Trust us

The Coalition Agreement between the LibDems and the Tories back in May 2010 has a few things to say about civil liberties:

“The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion.”

“Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.”

“Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.”

As David Bowie sang so memorably this year, ‘Where are we now?’ 

Where indeed.

As the Chilcott Inquiry hits the solid wall of Cabinet obstruction, being met with outright refusal to release papers showing who said what and when in the build up to the illegal Iraq War......

And as David Cameron reneges on an earlier commitment to have a judge-led inquiry into rendition and torture......

And as the deafening silence echoes around Whitehall as revelation after revelation exposes the extent to which GCHQ are deeply in bed with the American NSA --and as our neighbours and reported ‘allies’ become angrier and angrier at the way they have been snooped on.....

And as Jack Straw and the ex-head of MI6 cower behind the execrable ‘defence’ of national security  when the reality seems to be far more national embarrassment or even national crime.....

It seems that there is one law for us, the hoi polloi, and another for them, our rulers. 

Anyone unclear as to why any of this matters needs to wake up and catch up. In our name, innocent people have been sent to so-called ‘black’ prisons around the world where they were tortured. In our name the reverend Blair agreed to send back to Libya a couple of Gaddaffi’s opponents - in fact we sent back their families as well - so they could all be tortured - all so Blair could help his cronies in BP get their grubby little fingers on Libyan oil..... And in our name GCHQ bugs and snoops its way round the world listening in to just about everybody without any by your leave....

It appears that whenever one of our political parties assumes power in the UK they immediately jettison any commitments they made to civil liberties. New Labour were awful. Remember 90 day detention without trial? Now the Tories and LibDems have followed suit.

As for dealing with the secret services we are left with the pathetic toothless club of never was-ers and blazered fools to hold them to account. Really. No rigour, no transparency and no chance.

So what is the answer?

It is absolutely clear there is no way we can trust our leaders - of whatever persuasion - to do the right thing. The answer will have to come from outside Parliament.

A massive campaign of Reform, or...

Failing that revolution will follow - with all the uncertainties and unforeseen consequences and correlated damage which will do irreparable harm to the nation. 

So reform it is then.

What Would Mandela Do?

Listening to the shower of humbuggery cascading from the tory benches this week at the Mandela eulogy,  stretched credulity way beyond reasonable. The unprincipled and shameful support of apartheid, cheer-lead by Thatcher, Tebbit et al - was mysteriously forgotten. No surprise there - this bunch are adept at rewriting truth and would have amazed even Orwell with their terminology. 

As events unfold with continued attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable in our society this government is turning out to be one of the nastiest and divisive in our history.

Not convinced? Compare and contrast. 

Homeless numbers = up. Bankers responsible for financial chaos = untouched.

Food bank take up = up. Bankers arrested for fraud = none.

Children in poverty = up. Tax avoidance = increasing and encouraged.

Benefits supplementing income = widespread and essential. Labelled ‘scroungers’.

Millionaire cabinet introduce bedroom tax.  No mansion tax for the wealthy. 

NHS under siege.   Private medicine = encouraged.

Over 1 million young unemployed.  Rich offspring can take up unpaid internships.

Zero hours contracts = up.       CEO’s paying themselves mega bucks = up.

Distrust of politics/politicians = up. Policies of all 3 main parties alike. Leaders ‘out of touch.’

Public sector = hammered.         Private companies can do no wrong - despite doing         

                wrong.      Again and again and again.

Mandela did not simply campaign for freedom. He was also indomitable on poverty and the causes of poverty. With his experience he had a deep sense of injustice. The cutting back on legal aid for the poorest whether in civil cases, employment tribunals or the criminal justice system is yet more evidence of squeezing the poor. 

The more the suits spoke, the vaster the gulf appeared between them and Mandela.

In all this unfairness and division there is one over-riding fact which should be borne in mind at all times:

We are many - they are few. 

Do Tories Teach Their Children To Share?

And If So, Why?          

Thanks to Busfarehome (Guardian Online) for the thought

This little gem arose in a discussion thread following an article reporting Boris Johnson’s support for Gordon Gekko and hailing greed as a “valuable spur to economic activity.”

He is yet one more ‘swivel-eyed loon’ to fawn at the feet of Thatcher somehow forgetting that it was the Tory party who defenestrated her. 

“Johnson called for the rich to be hailed for their contribution to paying for public services as he said that the top 1% of earners contribute 30% of income tax. "That is an awful lot of schools and roads and hospitals that are being paid for by the super-rich. So why, I asked innocently, are they so despicable in the eyes of all decent British people? Surely they should be hailed like the Stakhanovites of Stalin's Russia, who half-killed themselves, in the name of the people, by mining record tonnages of coal?"
The mayor added: "It seems to me that though it would be wrong to persecute the rich, and madness to try and stifle wealth creation, and futile to stamp out inequality,”” Guardian 28/11/13

There is an alternative to BoJo’s greed manifesto.

