Craig Murray's Blog, page 198

No Platform for War Criminals

Blair’s latest attempt at rehabilitation is a discussion tomorrow at Westminster Central Hall with the Archbishop of Canterbury on the place of religion in society. A vexed question, but given that Blair believes God OK’d the invasion of Iraq and the resulting million deaths, not one that can usefully be discussed by this charlatan.

You can protest at Westminster Central Hall from 4pm tomorrow. Should be a lovely day for it. Bring own rotten tomatoes.

Martial Law Britain

Those coming from Central Asia, Bahrain, Qatar or Saudi Arabia to the Olympics, interested to see what life in a democracy feels like, will find it seems exactly like life at home in their dictatorship. 17,000 soldiers will be glowering over the venues, checking identity documents, stopping and searching. The mlitary will occupy residential buildings, be buzzing overhead, rolling down the streets and patrolling the river. There will be missiles on land, sea and air, though nobody knows what the threat is that this is supposed to counter.

What will make our dictatorship resident visitors feel especially at home is the contempt for the ordinary citizen. Not only will they have the military all over them and be subject to frequent stopping and questioning, they will be expected continually to get out of the way of their betters. Special VIP lanes on the road will allow officials to sweep by, while normal citizens will simply have to sit in gridlock and stew. Who cares? The military will stick missiles on your roof if they wish. What they are going to shoot down, and which bit of London it will land on, is not to be questioned.

Here in Ramsgate we are losing our regular train service to London completely for the duration. All the HS1 trains are being commandeered to run a shuttle service between Ebbsfleet and Stratford. 22 trains a day from Ramsgate are simply cancelled. Slow trains are available, but a journey normally 70 minutes will become – at the fastest possible – 2 hours and 35 minutes. A large number of commuters will simply be unable to get to work anything like on time, and have to spend door to door over seven hours a day in travelling as well as their working day. Nobody was consulted. Quite a few don’t yet know – there has been no determined effort to tell people. Leaflets are available in the ticket office if you ask for one.

But the leaflets might as well just say, “You are fucked, and we don’t care”.

The extra 3,500 military personnel it was today announced will be used at the games cover a shortfall in Group Four personnel. Group Four were providing 4,000 paid staff and 6,000 unpaid volunteers. It is the unpaid volunteer numbers which are short by 3,500.

Most people are not stupid. They may volunteer happily for sport or for charity, but to work for nothing to make tens of millions of pounds of profit for Group Four as it exploits them, plainly does not have universal appeal. Those 2,500 who have volunteered to work for nothing for G4S are the idiots in this story. How gullible can you be?

Bob Russell, MP for Colchester, today in parliament made the excellent point to Teresa May that Group Four (or G4S as they now call themselves) should not be employed because of their role in aiding and abetting Israel’s illegal activities in the West Bank and human rights abuse there. With breathtaking chutzpah Teresa May replied that it was this kind of valuable international experience that made Group Four the right company to provide security for the games.

Which brings me back to my point at the start. Those visiting from oppressive regimes will feel absolutely at home. That is the one and only thing you can trust Teresa May to ensure with grim efficiency.

Nabeel Rajab Jailed

Cameron’s favourite dictatorship, Bahrain, has jailed human rights activist Nabeel Rajab for three months for tweeting that pro-regime demonstrators were being paid. Total silence from western governments. Meanwhile two pro-democracy demonstrators have been shot dead in Saudi Arabia. More total silence from western governments. At the same time, those governments want us to believe that the massive arms shipments being sent by Saudi Arabia to promote a Syrian civil war are in support of democracy. Even the mianstream media appear to have worked out there is a problem with this narrative.

Sickening Labour

You expect the Tories to be stupid. It is their nature, as John Stuart Mill pointed out. But the disruption by New Labour of radical reform of the House of Lords is about career advantage and a total absence of genuine political belief. Which is precisely what Blair brought to New Labour. Tomorrow he makes his Labour Party comeback speech at Highbury – to a closed £120 a ticket dinner. Says it all, really.

Declining Democracy

Total membership of political parties in the UK has declined, very steadily and inexorably, from about 3.3 million in 1968 to about 500,000 in 2010. That is even worse than it sounds because of course the population grew substantially in the same period. That is one of the fascinating facts in this report by Democratic Audit.

That is just one of a large number of PDFs that comprise the total report. It is well worth reading and it reinforces the argument, consistently made on this blog, that democracy has failed in this country.

