Having a wonderful family Christmas, and thinking of our community of blog commenters, hoping that nobody is lonely today.

As regular readers know, my favourite carol is “It Came Upon The Midnight Clear”. Search for the lyrics and you will find that this verse is routinely censored out (missing from 8 of the first 10 versions on a google.com search for “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear Lyrics”):

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife
And hear the angels sing.

Cemeron wants us to adopt Christian values. Not bombing people would be a good start in the New Year.

Love to all.

I always seem to get back from Africa physically exhausted. I now have to tackle all the organisation of a family Christmas at the last minute. It is both the charm and disadvantage of this blog that the blogging is just me – it has no staff, and no revenue. That is not to devalue the contibution of the volunteer comment moderators – who help out with other things too – and the technical help from Tim, Clive and Richard and the the hosting team. But if I am not writing, nothing happens.

When I am lacking time or energy for deeper thinking, I tend to throw out some provocative thoughts from the top of my mind to see what people make of them. I am worrying today about the attacks on people of whom I disapprove.

I blogged recently about excessive police action against a blogger who argues against the existence of man-made climate change. I think he is wrong, but I don’t see why he should be the victim of police raids. I am going to surprise you by saying that I think that the hounding of Aidan Burley is going too far. Bad taste humour around the Nazis has existed throughout my lifetime – and was brought gloriously to the screen in the brilliant Mel Brooks’ The Producers (the first one, with the fantastic Zero Mostel).

Burley’s stag party seems rather a throwback to the Federation of Conservative Students of the late 70s, important elements of which delighted in singing Nazi songs to emphasise how right wing and taboo-free they were, with an element of self-parody (I speak as an eye-witness). You always worried there were genuine Third Reich sympathies in there – as of course there were so strongly in the British elite in the 1930s. That is the underlying worry in the Burley case – but if there were any evidence of real sympathy for Nazi views from Burley, it would have been dug up by now. I think we should just take this as bad taste humour a la Producers – a play which presumably cannot be produced under French law? Burley has been punished, revealed as a twit, and we should move on.

John Terry is a man whose TV persona and reported behaviour I have always found repulsive. I don’t know what he (or Suarez in a related case) actually said. I find racial abuse absolutely unacceptable. But again, I do not think that where it occurs between two individuals, and unless it is persistent and repeated over a period, it is a matter for the state and police. Not all bad behaviour should be a matter of higher intervention, and shaming can be a good sanction in itself. Both individuals and society have ways to sort things out without always involving the state or constituted organisations within it. I doubt Terry will do it again and it has been made plain that this is unacceptable behaviour in football. It is enough.

The same goes for Jeremy Clarkson. Again, total wanker. But nobody could have seen his TV appearance on the One Show and felt that he actually believed or advocated that strikers should be shot. His body language and tone of voice made it plain he was indulging in hyperbole with the object of being humorous. Exaggerated polemic should not be banned, or even censured. The real problem here is balance. Very right wing polemicists are very often allowed free rein to mouth off on broadcast media. On TV, opposing polemicists (like, err, me) are strictly banned. On radio, George Galloway on Talk Sport is pretty well a lone example. Personally I welcome the vigour of Clarkson’s expression – if only someone equally firm were allowed on to argue with him.

Finally, I am going to defend Herman Cain. No longer a candidate, and his tax and other policies were completely barking mad, therefore pretty mainstream Republican. But I saw very little wrong in anything he was alleged to have done in his love life. One woman alleged that he made a physical advance – put his hand on her leg – towards her in his car, after a dinner where she had asked him for help. It seems to me his behaviour was perfectly normal, and the important thing is she asked him to stop, and he did stop. If men were not allowed to make such advances, the human race would die out. Desisting once it is plain your advances are unwelcome is the important thing. The long term affair alleged was entirely mutual and consenting. Chatting up employees is tasteless, but ought not be a crime.

Burley, Terry, Clarkson and Cain are all people of whom, in different ways, I do not approve and with whose views on life I am heartily at odds. But I don’t hold the view that only people who hold certain approved views should be able to wander round and function, or that we should all be limited to certain highly constrained social behaviours. They are all, in various ways, victims of galloping political correctness. I thought I would express some sympathy for them. Human beings have a right to be wrong, and sometimes foolish. It is part of the human condition.

