That rather horrible bipolar episode seems to have passed, like a cloud over the sun. It makes you a candidate for Pseuds’ Corner to be depressed by the neo-con monopoly of power and the media narrative. But in fact it is the very enormity and power of what we have to fight, that makes the fight necessary.

Iran is firmly in the sights for the next neo-con war, while the siphoning off of resources from ordinary people to the ultra-rich is accelerating with every new measure to “support the markets”. Support for dicatorships and human rights abuse abroad becomes ever more blatant. The twist on all of these as they are presented to a docile population by a media whose terms of debate are circumscribed and manipulated, is blatant but effective.

Let’s get kicking back again.

The media is in a frenzy about Iranian “suspected” nuclear weapon development, with virtually every article and broadcast also referencing Israel’s view.

A free copy of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo for every one who first points out each mainstream media reference to Israel’s own massive illegal arsenal of nuclear weapons.

I don’t anticipate giving away a single book.

Sorry for the hiatus. I am suffering one of my periodic periods of self-doubt and depression. This was caused in part by my being very disappointed at the number of people who listened to my talk at Occupy London, and subsequently by my inability to get anyone mainstream to publish a major piece I have been working on. That has never happened to me before.

A little niche on the web helps you forget how insignificant you are; try to step outside that niche and you are brutally reminded.

The Scottish Conservatives have elected an openly gay leader. Good on them. It is also a shrewd political move. There are certainly more gays in Scotland than Conservatives.

I have just returned from recording a very long interview for Radio Scotland for a programme they are doing on Alexander Burnes in their series on great explorers. Just a few snippets of mine will be used in a half hour programme, but I have enormously enjoyed working with the BBC’s extremely knowledgable producer and research historian on this and I think the programme will explain why I am so enthusiastic about rescuing Burnes from obscurity. I will let you know the broadcast date.

Watching the international blackmail of Papandreou and Greece to cancel his referendum plan has been pretty ugly – I imagine the diplomatic style and atmosphere of the Munich conference was similar. The joy in the financial markets at the cancellation of the referndum may be foolish.

The Greeks have effectively given up all effective sovereignity over their economy. To do that without having voted on it is quite a difficult step for any people to take, particularly a people as nationalistic as the Greeks. There will be blowback.

There has been little reporting or understanding of what happened on the ground in Greece over the last week. 372 Foreign “advisers” moved in to take over Greek ministries, in some cases even sequestring minsters’ offices. They have absolute financial control of budgets and have to approve and sign off spending before money is paid out. In effect, these advisers are now the government of Greece. 28% of these “advisers” are civil servants from other Euro states. The majority are of bankers, and executives of private financial institutions, accountancy and consultancy firms.

Anybody who thinks this is going to work out is raving mad.

There may be a ruling today on Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden to face some ridiculously flimsy accusations of “minor rape”. The threat to Assange, that the Swedish authorities will simply hand him over to the United States on espionage charges, is very real. Sweden was one of the tiny minority of 14 – the US and US vassal states – who on Monday voted against Palestinian membership of UNESCO.

I am giving a talk at Occupy London’s Tent City University by St Paul’s at noon tomorrow. Many thanks to all who responded to my request to help the logistics of this. I am going to donate some copies of Murder in Samarkand and The Catholic Orangemen of Togo for people to read on the occupation.

I shall also be giving a talk at the Chapter Theatre, Cardiff on 13th November at 2.30pm, for Freedom from Torture (formerly the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture). This is a wonderful organisation which, among other things, does fantastic work for torture victims who are in the UK.

If anyone knows where I am giving a talk on 8 November please let me know!!!!

Palestine is now a state. Membership of the United Nations is not in international law a pre-condition of statehood, and indeed is not compulsory for states. The existence of states not members of the UN is recognised in international law, not least by the UN itself. Palestine has just joined UNESCO for example under a provision which allows states which are not members of the United Nations to join if they get qualified majority support – which Palestine overwhelmingly did.

So the UNESCO membership is crucial recognition of Palestine’s statehood, not an empty gesture. With this evidence of international acceptance, there is now absolutely no reason why Palestine cannot, instantly and without a vote, join the International Criminal Court. Palestine can now become a member of the International Criminal Court simply by submitting an instrument of accession to the Statute of Rome, and joining the list of states parties.

