Craig Murray's Blog, page 209

Egalitarianism

I have no excuse for not blogging the last couple of days, other than that I have been taking long walks over the beach and cliffs with my family. I feel wonderful for it.

There has been much well deserved publicity for the report of the Low Pay Commission, which stated that we are fast returning to Victorian levels of inequality as the gap between rich and poor grows wider at an extraordinary pace. The reaction of talking heads all over the broadcast media has been that it must be for shareholders to set executive remuneration.

Plainly this does not work. Thomas Cook is going under, and it paid its chief executive, who resigned last year, £7 million in four years.

JJB Sports is also going under. It has huge debts, but these are less than its founder, the appalling Dave Whelan, took out of the company himself. Whelan characterised a brief strike against terrible labour conditions at the company's depot as "communism". He is a big donor to the Tory party. He is chairman of Wigan Athletic, and his view on racial abuse on the pitch is that "black players have just got to get on with it".

I am not a fan of Polly Toynbee. She supported Blair tirelessly, appearing not to notice that it was in fact the Blair years, not the Thatcher years, that saw the huge acceleration in the gap between rich and poor. She continued to support New Labour war criminals on the grounds that a tiny improvement in the conditions of poor children in the UK was more important than the lives of hundreds of thousands of children killed or mutilated abroad in Blair's Wars – a view tantamount, in my view, to racism.

But the blinkered old bat got something right when she scathingly dismissed the notion that it was shareholders who should control excessive wages. The shareholders of major corporations, she said, are often many thousands of miles away, and are fund managers who hold and dump shares fleetingly as short term speculation. They have no more say in running the company than a punter who bets on a racehorse has in running the stable. An excellent analogy.

Governmental regulation is needed to stop ridiculous inequality. Transparency is important, as the government seems prepared to admit, but will not solve the problem. Nor will employee representation on remuneration committees. These employees will be senior "trusties", and if not, will be subject to all the threat implicit in the government drive – the most energetically pursued of all government policies – to end employees' rights and protection from unfair dismissal. That loss of employee rights will undoubtedly increase the wealth gap. If you make it easier to sack people, it is a lie that companies will hire more people. They will sack more people.

I maintain that the law should state that net total reward for the highest earner in a company or organisation should not be more than four times the rate of reward per hour for the lowest paid employee. So if a cleaner gets £320 per week for a 40 hour week, the boss should be able to get up to £2240 per week if he works a 70 hour week.

This would have one very good effect – you would in short time find the cleaners getting paid a lot more so the boss can get more. It would need to be plain that agency or sub-contractors working within the company count – so Goldman Sachs can't just get someone else to clean their toilets. The idea would work particularly well in the public sector, where a whole new raft of super-rich public employees were deliberately created by New Labour.

Petrol on the Flames

Nick Clegg today is proudly announcing a coalition housing policy which is perhaps the maddest thing the government has come up with yet (though that is a tough competition). Apparently the answer to housing problems is to find ways to enable people to take on yet more debt, being helped by government to find deposits which they will however ultimately have to repay in addition to the ordinary mortgage.

In effect the government thinks that the only problem with the housing market, is that it is not as it was in early 2008. The government supports ludicrous inflated house prices, giving the economy an entirely fictional huge monetary value asset base, sustained by mortgages of 100% or more on the inflated value, amounting to many multiples of the debtor's income.

The answer to housing availability is not for the government to find ways to enable young people to take on unrealistic amounts of debt so they can afford fake prices. The answer in the owned sector is for house prices to crash down to realistic levels which people can actually afford.

These government proposals are the precise opposite of what is needed.

The primary answer in the rented sector is for local councils to build public housing and rent it to people at genuinely affordable prices. There are a huge number of brownfield sites which can be utilised and a huge number of empty buildings ripe for conversion – including many of those empty shops. 50% of the "printed" money created by the Bank of England in the last round of Quantitative Easing exercise, and given to the banks, would have built 400,000 family homes if given to local authorities for that purpose. Think of the employment that would have created.

The UK is every bit as indebted as Greece, both as a per capita absolute and as a percentage of GDP. The difference is that Britain has more private and Greece more individual debt. But it is equally impossible to pay it back in the long term. That incredible mountain of personal debt is what has sustained Britain's ludicrous house prices. Just as the bamks have had to take a 50% haircut on Greek debt, so also they are going, in the end, to have to take a massive haircut on their UK mortgage portfolios.

