His Parachute Is Packed

Owen Jones wants Birkenhead.

You read it here first.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

And I once swore to myself that I would never use that line.

If it is not self-styled anti-racists who have never heard of Marc Wadsworth and who cannot see the problem with Netanyahu, then it is self-styled Socialists who have no idea about Frank Field's campaigns against poverty and economic exploitation, and who cannot see the problem with the EU. 

They profess to be inspired by Jeremy Corbyn, yet they are crowing about having got rid of an elderly Eurosceptic who has given Blair and every other Prime Minister grief over economic inequality. Well, hello. 

Meanwhile, all of the real problems remain enthroned on the Labour benches.

Centre Forward?

From New York, David Miliband has invited John Major to deliver something called the South Shields Lecture, which is apparently still within his gift. South Shields is the only constituency created since 1832 that has never elected a Conservative MP. But hey, ho. It is all taking shape. 

Normal people, by definition, do not care about Brexit. I do, but I have never claimed to be normal. Did the Lib Dems get 16 million votes? Well, there you are, then. Normal people, by definition, do not care about Brexit.

Speaking of the Lib Dems, why do the proponents of a new "centre" party not join the one that already exists? Well, the Lib Dems did have the wit to oppose the Blair Government on Iraq and on civil liberties. So there is no love lost there.

In fact, the Lib Dems are often among the most vigorous local opponents of the municipal Labour Right's incomparable viciousness, from the Haringey Development Vehicle to the treatment of the County Durham Teaching Assistants.

I would be glad if this new party happened, as I would be glad if there were to be a right-wing breakaway from the Conservatives, since each of them would get less than five per cent of the vote, and since neither of them would be the First Past the Post in any constituency. Then we might no longer have to listen to them, although I admit that that might be asking a bit much.

Meanwhile, as of this morning, Frank Field is not a member of the Labour Party. Publicly threatening to stand against Labour, at any level, is an autoexclusion, meaning that you are out and that you are banned for five years from coming back.

And The Guardian is doing its bit for media diversity by carrying two articles on Frank Field, one by Owen Jones and the other by Wes Streeting. I can only assume that this is supposed to be an in-joke. So to speak. Oh, well, in the words of Ben Sellers, "I don't think either of them enjoyed it very much."

By Every Traditional Radical Criterion

The man who called me a “prophet”, John Milbank, writes:

Jackie Ashley (This fight really matters, May 19) reveals the bizarre bankruptcy of the current British left. 

By every traditional radical criterion New Labour has failed: it has presided over a large increase in economic inequality and an entrenchment of poverty, while it has actively promoted the destruction of civil rights, authoritarian interference in education and medicine, and an excessively punitive approach to crime.

But never mind all that, says Jackie Ashley and her ilk: on what crucially matters - the extending of supposed biosexual freedom and the licensing of Faustian excesses of science - it is on the side of "progress". 

Yet it is arguably just this construal of left versus right which is most novel and questionable. Is it really so obvious that permitting children to be born without fathers is progressive, or even liberal and feminist? 

Behind the media facade, more subtle debates over these sorts of issue do not necessarily follow obvious political or religious versus secular divides. 

The reality is that, after the sell-out to extreme capitalism, the left seeks ideological alibis in the shape of hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites. 

An older left had more sense of the qualified goods of these things and the way they can work to allow a greater economic equality and the democratisation of excellence. 

Now many of us are beginning to realise that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories. 

In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a "traditionalist socialism" or a "red Toryism". 

After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good. 

Professor John Milbank 

Research professor of religion, politics and ethics, University of Nottingham

Not As Pushy As You Think You Are

When someone who will not be a few weeks short of 80 on the day of the 2022 General Election, who did not nominate Jeremy Corbyn for Leader, and who is in any sense whatever a Blairite, has to "jump before he was pushed", then I might be impressed.

Trial Date Watch: Day 113

More than 20 weeks after I had again been due to stand trial, I now no longer have a trial date, even though it is rightly a criminal offence to fail to attend one's trial.

Had I been tried, as expected, on 6th December, then, even had I been convicted, I would already have been released, since I would by now have served even the whole of a wildly improbable six month sentence.

The legal persecution of me, which has been going on for over a year, was initiated only in order to deter me from seeking public office or to prevent my election to it, and its continuation is only to one or both of those ends. Amnesty International is on the case.

Until there is anything to add to it, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Libel Watch: Day 166

The Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, was so afraid that I was going to be elected to that authority, that he faked a death threat against himself and dozens of other Councillors.

Despite the complete lack of evidence, that matter is still being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of the attempt by the sacked Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, to secure a Labour seat in one or other House of Parliament.

If I am wrong, then let Henig and Saunders sue me. Until they do, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Don't Be Mistaken, Don't Be Misled

The wrong right-wingers are leaving the Labour Party. The gloating in certain quarters is out of place.

From Birkenhead to Vauxhall, the Momentum teenagers are doing the Blairites' job for them. Frank Field nominated Jeremy Corbyn for Leader, and Kate Hoey, who voted to keep Corbyn as Leader, says that she trusts him on Brexit more than she trusts anyone in the Conservative Party. Oh, well, at least neither of them is going to be joining any new "centrist" party.

It tolls for thee. It always tolls for thee. This is one of several reasons why Stephen Guy of the decidedly non-adolescent and non-hipster Durham Miners' Association needs to be elected to the Labour Party's National Executive Committee and to its National Policy Forum. By all means vote for eight NEC candidates of your choice from the "official" Left slate, or for seven and Ann Black. But make sure that you also vote for him.

As for Field, Hoey, Graham Stringer (who would also be a loss) and John Mann (rather less so), they made a tactical calculation on the Customs Union that would not have been mine, as it was not Dennis Skinner's or Ronnie Campbell's. It is simply impossible, by definition, to be more Euroscpetical than those two, and least of all if you are still away with the myth of Margaret Thatcher.

Saving a Conservative Government, and especially one as bad as this, was a very bad look for a Labour MP, and keeping Brexit in the hands of Theresa May and Olly Robbins, instead of Jeremy Corbyn and everyone who would come with him, was if anything an even worse look for a Brexiteer. But if the Blairites are permitted to purge the traditional Right, then they will not stop there.

Mercifully, though, there is going to be another hung Parliament, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

Not Conducive To The Public Good

Practically everyone who has given to Alex Salmond's crowdfunder voted for the party that provides the Government that he is crowdfunding in order to take to court. Salmond's message to the SNP is clear: you are nothing without me.

