'Two cheers are quite enough.' - Will Jordan's blog

Complicity in Torture

2012-01-13T07:35:00.001Z

"It was nobody’s fault that an unarmed and unresisting electrician was shot six times in the head as he sat on a tube train. It was nobody’s fault the police subsequently lied about him. It is nobody’s fault that MI5 and MI6 officers were interviewing detainees with freshly mutilated genitals. It was nobody’s fault that, when I blew the whistle on active UK complicity in torture, I was immediately suspended from duty and charged with eighteen allegations of gross misconduct, every one of which was subsequently adjudged to be false. It was nobody’s fault that David Kelly died a horrible, lonely and mysterious death after letting slip the truth – that there were no Iraqi WMD. It was nobody’s fault that hundreds of thousands died and trillions were squandered due to the lies officially published – by nobody’s fault – about WMD."

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/01/complicity-in-torture/

Liberia & Libya: war, peace and hospitality

2011-10-21T09:13:00.002+01:00

It was once 'Africa's finest hotel', says the security guard as we wander around the concrete carcass. The Ducor at the end of Broad Street in Monrovia played host to many of the great and the good in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and also the bad. The story goes that Idi Amin swam in the Ducor's swimming pool, his pistol still by his side.

The views enjoyed by the guests at this 300-room hotel, built in 1959 by the Intercontinental Group, were spectacular. They still are, giving you an all-round view of Monrovia's peninsulas and port.

This old brochure shows the sleek hotel as it once was.

A gem in an African crown of hospitality - it was one of West Africa's thriving hotels, but by 1990 the last guest had checked out.

Liberia had sunk into civil war and fighters and looters were moving in. The stories were now of a haunted, derelict hotel. It stood over Monrovia as a symbol of the sad side-effects of civil war.

By 2003, Liberia had signed up for peace and by 2005 it had elected a new leader, Africa’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. War had left Liberia behind, and all the talk was of reconciliation and reconstruction.

Eventually, the conversation turned to the Ducor's redevelopment. In January 2011, the vice presidenthanded over the site to the investment arm of the Libyan government, ready for a multimillion dollar refit. The Ducor was to be restored to its former glory.

Perhaps military strongmen may once again swim in the pool, pistols by their sides.

The squatters were moved on. Today, only Frank, the caretaker, and a handful of security guards remain to roam the hulk of the hotel. Workers ringed the site with a shiny new corrugated-iron wall.

But in February in Libya, the people began their revolt. Libya's $60 million investment in Liberia was at risk. By June, President Sirleaf had decided to cut ties with Gaddafi’s Libya and work stopped at the Ducor.

It was a hotel destroyed by war at home. Now, another war more than 6,000 kilometres away has dented the dream of its redevelopment.

And so the building stands... waiting for someone else to come up the millions needed to bring a grand old dame a much needed and deserved makeover to face an uncertain future.

Liberia's election: a test for peace

2011-10-06T21:27:00.003+01:00

(First published here)

The sign at Monrovia airport said four things: NO STANDING, NO LOITERING, NO URINATING, NO SELLING. I stood, loitering until our fixer arrived. I bought a sim card from the kiosk selling them. Nobody urinated.

We drove into Monrovia, through the tropical lush green land along the coast, past the many election campaign posters, past the health ministry being rebuilt by the Chinese, past the huge UN tower, headquarters for the staff of one of the United Nations’ largest peacekeeping missions, cut from around 15,000 troops to 8,000.

“Monkey still working, let baboon wait small” reads one of the much-publicised posters from the ruling Unity Party of Africa’s first woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. It is one of many slogans she is using as she seeks re-election, urging voters to stick with what they know, a tried-and-tested, six-year-old government that is still on a mission to transform the country. The opposition can wait their turn. Other billboards focus on the schools and roads she has built and the development she has brought. “Development: Da’ my area.”

The country is captivated. Every radio and television station talks of nothing but the October 11 elections. Will they be peaceful? Can we tackle corruption? Who is the best candidate? Will the vote be free and fair?

And it is the same on the streets. Waiting for print-outs of our passport photos, we stood in a Chinese-run store. One man taking part in a march for a peaceful election burst through the door. He delivered his message loudly to assembled customers. At the top of his voice, he spoke of the importance of the election and of peace. He excitedly told the people they had a free choice.

