Craig Murray's Blog, page 206

The Ron Paul Effect

On balance, I view Ron Paul as a good thing.

I view myself as a libertarian and, in many ways, my criticisms of Ron Paul are that he is a more consistent libertarian than me. I want to see government provide health and welfare services, and run natural monopolies.

But much more importantly, Ron Paul is infinitely more consistent than the vast majority of those who label themselves "libertarian" in the UK and US, but are in fact just extreme right wingers with no concern at all for civil liberties, and who support the idea of a massive military force controlled by the government to annex foreign resources. Their "libertarianism" amounts to no more than a desire to be allowed to make money unscrupulously, without interference or tax. Paul Staines is the prime example of a false libertarian.

Ron Paul is not a false libertarian. His 21% showing in Iowa is going, for a while at least, to make it impossible to maintain the usual near total exclusion of anti-war and pro-civil liberties voices from the mainstream media. That is a great achievement. Having been given vastly less mainstream air time than Bachmann or Perry, that will now change for Paul – and even as they strive to limit that change, the establishment will hate that.

So, on balance a very good thing indeed. There are whispers about past racial attitudes. I have met Ron Paul, and am obliged to say I did not like him very much. But for a spell Americans are going to be able to hear someone question the trillions spent on foreign wars while US families suffer – and even a raising of the billions given to Israel. That outweighs a great deal of baggage.

Working for Peace

A hopeful article in the Guardian claims that peace discussions between the US and Taliban have reached the stage where the Taliban may open a political office in Qatar to conduct negotiations, and that some of their leaders may be released from Guantanamo. Let us hope this is all true.

Those who have read The Catholic Orangemen of Togo will immediately see that the basic issues mooted in the Guardian are the same I was dealing with as UK Representative to the Sierra Leone peace talks, and indeed the very stuff of conflict resolution – the transformation of opposing armed forces into a political process. Demobilisation, rehabilitation, funding of political activity. It all gets very emotive and sticky. There is another similarity with the Sierra Leone process in that ostensibly the main participant is the government (be it Sierra Leone or Afghanistan) but in fact the real decisions are taken for that government in the West.

Sitting here with my laptop in Ramsgate, I believe that I would be able to make a contribution to the peace process. I am a highly experienced diplomat who knows the region. I am almost uniquely placed, as a western person with high level diplomatic background and experience of treaty negotiation, who might nonetheless be trusted by the Taliban. I resigned my career in an effort to stop the persecution and torture of Central Asiam muslims in the "War on Terror" and have campaigned consistently and in public to end the occupation of Afghanistan. I was Ambassador in neighbouring Uzbekistan and have spent the last three years studying Afghan history.

Whether they realise it or not (and I suspect they do) the Taliban will need assistance and advice in dealing with the peace negotiations and drafting of peace agreements. My opposition to neo-con foreign policy means the UK and US would never use me in the peace talks, and would block my role with any mediating agency. The only possible route to involvement – and a difficult one to achieve – would be to offer my services as an unpaid independent adviser to the Taliban side of the talks. I have at present no route of direct contact to the Taliban: if the office in Qatar materialises, I will turn up and knock at the door.

Renationalise the Railways

Railways are a natural monopoly. There is no genuine competition between providers. For many people, the privately owned railway service is the only practical way to get to work. We have the most expensive passenger fares in the world, and a negligible amount of freight sent by rail, despite absolutely astonishing subsides pair to the private railway companies – and mostly ejected straight out again as shareholders' profits. I was hoping to give you a figure for the total subsidies private rail companies have received since the crazed system was set up, but I can't find a reliable series of figures anywhere – can anyone help?