And if Salmond can raise that much overnight in order to take the Scottish Government to court, then how much could Jeremy Corbyn raise in a week in order to sue David Aaronovitch or Jonathan Sacks?

Sacks is the most right-wing member of either House of Parliament, unless you can think of anyone else who has been a speechwriter for Mike Pence, or who has led a riotous Death To The Arabs march through the streets of East Jerusalem. Therefore, of course he hates Corbyn. So what?

In fact, Sacks, who is a British Citizen, has been appointed to the House of Lords when someone of a different nationality, but who held the same opinions and who had the same record, would be banned from entering the United Kingdom. 

That is not a theoretical point, since the late Rabbi Meir Kahane was indeed banned from entering the United Kingdom.

The rules work in reverse for Muslims. In Blackburn, Bradford or Birmingham, you would be arrested and interned, not necessarily without cause, for the expression of views that in Idlib would earn you the financial, military, and every other support of the British State.

Hindus seem to occupy a grey area. Tapan Ghosh, who by the way is at least as violently opposed to Christians in Bengal as he is to Muslims, has been hosted at the House of Commons by Bob Blackman MP, who is an old enemy of Nelson Mandela's.

Alongside such moral authorities as George Carey, Blackman serves as an Honorary Patron of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is now under Police investigation for death threats against Corbyn.

Along with Mike Freer and Matthew Offord, Blackman is one of three Conservative MPs to serve as Honorary Patrons of the Campaign Against Antisemitism while having been elected with the support of Operation Dharmic Vote, which was the only too successful campaign to repeal the ban on caste discrimination.

It will be interesting to see whether any of Ghosh's British wannabes is raised to the peerage. If so, then they will join on the red benches Britain's most prominent and influential preacher of hate, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Baron Sacks. A platform in the New Statesman would doubtless then be provided.

The Politics of Internationalism

Richard Burgon writes: 

Some commentators have recently been suggesting that things would be so much better with a Labour leadership retaining Jeremy Corbyn’s domestic anti-austerity politics but stripped of his internationalist politics. Such a state of affairs is neither achievable nor desirable. 

It’s not achievable because of the international nature of capital and its institutions. For example, tax havens are a key tool that the mega-rich use to protect their privileges. They need to be tackled at the national and international level. A socialist economic strategy requires us to engage with progressives the world over. 

And it’s not desirable because socialism is not socialism without the internationalist principles of ending global poverty and exploitation, war and occupation and the financial domination of the IMF and the like. 

My interest in politics and socialist politics wasn’t kindled by an international issue but by a domestic issue. Growing up I heard about the 1984-5 miners’ strike and it got me thinking about the unfair and sometimes brutal way society is governed and it also got me thinking about how society could be run in a less unfair and more decent way. 

But learning more about the 1984-5 miners’ strike inevitably opened my eyes up to the politics of internationalism.

I heard about the solidarity cheque sent to support striking miners in Britain by the South African National Union of Mineworkers, who were standing up for black workers under the oppression of the apartheid system supported by racists and imperialists in the Conservative Party and the British press. 

Britain’s NUM decided to frame the cheque as a symbol of internationalist solidarity rather than cash it. I also heard about the convoys of children’s toys sent over the channel by CGT trade unionists in France in time for Christmas in the British coalfields. 

Just as British miners received practical and political support from progressives in other countries, so progressives in other countries also drew inspiration from the miners’ struggle here. Nelson Mandela described Arthur Scargill as “a workers’ hero, respected by progressives of all continents.”  

Working-class politics and socialist struggle cannot be divorced from progressive international causes. And this is becoming clearer and clearer to more and more people as the ruinous and exploitative effects of the type of globalisation run by big business and free markets become increasingly apparent. 

The first demonstration I attended on an internationalist issue was on February 15 2003, when I caught the coach at the crack of dawn from outside the steps up to Leeds University Library to go down to London to protest against Tony Blair’s plan to back George Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. 

Jeremy Corbyn was one of the speakers that day. 

In relation to the size of that mobilisation, what was significant to me wasn’t just the fact that it was the biggest demonstration in the history of our country but the fact that up to 30 million people around the world were estimated to have taken part in such anti-war demonstrations that day. 

The world made clear its opposition to Bush and Blair’s bloody war. 

The international solidarity of the 1984-5 miners’ strike and the anti-war mobilisation of February 15 2003 were two hugely formative factors in the development of my socialist politics. And the truth is, virtually all MPs are interested in international affairs. 

Some may carp that “international issues” shouldn’t be something MPs really engage with. 

As someone who holds nearly 70 advice sessions for my constituents a year — Boris Johnson publicly boasts that doing 16 a year makes him a highly energetic champion for his constituents — I’m a passionate believer in the importance of “bread and butter” issues and local engagement and I put that into practice. 

But the reality is that Members of Parliament want to be part of a government which shares, and puts into practice, their principles. 

One of the important functions of government is our relations with other countries and the international community. We can’t ignore that and often the pretence that international issues can be side-lined is cover for backing the status quo. As the great Desmond Tutu rightly explained, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” 

As with domestic politics, the key question is what your vision for the world is. 

Some MPs are unwavering and very vocal advocates of bombing, invasion and being a junior partner of each and every US president in each and every foreign war come what may. Some MPs are intensely relaxed about Britain being a weapons supermarket for the royal family of Saudi Arabia which is inflicting death and misery in Yemen. Some MPs will defend Netanyahu’s government whatever policies it pursues and whatever human rights it breaches. 

Some MPs will revel in the very real hardship caused by the severe economic difficulties in Venezuela because they believe it “proves their point” about socialist movements but have remained studiously silent about the slaughter of trade unionists, human rights lawyers and journalists in Colombia and the murder of progressive students in post-coup Honduras. 

Some MPs still believe that British “interventions” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria are badges of honour — so much so that they’d do the same again elsewhere. 

Make no mistake, a socialist Labour leadership relinquishing its internationalist perspective would leave the field clear for all the foreign policy errors of the past, and present, to be repeated again and again, with all the human misery and danger that this entails. 

A socialist leadership of the Labour Party dropping its internationalist perspective is not an option. And it’s certainly not an option that someone with Jeremy’s politics would countenance. 

A theoretical Labour leadership that jettisoned progressive internationalist politics would be forgoing the chance to play a major and practical role in the push for a world of peace, where poverty is banished to the history books, equality in and between countries and continents is advanced and where almost apocalyptic climate change is avoided. 