Ghana in general is a well balanced society with a good education system and a large middle class. But there is a huge social problem affecting those at the bottom of the ladder, which there appears no will at all among the political class even to acknowledge, let alone tackle, and that is rent.

Ghana’s agricultural production has never collapsed, unlike Nigeria, and the traditional patterns of society in rural areas have not broken down. Modern services, in terms of edication, electrification and clean water, have penetrated rural communities better than in any other African country, though there are still areas of concern, particularly in the North. But the overall good picture means that there has therefore been less extreme urban drift, less shanty town existence, than in most of the developing world, and therefore less urban violence.

But despite all this there is a terrible problem with the rent culture of Accra. The poor all rent housing, rather than own. Demand exceeds supply and landlords invariably demand three, or at the very least two, years’ rent in advance. This is absolutely established as the way the market operates, and for the poor there is no way around it. Three years’ rent is typically over one year’s income, and in consequence the poor are sucked into a permanent life of debt. This applies to the majority of people living in the City. Quite literally, a day never passes in which at least one Ghanaian doesn’t ask me to lend them the money for their rent; yesterday there were four. I help where I can.

This situation was already calamitous but is going to get much worse, as land values are already starting to soar with the coming of the oil industry. I have good friends at the highest levels in all the Ghanaian political parties, but they all seem to have been so indoctrinated with IMF economics that they do not even consider rent controls. Unfortunately the performance of both the NPP and the NDC in building social housing has been very poor. I am forced to the opinion that the plight of the poor is not actually a pressing concern in the minds of the educated classes in Ghana in general.

The fierce party political divisions in Ghana need to be put aside, and an all-party solution on social housing and on rents has to be pursued with vigour, as a primary use for some of Ghana’s oil revenues.

I have been against the hosting of the Olympics since the inception. It seemed a vainglorious waste of money, to enable politicians to wave the patriotic flag, even before they gave away all our money to the bankers. Now it is just crazy.

It is also scarey. It has been announced that 13,000 military personnel will be policing the event together with 8,000 private contractors and 12,000 police. There will be battleships on the Thames. Euronews has just quoted a British official as defending this as being in line with what was done in Beijing. But Beijing is not in a democracy. It also claims that London in 2012 will be the “safest place in the world”.

That is “safe” in the same way that Jean Charles De Menezes was safe with all those armed police around.

UPDATE In response to the outraged, my position is simple. The Iraq War killed hundreds of thousands and maimed millions. Dead or wounded included over a million children. Those who planned the Iraq war, including those who used media positions to propagandise for it, have lost entitlement to the signs of society’s respect.

The world will undoubtedly be a duller place without Christopher Hitchens. Oh, and a better one too.

British journalism is full of people of the same generationwho have lurched from the Trotskyist far left to a crazed neo-con agenda with no intervening period of sanity. I suspect the available riches for zionist propagandists are a major factor. Hitchens, Aaronovitch, Phillips, Cohen. You can probably think of others. A strange and extremely unpleasant manifestation of intellectual prostitution.

My thoughts today are with Bradley Manning, on trial in the USA. He has been subject to solitary confinement, abuse and humiliation, with the sexual humiliation overtones (being kept naked) which seem to permeate US military culture in so many ways.

The BBC is a disgrace. The reporter on BBC World just questioned “Whether Julian Assange manipulated and controlled an impressionable young man?” There has been absolutely zero direct evidence produced of any meeting or communication between Assange and Manning. There is the hearsay word of a hacker informant, whom someone should point towards a potter’s field. Both Assange and Manning deny any communication – a fact the BBC did not consider worth reporting.

The relationship between Adam Werritty and Matthew Gould was key to the events which led to the resignation of Britain’s defence minister. There is a great deal more evidence for the Gould-Werritty relationship than for the Assange-Manning relationship, yet the BBC refused to carry a single word on Gould-Werritty telling me it was “speculative”. The neo-con agenda at the BBC is something they no longer seek to disguise.

