In the summer the distraction tool pimped by the BBC and the media focused on ‘bums on beaches;’ where could we go on holiday without facing quarantine after returning to the UK. This non-news rubbish I called ‘handyfloss’ flooded the airwaves to detract from the grim reality of job losses and the prospect of reduced support on furlough before an inevitable redundancy. Now the handyfloss is an obsession over pub closing times and punitive localized lockdowns, necessary because the masses failed to unflinchingly obey the strict orders of the wealthy elite who are of course exempt from any curtailment of their unbridled privilege. The wrangling between Johnson and city Mayors over his policy to disproportionately punish Labour supporting northern cities through forced lockdowns, where minimum wage earners are expected to subsist on just two thirds of their income, was just a raucous distraction to obscure the stripping away of our human right with powers that allow police and other agents to function entirely outside the law.
The necessary protective restrictions to reduce the spread of Covid 10 and limit its damage would be far less complicated if we first focused on logical evaluation of personal risk driving responsibility for individual behaviour within a strong framework of pragmatic national guidelines. This personal risk assessment is exactly what I did at the beginning of March; it included the following:
• Personal Health Risk Factors: advanced age, underlying health conditions, comorbidities, gender and ethnicity are all factors.
• Location risk: Living in London, any other major metropolitan area or within the regular commuting range of same, places with large Students populations, localities with a high propensity for overseas travel within the local population.
• Contact & Proximity Risk: elderly housing or care facilities, multigenerational homes, overcrowded accommodation including Student Halls, frontline work assignments.
From this it is possible to gauge your own potential risk and modify your personal conduct accordingly within nationally accepted regulations. Although you may feel that none of the first category applies to you, where you live, the personal circumstances of your accommodation or your work assignment might still put you at risk. Your ‘Contact & Proximity Risk ‘ is quite high if you cannot work from home due to a frontline job; the Tories know that wealthier Tory voters evade many of these risks. Nationwide risk will increase despite the Government imposed three tear unworkable plan that is really just a subterfuge. The Tories are relying on the children to act as vectors for Covid 19; despite the success of their planned cull they have kept their vile agenda under wraps. This is why the Tories are determined to keep schools open and have forced their Trojan horse Starmer to wholeheartedly endorse the plan. Meanwhile they distract and annoy us by closing pubs knowing those who can’t meet up can’t gripe or organize a protest.
The Government could have created an online algorithm for people to self assess their own personal risk and modify their conduct to compensate. If they had done this in February, plus set up checks and restrictions at points of entry and invested extra money in local test and trace, that was already a well established function of local health authorities, we could have greatly restricted the few cases arriving from hot spots. We should have reassessed our stockpile of PPE and access to ventilators and made up for the shortfall by stocking up fast in preparation. If we had done these things we would not be in this mess, the UK would be like New Zealand. Despite the warped agenda of their news coverage the BBC have a global reputation for program excellence; they could have started putting together educational materials for at home schooling for all age groups. Children who do not necessarily have a computer still have a TV, but even if it wasn’t needed at all in the UK, such programs could have been sold to countries overseas.
If the UK had acted swiftly following this tactic we really could have been ‘world beating,’ using our high tech sector to produce the supportive equipment and work on a vaccine, while we used caution to prepare and protect our entire population at the same time developing televised teaching materials well before we needed to close any schools. Instead influenced by ‘Herd Nerd’ eugenicist Dominic Cummings and warped by Corporate financial interests, an obsession with power and personal greed this rabid Tory cabal exploited the Covid crisis to plunder public money. Having seized control by fraud they enriched the wealthy elite by driving millions of the working poor into destitution while deliberately exterminating the elderly and disabled to reduce any future burden on the state. No tinkering around the edges over the restrictions is going to stem the carnage as they complete their ‘Slaughter of the Sheeple’ because that is their intended policy for the UK in the lead up to solidifying their Dictatorship after crash-out Brexit.
Boris Johnson will now sell the snake oil of his crash-out Brexit, the ‘No Deal’ that the Tories had planned all along; promoting it as if it were some massive benefit for ordinary British people. Any negative consequences will be blamed on the intransigence and confected bad-faith negotiating tactics of the EU and the compliant UK Media will indoctrinate the people in this new propaganda. The reality is just as duplicitous as Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ lie while forcing the northern Labour strongholds into greater hardship and destitution as he ‘Decimates Down’ with the Tory boot of austerity and punitive wage cuts firmly on our necks. Two thirds of minimum wage will become fully established as the new normal wage throughout the entire country as the Tories dictate that this will be necessary for businesses to recover from the double whammy of Covid and this punitive EU stance on crash-out Brexit. All of this hardship will be portrayed as totally unavoidable and not the fault of bad governance as the economic divide widens.