The extraordinary thing is, that those mortgages – based on totally unreasonable house valuations – constitute not liabilities but "assets" on a bank's balance sheet, and the banksters have been able to "leverage" those assets to make speculative financial transactions – or bets – to the valuse of 12 times the "asset".

These are some my policy prescriptions:

Give local authorities money to build 400,000 new council houses for truly social rent levels, using cash from quantitative easing

nationalise all housing association property and give to local councils as council housing

wipe off 50% of all outstanding mortgages

watch house prices crash, and cheer!

That may sound extreme to some of you. But I promise you it is infinitely more sensible than the incredible folly the government has just produced.

Death in Kabul

I contribute to this BBC Radio Scotland programme which goes out at 14.05 today. It tells the story of Alexander Burnes, of whom I am currently writing a biography. It will hopefully give you some idea of why I am so devoted to the project. I presume that outside Scotland you can listen to it online – can anyone give a link?

Given the appalling level of recent fatalities in our current doomed and pointless occupation of Kabul, I think you will find the story quite haunting.

Responsibility

Having through military force assisted in the overthrow of Colonel Gadaffi, the British government cannot absolve itself of responsibility for the fate of Seif al-Islam, and for ensuring that he is neither tortured nor killed. The government of Libya is legally within its rights in trying him in Libya rather than at ICC, provided the trial covers the charges before the ICC. The evidence of Seif al-Islam's guilt of war crimes is not immediately apparent. Certainly the charge of hiring mercenaries on one side of the civil war rather pales in comparison to the devastation wreaked by NATO in bombing cities on the other.

But Gadaffi's son is just one man. There are many who must be held accountable for torture, rape and murder, and at the moment there is no compelling evidence that these crimes were more prevalent from one faction in the civil war than another. You will not ehar that from a British government spokesman. Their view of responsibility for what happens next in Libya focuses on ensuring that the owners of British corporations and banks benefit.

Which brings me back to the question of the Malyshevs, deported by the British government as failed asylum seekers back to the hideous regime in Tashkent.

Six weeks later, the British government has still not given any substantive response to the public and MPs who wrote to them expressing concern at their disappearance. The last news that we had was that Nina's daughter Helena, who remains legally in the UK, contacted her local MP in great distress asking that all campaigning stop and no more questions be asked. I am afraid that is almost certainly a sign that Nina and Mikel – who nobody has yet sighted – are still under great threat from the Uzbek authorities and the usual means of pressure are being applied.

I am told that three more deportations to Uzbekistan are in the pipeline. The British government cannot demonstrate that deportees will be safe – because they will not be. It is completely irresponsible, indeed deeply shameful, to deport people back to Karimov in these circumstances.

More Fashionable Left Stupidity

The fashionable left continues its attempt to co-opt and elevate gangsters and violent thieves by an extremely poor article in the Guardian on the Duggan shooting. The Guardian acknowledge that Duggan had a gun, and that it was loaded, but call him "unarmed" on the basis that it was in a shoebox. The police, incidentally, deny that.

It is still completely beyond me why so many commenters on this blog seek to conflate the genuine problems police confront as they are increasingly faced with violent armed criminals, with the genuinely indefensible police actions in cases like their killing of Jean Charles De Menezes. Refusal to acknowledge the difference devalues the arguments around what is and is not reasonable for the police to do. Duggan is not De Menezes. The police were quite right to believe that Duggan was armed. Something went wrong in that Duggan was shot – but it was not an action without reason.

At a banal level, I had a really horrible journey down from St Andrews yesterday on a very overcrowded East Coast train, with the now routine problem of people sitting on the floor between coaches. In the coach which I was in, two tables of young people were listening to extremely loud music on a boombox. It really was very unpleasant, and prevented others from sleeping, reading etc. Two or three passengers asked them to turn it down, which they would do for perhaps thirty seconds and then turn it right up again. One notably old lady who had the misfortune to be seated back to back with them was called a "stupid old cow". The train staff seemed cowed and resorted to treating it all as a big joke. I tried to reason with them and got "Fuck off fat man" for my pains.

They were wearing sportswear. I pondered what a pity it was that they did not kick the old lady to death and go out and smash some more shop windows and steal some more sportswear. Then commenters on this blog could have explained to me they were an enlightened part of the revolutionary vanguard.