I am very worried by the report of a heavy handed police raid on Tallbloke, a blogger in Norfolk. According to this account, he was raided due to a link to leaked documents posted in a comments thread. We have become far too blase about the rapid erosion of civil liberties in this country. Norfolk is not devoid of serious crimes which these six detectives should be better employed in investigating.

I had not heard of Tallbloke and know nothing beyond the report to which I have linked. His blog discusses climate change at scientific levels well above my understanding, but scarcely seems a subject for the police. I do not share Tallboy’s views – in particular, I think man-made climate change is a fact we are not tackling with nearly sufficient seriousness. But whether or not I agree is irrelevant. What is important is the free speech issue. It is astonishing our media are criticising government handling of protest in Russia, when we have police raidng dissident bloggers in Norfolk which goes unnoticed.

Not even in Ghana can you escape the US propaganda surrounding the final pull-out of troops (but not oil companies) from Iraq. They leave Iraq “sovereign and free”, a variety of thuggish looking and dull Americans have just told us.

But being in Ghana I probably see rather more balance on TV than I would in the UK. For example, while there is still no official body count from the war, there is an official count of those wounded. The Iraqi Ministry of Health states, officially, that over 3 million were maimed.

Even though the Iraqi healthcare system was damaged by a decade of sanctions before the invastion, on the eve of the attack there were still over twice as many functioning healthcare clinics and hospitals as there are today, and nearly five times as many doctors working in them.

You won’t see that on BBC or Sky.

Adam Werritty has given an interview to the Spectator. I cannot find the original online, but there is a BBC report of it here.

It appears an exercise in misdirection. Sri Lanka is mentioned but never Israel. He denies having ever claimed to have any expertise in defence, despite the fact that “a certain expertise” was precisely Gus O’Donnell’s justification for his presence at the Ministry of Defence briefing meeting for Matthew Gould, British Ambassador to Israel.

Werritty asks “What had this ‘villainous’ Adam Werritty actually done?”, while being interviewed by a friendly neo-con rag. It is of course the journalist that should be asking that question, and Werritty has shunned everyone who might seriously ask about it. Meanwhile the parliamentary Table Office refuses to accept MPs’ questions about Werritty’s meetings with Gould, and the FCO refuses Freedom of Information requests for the correspondence between them.

I have not seen anybody deny that Gus O’Donnell’s report omitted a minimum of five Fox-Gould-Werritty meetings. The government refuses to answer questions and refuse to release the correspondence. But they have at no stage denied the allegations published here, around the web, and in the Independent on Sunday.

At the House of Commons Public Administration Committee, extreme zionist Conservative MP Robert Halfon attempted to defend Gus O’Donnell from accusations that he covered up a secret government policy with Israel over Iran, in which Werritty was involved. Halfon is the former paid Political Director of the Conservative Friends of Israel. His defence of O’Donnell – and Fox-Werritty – is extremely revealing.

Q381 Robert Halfon: Is it not for the Prime Minister to decide whether a Minister has broken collective responsibility, rather than yourself?
Sir Gus O’Donnell: Yes, absolutely. On this whole issue of violations of the code, I was just providing advice for the Prime Minister. It is the Prime Minister who decides.
Q382 Robert Halfon: So whether or not there was a separate policy is nothing to do with you; it is to do with the Prime Minister making a decision on whether or not a Minister broke the ministerial code.
Sir Gus O’Donnell: Yes.

I have no doubt that there is a “separate policy” on Israel and Iran, different to that acknowledged in public. I have no doubt that the Fox/Gould/Werritty meetings – and the blanket cover-up of them from scrutiny in parliament, documents or the media – afford a key way into it.

Being in Africa appears to make me more whimsical that when I am in my book-lined study at home. One of the joys of having small children is that you can get to do childish things, with an excuse. I took Cameron to the Hornby model centre in Broadstairs a few weeks ago. I never tire of watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And recently I re-watched Mary Poppins. I never much liked this, and still am not a great fan, but I had never before realised that the entire thing is an attack on materialism and the banks, particularly the City of London.

There is a moment when Banks finally rebels and turns on the big banker and says: “It turns out, with due respect, when all is said and done, that there’s no such thing as you!” The world of bankers has become even more of a fantasy since, of meaningless “wealth” unrelated to production, and casino speculation.