As both the USA and Israel refuse to join the ICC because of their desire to commit war crimes with impunity, acceding to the statute of Rome would not only confirm absolutely that Palestine is a state, it would reinforce the fact that Palestine is a better international citizen with more moral legitimacy than Israel.

There is an extremely crucial point here: if Palestine accedes to the Statute of Rome, under Article 12 of the Statute of Rome, the International Criminal Court would have jurisdiction over Israelis committing war crimes on Palestinian soil. Other states parties – including the UK – would be obliged by law to hand over indicted Israeli war criminals to the court at the Hague. This would be a massive blow to the Israeli propaganda and lobbying machine.

It would also be a huge chance for the International Criminal Court to redeem its reputation. It is widely believed, particularly in Africa, that the ICC is merely a tool of western domination and used against those that the NATO powers want it used against. That is a bit unfair on the court, who are dealing with the cases brought before them according to the statutes. Palestinian membership could give a chance for the court to assert its independence, and become a watershed for both Palestine and the ICC.

BBC journalism hit a new low today. The BBC News channel devoted only a single sentence to Palestine’s diplomatic coup in gaining full membership of Unesco. It used that single sentence once at 18.23 and once during the following hour. And this is that single sentence:

“Israel says that Unesco’s decision to admit Palestine to full membership will damage the prospects for peace in the Middle East.”

No other view was given, We did not hear what Palestine says, or what Unesco says, or what any of the huge majority of 107 countries which voted for Palestine say. The only view we were given was the Israeli view, and there was no questioning or discussion of that view.

“Israel says” – what an astonishing opening two words to a report on a great day for Palestinian diplomacy. Everyone connected with BBC News should be utterly ashamed. Why don’t we just save the license fee and let Netanyahu’s office broadcast the news instead?

The vote incidentally was 107 to 14. It was a humiliating defeat for US diplomacy. Latvia, Tuvalu and Uzbekistan are among the states which did not follow the US lead against Palestine but which always have done in the past. The USA was also unable to coerce a single African state – I am proud of Africa, and Ghana in particluar.

Here is the list of the pathetic 14, the overwhelmingly defeated states which tried to block Palestine and which either have extreme neo-con governments or are completely susceptible to US aid blackmail – you can decide which are which:

Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sweden, United States of America, Vanuatu.

Last week many were genuinely shocked by the news that the UK’s major company directors had awarded themselves average earnings increases of 49%, while most ordinary people suffered a significant drop in real income.

If you need further evidence of the callousness of society’s haves towards ordinary people, look at this from the USA. A Bank of America “foreclosure mill”, law firm Steven J Baum, makes its money by having families evicted from their homes onto the streets. These wealthy lawyers decided to have a Halloween party where they would dress up as – homeless people.

These two were by no means alone – if you google you can find plenty of pictures of other bastards at the party.

We are likely to see a major increase of home repossessions in the UK next year. There are signs that society is rediscovering the notion of horizontal solidarity. The highly effective role of social media in rapid political organisation leads me to think it ought to be possible to set up an organised system of resistance to evictions, with people rapidly converging to aid those under threat.

I thought I might wander down to Occupy London and chat to them about the lessons I feel might be drawn from my life experience working for government. I particularly wanted to outline the seamless link between western government promotion of dictatorships and terrible human rights abuses abroad, the undertaking of illegal wars for resources and the sucking up of internal resources in our country for the benefit of the wealthy.

I then want to relate that to the narrowing of the space of debate for legitimate political debate or action. Whether you are against the war in Afghanistan or against the bank bailouts, you are at the very least part of a very large minority in the country, yet none of the established political parties will represent you and your viewpoint is virtually never given a media airing.

Can anyone let me know how this idea to give a talk might work in practice? I haven’t been invited and I am not sure if they have any facility for listening to guest speakers, and if so if they would have any interest in listening to me.

Our three neo-con major political parties have come up with a jolly cunning plan to lift money direct from the taxpayer, in addtion to being paid by big business to promote the interests of big business against the people.