I choose the best candidate for me. That is my choice. My girl, she chooses the best candidate for her. This is only for her.”

His words reflect the rise of women’s rights in Liberia, spearheaded by President Sirleaf, and the hope for a free vote.

The customers express their scepticism and complain of the “aggressive” campaigning by some candidates. Election teams are distributing footballs, t-shirts, hats, badges, all sorts of paraphernalia adorned with their images, in the hope it will win them a vote.

“No one else could have done it better than we have,” President Sirleaf reportedly told a crowd on her campaign. She has tackled the painful legacy of war, working on reconciliation, development and corruption. She promised to govern for only one term but is now seeking a second. She says the task ahead is huge and she needs more than six years.

But her opponents say she has fallen short on tackling corruption, first and foremost. The main contender is Winston Tubman, who has teamed up with Liberia’s equivalent of David Beckham. George Weah is a football superstar who came second to Sirleaf in 2005, having polled better than her in the first round. They believe their brains-and-popularity combination is powerful.

“When I get up, they cheer,” says Tubman. “But when Weah gets up, they get excited. Kids three and four are jumping up and down, older people as well. It’s something magical to watch.”

On Monrovia’s main artery road, women lie on a football field, dressed in white, making the shape of a crucifix. They are fasting for one day and asking God for peace in “Mama Liberia”. They wail and weep and cry, “We’re tired. We want peace.”

The whole nation knows that this election, if it is concluded without a resort to violence, will be a huge milestone towards achieving that lasting peace. But it is also a serious flashpoint. This election is a challenge to which Liberia must rise. The alternative is a step backwards, towards conflict.

Britain: The underclass, the upper class and us

2011-08-10T13:02:00.008+01:00

We didn’t really notice when our society became warped. We were standing among the crowds. We knew it was changing because everybody had become middle class, like us. Posh people were middle class. Poor people were middle class.

But not quite everybody was. On the edge of the crowd a few had slipped away. Our famous class-structure had mutated.

Cool!

By 1997, the working class struggle was over. Their riots were routed, their jobs had gone, and their time had passed.

So too had John Major’s. Confused conservatism was out. The grey man of politics was replaced by a red man. But this was New Red, not Old Red. Old Red Neil Kinnock went into the Eurocracy. New Red Tony Blair cultivated Cool Britannia, having won the votes of the middle class.

Workers’ unions were out. Tony told us ‘things can only get better’ and his ministers danced to the tune. He was young and he was not too posh. He made Britain cool and filled us with hope for a more dynamic future.

We put Union Jacks on our cushions and on the roofs of our cars. We listened to new music. It was like old music, but cooler. The pop stars went to Whitehall and drank in Downing Street. They sang about champagne supernovas and wonderwalls, country houses and charmless men.

Boom!

Poor people got a minimum wage, so they were happy too. Tony wrote to us in 1999 in the Sunday People: “Why I’ve Declared War On Welfare”. He told us about his “big programme of reform. But you and I know it's necessary.”

We did know. We needed to stop those single mums who have babies at 15 and live off our state. They were out. We needed to stop those asylum seekers living it up on our tax money. They should stay out.

By 2002, Gordon Brown was telling us, “We today in our country have economic stability not boom and bust.” He had allowed the Bank of England to set interest rates. His people told us this was a visionary move, which had set us on the path to permanent prosperity.

It was good to know. The ‘90s had been very expensive. Interest rates had spiralled and people had lost homes and businesses.

But that was history. So banks texted and emailed us, offering to lend. We took their credit cards and bought new things. The experts told us consumer spending was driving the economy, so we drove new cars. We were all consumers now.

Things were so good that people were coming from all around. The plumbers were all Polish! They were cheaper and better than the British ones. There weren’t any British ones anyway.

Toffs!

At the same time, Tony was stopping the toffs from hunting foxes. They needed to find better ways to spend their spare time. Despite a million people marching in defence of country life, Tony moved to ban fox hunting.

The House of Lords struck back. The ones who had inherited their seat voted against Tony’s plans. So he stopped them from being able to vote and moved to get them out altogether.

Being born into the Lords and fox hunting were the preserves of old conservatism, which was out. We were all middle class now.

Chavs!

Even TV was changing. Andy Warhol had said in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. Now was the future. Reality TV was a revolution.

