craig

Nick Clegg The Death of Voting Reform

 in Lib Dems by | View Comments

I am a strong supporter of proportional representation, by the single transferable vote. I believe it would open up our politics and roll back some of the corporatism that makes our national politics so unresponsive. The purpose of this post is not to argue that case; we can do that another day.

Alternative Vote seems to me only very marginally preferable to first past the post. Rather than everyone having a good chance to be represented in a multi-member constituency, increasing diversity, AV advantages the inoffensive, it brings the elevation of mundanity. It is only marginally better than FPTP, which advantages the offensive and the funded to the exclusion of everyone else. The main reason I shall vote yes in the referndum is that at least AV will dispense with the ridiculous argument that the British people are incapable of ranking 1,2,3.

But after Barnsley Central it must be extremely likely that the AV referendum will be lost, because the electorate will fear it will bring an electoral advantage to Nick Clegg.

I rejoined the LibDems after Norwich North because I learnt from that experience that electoral politics in the UK are near impossible for an individual to crack. Ironic then that, as just an individual, I polled very nearly as well in Norwich North as the LibDems did in Barnsley – not just as a whole national party, but as a party in government. Indeed, as just an individual in Blackburn in 2005 I polled significantly better than the LibDems did in Barnsley Central.

Not only did I rejoin the LibDems, but at the LibDem Special Conference in Birmingham I voted for the coalition. But that was for a coalition agreement that bears no relation to what the government has actually done. I did not vote for £9,000 tuition fees. The LibDems could have abstained on tuition fees as the agreement I voted for provided – but it turns out that agreement was merely to placate the membership and bore no relation to what the right wing enthusiast Clegg actually intended to do in government.

Free schools, £9,000 tuition fees, ideological market mechanism reform of the NHS bringing yet more bureaucracy, internal invoicing, accountants and waste, 28 day detention, the continuation of control orders, war without end, children still in immigration detention, no sign of an open inquiry on complicity with torture…. I shall be astonished if anyone votes LibDem ever again. There must be some extremely happy Tories out there. Did they always know Clegg would turn out to be to the right of Thatcher?

View with comments

Perspective

 in Afghanistan by | View Comments

NATO air strikes have killed 80 civilians in Afghanistan in the last two weeks alone, including nine small boys who were out together collecting firewood. We have been raining down death from the sky around the world on innocent people pretty well every single day since 2002. Gadaffi’s use of air power is very wrong, but is on nothing like this scale.

The people who are positing a no-fly zone over Libya are precisely the people who support and sustain the bombing of children in Afghanistan. The lack of self-knowledge, the complete absence of any perspective, is bewildering.

View with comments

Western Cant on the Middle East

 in Middle East / Uncategorized by | View Comments

Consider a few facts:

The Obama administration had two years ago stopped all US funds to human rights defenders and civil society groups in Egypt, stipulating that all aid must go through the Mubarak regime

President Karimov of Uzbekistan killed more peaceful demonstrators in a single day in May 2005 than Colonel Gadaffi has done in the Libyan uprising so far. Yet Karimov in the fast three months had a visit from Hillary Clinton, a new military supply agreement with the United States and new partnership agreement with NATO, an official visit to the EU in Brussels, and new tarriff preferences for slave picked Uzbek cotton entering the EU. Most people in Uzbekistan have not a clue the arab revolutions are happening, such is state control of meida and internet and blocking of airwaves

In 1991, when the allies embarked on the First Gulf War to retake Kuwait from Iraq, John Major and George Bush sr declared that, rather than simply put the absolute Kuwaiti monarchy back on its throne (which it had unheroically run away from), the price of western soldiers being asked to risk their lives was the democratisation of Kuwait. That was immediately forgotten after the war. Ordinary British, US and other taxpayers paid out billions to put one of the richest families in the world back in sole charge of massive oil reserves. The Kuwaiti royal family still has a total monopoly of executive power, with a talking shop parliament and very limited electorate.