A government inquiry is recommending that £20 million a year in public funding be given to the three neo-con parties. Is there no end to their greed? I suppose the logic is perfect – it will finally cement into our political system the monopoly of power by parties that are arrogantly unrepresentative of the will of the people, knowing that their system, above all by control of the media, locks out any alternative from competing for political power.

I write with certainty that all our three political parties are now neo-conservative, but with great sadness. The Tories became fully neo-con around 1979, New Labour around 1996 and the Lib Dems around 2010. All the parties contain still a minority of resisters, the fewer the longer they have been neo-con. So Ken Clarke is an almost entirely isolated resister in the Tory party, Jeremy Corbyn one of very few left in New Labour, while the Lib Dems still have a few Norman Bakers who have not yet been entirely corrupted by power and money, but you can see the process working on the Lib Dems like acid and their integrity will have been completely eaten through in another 18 months.

Meanwhile, there are some who don’t get it, like poor deluded old bat Polly Toynbee, who still has not worked out that New Labour went neo-con. Yesterday’s Toynbee article has the headline: “Executive pay soars while the young poor face freefall. Where is Labour?” You are a fool, Toynbee. The ex-ministers of the last New Labour government are in the boardroom picking up those massive remunerations and perks you are rightly complaining about. Did you really not know that, or do you just refuse to see?

New Labour is now neo-con, Toynbee. It is fifteen years since Peter Mandelson said that “New Labour is intensely relaxed about the filty rich.” Mandelson and Blair and Hewitt and Jowell and Milburn and Burnham and Reid and Blunkett and the whole lot of them are now filthy rich. Somebody explain this to Toynbee.

But it is an extremely important point that I did not see a single mainstream politician yesterday questioning the obscenity of directors’ earnings rising over 49% last year – from a huge base – when average real incomes were falling. The media was packed with apologists explaining trickledown theory to us. I also noted that the Occupy movement needs to beware of the media appearing to give them coverage, when in fact the media are deliberately picking on people whose hearts, instincts and minds are all in the right place, but who lack media experience and formal education in the ground on which the media places them. The media can then give the impression of debate with the cards severely stacked, to make the view that in fact the large majority of those at home will hold, that executive salaries are obscene and untenable, appear amateur and ill-informed.

The parties do not represent us and their collective membership is falling, as they are now a vehicle for career rather than belief. No wonder they want to pick our pockets to keep up the pretence of democracy.

With impeccable timing, today we have official US government statistics saying that the top 1% of the US population have 17% of the take-home earnings. Their share has more than doubled from under 8% in 1979.

This vast gap between rich and poor, and rich and middling, has expanded fast and is now expanding exponentially faster. I have no doubt figures for the UK would show the same trend.

It also made me think nostalgically of the 7/84 Company and the play they made famous: The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black Black Oil. It had a massive effect on my teenage political consciousness when I saw it on the BBC in June 1974. There is absolutely no way the BBC would ever broadcast such a radical piece now, let alone to a prime time BBC 1 audience.

If anyone needed convincing that they should offer the Occupy protestors full and unconditional support, all doubts should be set aside by the stunning news that the average earnings rise of directors of major companies is 49%.

There is a massive squeeze at present on the living standards of ordinary people, with unemployment rising, inflation rising and salary increases substantially below inflation, plus a whole series of tax increases. Despite the mainstream media, pretty well everybody now understands that this is because their money is being paid straight into the pockets of fatcat bankers by the government. The bankers has already shown they were going to spit in our faces by maintaining the massive incomes of their executives, even at loss makers like UBS.

Those who argue that it should be left up to the shareholders to determine executive salaries are missing the point. The shareholders are, overwhelmingly, other institutions whose executives also benefit from this culture of sickeningly excessive reward, in an orgy of mutually reinforced looting.

What is so striking about this is the absolute fearlessness, the total arrogance of the 1%, safe in their control of the politicians and the power of the state. They seem to think they can trample on the little people forever, with impunity. We are approaching a stage where these people are becoming totally isolated from any bond of communality which holds together a society; are becoming in short the open enemies of the people.