We watched Big Brother. We laughed at the contestants’ stupid behaviour and their ignorant comments. We witnessed people plucked from obscurity and made famous and rich. They lived a charmed life acquired for free.

On her way to winning Big Brother in 2002, Jade Goody declared the other contestants were "trying to use me as an escape goat." We laughed and were entertained. The phrase entered our slang dictionary.

But on her next journey into the Big Brother house Jade Goody was making someone else an ‘escape goat’. We were sickened by her victimisation of a Bollywood star. We felt it was racist. Her ignorance had gone too far.

Not long after the death threats, she got cancer. She then died slowly, while we watched her on TV and read about it in the newspapers and magazines. Perhaps this life of fame and luxury did not come for free.

But it did create a new path to prosperity. And it showed how Britain was a land of opportunity, where people and fortunes could be made overnight. We sneered. Others were inspired.

Another word had entered the slang dictionary of the middle classes: chav. Where had the word come from? Council House And Violent? Who knows? But here was the word for the subculture we loved to hate.

The ‘youth’ with the shaved hair, hood over his head, and pitbull terrier in tow was now a modern cliché.

Hoodies!

That youth worried us. The newspapers told us knife crime was spiralling out of control. We heard gun crime was more common now. We were told of postcode wars, where gangs fought for control of territory in our cities.

Tony’s war in Afghanistan wasn’t going too well either. And that had meant lots more heroin. Drugs supply was rising. We were worried about law and order.

The politicians stumbled across the idea of the ‘hoodie’. He was like the chav and sometimes the same. But he was more threatening.

Now crime had a face. We couldn’t see it, because it was hidden under this angry young man’s hood, but we knew it meant trouble.

One Tory MP and famous battle axe took herself off to learn more, while also making a TV programme called Anne Widdecombe vs The Hoodies. In 2006 she visited the Andover Estate near Kings Cross in London, and sought out what she called ‘the forgotten decents’ left to fend for themselves in a community under mob rule.

The locals said they had been vilified and painted with one brush because of where they lived and who they were. “I’ve tried to wear hoods less and less,” says one boy from the estate in a film made in reply, “because I realise people tend to stereotype a little bit.”

Hugs!

So while the kids tried to alter their wardrobes, the war on hoodies, but not the causes of hoodies, was stepped up. Opposition leader, now prime minister, David Cameron took on the issue in a now famous speech.

Hoodies, he said, could be dealt with using three principles. “Understanding what's gone wrong in order to put things right. Giving priority to the emotional quality of the work we do with young people. And giving real power to the real experts who can make the biggest difference.”

He was derided. The speech was boiled down to the slogan ‘hug-a-hoodie’ by the Labour government. One minister and attack dog called it “vacuous… wash-and-go politics.”

With the derision, the idea that we should "try and understand what's gone wrong in these children's lives” had died.

Asbo!

Instead, the only answer was to stamp out this antisocial behaviour by tackling it head on, we decided.

Tony had been trying, and had introduced Anti-Social Behaviour Orders or ASBOs back in 1999. They would stop kids from spitting, stealing, and shoplifting by telling them they couldn’t do it. If they did, they’d face a tougher punishment.

The idea failed. We thought it was a bit stupid and soft. Then we started reading about farmers getting ASBOs and angry grannies. Then it seemed kids were proud of their ASBOs which made them look tough and cool.

Eventually we gave up, and the children’s secretary Ed Balls said he wanted, "to live in the kind of society that puts ASBOs behind us." It was no good telling these kids what not to do, we thought. They had to be punished for doing it, or stopped in the first place.

We needed more coppers and they needed to be able to do their jobs. Then the experts said policemen were spending a ‘truly staggering’ amount of time doing paperwork, not being bobbies on the beat. So we needed to get the boys in blue back on the streets and away from their desks, like the good old days.

Crash!

Ten years into Tony’s journey, and he’d managed a few more big reforms to help make us all middle class.

We should all be graduates, or at least half of us, he insisted. So Tony made more university places. The universities said they couldn’t afford to pay for the extra students, even though the kids were now paying fees. Tony said the universities were exaggerating.

He said students could borrow money from companies to pay for their tuition, and put the price up. He’d taken it from free to £1,000 to £3,000. It wasn’t great, but it was okay because we could borrow the money from a company for now and pay it back later. We all had good prospects.

