credit, to restrict the more toxic forms of derivatives, to rein in the activities of hedge funds, to insist that remuneration structures are not biased in favour of reckless speculation, and to use anti-trust law to break up the power of the big institutions then this, surely, is it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/09/freddiemacandfannie

I came in for much criticism at the time for being the first “respectable” commentator to call the fact that the “Bigger than 9/11 airline plot” was massive government hype, but my sources were very good. After a long trial a jury has now found that there was no credible evidence of plans to blow up airlines.

jurors rejected prosecution claims that Ali was responsible for an unprecedented airline bomb plot. They discarded evidence that Ali intended to target passenger jets flying from London to major North American cities with suicide attacks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/sep/08/11

The jury did find that three of the accused were engaged in a plan to carry out domestic terrorist bombing, and there does appear some quite firm evidence to substantiate that. Doubtless the appeals process will work its way through. But this appears to be another example of a small pathetic group of failed would be terrorists who were never, at any stage, planning to take liquid explosives on to airliners.

That is the fundamental problem with the “War on Terror”, It is not that Islamic extremist terrorism does not exist. It does. Frankly given the many, many thousands of civilians we have killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, it would be surprising if it did not exist. But it is massively hyped out of all reality by a government determined to use it to justify a massive increase in its powers over the citizenry.

I ask you to cast your minds back to just how very massive the hype was about the “airline liquid bomb plot” in summer of 2006. Scotland Yard called it “Bigger than 9/11”. In particular, remember the appalling anti-Muslim stories of plans to blow up planes using babies and baby bottles – as potent and horrifying a racist urban myth as has ever been developed.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2006/08/deadly_baby_bot.html

These were total rubbish.

Of the twenty one people arrested over this massive plot to blow up airlines, which the Metropolitan Police described as “Bigger than 9/11”, in the end three were convicted of conspiracy to murder and four of causing public nuisance. Not one of those dragged from their homes at 2.30 am on the direct personal instruction of John Reid was convicted.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2006/08/the_uk_terror_p.html

Accepting that 7/7 was Islamic terrorism (which I realise many people do not), about 60 people have been killed by Islamic terrorists in the UK. Any death is terrible, but that is about 2% of those who died in the Northern Ireland troubles. Even in the year of 7/7, less people were killed by Islamic terrorists than were drowned in their own baths. You have more chance of being struck by lightning than killed by a Islamic terrorist.

Yet this terrorist campaign was described by Tony Blair as “A fundamental threat to Western Civilisation” and by John Reid as “A threat on the scale of the Second World War”. The astonishing thing is that they created a climate in which the media accepted those assesments without a hint of the ridicule they deserved.

Terrorism has to be fought and prevented, but that is best done by meticulous, plodding police and intelligence work. It is also fundamental, but worth saying, that opposing rather than participating in oppression, bombing, torture and illegal invasion abroad would cut the ground from under terrorism. You do not fight terrorism by massively talking it up and terrifying your population into anti-Muslim attitudes, and initiating a spiral of repression that will just cause more terror.

On December 2006 I blogged:

I still do not rule out that there was a germ of a terror plot at the heart of this investigation. We can speculate about agents provocateurs and security service penetration, both British and Pakistani, but still there might have been genuine terrorists involved. But the incredible disruption to the travelling public, the War on Shampoo, and the “Bigger than 9/11” hype is unravelling.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2006/12/the_war_on_sham.html

If anyone can point to anything more prescient, I shall be dead impressed.

The apparent favourite for the leadership of Scottish New Labour is a Blairite named Iain Gray. He has come out in his true blue true colours by suggesting that Scottish New Labour need to cooperate with the Scottish Conservatives in the Scottish Parliament.

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Labour-could-team-up-with.4399354.jp

It says volumes for the despair of the numptie party that they think being associated with the Scottish Conservatives would actually increase their popularity in Scotland. But it also is but the simple confirmation of the truth of British politics today. In Scotland, New Labour and the Tories have teamed up against the SNP in local government in Dundee and elsewhere, determined to cling to the old order. Economically there is little difference between New Labour and Tory, while the Tory party is slightly more liberal in social and legal matters.

New Labour and Tory both support the illegal invasion of Iraq; they both support breaking the Non Proliferation Treaty by acquiring a massively destructive and ruinously expensive new nuclear missile system, thus further fuelling Russian paranioa and aggression; they both support making public services more expensive and allowing huge private profits from them through the Private Finance Initiative. I can think of no reason any New Labour supporter should not vote Tory, except for New Labour’s greater emphasis on attacking civil liberties.