But the phrase sent my mind flitting to Newt Gingrich. The Palestinians are very real indeed – I used to have a Palestinian girlfriend, and she definitely existed. Palestine is mentioned in Herodotus, and if the bible bashing Gingrich can’t see that “Palestine” and “Philistine” are the same word, he is a greater fool than I supposed. Or does he believe in etymological creationism, that all words were formed by God on the same day in precisely their current form?

The misery of the Palestinian people, squeezed into ever shrinking bantustans, is very very real. What Gingrich is doing is indicating his acquiescence in the genocidal policy of Israel towards the Palestinians. Given what is already happening, it is not a great leap from declaring someone does not exist, to seeking to make that a reality.

Gingrich appears an evil, corrupt, debased manifestation of the real agenda of the United States. He is the picture in America’s attic, with all its evil shown up-front. The man is a walking caricature of seething hatreds. Surely it is Newt Gingrich who does not really exist?

This blog has received many scores of lawyers’ letters over the years and given every single one a rude reply. For the first time I am offering an apology.

David Steel says that he was only a director of Heritage Oil and Gas for two years, many years ago, and that he resigned as soon as he became aware of the associations of Heritage and Tony Buckingham with Sandline and Executive Outcomes. I accept that David Steel never had any association with Sandline and Executive Outcomes, and that my accusations of hypocrisy were unwarranted. So were claims on his property dealings and values. I am meeting his legal costs.

I am off to Ghana today, and it leads me to think about how very much I have come to love Ramsgate. Walks along the cliffs and beach and across Pegwell Bay with my family are a major part of my life. The sea has always been important to reviving my spirits. Ramsgate’s magnificent Edwardian esplanades stretch for miles, and the Ramsgate Society is now putting a commendable effort into their restoration. Ramsgate has almost entirely ceased to be a seaside holiday destination and I really do not quite understand why.

All these pictures are of places within an easy 15 minute walk of my house:

The depressingly ugly Turner Modern at Margate continues to attract the visitors, 99.99% of whom are blissfully ignorant of far greater art – and infinitely greater architecture – just down the road:

The lack of public interest in St Augustine’s and its highly limited opening hours (Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday afternoons only, from memory) appear to be a vicious circle.

Pegwell Bay still looks precisely as it did when Dyce painted it:

Right on the street where I live we have a particularly good ghost story:

All this just one hour and ten minutes from St Pancras. Unfortunately Ramsgate town centre has suffered disastrously from the decision to build a huge out of town shopping centre at Westwood Cross, but is showing some first signs of revival.

Want another reason to hate the big supermarkets? They are building a new Asda at the top of the High Street, and a fortnight ago the builders cut through a main sewer, flooding several houses including the local vet, where a number of recuperating animals in cages were drowned.

Here is a picture of a jumbo coming in to land over Ramsgate, taken from the Open at Sandwich. You can see my house in this photo:

I am baffled by the scheme to build a new airport in the Thames Estuary, when just down the road at Manston, and already right on Britain’s first HS1 High Speed Rail route, you have the second longest, now civil, runway in the UK, fully operational but working at 1% capacity. Manston can take the A380 without modification. I have seen proximity to Schiphol given as the reason Manston cannot be used, but it is further from Schiphol than Heathrow is from Gatwick.

Anyway, time to pack…

I spent last night as a guest at Selwyn College’s Cripps Feast, which was simply splendid. I would never have thought of a well-aged Rioja with the venison, but it worked extremely well.

As it’s the weekend, here’s a BBC interview with Nadira – in Uzbek. It reminds me that I am a remarkably fortunate individual.

An MP has been refused by the Commons Table Office when they tried to table a question asking how many meetings Gould had held with Werritty and/or Fox. The Table Office say the question has already been answered – even though we know for certain that the answer given was untrue.

This was the untrue – or at the very least radically unfull – answer cited by the Table Office:

Adam Werritty
Jeremy Corbyn: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what meetings HM ambassador to Israel has had with the Secretary of State for Defence (a) in Israel, (b) in the UK and (c)
31 Oct 2011 : Column 374W
elsewhere since May 2010; whether Mr Adam Werritty was present on any such occasion; and which (i) other officials and (ii) other people were present on each occasion. [76970]
Alistair Burt: All meetings which our ambassador to Israel has had with the former Secretary of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) since May 2010 are set out in the Cabinet Secretary’s report of 18 October 2011. Our ambassador to Israel was also invited by the former Defence Secretary to a private social engagement in summer 2010 at which Adam Werritty was present.