They may find eventually this was not such a wise move, but for now they are so drowned in material consumption they really do not care.

One of the ways I stop myself getting over-depressed in periods whent I am skint is to make plans for what I will do with money when I have some. At the moment I am looking at mounting solar panels on my roof.

I intend to put up 12 panels producing 3000 kWh per year, at an initial cost of about £7,000. This will produce an income based on the feed-in tariff of about £750, index linked, on official statistics, and probably a little more as Ramsgate is one of the sunniest part of England, and my roof faces perfectly South with a 32 degree pitch. This works well for me as a personal investment – hard to get an index-linked and safe return over 10% nowadays.

This is of course because the feed-in tariff, at over 40p per kw/h is far greater than the current economic cost of generation (the gas turbine power station we have just built in Ghana, for example, produces at a full cost of about 10p per kw/h).

BUT we are going to produce ourselves over half the electricity we use. What is more a whole new industry has been kick-started. In getting quotes I have been besieged by local firms, all based within a few miles from here. That is an awful lot of people employed, paying tax and not claiming benefits. With this artificial stimulation of demand, the price of solar panel installations has plummeted as production savings kick in. In three years the cost per kw/h has halved. I will not be surprised if it halves again. As fossil fuel costs continue to rise, this will become a fully economic way to produce electricity. The kick-starting of that process by the feed-in tariff is a rare example of the government creatively stimulating the economy to promote economic growth and employment.

The government has put countless billions in bailouts and guarantees into propping up rich bankers and protecting them from the consequences of their uselessness at their job. Quantitive easing has given them a further £225 billion. Think of this. That £225 billion has been used to subsidise useless bankers by giving them good money in return for junk assets they had invested in. Not a single penny has found its way to anybody else but a banker, as increased bank lending has not happened.

Quantitive Easing has been described by paid apologists of the 1% as neo-Keynesianism, reflating the economy. Utter bollocks. It is a transfer of wealth to rich bankers, paid for by everybody else as high inflation. But what if the £225 billion created by quantitive easing had really been used in a Keynesian way, for public works?

What if it had been used to insulate everybody’s home, to give everybody solar panels, micro wind turbines, and heat pumps? What employment and growth would have been created then? What if we had built high speed railways and the Severn barrage?

No – they just gave the cash to the fatcat bankers. The solar feed-in tariff is the only measure of government economic stimulation I can think of. The Conservatives wish now to abandon it, on ideological grounds.

Canon Dr Giles Fraser is being forced from his job for the dreadful sin of actually acting as a Christian.

I was sent this recently; different church, same shit.

I am some kind of confused deist myself. I was recently told what I am sure is an old joke, but it struck me as very true:

God looked down at the sufferings of man, turned to the Devil, and said: “The plight of man moves me to compassion. I will send them Religion for consolation.”
“Good idea,” said the Devil, “I’ll organise it.”

I am not blogging about the EU summit. It is pointless. It will of course produce a communique to reassure the markets. It makes no difference.

The economic system in which most of our readers live is little to do with capitalism. The value of goods traded is an insignificant fraction of the flow of funds around the world, much of which relates to either bets on the future values of goods, or bets on the consequences of the vectors of financial flows of which the bets themselves are a part.

The whole edifice is based not on a market for exchange of goods and concrete services, but on an astonishing matrix of state enforced legal instruments creating an extraordinary pile of paper money produced by states, but ultimately worth nothing real. This legal framework was designed to shift the great bulk of this wealth from people who actually work for a living to a small financial elite, most (but not all) of whom create little or nothing real.

If the state compelled everyone to play a pyramid scheme, then you could keep it going for decades. As the system started to reach inevitable collapse, the state moved in with bank bailouts and quantitive easing, both of which simply moved yet more money from ordinary people to the super-rich. In fact the last three years have seen the biggest transfer of resources from poor to rich in human history.

It cannot last, and whether it is Greece or Italy or Spain which is this week’s fashionable media focus is irrelevant. In making these vast levied and leveraged transfers of resources from poor to rich, states have exhausted the capacity of their people to actually pay them. That is true all over Europe, the UK and US. The currency crises are a tiny symptom of a very large impending crash.