We also still have a rubbish service. Some nominal punctuality improvement has been made, largely by the ruse of making timetables themselves unambitious. A member of staff at Ramsgate station told me recently of an HS1 service which left Ramsgate 18 minutes late, but reached St Pancras on time. On 27 December I left Brussels 11 minutes late on a Eurostar and made Ashford one minute late. Giving a talk in Cardiff recently, the train from Paddington spent in total almost 20 minutes standing in stations to await shceduled departure. Many timetables, particularly around London, have in fact been worsened – the ordinary commuter service from Gravesend to Charing Cross for example is now scheduled to be eight minutes longer than it was when I used to get it every day in 1986. In other cases track, rolling stock and signalling improvements that make quicker journeys possible are ignored in the timetable, all to give that margin of leeway and avoid punctuality fines and refunds.

The last five railway journeys I have been on (excluding Eurostar) all had people standing or squatting in corridors.

We have a train service which is the most expensive in the world but is still arguably the least pleasant to use among developed nations, and is very slow when you compare similar journeys with our European counterparts. It is impossible credibly to argue that the crazed multiple contact privatisation model has worked.

Rail needs to be renationalised immediately.

2012 – Year of Crash and Opportunity

I predict a very substantial fall in UK house prices in 2012 – and that will be a very good thing.

Average house prices currently stand at over 6 times average earnings. That compares to a long term average since 1945 of under 4, which charts show to be the norm.

People simply cannot afford to buy homes at six times their earnings. People living on average earnings, and paying the high rents such high property prices entail, would take ten years to save one years earnings, which would give them a deposit. They then would need five times earnings (or two and half times joint earnings for a couple) in mortgage. It is with good reason that banks will not lend at that level – it is more than people can pay.

There is a fascinating graph in this BBC report of a National Housing Federation (NHF) study last summer. It shows that the number of households under 30 living in private rented accommodation increased astonishingly, from 30 per cent to 48 per cent, in the bubble years between 1997 and 2009. That is a massive gain to a landlord class apparently very rich in assets -but the value of whose assets is strangely inflated.

This leaves ordinary people stuck in a very unpleasant position. Until last year, I was forced to live in private rented accommodation. My annual rent was about 6% of the nominal property value. I now pay substantially less than that in mortgage interest.

The NHF study predicts that current trends will continue, that the private rented sector will continue to grow, and that house prices will grow 21% over the next five years. But the NHF, who commissioned the study, are providers of rented accommodation and as usual this "academic" study uses assumptions which promote the economic interests of those who funded it.

In fact, I expect the massive decoupling of house prices from average earnings will end in 2012 or 2013 and we will see a major crash in house prices. It may not begin in 2012 – possibly it can be delayed until 2013, but I predict that by 2015 we will see house prices to earnings ratios back to four per cent. And as I see no significant increase in average earnings over that period, that means a fall in nominal house prices of over 40%.

House prices currently bear no relation to the ability of people to buy them to live in. They are like a rock balanced on an apex, requiring only a little push to crash them down. A number of pushes are coming:

- Cuts in housing benefit. The whole rush to the private rented sector has been underpinned by artificially high rents forced up by government payment of housing benefit. I am of course extremely sorry that individuals may be hurt by the implementation of these cuts. I also expect some backtracking as it dawns on MPs that the £2,800 per month does not actually go into the pocket of the Daily Mail's Sudanese refugee family, it goes into the fat pocket of some Tory landlord. But the housing benefit cuts will reduce returns to landlords and knock house prices.

- Unemployment. The main impact of public spending cuts is yet to feed through in terms of higher unemployment – you ain't seen nothing yet. Tories like unemployment – it reduces the costs and leverage of labour. 2012 is the year that it will really hit. By the end of 2012, repossessions will be very high. This would always spark a drop in house prices; people have not yet got their heads round what a fall it will be this time.

- Interest Rates. The key factor in balancing that house price boulder has been the lack of any high wind of interest rates. The short term outlook is for base rates to remain real terms negative (which is undeniably true yet strangely almost never said). But that will not last forever either…

The coming crash in house prices is of course going to have a huge effect on the viability of the financial sector, and will join together with sovereign bond defaults in precipitating the fall of the casino capitalists who live on our labour and have the rest of us in their lockhold. Those who saw 2011 as a global year of revolutionary change were only witnessing a tremor before the eruption. I cannot be sure that the crash will come in 2012 rather than 2013 or 2014; but I am looking forward to the new year with genuine hope that a deal of stench will be cleansed.