Collect in all the tax from the tax-avoiding mega rich and corporations.

Cancel Trident.

Put the basic rate of Income Tax up to 60% for all those getting (note, not ‘earning’) over a million p.a.

Levy a 90% tax on Banker’s Bonuses ....... and Hey Presto!

Crisis? What crisis? 

Austerity? Who needs it? 

Isn’t ‘sharing’ grand? 

This is the last blog for a while as an appointment with the surgeon awaits. The knee that has been such a pain for the past four months is about to go under the knife. 

446 Fatalities and Rising

To date, well over 400 British forces personnel have been killed in Afghanistan. The war that began with the then Defence Minister, John Reid’s statement that “not a shot will be fired in anger” is coming to an end. The lies and half-truths we have been fed are not quite on the same scale as the Iraq debacle - but not by much.

And for what principled cause have these brave young warriors sacrificed their lives and brought sadness to their families and friends?

Seemingly to bring back stone age attitudes and values.

“A senior British minister has called on the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to block a draft proposal to put stoning on to the country's penal code as punishment for adultery.

The international development secretary, Justine Greening, who has made cutting violence against women a priority for the government's aid operation in Kabul, met the Afghan leader the day after news surfaced of the proposal to revive one of the most gruesome practices of the Taliban era.

The stoning of women in a Kabul stadium, during the half-time break of football matches, became a symbol of the fundamentalist group's harsh rule.” Guardian 26/11/13

Great that. Notice the ‘stoning of women’ by a regime and a religion who are so petrified of women, to the point of killing them in the most barbaric fashion imaginable. These little-willied men have thought it all out. The size of stones is strictly controlled. Too small – and they will not be lethal. Too big – and they will kill the victim far too quickly. 

If you are going to use a barbaric and cruel punishment, then it is best to use it most effectively - otherwise what is the point?

The ideal size apparently are rocks and pebbles about the size of a tennis ball. 

As Little Willy Hague and Call Me Dave stood in all their solemnity at the Cenotaph recently, did it cross their tiny little minds that all the recent deaths in foreign wars have been pointless? 

Did they not have the tiniest smidgeon of doubt when they pinned on their poppies? 

Or are they happy to continue working as corporate whores for the arms industry?

Labour and the spooks

There will be those among us who have wondered why, with all the revelations of spook skullduggery and invasion of privacy, the Labour Party have been so silent. Indeed they recently went so far as to endorse the government line. 

Well wonder no more. 

The latest revelations from Snowden show that the UK government signed a deal with the yanks,letting NSA have access to all UK citizens emails, phone records, fax numbers and IP records. It is reported that the deal was struck with the then Foreign Secretary. The deal was signed in 2007. Margaret Becket was Foreign Secretary at the time though it is likely that the groundwork was done by her predecessor, Jack Straw. And who was the Prime Minister? Step forward Reverend Blair, the madman with a mission.

NewLabour engaged in a ‘my willy’s bigger than yours’ battle with the Conservatives over Security and Anti- terrorism laws. So much so that the Coalition Agreement came up with the following:

The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury.

The restoration of rights to non-violent protest.

Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.

Further regulation of CCTV.

We now have secret courts; protesters being harassed by the police and authorities and little Willy Hague defending state snooping with the ridiculous ‘If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.’ And CCTV even more widespread.

The intoxication of power appears to be far greater and to last far longer than the values of liberty and freedom. 

Or, more sinisterly, Ministers fall under the blackmail threats of the spooks. If they have access to all phone records and emails, they will have access to some very juicy revelations and evidence of wrong-doing. 

The Chilcot Inquiry Sinks Into the Sand

Matt Carr: Author, freelance journalist and blogger

In the last fortnight a number of media commentators accused Russell Brand of naivete and political ignorance for his criticisms of the democratic system and the limitations of the right to vote.

This week however, the British public were presented with further evidence of how hollowed-out the democratic process has become, when the Chilcot Inquiry revealed that it was being denied access to 25 notes sent by Tony Blair to George Bush, and 130 documents relating to conversations between the two architects of the Iraq War, in addition to dozens of records of cabinet meetings.

There is no more serious decision that a government can take than a declaration of war, and there is no more serious test of a democracy than the ability to hold its leaders to account over why and how such decisions are taken, especially when a war is declared on false pretenses and results in a tragic and bloody disaster of the magnitude of the Iraq War.

The Chilcot Inquiry was established by Gordon Brown with the fairly mild remit to establish 'lessons' from the Iraq war, rather than 'apportion blame.' Much to its own surprise no doubt, it has shown more teeth than anyone expected, to the point when its investigations threaten the reputations - and the cash flow - of those responsible.

Today these noble statesmen have moved on. Bush now paints pictures of dogs and puppies, and makes donations to an organization that seeks to convert Jews into Christians. When he talks about Iraq at all it's only to say that like Edith Piaf and Dick Cheney, he doesn't regret anything.