One phenomenon is a universally accepted consequence of destitution and starvation: those who are facing a slow death will riot and fight back. Johnson will not hesitate to use the full force of the military to assist police in quelling the masses, but he could also draft in a substantial private militia to function well beyond the normal restraints of our police and conventional forces; either way many will slaughtered. The UK is a global leader in the creation of ruthless private mercenary companies who have been deployed all over the world to suite the neo-con agenda. These operations have been shrouded in secrecy and act with impunity committing war crimes overseas; they stand ready to serve any paymaster without conscience; without doubt they could be used against protesters and innocent citizens in our country. The recent dangerous bills rushed through Parliament will expand their powers and increase their immunity from persecution as well as distance the Tory Government from accountability for their actions.
I fear that the recent CHIS Spycops bill and the Overseas Operations Bill are a component of preparing to use brutal force against the population to subdue resistance; they are being raced through Parliament at speed. Because the UK has recruited and trained more private mercenaries than almost anywhere on earth there is a huge private army available to be rapidly mobilized to subdue our population if we rebel or protest against Tory authority. Focusing on the conduct of one rogue ‘security company, KMS, under the title, “The shocking story of UK mercenaries in Sri Lanka,” The Canary have posted a Video Interview. “Phil Miller, co-director of the new documentary Keenie Meenie, talks to The Canary about his film which exposes a shadowy British mercenary company involved in war crimes in Sri Lanka.” The Canary also post a Link to a far more detailed Declassified UK Article including the full Keenie Meenie documentary.
The Canary posts a number of ways in which you can proactively “get involved: If you live in the UK and want to raise the issue of Keenie Meenie Services (KMS) with your elected representatives then here are some things to include:
• Your local MP can ask the Foreign Secretary and Culture Minister to stop censoring files about KMS and release them in full to the National Archives.
• If you live in London, your London Assembly Member can ask the Mayor for updates on the investigation into KMS by the Metropolitan Police war crimes team.
• If you live in Scotland, your MSP can ask the Cabinet Secretary for Justice to stop Police Scotland from working with Sri Lankan officers.”
They remind activists to, “Please keep your correspondence with politicians courteous and polite.”
In the Declassified Article entitled, “Keenie Meenie Services – the most powerful mercenary company you’ve never heard of – was involved in war crimes in Sri Lanka for which its shadowy directors have never been held accountable” They report, “We began making this film in 2017 when UK Foreign Office files about Keenie Meenie Services (KMS) started to be declassified. This came 30 years after they were first written by British diplomats in the midst of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. These telegrams provided documentary evidence that British mercenaries had not only trained a notoriously violent Sri Lankan paramilitary unit – the Special Task Force – but that KMS pilots themselves flew helicopter gunships during operations. This happened during a period of constant aerial attacks on Tamil civilians in which hundreds of people were killed.”
Declassified say. “This paper trail from one of the most secretive foreign policy episodes of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister also provided long-hidden clues about the key players at the centre of this story. It named the mercenaries, civil servants and political fixers who knew exactly what was happening.” Lest we forget her proclivity for mercenary interventions the Guardian Article entitled, “Margaret Thatcher ‘gave her approval’ to her son Mark’s failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea” she condoned her own son’s illegal activity. They say in an, “Unpublished version of memoir by former SAS officer Simon Mann records Baroness Thatcher’s endorsement of plan to depose oil-rich country’s president.” This was revealed according to “the chief protagonist of the bid, former SAS officer Simon Mann. The former prime minister, whose son, Sir Mark, was convicted in a South African court of involvement in the attempted 2004 coup, allegedly told Mann at a meeting at her Belgravia home: ‘I’m sure it’s going to work’.”
Declassified reporting on KMS in Sri Lanka say, “While some had long since passed away, we were able to track others down in a four-year journey that took us around the UK, Europe and across post-war Sri Lanka, an island still living under a heavy military presence. Behind the mercenaries themselves – with their close connections to Britain’s special forces and intelligence agencies – there was always the political power of Whitehall. The UK government had a permissive policy towards KMS, which allowed the company to operate in Sri Lanka with a veneer of plausible deniability. To this day, the Foreign Office is resisting full disclosure of its KMS archive. While Whitehall is hiding the past, another UK agency appears unwilling to learn from it. Our film shows how Police Scotland has been working with the exact same Sri Lankan paramilitary unit that KMS coached in the 1980s – a unit whose tactic back then ‘when fired upon while on patrol [was] to enter the nearest village and burn it to the ground’.”
Declassified reveal that, “Scottish police have since trained the unit in ‘public order’ tactics and continue to offer Sri Lanka ‘community policing’ skills. However, there remains hope that the victims may see justice. The Metropolitan Police war crimes team recently launched an investigation into the activities of KMS in Sri Lanka. It is possible that some mercenaries may finally have to answer questions about their shadowy pasts, even if we were not able to speak to them for this film. Bringing criminal charges against anyone who was involved in KMS from this period would be a landmark moment. Although the UK has one of the largest private security industries in the world, no one has been convicted of mercenary offences by a British court in the last 150 years.” Will the Overseas Operations Bill effectively shut down any investigation into this and similar war crimes overseas? Worse still could we see equally violent tactics employed here in the UK against those who resist the oppression of the new Dictatorship?