St Andrews Iran Debate

I am happy to report that at St Andrews the motion "This House Would Resort to War to Prevent a Nuclear Iran" was defeated by about 90% to 10%. More down to the students good sense than to my speech, I think. As St Andrews is not exactly a bastion of left liberalism, I was rather pleased by this. Particularly as the debate took place not far from the Werritty parental home…

Executed Britons

The two British men executed by US drone attacks in Pakistan were not killed in combat. They were assassinated while going about normal life. This is a most barbarous practice, which amounts not just to execution without trial, but to inaccurate execution killing many who were never accused in the first place.

Being British does not make these particular victims more important than the thousands of others – including numerous women and children – that the US has assassinated in this way. But it does give the British government a standing to protest. Sadly there is no chance that the neo-cons in power will do anything about it. If there was one area where you might have expected the Lib-Dem presence in government to give it a slightly more liberal tinge, it was foreign affairs. In fact, there has been no evidence of that whatsoever.

Patriotism Cloaks the Scoundrels

It is very sickening to see Cameron, Osborne and Johnson dressing up their opposition to a financial transaction tax as a defence of the UK against Europeans. Reducing the attraction of multiple financial speculative transactions is an obvious step in reforming the crazed world of fantasy finance. If it did reduce the concentration of speculative centres in the City of London that would in the long term be good thing – our economy is over-dependent on servicing a system which cannot last anyway.

The Tories see Britain as the world capital of spivs, with unlimited free amounts of cash raining down on their friends and family in the city who devise ever more elaborate financial speculations on every one of which they take a margin. Free lolly forever. Hooray!

But it is probably too late anyway. The establishment seems oblivious to the extent to which the system is unravelling. Almost all European governments face increasing demands for real interest on the money they borrow from banks and financial institutions – increased bond yields – but that only increases debt, which countries largely service by new borrowing in this never-never land. Banks demand higher interest because they fear the risk of not being repaid, and the higher interest makes it more and more certain they won't be repaid. It is only one of a number of ways the logic of the system has collapsed.

So the Tories posture while the system sinks deeper and deeper, and meantime people around the world have noticed that the elite are screwing them. These really are the most interesting times of my lifetime.

Bibi's Official Genocide Policy

Much is made in the rush to war with Iran of Ahmadinejad's alleged saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map". I am not an Iranian speaker and not qualified to enter the debate as to whether that is, or is not, an accurate statement. I view Ahmadinejad as a thug anyway, irrespective of any linguistic quibble.

But it is quite astonishing that Netanyahu's decalred, published and open intention to wipe the Palestinians from the map gets nil publicity in the west. The source for this is impeccable: Likud's party platform as presented on the website of the Knesset.

This is absolutely compulsory reading for anybody who was taken in by the opposition to Palestinain statehood "without negotiation" as explained by the Israeli stooges in western governments. This is the actual, official Israeli policy:

The Jordan Valley and the territories that dominate it shall be under Israeli sovereignty. The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel.

So Likud says all of the West Bank belongs to Israel

The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.

This clearly claims all of Gaza – and Judea and Samaria – as land to which Israeli people have an "inalienable right". It is the apotheosis of religious fanatic claims to a "Greater Israel", elevated into the policy of the ruling party.

Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem, including the plan to divide the city presented to the Knesset by the Arab factions and supported by many members of Labor and Meretz.

So all of Jerusalem is to be taken too.

Likud specifically lays claim to absolutely all of the lands under at least semi-autonomous Palestinian control, and they say these claims are inalienable. There is no hint of any room for negotiation in the language of these statements. The UK and US governments who pretend that it is the Palestinians who are blocking negotiations, do so knowing they are lying, and because the majority of our politicians are tied in to the Israeli lobby with golden cords.

Netanyahu's platform, claiming every inch occupied by Palestinians, is a programme for genocide. It can be described as nothing else.

There is absolutely no room left to argue that Netanyahu does not intend to wipe the Palestinians off the map.

Iran War Debate

I may not be able to post tomorrow as I am travelling all day from Ramsgate up to St Andrews to take part in a debate, speaking against the motion that "This House Would Resort to War to Prevent a Nuclear Iran".

The debate will be in Lower Parliament Hall in St Andrews, starting at 19.30 on 17 November. I am sorry I can't tell you yet who else is participating, because as with all highly topical debates it has been put together as short notice. I view campaigning to prevent the terrible death toll that a war would bring as my top priority at the moment.