It would also be forgoing the chance to create a fundamental and irreversible shift in wealth, power and control in favour of working people and their families in this country because both the economic and political forces with whom we must work to achieve this and the economic and political forces who will work against us when we try to achieve this are international. 

The truth is that the commentators arguing the Labour leadership drops its internationalist politics are, in reality, in favour of dropping a socialist approach at home and abroad.

Payback

Wonga will run out of money before the end of this week, which is also the end of this month. 

Just give that a moment to sink in.

Natural Cycles, Indeed

There is nothing more effective than Natural Family Planning.

If it is taught properly, and then practised by a faithfully married couple.

It is not an app.

Trial Date Watch: Day 112

More than 20 weeks after I had again been due to stand trial, I now no longer have a trial date, even though it is rightly a criminal offence to fail to attend one's trial.

Had I been tried, as expected, on 6th December, then, even had I been convicted, I would already have been released, since I would by now have served even the whole of a wildly improbable six month sentence.

The legal persecution of me, which has been going on for over a year, was initiated only in order to deter me from seeking public office or to prevent my election to it, and its continuation is only to one or both of those ends. Amnesty International is on the case.

Until there is anything to add to it, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Libel Watch: Day 165

The Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, was so afraid that I was going to be elected to that authority, that he faked a death threat against himself and dozens of other Councillors.

Despite the complete lack of evidence, that matter is still being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of the attempt by the sacked Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, to secure a Labour seat in one or other House of Parliament.

If I am wrong, then let Henig and Saunders sue me. Until they do, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Never Mind The Scallops

Well, don't mind them too much, anyway.

200 miles, or to the median line. That would solve an awful lot. Although the French fishermen do have a point, but it is a point to be made to their own Government.

200 miles, or the median line. If we had a British Government that had any idea what it was doing, then that would not even be a question.

But we do not. Instead, we have Theresa May traipsing around Africa and addressing its amused inhabitants in the language of her girlhood. 

The Commonwealth organises student exchanges and a sports festival, and long may it continue to do so. But economically and strategically, while Africa is vital, the Commonwealth is irrelevant.

The key to Africa is bilateral relations with China and with France. Just as the key to post-Brexit prosperity in general is deals with the BRICS countries, and integration into the Belt and Road Initiative.

Ask them in Africa. They would tell you. But you won't. It would never occur to you to ask them anything.

When it is not the Commonwealth, then it is "the Anglopshere", which is not a real thing at all.

It is the kind of thing that only children believe, that countries are "friends" or even "family" because of nothing more than a common language, or relatively similar institutions due to a distant common origin.

Donald Trump is extremely unusual among Americans in that one of his parents was born in the United Kingdom. But he has just screwed over Canada for the sake of Mexico, because he has followed the money.

As should we. We need deals with the BRICS countries. We need integration into the Belt and Road Initiative. And we need the restoration of our historic fishing rights of 200 miles, or to the median line.

Therefore, we need our people to hold the balance of power in the coming hung Parliament. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any realistic chance of winning.

My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

Foaming With Much Blood

Theresa May in South Africa there, repeatedly refusing to say whether she had agreed with Margaret Thatcher that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.

And now, we have another apartheid state that the Conservatives and the Labour Right are determined to place beyond criticism.

The shameful decision of the New Statesman to give a platform to Jonathan Sacks has at least provided an opportunity to expose his views and his record. 

If you would not be interested in the opinion of Steve Bannon or Abu Qatada, then you ought not to be interested in the opinion of Jonathan Sacks. Except that Bannon or Qatada speaks for rather more people than Sacks does.

Jeremy Corbyn ought of course to sue Sacks, as he ought of course to sue David Aaronovitch. Talk of crowdfunding or what have you is comically naive. The most union-friendly Leader in the history of the Labour Party has no conceivable need of such devices.

Elsewhere in the legal world, not only do #IStandWithLindaBellos, but I wonder who is paying for a private prosecution to be brought against her. That is an astonishingly expensive thing to do.

I know, because I am looking into bringing one in the future, if the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to bring a prosecution against Simon Henig or Alison Saunders.

We can include Henig because there would be no shortage of people who would be prepared to stump up serious cash, even if I had to go round and collect it rather than deal with the banks, in order to send a former Director of Public Prosecutions to the clink.

But that will be lost both on Henig and on the CPS. What binds them to each other is their shared lack of understanding of English irony.

Trial Date Watch: Day 111

20 weeks after I had again been due to stand trial, I now no longer have a trial date, even though it is rightly a criminal offence to fail to attend one's trial.

Had I been tried, as expected, on 6th December, then, even had I been convicted, I would already have been released, since I would by now have served even the whole of a wildly improbable six month sentence.

The legal persecution of me, which has been going on for over a year, was initiated only in order to deter me from seeking public office or to prevent my election to it, and its continuation is only to one or both of those ends. Amnesty International is on the case.

Until there is anything to add to it, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Libel Watch: Day 164

The Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, was so afraid that I was going to be elected to that authority, that he faked a death threat against himself and dozens of other Councillors.

Despite the complete lack of evidence, that matter is still being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of the attempt by the sacked Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, to secure a Labour seat in one or other House of Parliament.

If I am wrong, then let Henig and Saunders sue me. Until they do, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Broken Moral Compass

Jonathan Sacks is held up as a moral authority despite being a Mike Pence speechwriter who once led a Death To The Arabs march through East Jerusalem.

Sacks says that Palestine never existed, even though it appears on war memorials in Britain because it sent troops to fight in the Second World War, which is a lot more than can be said for the subsequent founders of the State of Israel.

Sacks, a defender of the Nation-State Law in the generous pages of the New Statesman, is of course of the "all criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic" school of thought.

Meanwhile, from that same stable, the Campaign Against Antisemitism is organising a petition to remove Jeremy Corbyn as the Leader of the Labour Party.

Even though it is either a registered charity or it is falsely presenting itself as such on its website. Either way, the criminal law is being broken.

Defiling and Demeaning

The New Statesman, which with The Guardian and The Observer is the great redoubt of Liberal bitterness that the Labour Party was ever founded, has an interview with the perfectly hysterical Lord Sacks. As if anyone cared what he thought.

"Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth" is a ridiculous vanity title. The United Synagogue, which as the bearer of that moniker Sacks used to head, has 40,000 members, in a country of 66 million. There are 270,000 Jews in the United Kingdom, never mind in the Commonwealth.

Therefore, two points needs to be made a lot more often.

First, Sacks was, as the ubiquitous Ephraim Mirvis is, the Chief Rabbi of about one in seven British Jews, if that. And secondly, all British Jews are far less numerous than the 313,209 people who voted in 2016 to keep Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party.