Tony also sold all the houses provided by the council to companies, so poor people could rent or buy them. We should all be homeowners, he’d said. And the banks had all said so too. So we borrowed to buy houses.

Then Tony said goodbye and the middle class masses waved him off.

But soon after we heard that a bank called Northern Rock was in trouble. Lots of people tried to get their money out and we had a run on the bank as if we were living in Argentina or somewhere.

Then it all got worse. Lehman Brothers went down. Lloyds TSB was in trouble. Then the government had to take over Bradford and Bingley. RBS and HBOS were next.

Scandal!

Soon we were hearing about plans ‘to pump billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money into the economy.’ Just how many seemed unclear. A lot. Hundreds of billions. And it was our money, and for what? We hadn’t gambled it away. Maybe we had borrowed too much? We didn’t think so.

The answer seemed to lie in the city, where clever men had dreamt up ways to put lipstick on the pig of risky debt and call it safe debt. We realised, they had been paying themselves fortunes, millions of pounds to do so.

The papers began a narrative that’s familiar now, bashing the bankers for their greed. But before we could really take them to task, the Daily Telegraph had turned on the MPs. They had been cooking the books as well, fiddling their expenses and putting mortgages on the tab.

We were angry about it. And then one of them, Anthony Steen, said, “Do you know what it is about? Jealousy. I have got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral.”

• By 2010, the academics had worked out that Britain’s richest 10 per cent of people were more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10 per cent.

• A million young people between 16 and 24 years old are now out of work, one in five of them.

• Last year, the 1,000 richest people in Britain amassed 30 per cent more money than they had a year before. They owned £333.5 billion in total.

Plutocrats, us, scum.

We had created a parallel plutocracy and underclass. At the top of our society a new breed of super-rich were creaming off fortunes. They were making crazy money of the levels we had never dreamed of.

Chief executives were giving themselves huge pay rises far beyond inflation. Bankers were getting bonuses of millions of pounds and then fiddling it into untaxable share and stock options. They were driving around in Aston Martins, wearing Breitling watches and travelling with Louis Vuitton luggage to sail their luxury yachts in the Mediterranean.

And what’s more, they weren’t facing the music for fomenting the financial chaos.

Underneath us all was another class, the hoodies and the chavs, occupying an underworld.

Their antisocial behaviour was unstoppable. We read that they didn’t want to work. They wanted to get famous on reality TV. The girls wanted to have babies young and live off benefits, or marry footballers and live off them.

They were fighting postcode wars and stabbing each other on street corners in dark estates. They were stealing and dealing and fighting.

Like the Americans we are paying for our higher education, aspiring to be super rich, not regulating our businesses or taxing them too much and giving the police the power they needed to stop the criminal elements in our society. Like the Americans we are letting the rich get richer and the poor slip away.

We are fearing a vilified class that isn’t the super-rich and isn’t us. The underclass. The ones left behind, outside of our society.

London’s burning!

So when a new coalition government came in, led by the familiar Eton-Oxford cabal who rubbed shoulders with the plutocracy, they were not popular with the underclass.

And when they told those poor ten or twenty per cent that they had to pay more tax (especially value added tax, which costs them proportionately more than it does the rich) and they must receive less in return, that didn’t please them either.

And why must they pay more and get less? Because the plutocracy borrowed, gambled and lost too much, so much that it threatened our entire economy.

Mary Riddel, in her article “Riots: the underclass lashes out” outlines J K Galbraith’s causes of recession in his book, The Great Crash 1929: “bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance… All those factors are again in play.”

We’ve all roundly condemned these looters for their “mindless violence” and “sheer criminality”. But as Riddel writes, it is not sufficient “to heap contempt on the rioters as if they are a pariah caste.” They already are.

"To behave in this manner young people have to believe they have no stake in the neighbourhood, and consequently no stake in wider society," writes Stafford Scott.

Who represents this class of people in our politics now? The Tories and Labour look after the plutocrats and middle classes. But the poor? Nobody listens to them. Nobody represents them in our parliament. They have no party. They have no voice.

Become middle class, and you have a voice. That is our message.

Penny Red noticed one NBC report, in which a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes…You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you? Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night, a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Revolution! Where next?

2011-02-24T15:16:00.014Z

When Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight outside government offices in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on December 17, 2010, nobody could possibly have thought his actions would spark two, possibly three revolutions in North Africa.