I am an unabashed sports fan. I love watching the Olympics and get irrationally patriotic about it. Many of my friends find these traits irritating. But I have been really enjoying the last few days of British success.

Victoria Pendleton’s win in the sprint cycling was a great moment, but was completely marred by a classic propaganda moment by the monolithic state broadcaster. No, I don’t mean Chinese TV, I mean the BBC pumping New Labour as usual.

Victoria flashed across the line, and within two seconds the BBC cut to a shot of Tony Blair standing and applauding, holding him on screen for some time. It completely spoiled the moment for me – a sporting triumph marked by a war criminal. To complete the puff, the commentator praised Tony Blair’s “generous support for the British team”.

Bollocks – it was another example of a politician trying to gain kudos from national sporting achievement. And to describe Blair as “generous” is risible. Whenever you see Blair pop up anywhere, the first question to be asked is, who is paying for him? The great freeloader never pays for his own holidays, as has been frequently documented. On a previous visit to China, he received a US $500,000 payoff.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/08/china.tonyblair

Bkair has been to Chima at least four times since then – visits which would seem to have but a tenuous connection with his official role as chief facilitator of illegal Israeli settlement in Palestine. Blair has been making himself useful to the Chinese, and obnoxious to human rights and environmental campaigners, by arguing that politics should be kept out of the Olympics.

http://tonyblairoffice.org/2008/08/olympics-should-be-about-sport.html

So who is funding Blair’s Olympics?

The Mail is asking the same question, and got this response:

Earlier today Mr Blair’s spokesman insisted the couple were on a ‘family holiday’ but refused to comment on whether they had paid for it from their own pockets. He would also not be drawn on whether the Blairs were in China as someone’s guest

.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1046294/Pictured-Tony-Blair-reveals-slimline-new-look-visit-Olympics.html

I think that we can take that as an admission that the revolting Blair is being paid off again. The question is, for what?

General Musharraf was a smooth-talking dictator, but no more than that. He instituted military rule in an illegal coup and continued to govern in the interests of himself and a narrow elite, continually rolling back surviving vestiges of the rule of law in Pakistan. Under his rule Pakistan stagnated and the economic gap to neighbouring India grew so large as to be insurmountable for at least a generation. Dictatorship does not fight extremism, it promotes extremism in desperate and repressed opponents with no legitimate outlet for opposition.

It says volumes for where our far right New Labour government now stands on world affairs that they regret the political demise of this odious dictator. Here is David Miliband, the neo-con muppet who is New Labour’s hope for political revival:

“The Musharraf years yielded significant dividends… It is important to highlight President Musharraf’s commitment to tackle terrorism, to promote dialogue with India, especially over Kashmir, and to root out corruption,” he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/18/pakistan

Yeah, right. Come to think of it, why don’t we have military dictators all over the developing world? Plainly Miliband holds that these dusky foreigners need the smack of firm government. Why Miliband believes that rooting out corruption is a good thing, while his own government pro-actively harbours and protects it in the BAE scandal, is beyond me.

Miliband is no more than a foolish, shallow little disgrace. Despite New Labour’s best efforts, this is still in many ways a lovely country. It is both astonishing and appalling that it should be represented by someone as insubstantive as Miliband.

Russia has no right at all to invade Georgian territory – which South Ossetia is. Russia’s actions are illegal. The US and UK, who launched an equally illegal and much more devastating invasion of Iraq, are ill-placed to be outraged. Georgia was acting lawfully but unwisely in attacking rebels in South Ossetia. But Putin is lying when he says Georgia was engaged in genocide, and Georgia’s attack was itself less devastating than Russian attacks on Chechnya – a precisely parallel situation. So Russia is also being hideously hypocritical.

But we cannot just say that all the major powers involved are behaving terribly. That is true but not enough. Lenin’s Tomb has an excellent analysis.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-cold-war-escalates.html

But it is marred by the tendency of the left to think anyone opposed to Bush must be a good thing, and so give Putin the benefit of the doubt. Putin has plenty of blood on his hands also, and not only in Chechnya.

The truth is that life for ordinary people in the ex Soviet countries which have had “Orange Revolutions” like Ukraine and Georgia, is much, much better than in those which have not, like Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. That is so evident as to be undeniable to anyone who has actually been there.

Yet resurgent Russian nationalism is a major threat to Europe, and so Georgia must be supported as Russia tries to increase its hegemony over the former Soviet Union.

