October 4, 2008
The Catholic Orangemen of Togo
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 craigjmurray@tiscali.co.uk.
Posted by craig on 12:36 AM 04/10/08 under UK Policy | Comments (2)
October 3, 2008
Mandelson Returns
Peter Mandelson as Trade Secretary oversaw the "light touch" policy of regulation which has just nearly bankrupted us. His is now coming back to essentially the same job, and I just listened in disbelief as a reporter from BBC News just told us, after a lobby briefing, that Mandelson was going to help tackle the financial crisis by "Pushing forward on Brown's deregulation agenda".
Words fail me.
I must be going to wake up soon.
Posted by craig on 10:18 AM 03/10/08 under Other | Comments (2)
Ian Blair Goes At Last
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.
Posted by craig on 10:06 AM 03/10/08 under UK Policy | Comments (1)
October 1, 2008
Spiv and Speculator News
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§ioncode=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?
Posted by craig on 8:08 PM 01/10/08 under UK Policy | Comments (1)
Censorship and Freedom of Speech
This is the key section from my new book which the publisher is unwilling to publish due to legal threats from Schillings libel lawyers, acting on behalf of the mercenary commander Tim Spicer:
" Peter Penfold was back in the UK. He was interviewed separately. Both Penfold and Spicer were interviewed under caution, as suspects for having broken the arms embargo.
Then, suddenly, Tony Blair intervened. On 11 May 1998, without consulting the FCO, he gave a statement to journalists. Penfold, Blair declared, was “a hero”. A dictatorship had been successfully overthrown and democracy restored. Penfold had “Done a superb job in trying to deal with the consequences of the military coup.” All this stuff about Security Council Resolutions and sanctions was “an overblown hoo-ha”.
I believe this episode is extremely important. In 1998 the country was still starry-eyed about Blair, but with the benefit of hindsight, this intervention points the way towards the disasters of his later years in office. It is extraordinarily wrong for a Prime Minister to declare that a man is a hero, when Customs had questioned him two days earlier under caution over the very matter the Prime Minister is praising. It shows Blair’s belief that his judgement stood above the law of the land, something that was to occur again on a much bigger scale when he halted the Serious Fraud Office investigation into British Aerospace’s foreign bribes. But of course Blair's contempt for UN security council resolutions on the arms embargo, and the belief that installing democracy by invasion could trump the trivia of international law, prefigures precisely the disaster of Iraq. As with Iraq, Blair was also conveniently ignoring the fact that Sierra Leone was left a mess, with Kabbah in charge of little more than Freetown.
In the FCO we were astonished by Blair’s intervention, and deeply puzzled. Where had it come from? It differed completely from Robin Cook’s views. Who was drafting this stuff for Blair to the effect that the UN and the law were unimportant? For most of us, this was the very first indication we had of how deep a hold neo-con thinking and military interests had on the Blair circle. It was also my first encounter with the phenomenon of foreign policy being dictated by Alistair Campbell, the Prime Inister’s Press Secretary, The military lobby, of course, was working hard to defend Spicer, one of their own.
A few days later Customs and Excise concluded their investigations. A thick dossier, including documentation from the FCO, from the raid on Sandline’s offices, and from elsewhere, was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The Customs and Excise team who had interviewed us told me that the recommendation was that both Spicer and Penfold be prosecuted for breach of the embargo. The dossier was returned to Customs and Excise from the Crown Prosecution Service the very same day it was sent. It was marked, in effect, for no further action. There would be no prosecution. A customs officer told me bitterly that, given the time between the dossier leaving their offices and the time it was returned, allowing time for both deliveries, it could not have been in the CPS more than half an hour. It was a thick dossier. They could not even have read it before turning it down.
I felt sick to my stomach at the decision not to prosecute Spicer and Penfold. So were the customs officers investigating the case; at least two of them called me to commiserate. They had believed they had put together an extremely strong case, and they told me that their submission to the Crown Prosecution Service said so.
The decision not to prosecute in the Sandline case was the first major instance of the corruption of the legal process that was to be a hallmark of the Blair years. Customs and Excise were stunned by it. There is no doubt whatsoever that Spicer and Penfold had worked together to ship weapons to Sierra Leone in breach of UK law. Security Council 1132 had been given effect in British law by an Order in Council. I had never found in the least credible their assertions that they did not know about it. I had personally told Spicer that it would be illegal to ship arms to Sierra Leone, to any side in the conflict. Penfold’s claim never to have seen an absolutely key Security Council Resolution about a country to which he was High Commissioner is truly extraordinary.