But the uprisings of 2011 have been very real and provoked by what Hillary Clinton called a ‘perfect storm of powerful trends’. When she said it, her words were laced with fear and warning.

What would these uprisings bring? Would they benefit the people of those countries, and more importantly to her, would they benefit America? They will if she manages things well.

But since December 17 last year, we have seen two dictators flee in disgrace, Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt. Now, Muammar ‘Mad Dog’ Gaddafi looks like he will go down in a hail of mercenaries’ bullets and a sea of Libyan blood, which he has been intent on spilling.

Where next?

The big question many people are asking now is where next?

The Economist has had a go at answering the question with the Shoethrowers Index.

It aims to offer predictions looking at each country with these questions:

How long has the leader been in power?
What proportion of the population is under 25 and how many people does that make?
What is the country’s gross domestic product?
How pervasive is corruption?
How much press freedom is there?
How much democracy is there?

They are good questions to ask. The last two are, with the exception of Iraq and Lebanon, easily answered with ‘virtually none’.

The result is that Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Oman emerge most vulnerable to revolution. Libya is on its way. Yemen may be too, although it will play out more slowly than the others.

Syria, Iraq and Oman are more complicated examples. Clearly we need to add more to the index to get a reliable result.

What follow are less scientific supplementary measures that I propose. Then you get my guess (and it is just that – a guess) of where this all goes next.

(Another disclaimer: below are lots of sweeping generalisations. This is a massively wide ranging post which covers a whole region. Corrections, improvements, suggestions are very welcome.)

Ethnic make up

Which groups make up society is crucial. In Bahrain, the estimated 70% Shia population feel disenfranchised and frozen out of government. They do not have a say and opportunities for work, income, education and beyond are limited. This breeds resentment which is focused on the government which has denied them these things. The Shia have been quick to protest and they have been joined by an out-of-work, disenfranchised group of Sunni Bahrainis who want greater opportunities and a voice. This combination is a powerful opposing force.

In Libya, the neglect of the east has played a part. The region has been underdeveloped for decades and held back by Gaddafi. Now he is reaping what he sowed, and Benghazi in the east is the epicentre of the uprising. Nearly all tribes except his own now oppose him.

Sudan, for example, may well have faced a similar southern insurrection, having faced a two-decade civil war, had it not broken in two. If the disadvantaged ethnic outcasts had joined forces with the disenchanted Arab population, Bashir may have faced a revolt. As it is, he has conceded a third of his territory to avoid this eventuality, among others.

But where a country’s ethnic division is not a simple two-way split but a more complicated patchwork of groups, it can actually have a calming effect.

Take Syria. Here, no one religious group wants to rise up because they have a lot to lose. President Bashir, an Alawite, and his father, did much to keep the peace between the religious groups (sometimes brutally) and to protect the minorities’ social position. Any uprising may erase that work and leave each group with a lot to lose in a nasty, sectarian scramble for power.

These nations are dominated by one group, which has a stabilising effect: Yemen – it has its rebellions to contend with but it is mostly made up of Arabs, roughly 70 per cent of whom are Sunnis. Oman, Libya, Jordan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE are also broadly one people.

The odd one out here is Mauritania, which by this measure is not so stable. It has a deeply complex ethnic make up which I do not pretend to begin to understand. Roughly, it is Arabs, Berbers and African black ethnic groups like the Pular, Wolof and Soninké. But it has a history of ethnic tensions since independence, which may resurface now and work against the government.

GDP growth

It is not just how wealthy people are (GDP), but what prospect they have of getting wealthy (GDP growth). If an economy is booming, everybody is on the make and chasing the dream of affluent living. Corruption works against this. So too does a government favouring certain groups in society and freezing out others.

It is worth noting that in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, economic growth had been slowing in the last few years. Although Tripoli was full of towers, Libya’s economic growth has come down from nearly 10 per cent in 2005. Tunisia’s good fortune had taken a turn, as tourism incomes slowed and the same was true in Egypt.

Syria is doing well, growth has been around 5 per cent for the last 5 years, and this suggests stability. Oman has been in a relative boom, Qatar's economy in the Gulf is exploding. Bahrain had been doing quite well too, defying the pattern.