I could go on. If you want to go to the absolute font of western hypocrisy, take this from David Cameron:

It is not for me, or for governments outside the region, to pontificate about how each country meets the aspirations of its people. It is not for us to tell you how to do it, or precisely what shape your future should take. There is no single formula for success, and there are many ways to ensure greater, popular participation in Government

This was spoken in Dubai as Cameron travelled the region with a gang of millionaire arms dealers trying to flog weapons to any Emir wanting to buy. In other words, we feel free to insist on democracy in Libya. If we don’t do so in Saudi Arabia, it is not because we are hypocrites, it is because there is no single formula. Democracy would be quite wrong for Uzbekistan and Bahrain, and until two months ago it was quite wrong for Egypt too. It might hurt our allies. But it is absolutely essential yesterday in Libya and Zimbabwe.

Words scarcely suffice to condemn this cant. In Bahrain the majority are struggling for more freedom from their minority rulers, to a deafening silence from the West. In Yemen, a gross dictator hangs on with every kind of US support. In Egypt, the US policy of propping up Mubarak, then their replacement policy of a managed transition to Suleyman, have failed one by one and now we have a military dictatorship which is every day abducting and torturing pro-democracy campaigners. Over fifty Tahrir Square demonstrators have been sentenced to at least three years jail each by military tribunals in the last week, to total western silence. The US aim of securing an entrenched pro-Israeli government continues to be pushed forward by every available means.

That odious charlatan Niall Ferguson, producer for the right wing US market of popular history devoid of original research , informs us that democracy is not something arabs can do. For him to cite the invasion of Iraq, which he supported, as evidence that you cannot succeed with democracy in Arab countries, is sickening on so many levels. That democracy might be better implanted without killing hundreds of thousands of intended recipients, like so much else, does not occur to him.

Ferguson’s ludicrous assertion – inaccurate even for a generalisation – about lack of property rights in the Islamic world making democracy impossible there, needs to be challenged.

Firstly, it is by no means clear that democracy can only exist in a society with entrenched property rights. Ghana, for example, is widely viewed as the model African democracy, yet it is virtually impossible to own land there other than leasehold from the “stool”, or local chieftaincy. The vast majority of Ghanaians are not property owning in the Ferguson sense, but democracy and human rights function very well, thank you.

Secondly, there is a wide variety of property models throughout the Islamic world, and Islam has little or nothing to do with why the model is so different in Turkey, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

The notions that arabs and/or muslims are incapable of democracy is of course the staple of neo-conservative thinking. For there to be a “Clash of civilisations”, Islamic civilisation must be portrayed as incompatible with all modernity, as retrograde, autocratic and violent. Again, that is far from the truth.

That Islam and democracy are incompatible (and Turkey therefore presumably a mirage) has been the excuse for the Western backing of Mubarak, Karimov and endless other “hard men”. We really back them because they serve western interests over oil and gas, over Israel, or over Afghanistan. But we pretend that we back them because the only alternative to them is radical Islam.

That false dichotomy was given a seeming substance by our complicity with the torturers of Egypt, Uzbekistan, Tunisia and Morocco. The regime torturers happily made dissidents twisting in unimaginable agony admit that they wanted an al-Qaida state. The regime passed this on to the CIA and MI6, and they and western political leaders happily swallowed this claptrap because it united their interests with those of their client regime in a grubby circle of lying self-justification. I hope that puts Murder in Samarkand in context for you.

As for Gadaffi, we should not make the mistake of presuming he is not bad, because he is hypocritically denounced by those who support other dictators as bad or worse. Gadaffi is bad, and he is barking mad (you can read of my personal experience of him in The Catholic Orangemen of Togo). I hope that the Libyan people manage to oust him and bring democracy, though I fear this curiously low level civil war could drag on for a long while.

But the West should stay out. That the powers which are still trying, in the interests of Israel, to limit the democratic reform in Egypt, which still occupy Afghanistan, and are still propping up their puppet Gulf autocracies, should interfere with air or ground intervention, would be deeply unhelpful and the consequences are unreckonable. I can see an argument for shipping food and medical supplies to Benghazi and Tobruk, but that is the limit of western interference which might be helpful.