It is remarkable rule of parliament that apparently once a minister lies about something, parliamentarians are never allowed to ask about it again.

Meantime I have submitted a Freedom of Information request about a Freedom of Information request! I have asked for any notes, minutes, emails or correspondence relating to the handling of my FOI request for the Gould-Werritty correspondence. You may recall that my request was declined on grounds of cost, and dealt with in the remarkable time of just 76 minutes, the answer ebing received at 11.31 pm!

Finally the editor of the Jewish Chronicle has declined to publish the following article, which I submitted to him as a comment piece covering the JC’s promotion of the charges of anti-semitism against Paul Flynn for pursuing the Gould/Werritty issue. This is a shame, because the JC used to give space to liberal views, and because I believe a serious percentage of their readership would have been interested in the other side of the story.

There is a genuine argument that it was not wise to appoint Matthew Gould as Ambassador to Israel, and the accusations of anti-Semitism levelled at MP Paul Flynn MP by Dennis McShane, and reported by Martin Bright in the JC, do not address that argument.

Of course being Jewish does not in any way disqualify Matthew Gould from being a British ambassador. We are fortunate in the UK to have many brilliant Jewish diplomats. Jon Benjamin in Santiago is an example of an absolutely first rate ambassador with whom I was once privileged to work.

But Israel/Palestine remains, beyond dispute, a scene of unresolved conflict. The Israeli government, for example, recognises that conflict by invoking the San Remo Agreement to justify its naval embargo of Gaza. The San Remo agreement only applies in times of armed conflict. The dispute is also witnessed not just by events on the ground, but in diplomatic terms by the whole paraphernalia of Middle East peace negotiation, including the post of Quartet envoy occupied by Tony Blair.

So the situation surrounding Israel is not normal and involves conflict. That is, of course, by no means unique. Nearby Cyprus is subject to a dispute that has many parallels. I was Head of the FCO Cyprus section for three years, and tried hard but failed to make progress in resolving the “Cyprus question”. Winning trust was extremely difficult; it would have been well nigh impossible had I been ethnically Greek or Turkish. For the Head of the FCO Cyprus section, or for our Ambassador in Nicosia, to be ethnically Greek, Turkish or either shade of Cypriot just would not be practically useful. I hope nobody will accuse me of being anti-Greek or anti-Turk for saying so.

Similarly, it is just not helpful to have an Ambassador in Tel-Aviv who is Jewish or Palestinian. It just isn’t practically wise. This is not a matter of high policy. There may be Jews or Palestinians of such exceptional personal qualities they could rise above any suspicion of partisanship and be effective. But Matthew Gould has proven himself not to be that talented.

Matthew’s frequent declarations to the Israeli media of his personal commitment to zionism are neither helpful nor necessary for a diplomat. Take for example this from the Jerusalem Post of 29 May:

“British Ambassador Matthew Gould declared his commitment to Israel and the principles of Zionism on Thursday”
That really is a very peculiar thing for a diplomat, who is supposed to have just the one national commitment, to say. I was dismissed as an Ambassador – by FCO ministers including Dennis McShane – for too strong a personal commitment to human rights. A personal commitment to zionism is by comparison a good thing, apparently.

We also cannot pretend that in 2011 to declare oneself a “zionist” in political terms merely has its 19th century meaning of somebody who believes in the existence of a state of Israel. The readership of the JC knows that the term “zionist” has accrued baggage of support for settlements and a greater Israel, for the annexation of the whole of Jerusalem, and of links with the non-Jewish foreign policy neo-Cons both sides of the Atlantic. who also declare themselves ardent zionists at every opportunity.

It is also worth noting that, of the entertained guests who have passed into Gould’s Tel Aviv residence, a disgruntled British Embassy source tells me that well less than 5% of invites have been to Israeli Arabs who constitute 20% of the population.