Russia’s attempt to leverage its Russian minorities into political power has been most obvious in Georgia and remains a major threat in the Ukraine. Given its own opposition to separatism for the many ethnic areas within Russia, this is not a question of principle. I posted on this last week.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/08/china_and_the_u.html

Most commentators have quite correctly picked up on the fact that this is in large part about control of oil and gas pipelines. Those who have seen me lecture know that I have been talking about Russian pressure on Georgia for the last four years. My professional eye on the diplomatic dances around the invasion shows me that, as I predicted, energy dependency has made Germany a Russian client state within the European Union.

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

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/05/uzbekistan_and.html

Those in Poland and Scandinavia who have been campaigning against the Nordstream gas pipeline project are absolutely right. European dependence on Russian hydrocarbons is not only an environmental abomination but also a major security risk. A Russian pipeline through Poland would be designated a major strategic national security interest for Russia – and for Germany. I can see easily see it becoming a cause for future conflict.

An immediate ceasefire is required now and a de facto Russian annexation of South Ossetia must not be permitted, unless we eventually want a war for East Ukraine. Sadly, the West will learn the wrong long-term lesson. The answer is not to strengthen NATO. NATO is part of the cause of the problem, not the solution. By encircling and humiliating Russia, not least with new missile systems, NATO has creaated the climate in Russia so favourable to Putin.

The new NATO is the main symptom of the West’s chronic inability to create a new post cold war security structure. By clinging to and expanding NATO, we merely made the return of the Cold War inevitable – much to the benefit of the arms industry and military establishment. If our leaders had any imagination, they would realise that the answer is to wind down NATO and create new structures into which Russia should be drawn.

It is already a decade late for such thinking. With Bush and Brown at the helm and the military and arms industry in grater control than ever of policy in both the US and UK, it is currently impossible.

Download file

David Milliband, Labour’s so-called new start, is furiously defending the FCO’s new near-fascist regulations for its employees, rules so illiberal that even the House of Commons Public Affairs Committee has today called them “Draconian” and “Oppressive”.

Read this next bit carefully. Under New Labour’s New Rules, FCO employess may not, for as long as they live publish, broadcast or comment upon, in book, article or interview anything they have learnt or may have learnt in the course of their employment.

Read it again – astonishing isn’t it. The ever-excellent Brian Barder has been blogging about it for some time, including this:

http://www.barder.com/ephems/708

The idea, of course, is that only the ministers’ version of truth will enter history. You can be confident that Jack Straw’s memoirs will not tell you that he instructed Richard Dearlove that we would use intelligence from torture, or that we colluded with torture and extraordinary rendition in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. You needed my memoirs for that. If Jack Straw had his way, I would not have been able to publish my book telling you the truth; in fact the new regulations were born directly out of Straw’s fury at Murder in Samarkand.

We now have a government so despised that it strives to protect itself further and further from scrutiny. The entire mess can be traced back to the decision to abandon international law and go for illegal war, torture and assassination. It is impossible to adopt such rotten tactics while maintaining liberalism at home. What New Labour have given us is a fundamental shift towards authoritarianism, which occasionally manifests itself in a dramatic symptom like this one. The body politic of this country is rotting from within.

“The reaction from here [Scotland Yard] is, rightly or wrongly, that any re-investigation will be unlikely to reach any different conclusion.” – Sky News, 4 August, 12.18pm. Scotland Yard have been briefing journalists furiously for the last forty eight hours that Barry George is guilty and the jury got it wrong. Two teams of detectives, they told the Sky reporter, had investigated the case and reached the same conclusion. Disgracefully Sky News are challenging poor George – who has a mental age of 10 – to take a lie detector test.

I was horrified by the original conviction and the case has been on my mind from time to time for the last eight years. I have no idea who killed Jill Dando or why, but plainly it was very professional. It was carried out with a custom modified and silenced gun, leaving no evidence of the killer on site. George, who needed help with his shoelaces and became confused and lost if on the streets on his own, plainly was simply not up to it. In the police laboratory a single micro-fleck of gunpowder residue, invisible to the naked eye, reached his coat.

There was something medieval about the conviction – a crime has been committed, so let us convict the local mentally disabled person. Lessons must be learnt urgently about the need to protect the mentally weak from the Police and from the prejudice of juries. The case is almost exactly the same as the horrible miscarriage of justice that destroyed the life of Stefan Kiszko and his family. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7052109.stm That again was a case of simply harrowing the local mentally disabled member of the community.

We have learnt nothing in the last thirty years. And judging by their arrogant and disgraceful attitude today, Scotland Yard have no intention of learning anything.