The Arab people have shown they are more than capable of seizing their own destiny. This must be for the Libyan people and other Arab states to sort out. For years, Western commentators spoke of “the Arab street” as a coherent public opinion, but as though it were natural that such opinion was at complete odds with the views of autocratic leaders, and the arab voice had no potential for translation to action. That has changed and the Arab voice must reverberate loudly enough to shake down more autocratic leaders – Gadaffi included.

The undeniable fact of the existence of the articulate young protestors of Tunisia, Tahrir Square, Bahrain, Muscat and elsewhere should have killed forever the figleaf behind which Western viciousness sought to skulk, that there are only two Arab political options: dictatorship or theocracy. In fact the Arab peoples are teeming with possibility and vast untapped human potential, waiting to form dynamically into new political and social organisation. We should leave them alone, stop arming their repressors and give them that chance.

View with comments

It Looks Wonderful – But Does it Work?

 in Other / Uncategorized by | View Comments

I have a brand new shiny blog but can I fly it? I’ll never get over Macho Grande.

Infinite thanks to Tim Ireland for the extraordinary amount of work involved in getting this blog moved over from Movable Type to WordPress. Not to mention cleaning out over 300,000 pieces of spam. Transferring the 57,000 (yes, really that many) remaining genuine comments on to the Intense Debate plugin has been even more onerous and is still not complete. While that process goes on, comments will have to be delayed by moderation. Volunteer moderators from longstanding and trusted associates and contributors are welcome.

Thanks as ever also to Richard Kastelein and expathos for their fearless hosting.

Many of you will be familiar with WordPress; input is welcome on the format, look and working of the new site and which plugins you would particularly want to see.

Events over the last few months has made this blog’s largely international focus, particularly on human rights and the Islamic world as impacted by Western foreign policy, more relevant than ever. So if I can post this, then enough of the admin and let me get down to the real work.

View with comments

Raymond Davis Does Not Have Diplomatic Immunity

 in Afghanistan by | View Comments

Take this as definitive from a former Ambassador

There are five circumstances in which Raymond Davis, the American killer caught in Pakistan, might have diplomatic immunity. They are these.

1) He was notified in writing to the government of Pakistan as a member of diplomatic staff of a US diplomatic mission in Pakistan, and the government of Pakistan had accepted him as such in writing.

2) He was part of an official delegation engaged in diplomatic negotiations notified to the government of Pakistan and accepted by them.

3) He was a member of staff of an international organisation recognised by Pakistan and was resident in Pakistan as a member of diplomatic staff working for that organisation, or was in Pakistan undertaking work for that organisation with the knowledge and approval of the Pakistani authorities.

4) He was an accredited diplomat elsewhere and was in direct tranist through Pakistan to his diplomatic posting.

5) He was an accredited courier carrying US diplomatic dispatches in transit through Pakistan.

2) to 5) plainly do not apply. The Obama administration is going for 1). My information, from senior Pakistani ex-military sources that I trust, is firmly that the necessary diplomatic exchange of notes does not exist that would make Davis an accredited US diplomat in Pakistan, but that the State Department is putting huge pressure on the government of Pakistan to overlook that fact. This passes a commonsense test – if the documents did exist. La Clinton would have waved them at us by now.

A brilliant article here by Glenn Greenwald.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/02/21/heartsandminds/index.html

View with comments

Berlusconi’s Cut

 in UK Policy by | View Comments

A very senior diplomatic source told me yesterday that Berlusconi is frantic lest Gadaffi falls and the channels are revealed by which Berlusconi gets a cut on the huge amounts of Libyan oil and gas lifted to Italy. Just at the moment that would be too much even for Berlusconi to survive.

This morning I see the Italian foreign minister is warning 300.000 Libyan refugees will fly to Europe if Gadaffi falls – as though there will be none if he stays. I have checked with other diplomatic sources, and they confirm that Italy is using the refugee warning to argue that Europe should back Gadaffi, and not impose sanctions. That point is not coming over in the mainstream media.