There is one constituent of a genuine democracy that the report does not seek to measure, but which I think could usefully be quantified by political scientists. That is the degree of real choice being offered by the political parties. I am sure that this has very substantially declined as well. There is no real choice on offer nowadays between the various neo-con parties. The differences on the timing and depth of cuts in public services, on continued privatisation of health services, on Trident nuclear weapons, on Afghanistan, on the money men who control the politicians, are miniscule. Only in Scotland do voters have a genuine choice of a different direction, and they take it.

This is a direct consequence of the other trends the Democratic Audit does measure. They show that the parties are more than ever, and constantly more, not avenues for popular participation but the domain of a political class and controlled by a wealthy “elite”. It is no wonder that they all have the same programme of promoting the interests of that elite.

Deluge of Propaganda Begins

The day after the announcement that air defence missiles are being stationed around London to guard the Olympic stadium from the Luftwaffe and the army will be coveing the turnstiles from armoured vehicles, we have the arrest of six Muslims, three of them in Stratford, for yet another famous “terrorist plot”. The Guardian reports this as a “pre-planned operation”. You betcha.

What scares me so much is that is blindingly obvious what kind of society we are becoming, but so many people refuse to see it.

Henry Sheilds

Henry Sheilds as me and Nathan Ives Moiba as Colonel Isaac in One Turbulent Ambassador, on until 10 July at the Lyric Hammersmith.

One Turbulent Ambassador, Tony Blair and the Wheel of Life

One Turbulent Ambassador

Believe it or not, I haven’t actually seen One Turbulent Ambassador yet, largely because I am on the wrong continent. But there is a very interesting interview with Robin Soans about the play by the Cambridge academic Scott Antony in Exeunt.

I rather liked this judgement:

History is a strange and fickle creature,’ smiles Soans, ‘at the time of his demise Craig Murray was a figure of ridicule, and Tony Blair cast him out as a traitor. But he’s now a rector of a university and addresses student rallies and appears on television and talks really very intelligently, while anyone of discernment has no time for anything Tony Blair has to say at all. Virtually everything says he’s ludicrous. So much of what he said was duplicitous, and underhand, and not even approaching the truth. And that’s just seven or eight years and history has already done a volte face.

But some of it is a bit tough for me to read, like this:

The students and Jessica said I think you’re emphasising the heroic side of this man, rather than the shitty things he’s done to various people and the trail of misery he’s left in his wake.

But then as the great man himself said

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us

It wad frae monie a blunder free us

An’ foolish notion

I am on tenterhooks for some honest feedback. There are I think only three performances left. If you can catch one, please do leave your impressions here.

“Judge-Led” Bullshit

The hopelessness of New Labour as a vehicle of change is underlined by their fixation with “judge-led” inquiries into anything that crops up. Remember the Hutton whitewash? Will a senior judge really recommend the fundamental reform of casino banking in the City of London and the careers of the banking squillionaires he undoubtedly knows so well at his club, lodge and golf course?

Which of these best describes most senior judges?

a) A fearless crusader for truth and social justice with unimpeachable morals and the intellectual stringency of a great philosopher

or

b) A very well paid establishment figure with an authoritarian streak who got his position from Jack Straw or his predecessors by very carefully in his career never stepping out of line with the very powerful.

Frankly, it makes no difference at all whether politicians or judges conduct the inquiry into banking practices. It’ll be the same old whitewash. As it happens, Andrew Tyrie MP happens to be one of the very few decent people in parliament. But if he does chair the inquiry as Cameron proposes, be sure the forces of control will rapidly close over his head.

I didn’t bother to watch the Bob Diamond select committee appearance yesterday. In fact, I have come to terms with the (to me) shocking fact that I now believe our political system to be so corrupt that our horribly and increasingly unequal society will eventually, and rightly, be changed by extra-parliamentary means. Probably not in my lifetime, but one day. I never imagined I would end up believing that.

The political blogosphere will buzz today with parliamentary debate on the banks. It seems obvious to me that parliament is not going to do anything against the financial services paymasters of the politicians.

Parliament is irrelevant.

Shared Values

Following on from yesterday’s post, here is a tiny everyday example of those shared US/Israeli values Dianne Feinstein was on about.

Courtesy of the Guardian.

Meanwhile another 47 people are killed by a truck bomb in Iraq and over 200 maimed. A slightly larger toll than usual in a single incident so it actually made the media here, but again in Iraq such violent death is an everyday occurrence. That is over ten years of fear, carnage on an unthinkable scale, dire poverty and destruction of basic services. I bet the Iraqis are extremely grateful for the peace and security Blair and Bush brought them.