That is why I am not blogging about today’s EU meeting or a specific statement of the US Federal Bank Chairman. They are all pissing into the wind that is shortly to be a tornado. I expect before I die I will see a genuine social revolution. I expect that, as always happens, middle class liberals like me will start by being elated by it, and end up being shot by those who seize on the change, to take their turn to use the power of the state to corner resources for themselves.

It is five days now since Nina and Mikel Malyshev were “disappeared” – I have no doubt by the Uzbek security services – during their deportation to Uzbekistan by the UK Border Agency.

I had hoped that they would be detained for a couple of days and then released after signing a confession that they had been misled by evil people like me and that President Karimov was the great father of his nation. But unfortunately this is now looking far more sinister, particularly as we know that they were taken past passport control at the airport without their arrival being registered. I fear they may have simply disappeared forever and the Uzbek government will deny all knowledge they ever arrived.

The British government denies all responsibility. This from the UK border agency, who sent them back to Karimov:

“These individuals were removed on Friday after they refused to leave voluntarily. “The UK Border Agency carefully considered their cases and several different judges agreed in the courts that they did not need the UK’s protection.”

The British Embassy in Tashkent have told the family they have no responsibility for the Malyshevs.

The UK Border Agency deported the Malyshevs on 21 October. At 6am on 22 October they phoned their relatives in Port Talbot to say that they were alright, they had been met at the plane by a representative of the British Embassy and escorted through the airport, bypassing passport control, security checks and customs. They expected to be put on a bus to their former home in Zarafshan. They never arrived in Zarafshan and have disappeared. The British Embassy say they did not send anybody to the airport to meet them.

The fake British official was without doubt from the Uzbek security services. Nobody else could get airside at Tashkent – including, incidentally, the British Embassy who do not have airside access.

I gave written evidence to the Malyshevs’ asylum appeal. I specifically stated that if deported the Malyshevs would be picked up at the airport by the security services. The Home Office stated this was not true, and my knowledge was out of date.

It is not acceptable for the British government knowingly to deport people to probable torture in Uzbekistan, and then refuse to find out what happens to them. The government refuses to check up on the Malyshevs’ fate partly because it does not care what happens to them, and partly because it wants to continue to claim there is no problem and continue to deport others to Karimov.

Please raise this with any group you know, and get as many people as possible to write to their MPs. Amnesty members try to get them involved. Please repost this as widely as possible on the web. The Malyshevs may still be alive in a cell or gulag. We need to find them.

UPDATE

Mikel Malyshev has just phoned his sister – so the good news is that he is alive. But he did not appear able to talk freely and when asked if he was OK replied “Yes and No”. He was not alone – other voices could be heard – and seemed very nervous. He was not with Nina and could or would not say where she was.

Gus O’Donnell’s report deliberately omitted evidence that Werritty and Fox were scheming with British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould to prepare the diplomatic ground for a military attack on Iran.

O’Donnell listed two meetings between Fox, Werritty and Gould. But he left out a key meeting of the three, before Fox became Secretary of State for Defence, while Fox was still in opposition. The fact that the three had met before casts a whole new light on their three subsequent meetings, of which O’Donnell mentions only two.

This is what O’Donnell says of one Gould/Fox/Werritty meeting, in para 6 of his report:

This leaves a meeting between Dr Fox and Matthew Gould, the then UK Ambassador Designate to Israel in September 2010. I understand that this was a general discussion of international defence and security matters to enable Mr
Gould better to understand MOD’s perspective of the security situation in the Middle East. Mr Werritty was invited to attend as an individual with some experience in these matters. As a private citizen, however, with no official locus, it was not appropriate for Mr Werritty to have attended this meeting. Dr Fox has since acknowledged this.

It is a lie by omission for O’Donnell to leave out the fact that the three had met up before. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has refused to answer the following questions:

When and where did Gould meet Fox and Werrity while Fox was shadow Defence Secretary?
What position did Gould hold at the time?
There are very strict protocols for officials meeting and briefing opposition front bench spokesmen. Were they met?
In what capacity was Werritty there?
What was discussed and was the meeting minuted?