This blog will be back up completely revamped next week. But I thought this snippet was important. If someone wants to repost it somewhere comments are possible…

View with comments

Israeli Hubris

 in Palestine by | View Comments

Israel’s unbelievably smug and callous “report” on the murderous attack on the Gaza aid convoy, showed again the State of Israel’s fundamentally racist view of which human beings are expendable. It also showed how little Israel is concerned about completing the alienation of the regional power, Turkey.

The Al Jazeera revelations of how desperately the Palestinian negotiators were trying to secure peace at almost any price, again showed the incredible hubris of the Israelis in turning it all down flat. If gaining all that they officially desire was not acceptable to the Israelis, then the true Israeli goal is indeed the genocide of the Palestinians.

But all that arrogance was predicated on the sense of security of having the American puppet Mubarak securing their back. Suddenly this morning the Israelis don’t look quite so clever, do they?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all those US taxpayer paid Abrams tanks deployed on the streets of Cairo, end up defending the Palestinians.

View with comments

Hard Times for the US

 in Afghanistan by | View Comments

It is hard not to feel happy at the discomfiture of US hubris.

Not only is the most important US/Israeli client dictator in danger of overthrow in Egypt, the last remaining rationale of their Afghan policy is collapsing, with Russia moving in on the trans Afghan gas pipeline.

http://centralasianewswire.com/Russian-TAPI-involvement-damages-Turkmenistan-US/viewstory.aspx?id=3075

Interesting times.

View with comments

The EU – Less Ethical than Tesco or Wal-Mart!

 in Uzbekistan by | View Comments

Today the European Union hosts Karimov in Brussels, which will be used to promote Karimov in his dictatorship, while western journalists will be given no access to the visit in Brussels.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/rights-groups-slate-european-union-for-hosting-uzbek-dictator-2192479.html

Here is a short piece I have written for the Independent. I was allowed only 400 words, so kept it simple on Afghanistan rather than also tried to explain regional hydrocarbon politics:

Today the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, will host an official visit by the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov.

This may seem a peculiar thing for the European Union to do. Karimov is infamous for the massacre of over 700 demonstrators at Andijan in 2005, for the boiling alive of dissident Muzaffar Avazov in 2002, for some 10,000 political prisoners held in ex-Soviet gulags, for banning all Western media organisations and reporters, for the imprisonment in lunatic asylums of dissident journalists including his own nephew, for the jailing of HIV campaigners for corrupting public morals…

But I do have to add the vast wealth of the Karimov family compared to a deeply impoverished population, most of whom are forced into labour on state cotton plantations. More than a million children are removed from education every year, for periods varying from one week to three months, and forced to pick cotton by hand in dreadful and sometimes fatal conditions. This scandal of the cotton fields is so bad that retailers, including Tesco, Walmart and Marks & Spencer, have entirely voluntarily removed all Uzbek cotton content from their products sold, and put resources into audit provisions to make sure this sticks.

Yet the European Commission maintains there is insufficient evidence of forced child labour in Uzbekistan for EU trade sanctions ?” a straightforward lie, as anybody can discover in five minutes on the internet.

So why is the EU less moral than Tesco or Walmart? The answer is a single word ?” Afghanistan. Twenty per cent of supplies to Nato forces in Afghanistan now transit Uzbekistan, and the figure has steadily been increasing as supplies through Pakistan are increasingly tenuous. Germany also has an airbase in Uzbekistan. What is in it for Karimov? Political backing for his dictatorship, and juicy Pentagon supply contracts routed through his daughter.

It is a prime example of the way our disastrous Afghan policy is not just failing in Afghanistan, but poisoning an entire nexus of foreign policy issues. The effect of that corrosion will be seen vividly in Brussels today. Uniquely, no journalists are allowed to accredit for today’s official visit. Only the official Commission and Uzbek government media will be allowed to take pictures, to be relayed to Uzbekistan’s endarkened population as more evidence that their infallible President bestrides the world stage.

The EU are making sure that it feels just like home for Karimov.

My position as British ambassador in Tashkent was highly uncomfortable. I cared about the human rights of ordinary Uzbeks, and I assure you that the British government didn’t.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/craig-murray-afghanistan-is-the-reason-why-eu-ignores-atrocities-2192480.html

I am sorry comments are still not open here yet while the site undergoes a complete rebuild on a new platform. But you can comment over at the indie.