Everything Gets Done At Funerals, You Know

When Joe Biden is a pallbearer and a speaker at John McCain's funeral, then he will enter the 2020 Presidential contest as the "moderate" and "centrist" candidate.

Against Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and anyone who might seek the Democratic nomination from Sanders's increasingly open left.

But endorsed by other pallbearers such as Gary Hart, Russ Feingold, Michael Bloomberg, William Cohen, Tom Ridge, and Sheldon Whitehouse.

And endorsed by other speakers such as Kelly Ayotte, Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham, Henry Kissinger, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush.

What a way to go.

Mogged By Reality

Jacob Rees-Mogg has only been an MP since 2010, and although his party has been led by the Prime Minister throughout his time in Parliament, he has never been given any kind of office, despite the extremely low calibre of many of the people who have been.

His latest bizarre utterance, this time on Northern Ireland, needs to be seen in that light, as well as being recognised as yet another example of the fact that he simply does not come across as a Catholic at all to Catholics in general.

Culturally, he is just wrong: wrong region, wrong class, wrong party, wrong points of reference (Book of Common Prayer, King James Bible, Victorian Anglican hymnody), and now wildly wrong views on Ireland.

But then, the Unionists, broadly the existence of Unionism at all but more specifically the DUP, are now universally regarded as The Problem.

No one in Britain is happy about being ruled by this utterly foreign combination of religious fanaticism and jaw-dropping financial corruption, which gobbles up money insatiably while roaring abuse at anyone who has the temerity to question its entitlement.

This is all enunciated in the heaviest Irish accents in the world. That is the key to understanding why no one in Britain ever did regard Northern Ireland as quite British, really. And they sure as hell don't now.

If pushed, most people never saw it as British at all, and they were baffled at its own definition of the term even in those days.

Never mind today, when the Swastika is flown alongside the Israeli flag on the Twelfth, apparently as an expression of British loyalty, identity and culture.

In that context, no one cares about Jeremy Corbyn and events aeons ago.

If anything, the success of all of that would have spared us what we have to endure now, rule by Swastika-wavers with their hands in the till.

And since the side with which Corbyn was associated is now within an ace of victory anyway, why did we fight it back in the day? What for? So that we could end up being ruled by the DUP?

On both counts, we would have saved an awful lot of everything if we had simply never bothered. We never really wanted to.

Trial Date Watch: Day 110

More than 19 weeks after I had again been due to stand trial, I now no longer have a trial date, even though it is rightly a criminal offence to fail to attend one's trial.

Had I been tried, as expected, on 6th December, then, even had I been convicted, I would already have been released, since I would by now have served even the whole of a wildly improbable six month sentence.

The legal persecution of me, which has been going on for over a year, was initiated only in order to deter me from seeking public office or to prevent my election to it, and its continuation is only to one or both of those ends. Amnesty International is on the case.

Until there is anything to add to it, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Libel Watch: Day 163

The Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, was so afraid that I was going to be elected to that authority, that he faked a death threat against himself and dozens of other Councillors.

Despite the complete lack of evidence, that matter is still being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of the attempt by the sacked Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, to secure a Labour seat in one or other House of Parliament.

If I am wrong, then let Henig and Saunders sue me. Until they do, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Just Flagging This Up

The Syrian Arab Army, which is itself 80 per cent Sunni Muslim, stands on the cusp of liberating Idlib from the Islamist head-choppers and heart-cutters who were so beloved of John McCain and who remain so beloved of David Aaronovitch.

Therefore, expect a false flag "chemical weapons attack" in Idlib in order to "justify" an "intervention". John Bolton has as good as said as much.

I am beginning to think, not only that Jeremy Corbyn should sue Aaronovitch, but that this time he really will.

Forcing Aaronovitch to defend under oath his doolally theory about the Warrington bombings would shed an important light on all of his many other excursions into transparent lunacy.

Down to, and including, the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

By contrast, Corbyn passed the security vetting for the Privy Council. There is no answer to that. The claims made by Aaronovitch, and by Andrew Gilligan, cannot be true.

The Whitewashing of John McCain

Fraser Myers writes: 

For a clear illustration of the effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome, look no further than the elevation to the status of secular saint of the recently deceased Republican senator and former presidential hopeful, John McCain. 

McCain was famously critical of Donald Trump during his election campaign. He accused Trump of using rhetoric which ‘fired up the crazies’ and he withdrew his support of Trump’s candidacy following the emergence of the ‘grab them by the pussy’ tape.

In death, McCain has added a further snub, refusing to allow Trump to attend his funeral.

Amid the rolling-news hagiography of the late senator, CNN’s Jake Tapper veered momentarily off-script to ask whether ‘the reason there’s so much reverence for him today is because of who’s in the White House right now’. 

Indeed, the organs of the #Resistance have struggled to contain their appreciation for the right-wing senator ever since he first criticised Trump. Last year, a writer for the Washington Post said it is ‘simply impossible to overestimate the love, bordering on worship, that reporters in Washington’ had for McCain. 

Following his death, a Washington Post editorial claimed that ‘all over this world, Mr McCain is associated with freedom and democracy’. He ‘championed human rights with verve and timelessness – speaking out against repression and authoritarianism’, apparently. 

Gushing tributes have flooded in from prominent Democrats. Minority senate leader Chuck Schumer says McCain was a ‘truth-teller… never afraid to speak truth to power’ – a clear reference to his attacks on Trump. 

Schumer says he will propose a bill to rename the Senate’s Russell building after McCain. Even the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party has heaped praise on him: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called him an ‘unparalleled example of human decency’. 

McCain’s military record in Vietnam – particularly his refusal to be released from a POW camp until all of his compatriots were freed – has understandably made him a moral exemplar to some. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that he was also a serial warmonger who endorsed every disastrous US military intervention of the past two decades. He has even called for military action in Nigeria, Mali, North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Russia.

In a competitive field, he held some of the most hawkish foreign-policy views of any American politician. He cosied up to dictators in Libya and Saudi Arabia – ‘Thank God for the Saudis’, he once said to CNN. 

But for today’s so-called Resistance, simply being anti-Trump puts you on the right side of history. 

The overblown, hysterical reaction to Trump, the belief that his victory heralded a return to the 1930s, that he is a uniquely evil president, is having a profound effect on some people’s understanding of the recent past. 

The relentless media love-bombing of McCain has completely transformed his reputation. According to a Fox News poll, while just 41 per cent of Republicans hold a favourable view of the late senator, 60 per cent of Democrats do.