This is the FCO’s official response to my questions:

Mr Gould’s meeting with the Defence Secretary was arranged by his office as part of his pre-posting briefing calls. Mr Gould was not aware of likely attendance at that meeting in advance; nor does he recall the nature of any introductions made.

As noted in the Cabinet Secretary’s recent report, this was a general discussion of international defence and security matters to enable Mr Gould better to understand MoD’s perspective of the security situation in the Middle East. No classified material was discussed at this meeting.

We are not aware of any record of the meeting having been taken. This is quite normal for routine pre-posting meetings of this kind.

Mr Werritty was also present at an earlier meeting Mr Gould had with Dr Fox in the latter’s capacity as shadow Defence Secretary.

The conference which both Mr Gould and Mr Werritty attended in Israel in February this year was the latest in the series of annual Herzliya Conferences. A programme and other documents related to the conference can be found on the Herzliya Conference website. As noted in the Cabinet Secretary’s report, Mr Gould also attended a private dinner with the Defence Secretary, Mr Werritty and senior Israelis in the margins of that conference, at which there was a general discussion of international affairs.

Why were the facts in bold omitted from Gus O’Donnell’s report?

The programme is worth looking at: nobody could accuse the Herzilya conference of balance in its agenda or its participation.

But to return to the detail. The FCO is quite wrong to describe Gould’s meeting with Fox as a “routine pre-posting briefing meeting.” This is in fact another deliberate lie. Brieifngs for even the most senior Ambassadors on their pre-posting briefing tours are not normally at Secretary of State level. Liam Fox did not meet any other British Ambassadors to give them pre-posting briefing. And when an Ambassador does call on the Secretary of State for Defence, there would always be a private secretary in attendance in case any action points arise. Not only was there no private secretary, but I am told by an inside source this meeting was not in Fox’s office but in the MOD dining room.

Not a “routine pre-posting briefing meeting” at all then.

O’Donnell omits the Herzilya Conference but includes the dinner. Again, what O’Donnell says is quite extraordinary to any FCO insider:

6 February in Tel Aviv. This was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK Ambassador was present.

The idea that the Secretary of State for Defence can have, together with the British Ambassador to a country, a “Private dinner” with officials of that country is just plain nonsense. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office refuse to say who the “Senior Israelis” with Fox, Gould and Werritty were. They also refuse to say who paid for that dinner.

My information is that the reason that dinner is characterised as “Private” is that it included senior Israeli military and Mossad representatives and that the subject of discussion was preparing the diplomatic ground for a military attack on Iran.

Matthew Gould is British Ambassador. He represents this country at all times and every utterance he makes on diplomatic or policy questions to an official of his host country is “official”. We are entitled to know:

Who paid for the dinner?
Which senior Israelis were at that dinner in Israel on 6 February 2011 with Gould, Fox and Werritty?
What was discussed?

O’Donnell omits the fact that Gould, Fox and Werritty were plotting from before Fox became Secretary of State. O’Donnell mentions only two of the four meetings between all three that we know about. He separates those two meetings by seven paragraphs, does not mention Gould by name at the second reference, and gives deliberately false characterisations of those meetings. This is misdirection on an epic scale.

Werritty visited Iran to meet opposition groups while Gould was serving in the Embassy there. Atlantic Bridge, the Fox-Werritty fake charity, was operating in the US when Gould was serving in the British Embassy in Washington with specific responsibility for US-Iranian relations.

Both O’Donnell and the FCO have listed only meetings at which Fox, Gould and Werritty were all three present. They have refused to say how many times Gould met Werritty without Fox, or how many telephone conversations or written or electronic communications there have been between Gould and Werritty.

I started this investigation on a tip-off. The FCO’s confirmation that Gould met Werritty and Fox while Fox was still in opposition confirms that some of what my informant says is true. An overwhelming mass of circumstantial evidence and the government’s lies, misleading statements and refusal to clarify some very simple facts, leaves me convinced that the truth has been found.

Werritty received such large amounts of Zionist lobby funding because he was, with Fox, promoting an attack on Iran – an agenda in which Matthew Gould had got himself wrapped.