View with comments

A Better Service Will Be Resumed

 in Life by | View Comments

Very sorry that we can’t discuss and there have been so few posts of late. You will be glad to know that work is underway and finally we are moving to a new and better blog platform in a few days!

[ADMIN NOTE – Comments may be closed, even on recent entries, during this move.]

View with comments

Bliar and the Patsies

 in War in Iraq by | View Comments

The Chilcot Inquiry was summed up for me ten minutes ago, when Tony Blair quoted an extraordinary passage – I believe from George Bush, but didn’t catch his attribution. The quote said that WMD were not things that had a physical existence, but rather existed in the minds of scientists who could create them, other than nuclear weapons, at very short notice.

This absurd expedition into metaphysical justification was greeted by Sir Roderic Lyne’s much vaunted forensic brain. Lyne commented:

“I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.”

What?

What?

What?

It is absurd. Given that Blair had been issuing prophetic warnings against the Islamic menace which wants to kill hundreds of thousands, then the disconnect between the alleged lack of physical barriers to the creation of WMD, and the failure of terrorists to produce one in the decade of the “War on Terror”, is startling. Not to mention the need for delivery systems, which are hard to whip up in the kitchen.

What a farce. Another platform for Blair to spout his neo-con certainties of hate and bang the drum for war on Iran. In the first 90 seconds Blair had conflated Saddam Hussein and 9/11 and called for action – plainly meaning military action – against Iran. Meanwhile the establishment patsies look concerned and dance around small points, to give an air of spurious credibility to their pre-determined exoneration.

View with comments

The Laws of Physics Disproven

 in Dundee Uni by | View Comments

The passing of wood through glass is a remarkable feat. There are those who believe that royalty can perform miracles – there is a well developed cult around the vain and vicious Charles I, for example. It now appears that the presence of the future Charles III also has the ability to suspend the laws of physics.

The police have now issued extensive CCTV footage of the attack on the vehicle of Charles and Camilla on the fringes of the anti-tuition fee demonstrations, and the media have been replete with more nonsense about Camilla being poked with a stick. Yet of all the CCTV footage and numerous photographs, there is no evidence at all of this attack and all the images show the car windows to be closed – as they would be. One gets cracked but not holed.

There is in fact no evidence at all of any intent to harm the persons of the expensive royal layabouts, as opposed to discomfiting them and damaging their vehicle. It is fascinating that the media continually repeats the “Camilla attacked with a stick” line when it is so blatantly untrue. There appears to be a closing of ranks by the whole Establishment to perpetuate the myth – both the Home Office and St James Palace have deliberately fostered the myth by refusing to confirm or deny.

Personally I would not touch Camilla with a bargepole. I dislike violence at demonstrations. Demonstrations, good, riots, bad is my basic mantra. Attacks on people in a civil demonstration are always wrong, including attacks on the police unless in self defence. I did not join in the outrage at the prosecutions of violent demonstrators after the big Lebanon demonstration in London, because I personally witnessed the group hurling dangerous missiles at police who were neither attacking, threatening nor kettling them. That is absolutely unacceptable.

But a policy as appalling as the withdrawal of state funding from university teaching, carried out by Nick Clegg by one of the most blatant political breaches of fatih with the public in history, , is bound to provoke huge anger. The government reaps what it sows. Demonstrators should not set out to hurt people. But all the evidence shows they had no intention of hurting Charles and Camilla.

I have personally worked closely with the royal family’s close protection officers in organising two state visits abroad, and plainly they too could see there was no intent to injure – that is why weapons were not drawn. They deserve commendation rather than the crap spouted out by Sky News, who seem to think they should have gunned down the odd student.

All of which serves to take the focus off vicious police attacks on students and the use of kettling to detain people who were seeking peacefully to express their views. Kettling people in extreme cold and with no access to toilet facilities raises questions on illegal detention which genuine liberals in government would wish to address. What is it? Is it a form of arrest? What is the status of the fenced pens into which people are herded? Should they not be formalised as places of police detention, and individuals booked in and given access to lawyers? If that is not possible, this detention – which can be for many hours – is not lawful.