Evil Enlightenment

You were not expecting my thoughts on Michael Jackson and Beyonce Knowles.

This blog is effectively closed down during the period of yuletide festivity, during most of which I am happy to say the world gets subsumed in a warm glow of family, friends, goodwill and alcohol. The gears are grinding behind the surface and I have some explosive stuff on Adam Werritty for the New Year. But today I have escaped from the eight adults and five children watching Beyonce in the sitting room to pen some of the thoughts that it just aroused in me (actually most of the thoughts Beyonce arouses in me are best not written down, but that is another story).

For me the most interesting thing about the sorry Michael Jackson death trial was when Dr Conrad Murray announced that he had cleared out some "embarassing" creams from Jackson's bedroom before the arrival of police. At first this sounded like it might relate to medication causing Jackson's death; then it sounded like it might relate to Jackson's sex life – anal lubricant? Then finally the information came out – they were skin lightening creams.

Which is what connects to Beyonce Knowles, who is beyond doubt many degrees lighter than she used to be, a fact which seems largely to escape comment. I know people in Ghana and in Nigeria who have really disfiguring marks – most commonly a series of ruched lines of skin on the body something like stretch marks – which will be with them for life, as a result of using skin lightening creams. In West Africa mercury is frequently a component.

One of my first rows with my employers in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office happened in 1986 when I held the lowly position of Second Secretary (Commercial) in the British High Commission in Lagos. The sale of such creams in the UK had been very recently outlawed due to EU regulation, but it was at that time still legal to manufacture in the UK poisonous skin lightening products – including those containing mercury – for export outside the EU. I ejected from my office with little ceremony a gentleman from Birmingham wanting help from the High Commission in Lagos with his sales of mercury soaps. I recall having no sympathy at all from FCO colleagues over my stand. Why it took me twenty more years to realise I was in the wrong organisation is a tribute to my stupidity.

The pressure on black people to be as deracialised as Beyonce or Michael Jackson is a kind of racially aggravated version of the standards of physical appearance foisted on us every day by the advertising industry. It is the same process, operating in a different way, that gives us identikit politicians like Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Miliband, all striving to look like Pierce Brosnan, and devoid of deep political content.

My studies for Alexander Burnes have convinced me that the great incubus of colonial racialist baggage was largely an invention of the 1830′s onwards. Prior to that, the West largely judged people by religious affiliation before skin colour. There is no presumption in the writings of Mungo Park or Alexander Burnes of any intellectual superiority on their part on grounds of skin colour. The much underestimated presence of black people in the UK for centuries partly reflects the fact that they were viewed just as people. Of course this is broad brush, and the 18th century gentlemen with their picaresque coloured servants could have racist attitudes – and slave plantations. But it was not in general assumed that white meant superior in the way the racial construct arose during the mid-Victorian period.

It is also of course the case that prejudice in favour of the lighter skinned could be observed in Indian and African societies themselves as early as at least the seventeenth century, and that the relationship of those prejudices to lighter skinned governing elites or European contacts and mixed race people is a complex question.

But with all these caveats, it is still reasonable to assert that the mania among the fashionable young and black to have a lighter skin than God gave them is a reinforcement of the colonial and slave-owning prejudices of a couple of centuries.

I am as white as they come – almost blue like a good Scot. And pretty ugly. Colour has nothing to do with beauty.

It is illegal, but sales of skin lightening products in the UK are probably higher now that when they were still legal in the 1970′s. The real question is, what are we doing that makes people so unhappy with their own colour that they risk serious damage in this way?

Merry Christmas to our Family

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.

Free Speech for the Unlovely

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.

Rent Culture

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.

Military Rule

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.

Christopher Hitchens RIP

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.