Similarly, George W Bush, architect of the 21st century’s bloodiest war and overseer of the financial crisis, now receives standing ovations at speaking engagements because he has criticised Trump. His approval rating has rocketed to 54 per cent among Democrats, according to a CNN poll. 

Trump Derangement Syndrome is whitewashing some of the most destructive events and decisions of recent history and rehabilitating those responsible for them.

The Extreme Centre

Solomon Hughes writes: 

The rolling campaign for a “new centre party” stands — and then falls — on the claim that the “middle,” where “sensible moderates” of both parties meet, is a good place.

But we’ve lived in that place for nearly two decades and it doesn’t look good at all. 

This is where the “sensible moderates” of both parties agreed the private finance initiative for hospitals and schools, contracting out for the NHS, Carillion to run public services, Atos to test the disabled, G4S to run private prisons or jails where we can “lock up asylum-seekers,” student loans, academy schools, deregulate the banks then fix the resulting banking crash by years of austerity, the Iraq war and Libyan bombing. 

The “cross-party consensus” is privatisation and war. It might be the “centre,” but it isn’t moderate. 

The latest expression of this “extreme centre” is the Tory Glastonbury being held in Cambridge on the September 8. 

Organised by Tory “moderate” MP George Freeman, this festival of debates in tents looks more like a kind of Tory bake-off or a posh wedding than Glastonbury.

Its proper name is the Big Tent Ideas Festival. Last year Bridges said the festival was trying to get “a cultural revival of grassroots Conservatism.” 

This year Freeman has changed it from what he called a “Conservative Ideas Festival” to a “cross-party festival,” claiming it will have “speakers from across the radical centre of British politics” to challenge the “rapidly polarising political climate.” 

It’s a softer version of the New Centrist Party claims. 

To make it cross-party, Freeman has recruited a co-chair, Labour Baroness Sally Morgan. In doing so he has shown how the centre is not “moderate” or “sensible.” 

The short version: former Tony Blair minister Sally Morgan was a Carillion director, sitting on the board while the firm collapsed in one of Britain’s worst corporate scandals. 

She was one of the leaders of a corporation that grabbed huge public-sector contracts thanks to New Labour and Tory privatisation, threw money at shareholders and directors, then disintegrated when dodgy accounting was exposed.

It is a perfect example of the politics of the centre. 

The longer version is even worse. Morgan was Blair’s political secretary in 1997. In 2001 Blair made her a baroness and a Cabinet Office minister and then his director of political and government relations — a post she held from 2001-5. 

Alastair Campbell told the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war that Morgan “was very, very important” in Labour’s Iraq war plans, especially by organising for Blair’s war in Parliament. 

Morgan was at many of the war planning meetings. One key document, the “Downing Street Memo,” records an “extremely sensitive” meeting of Blair’s officials in 2002. 

The memo includes the admission, not shared with the public, that the “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” and the WMD “case was thin.” 

The memo is addressed to 10 people, including the heads of the army, intelligence service, the defence and foreign secretaries — and Sally Morgan. 

Morgan was not only one of the Iraq war architects. She also helped get Labour’s NHS privatisation and PFI plans going. 

She left government in 2005 and started taking on corporate jobs, especially with firms looking for privatisation gains. 

Morgan was a director of private care home operator Southern Cross Healthcare from 2006-11.

Southern Cross squeezed loads of money out of publicly funded social care budgets, sometimes for homes with “zero-star” ratings from the regulator, indicating squalid conditions.

Like Carillion, Southern Cross collapsed in 2011. Critics said it tried to extract too much money by tricky accounting schemes. 

Morgan also had a job on the advisory board of Lloyds the chemists, just as they were trying to grab more NHS work. 

In 2010, Channel 4 Dispatches ran a “politicians for hire” sting. Its undercover reporter approached Lords and MPs and pretended to be lobbyists seeking to hire politicians to help their clients get business. 

Because of her corporate jobs, Dispatches approached Morgan. She told them that, because of her political contacts, she could help her corporate employers. 

She knew “which buttons to push” and could “push a direction of travel on policy” and that, when it came to health, she knew “who to scream at in the department.” 

Morgan explained she could advise how private firms could reach the government with “some fairly basic things like, probably, give advice on to what extent they should have presence at a party conference, to what extent should they be trying to seek, at what stage should they be trying to seek meetings with ministers, at what level of civil servants, should they sponsor a seminar on it.” 

The House of Lords privileges committee ruled that Morgan had done nothing wrong when offering advice to the undercover reporters, though to me it looks like a prime example of how corporations get access to politics. 

Morgan also said: “What you find is — and it’s quite funny, I mean, you know, you might be completely unaware of it — what’s bizarre is, almost regardless of who’s in power, an awful lot of the key players don’t change, which is odd.” 

The Carillion crash means Morgan is down to one corporate job. Since 2014 she has been a director of housebuilder Countryside Properties. 

Twenty-seven per cent of Countryside house sales rely on George Osborne’s “Help to Buy” subsidy, which has enriched housing firms but left house prices high. 

Freeman, her co-chair of the “Big Ideas” festival is a supposedly “moderate” Tory. He has been calling for a “cross-party” initiative to “end the idea that co-payments, top-ups, are somehow antithetical to an NHS.” 

When I saw him at the last Tory conference, he said the Conservative message to the young should be: “Guys, we need to be really honest with you. This is a bit of a mess. The structural deficit means we are simply not going to have the resources to give you what everyone post-war had. So what do you want to have?” 

So Freeman and Morgan running the Tory Glastonbury really is the “radical centre” — where the centre means the Iraq war, Carillion rip-offs, NHS privatisation and austerity.

British Journalism In 2018

Andrew Gilligan, or someone very close to him, edits the Wikipedia entry of an obscure political organisation from a long time ago.

Gilligan then immediately writes up that entry, thus edited, as an article that the Sunday Times proceeds to print, a decision for which even the best excuse is that, oh, well, it is August, I suppose.

David Aaronovitch then does the necessary on Twitter, trying to link Jeremy Corbyn to the Warrington bombings.

David Aaronovitch, who is himself very closely linked to people who really have done an awful lot of bombing, and that a lot more recently than 1993.

Of course, no one is taking any of this seriously. Like the "Labour MPs need bodyguards" nonsense, not even Guido has picked it up.

And even if it were true, which it so very obviously is not, then who would care? A couple of 80-year-old retired colonels and the man who is already in prison for the murder of Jo Cox.