View with comments

Gazan Youth Breaks Out

 in Palestine by | View Comments

I expect you need to be on Facebook to go to this link:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Gaza-Youth-Breaks-Out-GYBO/118914244840679

The Guardian published their manifesto yesterday. It may be superfluous but I nonetheless think it should be repeated as widely as possible:

GAZA YOUTH’S MANIFESTO FOR CHANGE: “We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream…” – read more below!

Contact us: [email protected]

Pls consider supporting us by taking one or more of the following actions:

1) Promoting our manifesto by sharing it on your profile on Facebook

2) Sending an email to your friends asking them to like our page FB

3) Translating the manifesto to your language and sending it to us (we have it in Arabic, Hebrew, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Chinese, Russian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish)

4) Sending the manifesto to journalists in your country

5) Making organizations in your countries that are concerned with the Palestinian issue and/or youth rights know about our existence

6) Posting links about violation of youth’s rights in Gaza on our wall

7) Suggesting us ideas for reaching out to a greater number of people

???|__

View with comments

Still at Schiphol

 in Life by | View Comments

I am becoming quite fond of my little corner of Schiphol airport. I have put up my Christmas cards and a few bits of tinsel. I now have a boarding card for the 0800 to Manchester. This is the sixth boarding card I have had. It is very hard to understand why, time after time, they don’t know a flight is cancelled until some time after it was due to leave and all the passengers have queued at the gate for hours.

Of course, Manchester is a lot further from Ramsgate than Schiphol is, so even if the flight atually goes, this represents rather dubious progress.

Happy New Year everybody.

Remarkably, KLM delivered my lost luggage, including my laptop, at 9.30 pm on New Year’s Eve. At that time a pretty lively party was already in full swing,much improved by the presence of a great many beautiful young women, mostly from Latvia. I am not sure why; my life as ever consists of a bewildering succession of chance encounters with really nice people. I am in the fortunate position of being able to say that Nadira was the most lovely of all, without indulging in dutiful hyperbole.

It was an extremely happy Christmas. Having my mum, both my brothers and all my three chidren together was as great as it was rare.

We have been through the laptop in lost luggage discussion before. The problem is that my shoulders dislocate at the drop of a hat, and I travel without hand luggage to avoid an accident.

2011 is going to be a very important year for me. particularly the first quarter. A number of crucial events are going either to set me up financially for the rest of my life, or result in real distress and failure. At present I have reason to be very optimistic. I am also very absorbed in my life of Alexander Burnes, which I hope will help establish a serious academic reputation.

The Portuguese edition of Murder in Samarkand has sold unexpectedly well in Brazil. The translation of the Turkish edition has just been finished.

I hope to do a Wikileaks retrospective in the next couple of days. Just a quick thought on the case of the poor young gardener in Bristol. Of the Jill Dando case, long before Barry Bulsara’s succesful appeal I blogged that this appeared to be a miscarriage of justice in which the police had fitted up the local weirdo.

Despite not being enamoured of landlords in general, I fear the same dynamic is at work in Bristol, albeit Chris Jefferies is much more intellectually capable than Bulsara. My instinct is that the police have picked up on Jefferies for being camper than a boy scout jamboree and archer than Trajan.

Jefferies’ release on bail has me worried that there was nothing against him other than the “He’s a weird one, guv” instinct of some not very bright cop. The case needs to be closely watched as history shows that the powers of the police to make the evidence fit the suspect are considerable.

View with comments

Why Students Must Join the Lib Dems

 in Lib Dems by | View Comments

A great many people are asking me why I am not leaving the Lib Dems. Well, I am a party member because of John Bright and John Stuart Mill. I am not leaving it because of a nonentity like Nick Clegg.

I am hugely angry over tuition fees. The policy itself, with the effective withdrawal of the state from university teaching and the reinforcement of social division, is a terrible disaster. The blatant display of political opportunism and bad faith by Cless and his ilk will poison politics for a generation.