But even if they did not know, ignorance of the law is famously no defence in England. Who knows what a jury would have made of this sorry tale of greed, hired killers and blood diamonds. But I have no doubt at all – and more importantly nor did the customs officers investigating the case – that there was enough there for a viable prosecution.
The head of the Crown Prosecution Service when it decided not to prosecute was Barbara Mills. Barbara Mills is a very well-connected woman in New Labour circles. She is married to John Mills, a former Labour councillor in Camden. That makes her sister-in-law to Tessa Jowell, the New Labour cabinet minister with a penchant for taking out repeated mortgages on her home, and then paying them off with cash widely alleged to have come from Silvio Berlusconi, the friend and business colleague of her husband David Mills, who according to a BBC documentary by the estimable John Sweeney has created offshore companies for known Camorra and Mafia interests. Tessa Jowell and David Mills were also both Camden Labour Councillors, and are close to Tony Blair. Blair is also a great friend of Berlusconi, despite the numerous criminal allegations against Berlusconi and his long history of political alliances with open fascists. Just to complete the cosy New Labour picture, another brother-in-law of Barbara Mills and Tessa Jowell is Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.
Did any of those relationships of Barbara Mills, the Director of Public Prosecutions, affect the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to proceed with the case, and to take that decision in less time than it would have taken them to read the dossier Customs and Excise sent them?
Barbara Mills was to resign as Director of Public Prosecutions later that year after being personally criticised in his judgement by a High Court judge who ruled against the Crown Prosecution Service for continually failing to prosecute over deaths in police custody. That has not stopped the extremely well connected Dame Barbara from being appointed to a string of highly paid public positions since then. "
It is infuriating that, Maxwell style, Spicer (who has made millions form the war in Iraq) is using the prohibitive costs of defending a libel case to intimidate my publisher. The result is that important information I received at first hand, and an account of events to which I am eye-witness, is being repressed, as is an important independent critique of early Blair foreign policy.
I am not currently confident the book will get published at all - I am not prepared to put out anodyne pap, which hides the truth, under my name.
Posted by craig on 2:34 PM 01/10/08 under The Book | Comments (6)
September 25, 2008
Text of George Bush's Address
My Fellow Americans,
It grieves me to see the livelihood of decent ordinary Americans, folk who pay off their mortgages and file their tax returns every April 15, threatened by the behaviour of irresponsible people in the financial sector. That is why I am planning to take the money away from ordinary Americans and give it to those irresponsible people. Because capitalism and democracy is the best system of government in the world, and you can't have capitalism without irresponsible people in the financial sector.
In normal circumstances I believe that companies which are managed badly should be allowed to go bust. But these are not normal circumstances. The market is not working, as people have lost confidence in the system. That is why, so that ordinary decent people will still be able to get credit to buy homes and pay their children through college, I must take all their money and give it to these very well paid people who mismanaged their companies. Because these are not ordinary people in normal circumstances who use monkey wrenches and stuff and can be allowed to lose their jobs as firms go bust. These are rich folk like me. Society needs rich folk, so unless you give away all your money to these very rich people now, you will end up poor and without a pension and you will die alone and miserable.
This is not like taking money for medical insurance or welfare. I can assure you none of this money will be wasted on poor people, and hardly any of it on black people. So unless we build a bipartisan consensus and you give all your money to me to redistribute to the extremely rich, the plain truth is you will end up poor.
Thank you.
George W Bush
Posted by craig on 12:36 PM 25/09/08 under Other | Comments (8)
September 23, 2008
Extra-judicial Executions in the UK
An inquest jury has started hearing evidence in the case of the killing of Jean Charles De Menezes. New Labour has made damn sure that no inquest jury has heard the evidence on the death of Dr David Kelly.
The difference, of course, is that the murder of Mr Menezes was a low level decision.
Posted by craig on 10:49 AM 23/09/08 under War in Iraq | Comments (10)
John Le Carre for Prime Minister
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/
Posted by craig on 10:28 AM 23/09/08 under UK Policy | Comments (1)
Attacked By The Sunday Times Again!