Finally, we have to consider the extraordinary relationship of Gould with Adam Fox and Liam Werritty. It has been shown that the trio met at least seven times, including several meetings before the election, according to Gus O’Donnell’s replies to Paul Flynn at the Public Administration Committee. The FCO refuses point-blank to say how many times Gould met Werritty without Fox, and refused within the hour (at nearly midnight!) my emailed Freedom of Information request for the Gould/Werritty correspondence.

No other official was ever present at any of the Fox-Gould-Werritty meetings – one of many strange facts about them. Gus O’Donnell’s report mentions only two of what we now know was a much larger series of meetings. We really need to know what Gould, the “committed zionist”, was doing with the two extreme Atlanticist neo-cons – and why the government is so anxious to hide it..

That is a genuine question, and to scream “anti-semite” at anyone who asks it devalues the term.

From now until the referendum, I shall give ten per cent of my income to the campaign for Scottish Independence. My income is both meagre and unreliable, and I can’t really afford it, but people have died for freedom willingly, and this is a much smaller sacrifice by comparison.

I urge all my fellow Scots to do the same. The media is viciously anti-independence and the massive resources of the British establishment are going to be concentrated fully against us. This is our first chance for national self-determination since 1707, and if we are not to be “Bought and sold for English gold” again, we need to raise some of our own.

UPDATE

Exactly as predicted, the broadcast media this morning are hailing Cameron’s patriotism in opposing a financial transaction tax and “Protecting the City of London”, as though this were the Blitz.

Both the BBC and Sky News have featured economists “explaining” what a bad thing a financial transaction tax would be for the City of London. Both were employed by institutions which would have to pay the tax – a fact which was not pointed out.

Despite the fact that a large majority of academic economists, the European Commission, 23 European governmnets, the Obama administration, and Vince Cable before he got his ministerial chauffeur, all believe that a transaction tax is an essential step towards preventing the banking speculation that caused this whole mess, the media are not presenting anyone who believes in the transaction tax.

No, the media narrative is simple. It’s fighting off the Johnny foreigner, Batting for Britain.

What a load of crap.

End of update: here is yesterday’s piece:

The xenophobic yaah-booing of the Tories over the demand for Cameron to show the “Bulldog spirit” is Europe is quite sickening. It is astonishing that the broadcast media have universally bought in to the spin that Cameron is “Defending Britain” by opposing the banking transaction tax, that all other major European powers want.

Cameron is not defending Britain. He is defending his banking paymasters. A transaction tax is essential to discourage multiple speculative transactions and other banking practices which have shown they can wreck entire national economies. Cameron’s opposition to the transaction tax should be vilified as reckless and a blatant pursuit of class interest, not universally lauded as “patriotic”.

Our schadenfreude at Germany’s difficulties is misplaced. Germany remains a much better economy than the UK. They manufacture a great deal more and thus have a much better balanced economy. Despite having swallowed East Germany, German GDP per capita is once again higher than that of the UK, by about 3%.

Crucially, as shown in the recent OECD report, income in Germany is much more fairly distributed than in the UK. The UK in fact is twice as unequal. In the UK the top ten per cent of the population have an average income that is twelve times that of the bottom ten per cent. The same figure for Germany is six times. What is more, inequality in Germany has been falling for the last six years, whereas in the UK it is accelerating.

Yet the German economy has outgrown the UK economy in the same period. That is impossible, according to every TV pundit I have seen in the last month. “It is massive reward for thrusting executives that encourages them to put the dynamic effort in, that leads to economic growth and drags the low paid mere mortals along behind them. If the gap between rich and poor is not colossal and widening, the economy cannot perform as well. Otherwise these vital high earners will desert us and move to Singapore.”

The mantra that economic growth must entail a widening wealth gap is scarcely challenged in the mainstream media narrative. But it is plainly untrue. In Germany in 1990 the top 1% of income “earners” received a staggering 11.1% of total national incomes. By 2007 that figure was – still 11.1%. By contrast in the UK in 1990 the top 1% took 9.9% of national income. By 2007 that figure had shot up to 14.2%. And all the indications are that in the last four years it has accelerated still faster, almost certainly now over 16%.