But not the UAE or Saudi. And Yemen's growth has been steady, but perhaps not fast enough in a poor nation. Jordan too has seen slowing growth, and the King has been fast to make concessions in a bid to nip protests and an uprising in the bud.

Note also, Mauritania’s economy has been contracting. Algeria has also been struggling.

And in Iran, which saw protests in mid 2009, the economy has gone from a boom of nearly 8 per cent growth in 2007 to just 1.8 per cent in 2009. In the noose of sanctions, it may well be shrinking now. That should worry Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and co.

Leader’s popularity

Longevity does not necessarily mean unpopularity. Some long-time leaders are extremely popular and a people does not always get fed up with its leader.

Often, though, this is because a monarch or supreme leader insulates himself from responsibility by installing a government to do the hard work, such as Iran’s Supreme Leader. King Abdulla in Jordan dismissed his entire government and is clearly working to portray himself as an overseer and guardian of Jordan, not a man intricately involved in the nitty-gritty of government.

Note also how Gaddafi, in his impromptu phone call to state TV, suddenly said he was mostly a symbolic leader.

Popularity is a difficult thing to quantify, and is of course a subjective judgement. There are few or no public opinion surveys in the region to rely upon.

But it is generally accepted that Morocco’s king is a popular character. So too is Bashir in Syria, helped along by the siege mentality (more on that later). Sultan Qaboos in Oman is popular, credited with bringing about what is known in the country as 'The Renaissance’. Despite his longevity he remains revered.

There’s a question mark here though about Bouteflika of Algeria. Is he popular? He’s been around for 12 years. And in Mauritania, General Abdelaziz has only been in power a few years, but his popularity is by no means assured and he has not had time to establish a reputation as a guardian of peace and prosperity.

Foreign influence

This is a minefield. But there are a few things at play here that we can identify easily enough.

U.S. opposition to Syria and Iran’s regimes have helped Bashir and Ahmadinejad cultivate a perception of their countries being under siege by an imperial power and in turn helped the leaders to shore up power. Both have got a clear ‘enemy’ and a justifying narrative, which is absolutely essential to their survival. Bashir and Ahmadinejad are both able to present themselves as part of an axis of resistance to a malign American influence.

It’s something Gaddafi in Libya has done for a long time. Although his cosying up to the West since 2004 has stolen him of this narrative now he tries to put down the revolution. Instead he’s blaming Bin Laden. Flip it on its head, and it means we have the unusual situation of an American president and Bin Laden both backing the same side in Libya!

In Yemen, Saleh’s close cooperation with the U.S., allowing its drone strikes (revealed by Wikileaks) leaves him vulnerable to claims he is an American stooge. But it also means the Americans may work hard to keep him in power. He is important for them in the battle against Al Qaeda. Yemen is home to much Al Qaeda activity and while he may not be an ideal leader, he is reliable. He lets the U.S. carry out drone strikes and gives them good access for intelligence gathering. The Americans won’t want to see him go.

But Saleh doesn’t have a great deal of support in Saudi, and won’t get much help from them. That is no the case in Bahrain, where Saudi soldiers were rumoured to have been on the streets helping to put down the protests. The Bahraini government will be under strict instructions from Riyadh not to concede, I have no doubt.

Across the Gulf, in Bahrain, Saudi, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait, there is some popular unease with the close cooperation with the U.S., but I think many understand that having a great big American military presence brings with it security. The first Gulf War has not been forgotten. Though it does generate some resentment among Gulf populations. Looking at it from the other angle, and it is obvious the U.S. will absolutely not want Saudi to slip into uprising and revolution, or Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE or Qatar. But that’s highly unlikely anyway.

King Abdulla in Jordan has a similar problem to Mubarak. He’s made peace with Israel and become a close ally of the U.S. It’s a situation which leave shim very vulnerable to claims of being a stooge and having sold out. But Jordanians, like many in the Middle East, prize peace very highly in a region that has seen so much war. They understand and have sympathy with his rationale and are grateful for peace. And the King has the backing of the Americans, who will work to keep him in place.

Algeria and Morocco also have cordial relations with the U.S., which appear generally appreciated by their populations as beneficial. And the Americans will in turn try to keep protests to a minimum.