I may be just one man and his battered keyboard, but something I have brought to light about Buckingham, Spicer, Usmanov or some other creep has evidently struck home because the Sunday Times has run a character assassination piece on me yet again!
This time I merit a page and a bit in one of their pullouts, and a big picture from which they have very kindly airbrushed the wrinkles, presumably to make me more plausible as the dangerous Lothario they are portraying. To be attacked for antiquated attitudes to women by Murdoch, with his page 3 girls and Jordan/Katie Price industry, is vaguely amusing.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4794188.ece
Ms Bowditch, the journalist, was quite pleasant, but kept asking me questions about my love life. For her to write that sex is never far from my mind is a bit rich. Actually it is quite often far from my mind, but not when people ask me repeated questions about it. It is difficult for anything to be far from your mind in those circumstances.
Ms Bowditch came determined to quiz me on and write about my love life. It is ludicrous hypocrisy to do that and then shed crocodile tears that my love life detracts from more important issues in Uzbekistan. I think that there is a simple test of how genuine the Sunday Times is on this:
Question: How many times this century has the Sunday Times sent a correspondent to Uzbekistan?
Answer: Nil
Question: How many serious articles has the Sunday Times written on Uzbekistan other than attacks on me?
Answer: Nil
Posted by craig on 7:55 AM 23/09/08 under Other | Comments (6)
I am cleverer than I realise
Apparently I have done something very clever in my respose to Weill and Buckingham.
What’s most interesting is that in response Murray has written a search-engine optimized blog post. Read his last paragraph, beginning “It would be a great pity….” It’s been lexically massaged until it’s like something off about.com, which is a sure sign that it’s aimed at the search engines as much as at human beings.http://www.biggrandejatte.co.uk/smallbeds/
I have to admit that was totally accidental. Tim Ireland advises me on that stuff sometimes, and I try to nod and look intelligent, but I have no idea what he is saying most of the time. However if it worked by chance I am very happy.
Posted by craig on 7:40 AM 23/09/08 under The Book | Comments (0)
Nick Faldo
The hatred of large sections of the British media for Nick Faldo is a puzzle. Faldo has an awkward manner, is uneasy with the press, and has always been inclined to be a bit...well, naff. His attempts to explain off the photo of his pairings as a sandwich list this week was emblematic of his lack of easy grace.
But for a substantial period Faldo was the best golfer in the world. To be the very best in a sport that has two hundred million players is tremendous. Yet compare Faldo's treatment with that of Steve Redgrave, who was the best in a sport with approximately 200 million less players, or Johnny Wilkinson whose sport has approximately 199.5 million less players. Andy Murray will equal Faldo in stature when he has won six Grand Slam titles, compared to his current total of, umm, nil. All the signs are that Murray has less natural grace than Faldo. Yet in Murray the press portray it is a tigerish will to win.
A narrow loss to the United States in the Ryder Cup is no disgrace, The rubbish performance of seasoned pros like Garcia, Harrington, Jimenez, Westwood and Casey cannot be blamed on Faldo. Golf writers almost unanimously hailed one of the captain's picks, Casey, as good and condemned the other, Poulter. Yet Casey was rubbish in the match. His decison to take a driver off the tee when Hunter Mahan was in the woods was for me the moment that lost the Ryder Cup. Poulter turned out to be the best player on either side in the entire match. Yet those same golf writers who got that completely wrong are now laying into Faldo big time.
Faldo is a sporting hero. There is not a golf writer in the country who deserves to shine his shoes.
This blog has moved into sport and films because, having seen David Milliband's speech on TV, the very thought of politics makes me feel sick. Normal service will be resumed shortly.
Posted by craig on 7:02 AM 23/09/08 under Other | Comments (0)
September 22, 2008
The Duchess
I seldom venture into film criticism, but I suspect that like many men I was persuaded by my partner to go and see The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley. Looking at Keira Knightley is always a pleasure, but what a terrible script!
The credits list three screenwriters and an original book author, so you would think they might between them have got some of the period detail right. Unfortunately, in a genre of costume true story which has little but historical accuracy to justify making it at all, the entire film was an exercise in solecism.