The first two were never going to vote for Corbyn anyway, like Gillingan and Aaronovitch, while the third could not do so even if he wanted to, like Aaronivitch's mates once justice comes. 

As justice will come. Oh, yes, it will.

We Have Not Yet Begun To Fight

Craig Murray writes: 

On 8 July 2018 a lady named Kirsty Eccles asked what, in its enormous ramifications, historians may one day see as the most important Freedom of Information request ever made. The rest of this post requires extremely close and careful reading, and some thought, for you to understand that claim.

Dear British Broadcasting Corporation,

1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer. 

2: When did the BBC know this? 

3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the subject of Sergei Skripal. 

Yours faithfully, 

Kirsty Eccles 

The ramifications of this little request are enormous as they cut right to the heart of the ramping up of the new Cold War, of the BBC’s propaganda collusion with the security services to that end, and of the concoction of fraudulent evidence in the Steele “dirty dossier”.

This also of course casts a strong light on more plausible motives for an attack on the Skripals. Which is why the BBC point blank refused to answer Kirsty’s request, stating that it was subject to the Freedom of Information exemption for “Journalism”.

10th July 2018

Dear Ms Eccles

Freedom of Information request – RFI20181319

Thank you for your request to the BBC of 8th July 2018, seeking the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000:

1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer.

2: When did the BBC know this?

3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the subject of Sergei Skripal.

The information you have requested is excluded from the Act because it is held for the purposes of ‘journalism, art or literature.’ The BBC is therefore not obliged to provide this information to you. 

Part VI of Schedule 1 to FOIA provides that information held by the BBC and the other public service broadcasters is only covered by the Act if it is held for ‘purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature”. 

The BBC is not required to supply information held for the purposes of creating the BBC’s output or information that supports and is closely associated with these creative activities.

The BBC is of course being entirely tendentious here – “journalism” does not include the deliberate suppression of vital information from the public, particularly in order to facilitate the propagation of fake news on behalf of the security services.

That black propaganda is precisely what the BBC is knowingly engaged in, and here trying hard to hide. I have today attempted to contact Mark Urban at Newsnight by phone, with no success, and sent him this email:

To: mark.urban@bbc.co.uk

Dear Mark, 

As you may know, I am a journalist working in alternative media, a member of the NUJ, as well as a former British Ambassador. I am researching the Skripal case. I wish to ask you the following questions. 

1) When the Skripals were first poisoned, it was the largest news story in the entire World and you were uniquely positioned having held several meetings with Sergei Skripal the previous year. Yet faced with what should have been a massive career break, you withheld that unique information on a major story from the public for four months. Why?

2) You were an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment together with Skripal’s MI6 handler, Pablo Miller, who also lived in Salisbury. Have you maintained friendship with Miller over the years and how often do you communicate?

3) When you met Skripal in Salisbury, was Miller present all or part of the time, or did you meet Miller separately?

4) Was the BBC aware of your meetings with Miller and/or Skripal at the time?

5) When, four months later, you told the world about your meetings with Skripal after the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you said you had met him to research a book. Yet the only forthcoming book by you advertised is on the Skripal attack. What was the subject of your discussions with Skripal?

6) Pablo Miller worked for Orbis Intelligence. Do you know if Miller contributed to the Christopher Steele dossier on Trump/Russia?

7) Did you discuss the Trump dossier with Skripal and/or Miller?

8) Do you know whether Skripal contributed to the Trump dossier?

9) In your Newsnight piece following the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you stated that security service sources had told you that Yulia Skripal’s telephone may have been bugged. Since January 2017, how many security service briefings or discussions have you had on any of the matter above.

I look forward to hearing from you. 

Craig Murray 

I should very much welcome others also sending emails to Mark Urban to emphasise the public demand for an answer from the BBC to these vital questions.

If you have time, write your own email, or if not copy and paste from mine.

To quote that great Scot John Paul Jones, “We have not yet begun to fight”.

Nothing If Not A Cautionary Tale

Whereas Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweets the proof that some people are ready and some people simply are not (as we know only too well in North West Durham), Daniel Larison writes:

Sen. John McCain died from brain cancer over the weekend:

John S. McCain, the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81.

McCain served in Congress for more than thirty years. In that time, he went from the Vietnam veteran who warned against an unwise entanglement in Lebanon to becoming the most vocal and predictable advocate for every bad military intervention under the sun.

The longer he stayed in Washington, the worse he became. His career is nothing if not a cautionary tale to other would-be legislators.

He specialized in matters of national security and foreign policy, and yet he had a remarkable knack for misjudging practically every major foreign policy issue of the last three decades.

McCain distinguished himself as a consistent proponent of unnecessary foreign wars in the name of American “leadership,” and the country was always worse off when the president heeded his recommendations.

He was a leading cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya, and he was wrong about both. He was also a Kosovo war supporter and has been a steadfast defender of U.S. support for the Saudi war on Yemen.

When Georgia escalated a conflict with Russia, he insanely proclaimed, “We are all Georgians” and gave the impression that he was willing to risk WWIII over a dispute that had nothing to do with us.

Despite his constant demands for more “action,” the U.S. did not intervene in Syria as forcefully or as soon as he wanted.

He was even once quoted praising the Saudis for their role in Syria. “Thank God for the Saudis,” he said.

He was famously hawkish on Iran (“bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran,” he sang), and in recent years went so far as to jump on the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) bandwagon.

This is a record of horrible judgment and even more horrible costs for the people in the countries affected by the policies he supported.

If McCain had his way, the U.S. would have been in even more wars for much longer than we already were, and even his admirers can’t deny that.

For the last twenty years of his political career, McCain was an irrepressible champion of reckless U.S. meddling around the world.

It was an enormous stroke of good fortune for the U.S. and the world that his 2008 presidential bid failed.

If you believe that U.S. foreign policy is far too militarized, overreaching, and destructive, McCain did a great deal to make and keep it that way.

The one big thing that McCain got right in his Senate career was his opposition to torture.

Because he had suffered from the use of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he understandably had no patience for the euphemisms and rationalizations of his pro-torture colleagues.

This was the most significant disagreement he had with his party, and in the end it is probably the only issue where his willingness to break with his party from time to time really mattered.

McCain had the ability to put principle ahead of party on occasion. Unfortunately, he did not do so all that often, and when it came to foreign policy the principles he followed were usually very bad ones.

The Strange Silence of Sergei Skripal

Neil Clark writes:

'Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?' 'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time' 'The dog did nothing in the night-time'. 'That was the curious incident', remarked Sherlock Holmes. 