But not only am I staying in the Lib Dems, I am seeking actively to recruit students. A very high proportion of the student vote went to the Lib Dems at the last election. Those genuine Lib Dem voters are absolutely entitled to join the party. They voted Lib Dem – this is not entryism from outside.

Every Lib Dem MP must win a majority of a vote of his local party members to be reselected.

Under clause 11.7 of the Federal Constitution if a sitting MP wishes to be reselected they have to either:

win a majority vote of the members present at a local party general meeting (conducted by secret ballot)

or

If that resolution is defeated then the MP can request a ballot of all members of the local party.

http://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-time-to-end-the-special-treatment-for-sitting-mps-22319.html

I want to see many, many students join the party, in places like, oh, Sheffield Hallam, for example. The answer to the disillusion of students with our democratic system is for them to join the party and actively participate in, oh, Nick Clegg’s reselection vote, for example.

View with comments

Cold Weather Failures

 in Life by | View Comments

The good news is that I am at Schiphol airport with a passable internet connection for the first time in three weeks. The bad news is that I am at Schiphol airport a great deal longer than I anticipated. Schiphol is colder than Heathrow and has mpre snow than Heathrow. It is operating normally – except for flights to the UK, of course.

A combination of crazed right wing thinking and crazed left wind thinking, so typical of the UK, is why our airports are rubbish.

The crazed right wing thinking is that our privatised infrastructure operates on the basis of maximising short term income. BAA is a renter of luxury goods retail space and the planes are just an unavoidable inconvenience. Following modern capitalist dogma, it carries no redundancy. It has only enough staff to just run the airport if they are all present and at full stretch. It can’t cope with a percentage not being able to get to work; it has no built in insurance of excess capacity.

BAA invests in only enough cold weather equipment to cope with a mild to normal winter. It has not tied up capital in equipment that may be fully needed only once in every five years. It crosses its fingers and hopes – it has, in effect, no insurance.

It is not of course unique. The philosophy of just in time ordering that transformed cash flows two decades ago, means total collapse if transport is disrupted. You hold no stock, carry no excess of anything.

It is this ideological commitment to short term profit maximisation that makes capitalism an unsafe model for British public infrastructure.

But then there adds to the chaos the left wing rubbish of health and safety culture. A man may not unload bags if there is any ice under his boots. He may slip. All risk must be eliminated and we must live hermetically sealed from our environment.

Weirdly the health and safety bullshit has become a part of corporate culture, an intrinsic part of management speak, trotted out by people who would sell baby parts to turn a buck, but not if there was a danger someone in the workplace would slip on the blood. Health and

safety is a mantra divorced of either morality or common sense.

Now where is that free champagne?

View with comments

They got the wrong person

 in Sleaze by | View Comments

There are many thousands of people imprisoned in Uzbekistan alone who should not be imprisoned and who suffer much worse conditions than even the genuine horrors of Wandsworth being visited on Julian Assange. But the Assange case has implications for ever deteriorating Western freedoms which should not be overlooked.

Then there are many war criminals who ought to be in jail and who are not. Most prominent of these are Bush, Blair, Cheney, Straw and their crew. A minor figurewho ought to be in jail is Anna Ardin. Here are two tweets she published after being “raped” by Julian Assange:

‘Julian wants to go to a crayfish party, anyone have a couple of available seats tonight or tomorrow? #fb’

‘Sitting outdoors at 02:00 and hardly freezing with the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing! #fb’

She subsequently deleted and tried to expunge those. I doff my hat to Rixstep:

http://rixstep.com/1/20101001,01.shtml

For another avowed feminist trying to bring Assange down, analyse the use of language in this article by the Guardian’s useless Helen Piddle. For a worm like her to use words like bizarre and raggle-taggle in relation to John Pilger really defies rationality.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/08/julian-assange-celebrity-supporters

View with comments

Ludicrous Attack on Assange

 in UK Policy by | View Comments

The decision to put Julian Assange in a cell over ludicrous sexual offence allegations is a politically motivated act that must be resisted. Assange has never been in hiding from the police, and there is no reason at all to believe he would abscond if granted bail.