The auther, “Phil Miller is a staff reporter for Declassified UK, an investigative organisation covering British foreign policy. His book, Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes, is available to buy from Pluto Press. Lou Macnamara is a self-shooting documentary director. Lou co-directed documentary short Working Illegally (2015) which explores the UK’s privatised immigration detention estate. They are both directors of Yardstick Films.” We must tenaciously defend this courageous level of professional investigative Journalism that is under serious threat right now with the extradition hearing of Julian Assange also discreetly buried by compliant news reporters supporting the authoritarian will of this corrupt Tory Government. When war crimes, atrocities and injustices remain secret no one is ever held to account for Human Rights abuses which in turn will further embolden those considering the use of extreme force, extraordinary rendition, torture and summary executions in future.
Way back in a December 2018 Open Democracy Article entitled, “Britain is the world centre for private military contractors – and it’s almost impossible to find out what they’re up to” they elaborated on the lawlessness of modern day mercenaries. They wrote that, “Yesterday, an American man was convicted for killing unarmed civilians whilst on patrol in Iraq. But he wasn’t a member of the US Army. When the incident took place, he was working for the company Blackwater. Last month, the Taliban carried out a lethal suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan. But the compound they targeted wasn’t controlled by the army of any nation. It was run by G4S. According to the Islamist group, the British company constituted an ‘important base of occupying forces’, from which attacks against the Taliban were planned and mobilised.”
Open Democracy report that, “G4S, one of the UK’s biggest private military companies, provides pivotal ‘operational support’ to Britain’s military in Afghanistan and such incidents bring back into focus the extent that private military and security companies are present, and sometimes directly involved, in combat. Since the ‘War on Terror’ began in 2001, billions of dollars have been made by men (and it is almost always men) working for private military and security companies (PMSCs) around the world. In the killing zones of Iraq or Afghanistan, Somalia or Yemen, such corporations have become central to undertaking roles traditionally reserved for national militaries.” However the name G4S is familiar to citizens here in the UK where they have been awarded an increasing number of Government contracts and have been accused of Human Rights violations in their treatment of asylum detainees. The old Keenie Meenie company KMS has morphed into a new entity ‘Saladin’ with the same directors and the same deadly mandate.
Open Democracy warns that, “Britain has led this privatisation of modern warfare. It leads the world in providing armed contractors to ‘hot spots’, be it combating terrorism in the Middle East or fighting pirates off the Horn of Africa. Some of their biggest clients are governments; since 2004, the British state has spent approximately £50 million annually on mercenary companies. The total worth of the global private military and security industry has been estimated to stand somewhere between £69 billion and £275 billion a year. Many of these companies will serve whoever can pay, from wealthy private individuals to faceless corporations. It is easy for them to do so. Despite the size of this mercenary industry, the entire sector is marked by secrecy. Men trained in the arts of subterfuge and counter-intelligence dominate this sphere, and the result is an industry that operates from the shadows.” We should ask, what would it take, under Tory Government orders, for the latest priority ‘hot spot’ assignment to be the streets of UK cities?
The project of shifting this country from a deeply flawed democracy to the full authoritarian Dictatorship of Boris Johnson as controlled by Dominic Cummings is nearing completion. They have abandoned all pretence of negotiating an EU deal after only played along with the concept in order to dupe the UK public, while running down the clock and ramping-up the assignment of blame to the EU for the inevitable failings and the horrendous consequences for ordinary working people here. With his disastrous mismanagement of the Covid 19 crisis, the PM has managed to keep the British public distracted from the reality of his deliberate targeting of the most vulnerable ‘economically inactive’ elderly and disabled sectors of the population he is actively trying to exterminate. For the working poor, the Tories will force wages down below subsistence levels using regional lockdowns; crash-out Brexit will just exacerbate this mass misery as we are all collectively brought to heel under the new Tory Johnson/Cummings Dictatorship.
Dictatorships endure for decades and this one will be no exception, unless we derail their plan by removing them from office ASAP a lengthy dystopian nightmare lays ahead. The only way to avert this grisly scenario is to expose the industrial scale fraud of the Covert 2019 Rigged Election and fully Investigate the result to render it invalid. That would delegitimize the Tories claim to power with their stolen ‘landslide victory’ majority in Parliament and could see the PM, Cummings and key Ministers not just removed from office, but also jailed for their illegal conduct. The Tory Government’s misappropriation of public funds paying the ‘Integrity Initiative’ to create libellous propaganda to discredit the Labour Leader and opposition party would be enough to warrant jail sentences in any valid democracy, but sadly the UK has already departed from that high standard of integrity. Evidence for this last deception already exists, but it is far from the only plundering of public money that must now be dealt with in Court to Get the Tories Out! DO NOT MOVE ON!