Nor does his partner-in-crime, the Right Honorable Tony Blair, peace envoy and all-round money-making machine, who just gets richer and richer, and continues to urge on new wars with the same combination of bug-eyed fanaticism, ignorance and deference that once produced such sterling results in Iraq.

This week he picked up £150,000 for an hour-long speech in Dubai, whose subject, apparently, was something called 'global affairs'. To paraphrase Churchill, never in the field of human history has one man earned so much from the deaths of so many.

And people are still dying in the broken country and interminable battlefield that Iraq has become. This week, 67 Shi'ite pilgrims were killed and 152 more wounded in sectarian attacks on the Ashura celebrations in Karbala.

This year, more than 6,000 people have died in Iraq - exactly ten years after it was 'liberated' and its society effectively destroyed by the madcap free market experiment, the incredibly botched occupation, the lies and manipulations, the death squads, the suicide bombers and all the other disastrous consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

That matters, and should matter most of all in the countries that made it happen. Yet now we find that the inquiry established to 'learn lessons' from the war will not be able to know what the two men most responsible for this bloody debacle were saying to each other, or what Blair was saying - or not saying - to his cabinet.

If a democratic society cannot establish mechanisms to hold its elected officials to account over a war that amounts to one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in British history - a war that according to the Nuremberg Trials amounts to a war of aggression and the 'supreme crime', then it is not serious.

If such a society allows those responsible to cloak themselves in secrecy on spurious grounds of reasons of state that are designed to protect them from scrutiny - then such a democracy is essentially a simulacrum, an elite-managed spectacle, a Derren Brown magic trick that provides the illusion, but not the substance of public participation in the political process.

It means that democracy is a kind of theatre, in which the public is allowed to play a limited role, like the audience in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or Strictly Come Dancing, and press a buzzer for this party or that party, but it cannot be privy to the backrooms where politicians and civil servants take decisions without consultation and without explanation.

That is why it matters that the US state department and Whitehall are conniving to keep Bush and Blair's machinations under wraps. One of the key individuals who is blocking the Chilcot Inquiry's access to key documents is Sir Jeremy Heywood, the UK's most senior civil servant, formerly private secretary to Tony Blair during the lead-up to the Iraq War.

To expect such a man to behave otherwise is a bit like expecting Macbeth to hold a public inquiry into the murder of King Duncan.

But Heywood should not be allowed to get away with it, and nor should the Coalition, which is also complicit in this cover-up. All of them clearly hope that Chilcot will just go ahead without these documents and produce some polite and-all-very British pseudo-criticism that Blair can agree to and no one will pay any attention to.

Then everyone will agree that lessons have been 'learned', when we won't have learned anything at all.

We shouldn't let this happen. Because it isn't just about them and it isn't just about Iraq. It's also about us. And if a government can get away with this, it can get away with anything.

Huffington Post 16/11/13

Cameron has just been accused of ‘throwing stones in a glasshouse’ by the President of Sri Lanka. Reading this article, the despot has a point.

Tories rewrite history

“The Conservatives have removed a decade of speeches from their website and from the main internet library – including one in which David Cameron claimed that being able to search the web would democratise politics by making "more information available to more people".

The party has removed the archive from its public website, erasing records of speeches and press releases from 2000 until May 2010. The effect will be to remove any speeches and articles during the Tories' modernisation period, including its commitment to spend the same as a Labour government.” Guardian 14/11/13

Don’t quote us on that: Tory pledges

* No big NHS reorganisation

'With the Conservatives there will be no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down restructures that have dominated the last decade of the NHS'

David Cameron, 2009

(Andrew Lansley went on to launch one of the largest reorganisations in NHS history)

* Protecting Sure Start centres from closure

'Sure Start will stay, and we’ll improve it. We will keep flexible working, and extend it'

David Cameron, 2009

(Labour claims more than 400 Sure Start centres have been shut since the Coalition came to power) [Cameron’s constituency is set to lose one - he was challenged by campaigners this week] 

* Reforming the lobbying industry

'It is the next big scandal waiting to happen. I’m talking about lobbying. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism'

David Cameron, 2010

(The Government’s Lobbying Bill will not tackle in-house lobbyists and/or regulate contacts between special-interest groups, government advisers and most civil servants)

* Becoming the greenest government in history

'There’s increasingly an argument being aired that the public might put up with the green agenda when the going’s good, but not now that the economy is slowing and they’re feeling the pinch. But [that] should make it even more urgent that we act'

George Osborne, 2008

(Tories in government are enthusiastically pushing a “dash for shale gas” as an alternative to what they see as expensive green energy)

* No cuts to child benefit

'I like the child benefit, I wouldn’t change child benefit, I wouldn’t means-test it'

David Cameron, 2010

(The Coalition later abolished the benefit for higher earners and froze it for three years)

Independent 14/11/13

Update Friday 15th 

The Conservatives have changed their mind and restored their website. Fancy that!

They have managed the remarkable feat of reminding us what a lying bunch of bastards they are….. yet their broken pledges are still on line.