This is kompromat – the use of sexual allegations to denigrate a person perceived as a threat to the state. They did it to Charles Parnell and Roger Casement and, a lowlier case, to me. This is an article I wrote on August 25:

The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat”. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.

Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.

Bizarrely the offence for which Julian is wanted for questioning in Sweden was dropped from rape to sexual harassment, and then from sexual harassment to just harassment. The precise law in Swedish, as translated for me and other Sam Adams alumni by our colleague Major Frank Grevil, reads:

“He who lays hands on or by means of shooting from a firearm, throwing of stones, noise or in any other way harasses another person will be sentenced for harassment to fines or imprisonment for up to one year.”

So from rape to non-sexual something. Actually I rather like that law – if we had it here, I could have had Jack Straw locked up for a year.

Julian tells us that the first woman accuser and prime mover had worked in the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC and had been expelled from Cuba for anti-Cuban government activity, as well as the rather different persona of being a feminist lesbian who owns lesbian night clubs.

Scott Ritter and I are well known whistleblowers subsequently accused of sexual offences. A less well known whistleblower is James Cameron, another FCO employee. Almost simultaneous with my case, a number of the sexual allegations the FCO made against Cameron were identical even in wording to those the FCO initially threw at me.

Another fascinating point about kompromat is that being cleared of the allegations – as happens in virtually every case – doesn’t help, as the blackening of reputation has taken effect. In my own case I was formerly cleared of all allegations of both misconduct and gross misconduct, except for the Kafkaesque charge of having told defence witnesses of the existence of the allegations. The allegations were officially a state secret, even though it was the government who leaked them to the tabloids.

Yet, even to this day, the FCO has refused to acknowledge in public that I was in fact cleared of all charges. This is even true of the new government. A letter I wrote for my MP to pass to William Hague, complaining that the FCO was obscuring the fact that I was cleared on all charges, received a reply from a junior Conservative minister stating that the allegations were serious and had needed to be properly investigated – but still failing to acknowledge the result of the process. Nor has there been any official revelation of who originated these “serious allegations”.

Governments operate in the blackest of ways, especially when it comes to big war money and big oil money. I can see what they are doing to Julian Assange, I know what they did to me and others (another recent example – Brigadier Janis Karpinski was framed for shoplifting). In a very real sense, it makes little difference if they murdered David Kelly or terrified him into doing it himself. Telling the truth is hazardous in today’s Western political system.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/08/julian_assange_1.html

There are a couple of things to add. The lead complainant is a serial crier of rape who made allegations against someone else which were found groundless, and has published a guide to sexual revenge over men. She consulted with the second complainant before the second complainant went to the police; these are not two unrelated complaints. The second one relates to a Swedish offence of not wearing a condom.

This from Danish WMD whistelblower – jailed for two years for whistleblowing – Major Frank Grevil:

Comparison of crime statistics between the three Scandinavian countries,

which have historically a highly similar societal structure, gives the

remarkable result that the incidence of sexual crimes is about ten times

higher in Sweden than in Denmark or Norway. Usually Sweden’s higher

proportion of unassimilated immigrants from first and foremost islamic

countries is blamed, but it would seem to be only a minor part of the

explanation. Rather, political instructions to the police seem to be the

major reason!

Critics maintain that Sweden has turned into a gynocracy, with some of the

most hateful female politicians – front figures for a party called

“Feministiskt initiativ”* – having publicly declared that male fetuses

should be selectively aborted, and all adult males castrated!

In such an atmosphere of hate, the Swedish police has been instructed to put

all alleged crimes of even the most remotely sexual character under the

statistical heading “rape”. This includes consenting intercourse between

teenagers with the female part being slightly under-age. It also includes

consenting intercourse where the female part was drunk.

So whoever initiated the plot to go for Assange on Swedish sexual charges knew what they were doing.

I am not a fan of radical feminists. They are hate filled individuals whose very souls are ugly. They seem particularly fixated with causing trouble to political radicals. Anyone who knows the real story of the Tommy Sheridan debacle knows that. They succeeded in alienating me from the Stop the War movement

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

Now, very much more importantly, they are gunning for Julian Assange at a crucial time for democracy. Silly little girls.

View with comments