That famous exchange between Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr Watson in the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle short story 'Silver Blaze', springs readily to mind when one considers the strange silence of Sergei Skripal. 

This week, the Times newspaper reported that the British authorities had rejected a claim by Sergei Skripal's niece that the former Russian double agent, who was poisoned with nerve agent in Salisbury on 4th March, could already be dead.

But if Skripal is not dead, then why haven't we heard from him, or seen any recent photograph of him? 

There have in fact, been no pictures of him, since 4th March, the day he was poisoned. He's become the 2018 equivalent of H.G. Wells' Invisible Man. 

Let's think this through logically, without fear or favour. 

Skripal, we were told, was discharged was from Salisbury District hospital on Friday 18th May, over two months on from him being found unconscious, with his daughter Yulia, on a park bench near to the centre of the Wiltshire town. 

Five days later, on Wednesday 23rd May, Yulia appeared on video, making a short statement that was filmed in a secret location somewhere in England. 

She said: 'I take one day at a time and want to help care for my Dad till his full recovery. In the longer term I hope to return to my country'. 

She also said: 'I want to re-iterate what I said in my earlier statement that no one speaks for me, or my father, but ourselves'. 

The next we hear from Yulia is in a telephone call to her cousin Vicktoria, which took place on or around 4th July. 

In it, she blames her cousin for making 'this public' and says 'I am just asking that no one interferes in this situation, that's all'. 

Yulia says that 'no-one' is stopping her returning home to live her life. 'I can do that any day. It's just that I am currently looking after my father and recovering myself'. 

The investigative blogger The Blogmire, who has done some really excellent work on the case, surmises that Yulia Skripal did not know that Russia had been blamed when she spoke to her cousin. She had not been told this by the UK authorities.

'Had she been told, she could hardly have blamed her cousin for creating the publicity that is apparently preventing her return', The Blogmire writes. 

It's clear also that Yulia doesn't blame Russia for trying to kill her, or else she would not have said that she could return home 'any day'. 

Why would she want to go a place where the government/state security services had tried to kill her and her father, even if it was her home country? 

Even more interestingly, Viktoria says another call with Yulia took place on 24th July, in which Yulia said 'I finally got the internet, and I read everything. I understood everything. Forgive me'. 

In that phone call, to her grandmother on her birthday, Yulia says that she is in London with her father. 

She says: "He can't speak because he's got a tracheotomy, that pipe, which will be taken off in three days.

"Now when he speaks with that pipe, his voice is first of all very weak and secondly he makes quite a lot of wheeze." 

That would explain why we hadn't heard from Sergei up to then, but one more month has now passed. 

Viktoria said that Yulia told her her father would call on his own after the pipe had been removed, but there's been no word from him. Why no updates on his condition? 

Another important question we need to ask is: why did the British authorities keep Yulia and presumably Sergei Skripal too, in the dark about them blaming Russia, at least until early July? 

Could it be because they knew Russia was not responsible and that they knew that Yulia and Sergei knew that too, because they had a very good idea of who had attacked them?

Let's suppose that someone else was behind the 'attack', to use Yulia's own term. 

The exposure of that would be hugely embarrassing for the British government, and indeed for most of the political and media establishment, who decided Russia was guilty even before any kind of criminal investigation could begin. 

Not only did Britain expel 23 Russian diplomats, it urged other countries to do the same. 

There were even calls for the football World Cup to be taken away from Russia and for Russian media operating lawfully in the UK to be shut down. 

Don't forget too that only last week new US sanctions on Russia, imposed because of the Skripal case, came into force. 

The Russian claim for compensation, if the accusations are revealed as false, could run into billions of dollars. 

Which begs the question: if it wasn't Russia, but some other actor, state or non-state, would we ever be allowed to know? 

Surely if Yulia or Sergei agreed with the UK government line that Russia was responsible, the authorities would have done everything to get them in front of a camera, reading a statement to that effect. 

Think how that would aid the anti-Russian cause, which the British neoconservative government is so keen to pursue. 

The fact that neither Skripal has come out with any such statement, is arguably as significant as Sherlock Holmes's dog that didn't bark in the night time. 

As to the claims circulating that Sergei is already dead, a simple short video, or, if that's not possible, a dated photograph, could easily disprove that and end the speculation.

The public needs to know what's going on. 

We need to hear from Yulia and Sergei Skripal and their account of what happened on 4th March. We need to see the evidence, as this is a matter of great national and international significance.

Is that really too much to ask for, Mrs May?

I Will Always Love You?

Anti-Corbyn Labour MPs affecting bodyguards, as if anyone would know who those MPs were, is one of the funniest things that I have ever heard. 

How utterly delusional these people now are. One might even say that they lacked a grasp of English irony.

Red Action Redaction

Red Action. The very name sounds like a pun. With his roots in the Communist Party, David Aaronovitch had airily never heard of it until this weekend. 

But it is now the latest stick with which to beat Jeremy Corbyn, who would be a pariah on the Left if he had in fact had any connection to it. And whatever else Corbyn may be, he is not a pariah on the Left.

Red Action was founded by people who had been expelled from the Socialist Workers Party for "squadism", direct physical action against the likes of the National Front. 

That was all far too working-class for the SWP. But it was rather effective over the years, not least against Combat 18. I am not condoning it. But I cannot condemn it absolutely, either. Corbyn probably would, though, I suspect.

Insofar as that did sometimes cross over with links to Irish paramilitary activity, and the alleged link to the Warrington bombings is wholly unproven, then that was because of the ties between the British Far Right and Ulster Loyalist paramilitarism.

Those ties are still in place, and the present Government would not thank anyone for bringing them up, since it depends for confidence and supply on 10 MPs with varying degrees of such connection, including one who owed her unexpected election last year directly to the support of those organisations.

Red Action has remained on certain terms with others who have also, at various times, parted company with the SWP because they was too working-class for it, and too critical of identity politics.

With the Revolutionary Communist Group, it organised the Independent Working Class Association that has had some success in electing its candidates to Oxford City Council.

And at the 1987 General Election, it organised the Red Front with the RCG and the Revolutionary Communist Party. Yes, that Revolutionary Communist Party. To bring all of this up again after all these years would be to enter quite the moral maze.

To Maintain The Lie

Yanis Varoufakis writes:

Over the past week, the world’s media have been proclaiming the successful completion of the Greek financial rescue programme mounted in 2010 by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Headlines celebrated the end of Greece’s bailout, even the termination of austerity. 