So if those braying conservatives are right about what makes economies grow, our economy should be streaking ahead of Germany. But it isn’t, quite the opposite. Meanwhile the “right wing” Merkel has overseen a greater drop in inequality than Britain has seen in two generations.

A period of humility from Britain is called for. Those braying Tory MPs are fools.

I don’t buy newspapers any more, but I strongly recommend that today everyone puts their hand in their pocket to support the Independent’s tremendous work exposing the immoral – no, evil – work of political lobbyists and the way our politicians are bought and paid for.

You can work your way through all the articles online beginning with this one, where I get a kind mention. This all follows on beautifully – and genuinely by coincidence – from my blog post of yesterday,

The Afghanistan conference in Bonn is a farce. There are no representatives of the Afghan resistance to the occupation, so it is not negotiating peace. Karzai’s corrupt and effete presidency, obtained by massive electoral fraud, expires in 2014. It is no coincidence that immediately after that the NATO troops will leave. Be guaranteed that none of the Karzai family will remain in Afghanistan, but will rather retire to Switzerland with the many billions of dollars they have looted from UK and US taxpayers’ funds, and made from the heroin trade.

Pakistan of course is not present at the conference. After approximately 6,000 Pakistanis were blown up by the USA on Pakistani soil, the next 25 were killed all at once and were all young soldiers, something that not even Pakistan’s complacent, corrupt government could gloss over. So for now all of NATO’s ground supplies are being shipped through Uzbekistan – the percentage of NATO supplies going that way was already increased to almost 50% and still rising fast as a matter of policy,

Lucky that Hillary has a new best friend in President Karimov

All of which explains why there has been not one single word of criticism of Uzbekistan’s human rights record by the co-alition government in the UK. There was not one single mention of human rights, of child slave labour, of political prisoners, of free elections, unbanning the opposition, of freedom of assembly, speech or religious belief, when the British government hosted official Uzbek parliamentary and trade delegations last month. There was not one word either in public or in private on any of these subjects.

The current British government loves Karimov. It has never issued even the mildest criticism. Boiling people alive and torturing political opponents to death is fine by them. We even deport him back extra dissidents to practice on. This British government succesfully pushed through the EU new preferential tariff access for Uzbek cotton picked by eight year old child slaves.
The love affair with the British establishment goes wider than just this government. New Labour’s chief financier, their own Lord Ashcroft, is a man named Andrew Rosenfeld. He has sold a house in Switzerland to Karimov’s daughter Lola for three times its market value. Such huge payments in excess of market value are, very often, a spot of money laundering with the extra money being in return for something else.

Money flows both way – as previously reported here, Karimov’s elder daughter Gulnara is getting a massive cut from the transport of all those NATO supplies through Uzbekistan.

But the latest bit of love-in with the Karimov family will astound you. William Hague is going to agree that Gulnara Karimova – the most hated person in Uzbekistan – can come and live in London as Uzbek Ambassador. The request for her to be accepted (“agrement” in diplomatic parlance, in French) – has been in for some time. The only obstacle remaining is to resolve how many of Gulnara’s seven bodyguards will be allowed to carry semi-automatic weapons on the streets of London.

Among our major political parties, the notion of morality appears virtually as dead as it is to the Karimov family.

The planned scenario for a war with Iran is playing out before our eyes at frightening speed now. Unfortunately. as I have frequently said, Iran has a regime that is not only thuggish but controlled by theocratic nutters: the attack on the British Embassy played perfectly into the hands of the neo-cons. William Hague is smirking like the cat who got the cream.

The importance of the Fox-Gould-Werritty scandal is that it lifts the lid on the fact that the move to war with Iran is not a reaction to any street attack or any nuclear agency report. It is a long nurtured plan, designed to keep feeding the huge military industrial war machine that has become a huge part of the UK and US economies, and whose sucking up of trillions of dollars has contributed massively to the financial crisis, and which forms a keystone in the whole South Sea Bubble corporate finance system for servicing the ultra-rich. They need constant, regenerative war. They feed on the shattered bodies of small children.

