Download file

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As frequently detailed on this site, Jack Straw’s relationship with British Aerospace has been a consistent thread in his political career and in government he has been especially helpful to them, over the sale of Hawk jets to Indonesia, the stopping of the Saudi bribes investigation, corruption allegations in Tanzania, and doubtless in other ways I do not yet know fully about. Not to menoion the billions in arms sales they have made from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which he helped to promote. It probably was not entirely unhelpful either that Jack Straw’s wife, Alice Perkins, held Treasury and Cabinet Office jobs which involved policy on defence spending. Among the benefits to Jack Straw which are declared in public are substantial payments for his election expenses by a BAE director.

The huge bribes which the sleazebags in BAE gave to disgusting Saudi crooks were channelled through middlemen including Wafic Said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/nov/29/topstories3.politics

As the Guardian politely puts it: “Wafic Said is one of Britain’s wealthiest men. But how he accumulated his estimated £1bn fortune is somewhat opaque.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/07/bae17

In other words, he is a crook.

http://intl-news.blogspot.com/2006/11/uks-bae-systems-caught-bribing-saudi.html

But in this brave new world where Universities exist not to advance the sum of human knowledge, but to oil the wheels of commerce, being a succesful crook opens the door to governing boards and gilded statues amidst the groves of academe. Witness the (vomit warning) Oxford University Wafic Said Business School.

http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/news/archives/Main/Wafic+Said+creates+25+million+fund+for+Said+Business+School.htm

And who is this on the Said School’s Business Advisory Forum – oh look – it’s Alice Perkins, aka Mrs Jack Straw!!

http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/corporate/baf/

Some may think it is a bit strange for the wife of the Minister for Justice (sic) and Lord Chancellor to sit on the board of the foundation of a suspect in a major crime who has just been let off by the government on grounds of “National Security”. But in these brave days of New Labour, it doesn’t matter at all.

Jack Straw’s wife was a senior civil servant and I am sure she was entirely competent. But there are many thousand retired public employees around of equivalent rank, and they don’t get nominated to positions by dodgy Arab arms dealers, or for that matter to the board of that rip-off mis-managed monopoly, the British Airports Authority.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/aug/20/businesscomment.theairlineindustry?commentpage=1

Incidentally, there are some lovely people on the board of Said’s business school. There is the former chairman of Centrica, owners of British Gas who just put the price of fuel up 35%. And there is the former chairman of the Charities Commission. See my post on the Smith Institute immediately below.

Here are statements from Corner House and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade on today’s deeply shocking judgement by the Law Lords:

The Law Lords have this morning upheld an appeal by the Director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) against the High Court’s ruling that he acted unlawfully in terminating a corruption investigation into BAE Systems’ arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

The appeal followed a High Court judgment in April that the SFO, acting on government advice, had dropped the investigation following lobbying by BAE and a threat from Saudi Arabia to withdraw diplomatic and intelligence co-operation if the investigation were not dropped. This judgment was in response to a judicial review brought by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and The Corner House.

Nicholas Hildyard of The Corner House said:

“Now we know where we are. Under UK law, a supposedly independent prosecutor can do nothing to resist a threat made by someone abroad if the UK government claims that the threat endangers national security. The unscrupulous who have friends in high places overseas willing to make such threats now have a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card ?” and there is nothing the public can do to hold the government to account if it abuses its national security powers. Parliament needs urgently to plug this gaping hole in the law and in the constitutional checks and balances dealing with national security. With the law as it is, a government can simply invoke ‘national security’ to drive a coach and horses through international anti-bribery legislation, as the UK government has done, to stop corruption investigations.”

Symon Hill of CAAT said:

“BAE and the government will be quickly disappointed if they think that this ruling will bring an end to public criticism. Throughout this case we have been overwhelmed with support from people in all walks of life. There has been a sharp rise in opposition to BAE’s influence in the corridors of power. Fewer people are now taken in by exaggerated claims about British jobs dependent on the arms trade. The government has been judged in the court of public opinion. The public know that Britain will be a better place when BAE is no longer calling the shots.”

CAAT and The Corner House will issue a more detailed statement following an analysis of the Lords’ judgments.

They are going to have to chisel off the blindfold from the famous statue of justice at the Old Bailey. The Law Lords have killed off the cherished notion that justice is blind to outside concerns and does not discriminate between persons or favour the wealthy and powerful. They have also reversed the lesson of the beheading of Charles I – that the Executive is not above the law. Be ye ever so mighty, you can now stand above the law with impunity.

I am deeply shocked by the Law Lords’ judgement in the case of the bunch of crooks at BAE. The government of this country can simply suspend the rule of law by invoking “National security”, and can do so in the interests of the some of the worst corporate sleazebags in the world and the equally unlovely Saudi Royal Family. The government’s assertion of “National security” is itself deemed unchallengeable in the courts.

We have indeed moved far from liberty in this land. We have also lost as a nation any right to criticise African or other governments for corruption, when we actively connive at bribery and at protecting crooks.

My very soul feels sick.