Most fundamentally, it viewed Regency Britian through a prism of Victorian sensibility. The living arrangements of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were no more than very mildly scandalous by the standards of the time. In fact the Duke of Devonshire in question was pretty restrained in his sex life by late 18th century aristocratic standards. Nor was the menage a trois uncommon - this one was contemporary with that of Nelson and the Hamiltons. The attempt to project a modern sensibility onto a very different era was part of an attempt to draw a publicity parallel with the situation of a later Spencer female, Lady Diana Spencer. That commercial potential seems indeed the only possible motivation for the film.
The other fundamental flaw was the attempt to present the Duchess' lover, Charles Grey, as a man of the people. He was played with a slight Estuary accent and there were several references to his lowly social stature and lack of funds; indeed his alleged dependency on the Duke of Devonshire for cash was brought into the plot at one stage.
What complete piffle. Grey was a senior member of the great Grey family of Northumberland and Yorkshire who people the Shakespeare history plays. He was born in their majestic seat of Fallodon and at about the time of the action of the film moved into his own superb mansion of Howick Hall. Almost all aristocratic families at this time led lifestyles that brought them into substantial short term debt despite their vast incomes, but the Devonshires were more renowned for this than the Greys. If Grey did have an accent (which he probably did - regional accents were more pronounced in aristocratic circles then) it was Northern, not London.
The film rightly connects Grey with progressive politics of the time, but errs ludicrously in trying to make him a working class hero. He was to go on to become the Prime Minister who forced through the Great Reform Act, the first and most crucial step towards British democracy, and the abolition of the slave trade. The tea is named after him. The family were always connected with the progressive side in politics. A Grey was the only member of the House of Lords to sign Charles I's death warrant. Stephen Grey, the best exposer of extraordinary rendition and author of Ghost Plane, is a member of the family.
Back to the film. Among the scores of the easily avoidable mistakes, the use of titles was wrong more often than not. Grey tells a grieving Duchess: "I am engaged to Lady Ponsonby". That would come as a hell of a shock to Lord Ponsonby. He meant he was engaged to one of Lady Ponsonby's daughters, and would in fact have said "I am engaged to Lady Mary Ponsonby", or much more likely between these two, just "I am engaged to Mary Ponsonby".
Anyway, "The Duchess" is a lot of unhistorical bollocks written by the terminally ill-educated. It would have been much more enjoyable just to watch Keira Knightley sitting quietly for ninety minutes.
Posted by craig on 6:40 PM 22/09/08 under Other | Comments (5)
The Emperor's New Banks
To state the obvious, the problem with the US government's bailout of the US financial system is that the US government doesn't have $700 billion. It doesn't in fact have any money at all, being substantially in debt. The idea that this creation of yet more funny money in some way heals the system is patently absurd. It merely postpones, very temporarily, some impoverishment and ensures the pain will be borne for a generation or three.
The profligate use of taxpayers' indebtedness throughout the last year, on both sides of the Atlantic, had been astounding, whether from the hundreds of billions "pumped into the money markets" by central banks, or all those successive rescue packages for individual institutions.
The signals sent to the market are extraordinarily contrary. Executives of failed institutions, whose policies were the direct cause of failure and who awarded themselves billions in bonuses for pursuing those policies, now have their jobs protected after they failed so badly. Irresponsibility and massive greed pays. Neither in the US nor the UK will the government again be able to tell public servants that they get lower pay because they take less risk than the private sector. And we now have institutions which are in effect now public sector, but where individual public servants - for that is what they now are - are receiving pay in the millions.
Furthermore, the investors - who if the market works should, indeed must lose their funds if the institution goes bust, just as they can make great gains if it booms - are not going to lose their money. At least with Northern Rock the British government got that bit right.
What we have instead is perhaps the single most regressive movement of funds in history, with taxes going to protect investments. Yes, I know many ordinary people benefit a bit from investments through pension funds etc, but the wealthy undoubtedly have many more investments on average than the poor, while many of the very poor have no interest in investments but still pay tax.
This is a huge bailout of the wealthy on the backs of the poor. That is why Bush is acting with such alacrity. Those commentators claiming Bush is taking leftward action iwith a "New Deal" philosophy could not be more wrong.
Posted by craig on 4:54 PM 22/09/08 under Other | Comments (2)
September 19, 2008
Spot The Joker Competition
Posted by craig on 12:21 AM 19/09/08 under The Book | Comments (0)