Buoyant reports from ground zero of the eurozone crisis portrayed Europe’s eight-year long Greek intervention as a paradigm of judicious European solidarity with its black sheep; a case of “tough love” that, reportedly, worked. 

A more careful reading of the facts points to a different reality. 

In the very week that a devastated Greece entered another 42 years of harsh austerity and deeper debt bondage (2018-2060), how can the end of austerity and Greece’s regained financial independence be presented as fact?

Instead, last week should be cited in our universities’ media schools and economics departments as an example of how consent can be built internationally around a preposterous lie.

But let’s begin by defining our terms. What is a bailout and why is Greece’s version exceptional and never-ending?

Following the banking debacle in 2008, almost every government bailed out the banks.

In the UK and US, governments famously gave the green light to, respectively, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve to print mountains of public money to refloat the banks. 

Additionally, the UK and US governments borrowed large sums to further aid the failing banks while their central banks financed much of those debts. 

On the European continent, a far worse drama was unfolding due to the EU’s odd decision, back in 1998, to create monetary union featuring a European Central Bank without a state to support it politically and 19 governments responsible for salvaging their banks in times of financial tumult, but without a central bank to aid them. 

Why this anomalous arrangement? Because the German condition for swapping the deutschmark for the euro was a total ban on any central bank financing of banks or governments – Italian or Greek, say. 

So, when in 2009 the French and German banks proved even more insolvent than those of Wall Street or the City, there was no central bank with the legal authority, or backed by the political will, to save them. 

Thus, in 2009, even Germany’s Chancellor Merkel panicked when told that her government had to inject, overnight, €406bn of taxpayers’ money into the German banks. 

Alas, it was not enough. A few months later, Mrs Merkel’s aides informed her that, just like the German banks, the over-indebted Greek state was finding it impossible to roll over its debt. 

Had it declared its bankruptcy, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal would follow suit, with the result that Berlin and Paris would have faced a fresh bailout of their banks greater than €1tn. 

At that point, it was decided that the Greek government could not be allowed to tell the truth, that is, confess to its bankruptcy. 

To maintain the lie, insolvent Athens was given, under the smokescreen of “solidarity with the Greeks”, the largest loan in human history, to be passed on immediately to the German and French banks. 

To pacify angry German parliamentarians, that gargantuan loan was given on condition of brutal austerity for the Greek people, placing them in a permanent great depression. 

To get a feel for the devastation that ensued, imagine what would have happened in the UK if RBS, Lloyds and the other City banks had been rescued without the help of the Bank of England and solely via foreign loans to the exchequer. 

All granted on the condition that UK wages would be reduced by 40%, pensions by 45%, the minimum wage by 30%, NHS spending by 32%. 

The UK would now be the wasteland of Europe, just as Greece is today. 

But did this nightmare not end last week? Not in the slightest.

Technically speaking, the Greek bailouts had two components. 

The first entailed the EU and the IMF granting the Greek government some financial facility by which to pretend to be repaying its debts. 

Then there was the harsh austerity taking the form of ridiculously high tax rates and savage cuts in pensions, wages, public health and education. 

Last week, the third bailout package did end, just as the second had ended in 2015 and the first in 2012. 

We now have a fourth such package that differs from the past three in two unimportant ways. 

Instead of new loans, payments of €96.6bn that were due to begin in 2023 will be deferred until after 2032, when the monies must be repaid with interest on top of other large repayments previously scheduled. 

And, second, instead of calling it a fourth bailout, the EU has named it, triumphantly, the “end of the bailout”. 

Ridiculously high VAT and small business tax rates will, of course, continue, as will fresh pension cuts and new punitive income tax rates for the poorest that have been scheduled for 2019. 

The Greek government has also committed to maintaining a long-term budget surplus target, not counting debt repayments (3.5% of national income until 2021, and 2.2% during 2022-2060) that demands permanent austerity, a target that the IMF itself gives less than 6% probability of ever being attained by any eurozone country. 

In summary, after having bailed out French and German banks at the expense of Europe’s poorest citizens, and after having turned Greece into a debtor’s prison, last week Greece’s creditors decided to declare victory

Having put Greece into a coma, they made it permanent and declared it “stability”: they pushed our people off a cliff and celebrated their bounce off the hard rock of a great depression as proof of “recovery”. 

To quote Tacitus, they made a desert and called it peace.

Not The Norm

I do not expect the Norman Bettison treatment, eventually able to go on television and claim vindication because the witnesses had started to drop dead after 30 years.

After all, I am not a Freemason. Nor was I ever a trusty of the Thatcher Government, by no means only in relation to Hillsborough.

But most of all, there are no witnesses against me to drop dead, not even in 30 years' time.

Split Ends?

Exactly how many people have to leave a political party for it to count as a split? One?

Even the loss of an improbable 50 MPs, and of a no less unlikely 10,000 hangers on, would be of no consequence to a Labour Party that had well over half a million members.

The Language of Today

Visiting Ireland, the Pope has spoken in Italian, preached in Spanish, and chatted in French to people from Burkina Faso. But he has only given a blessing in English.

He did not speak it much, if at all, when he visited the United States, either. But then, although he will not live to see it, his own mother tongue will be that country's principal language soon enough.

The "Anglosphere" is as dead as the EU. Getting out of the latter, and arguably out of the former in that sense, is our chance to deal instead with the great rising powers of Eurasia, Latin America, and Africa.

India has less and less of an Anglophone, Anglophile elite; it is still there, but it runs things less and less. China has never had one.

And yes, I do speak French. A bit of Spanish, too; I must brush up. But mostly French. I love it, and that is reason enough in itself. But it is also the key to much of Africa. And there will soon enough be a President of France who understands which way the world is heading.

Britain, however, seems determined to take longer to catch up.

On Tablets of Stone

The name of Palestine appears on war memorials that are now being defaced by pro-Israeli activists, for example in Brighton. 

Palestine, you see, fought with Britain during the Second World War. 

The subsequent founders of the State of Israel, by contrast, took a very different approach.

Just The Tikkit

Please give me a Follow.

Front Room Front Line

The 1967 Abortion Act was supposed to end the "backstreet abortions" that the people who would have had to have dealt professionally with the consequences were in any case insistent barely existed.

But 51 years later, we are to have front room abortions, with women taking highly powerful drugs, and running a very high risk of serious complications, under absolutely no medical supervision whatever.

We need our people to hold the balance of power in the coming hung Parliament. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any realistic chance of winning.

My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.