Gould, Fox and Werritty were plotting with Israel to further war with Iran over years. The Werritty scandal was hushed up by Gus O’Donnell’s risibly meagre “investigation” – a blatant cover-up – and Fox resigned precisely to put a cap on any further digging into what they had been doing. I discovered – with a lot of determination and a modicum of effort – that Fox, Werritty and British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould had met many times, not the twice that Gus O’Donnell claimed, and had been in direct contact with Mossad over plans to attack Iran. Eventually the Independent published it, a fortnight after it went viral on the blogosphere.

The resignation of the Defence Secretary in a scandal is a huge political event. People still talk of the Profumo scandal 50 years later. But Fox’s resignation was forgotten by the media within a fortnight, even though it is now proven that the Gus O’Donell official investigation into the affair was a tissue of lies.

Take only these undisputed facts:

Fox Gould and Werritty met at least five times more than the twice the official investigation claims
The government refuses to say how often Gould and Werritty met without Fox
The government refuses to release the Gould-Werritty correspondence
The three met with Mossad

How can that not be a news story? I spent the most frustrating fortnight of my life trying to get a newspaper – any newspaper – to publish even these bare facts. I concentrated my efforts on the Guardian.

I sent all my research, and all the evidence for it, in numeorus emails to the Guardian, including to David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Rupert Neate and Seumas Milne. I spoke to the first three, several times. I found a complete resistance to publishing anything on all those hidden Fox/Werritty/Gould meetings, or what they tell us about neo-con links with Israel.

Why? Guardian Media Group has a relationship with an Israel investment company, Apax, but the Guardian strongly denies that this has any effect on them.

The Guardian to this day has not published the fact that there were more Fox-Gould-Werritty meetings than O’Donnell disclosed. Why?

I contacted the Guardian to tell them I intended to publish this article, and invited them to give a statement. Here it is, From David Leigh, Associate Editor:

I hope your blogpost will carry the following response in full.

1. I know nothing of any Israeli stake in the ownership of the Guardian. As it is owned by the Scott Trust, not any Israelis, your suggestion sems a bit mad.

2. The Guardian has not “refused” to publish any information supplied by you. On the contrary, I personally have been spending my time looking into it, as I told you previously. I have no idea what the attitude of others in “the Guardian” is. I form my own opinions about what is worth publishing, and don’t take dictation from others. That includes you.

3. I can’t imagine what you are hinting at in your reference to Assange. If you’ve got a conspiracy theory, why don’t you spit it out?

I can understand your frustration, Craig, when others don’t join up the dots in the same way as you. But please try not to be offensive, defamatory, or plain daft about it.

As I said, it would be honest of you to publish my response in full if you want to go ahead with these unwarranted attacks on the Guardian’s integrity.

Possible some Guardian readers will get drawn to this post: at least then they will find out that Werritty, Fox and Gould held many more meetings, hushed up by O’Donnell and hushed up by the Guardian.

It should not be forgotten that the Guardian never stopped supporting Blair and New Labour, even when he was presiding over illegal wars and the massive widening of the gap between rich and poor. My point about Assange is that he has done a great deal to undermine the neo-con war agenda – and the Guardian is subjecting him to a campaign of denigration. On the other hand Gould/Fox/Werritty were pushing a neo-con project for war – and the Guardian is actively complicit in the cover-up of their activities.

The Guardian. Whom does it serve?

I have been most impressed today by the ordinary strikers who have been interviewed on all broadcast news media. While some of them have been very low paid, they have not just been talking about their own problems and their own pensions. They have rather continually referred to the fact that they are suffering so much because hundreds of billions of public money have been given to the bankers, who continue to give themselves massive salaries and bonuses. There have also been many references to tax evasion by the wealthy and their massive income increases.

Plainly this is not just a strike about specific pension issues; in the mind of the ordinary people, this is action against the sickening levels of inequality in society.

I have also been struck by the horrible braying Tories, who to a man have stripped off their masks of social decency. How long will the Lib Dems go along with it?

Unfortunately, much of the detail on pensions is, just as the difference between Osborne’s and Balls’ spending plans, is irrelevant. The effects of the inevitable collapse of the South Sea Bubble model of western economy, are only just starting to be felt. They are not rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Ed Balls is suggesting there should be a few more deck chairs, and special chairs for the old and sick, and better pay and conditions for the crew. But the ship is still going down.