And lets get Iraq out of the way. This is an anomaly. The links between Western and Iraq governments are so complex and so close that things are not so straightforward. We could write books and books on the relationships here and the battle for Iraq being waged by various nations. All we can safely say is that all the leaders are flirting with outside powers and are vulnerable as a result.

Conclusion

If you apply these other less quantifiable and less scientific measures on top of the Economist’s Show Thrower’s Index, you get a good picture of how the region is set.

It shows Oman is the odd one out so high up the list. The leader is popular. The country is ethnically pretty uniform. The country’s economy is growing healthily, in part because of its good relations with the West. These all mean the population will not be provoking a revolution any time soon.

There have been small gatherings amid the regional uprisings, but nothing on a large scale. The only thing that contradicts this is how hard it is to find work for young, educated Omanis. This leaves the youth frustrated and out of work, which could lead them to protest but don’t bank on it just yet.

Iraq is also an odd one out. Its unique experience of the devastating U.S. invasion means while people will demand better government than they have been getting recently, they will not force a full, bloody revolution. There is enough blood being shed already. And outside powers will not want a revolution either. There is enough going on already.

Yemen is rightly at the top. It might not have got as much press as Bahrain, but in both places, the genie is now out of the lamp. The people are on the streets and full of anger after their governments shot their fellow countrymen dead and unleashed their goons. Both face long, drawn out days of demonstrations. Both will have to make significant concessions, and may have to go.

But both also have strong American backing and very powerful forces which want them to stay. The Americans will urge them to tough it out while trying to kill as few people as possible. That strategy may well work.

Saleh in Yemen on Thursday urged his police to protect the protesters. This was, I suspect, suggested to him by the Americans. And the Bahraini government has suddenly found a heart, calling for a day of mourning. We’ll say sorry, but we won’t quit. That is their message, brought to you by America.

Mauritania and Algeria can move up the list. Their leaders’ popularity is not as high as in other nations. Their economies are not booming. Mauritania has a complex ethnic make-up. Algeria borders Libya and Tunisia. Mauritania is a weak state.

My prediction? Yemen may rumble towards a revolt. Mauritania and Algeria are the two other countries at most risk of an uprising. Elsewhere, protests might make governments give concessions, but there will be no more dictators heading to luxury compounds to live out a life in exile.

Meat, murder and all that

2011-02-13T22:10:00.008Z

Daisy, who is young and idealistic, sent me this link to meat.org. It takes you to a video of Sir Paul McCartney explaining that commercial farming practices and the mass killing of farm animals can be very cruel. On that point he is perfectly correct.

Sir Paul then goes on to suggest that because of this, we should all become vegetarians. The video shows a picture of Natalie Portman and some other movie star, both fine specimens of the human race, as evidence of the benefits of vegetarianism.

He also explains that meats are an unhealthy 'stew' of bad bacteria, which I am not sure is quite true.

Sir Paul has achieved some amazing things in his life, but I think that converting the human race from being omnivorous to being herbivorous is beyond even him.

Humans eat meat. They always have. They always will.

While killing animals to eat them may be cruel, it is inevitable and it is natural. We have been doing it ever since we first appeared on this planet. Humans developed tools primarily so they could kill animals to eat.

But Sir Paul is right in so far as the tools we have developed today to kill animals in the most efficient, fast and cheap ways are callous and cruel.

The logical conclusion is to take action, but it is not logical to decide not to eat meat. Much more sensible is to aim to minimise the cruel practices by which we kill farm animals.

Sir Paul might focus on holding to account those who carry out such cruelty. He might consider making them adhere to better standards of slaughter. And he might lobby the government to improve the methods by which animals are legally farmed and slaughtered.

But by urging us all to become vegetarian, he actually makes the problem worse. Some farmers breed animals and then kill them in callous, cruel ways because it is the most profitable way.

If fewer people eat meat, then it becomes harder to make a living from farming, and so farmers are further compelled to cut costs and be cruel.

Sir Paul, if there are parts of farming that are cruel, you should work to make them less cruel.

You should not try to achieve something that is both impossible and unnatural, like getting the human race to avoid eating meat.

Don't ask, don't tell, don't be gay: Roger Garford & Jean MacDonald

2010-12-27T07:35:00.008Z

Jean MacDonald and Roger Garford have finally got some media coverage (thanks to Kris Jepson at Channel 4 News) for the injustice they suffered from the UK Ministry of Defence.

Two years ago, in March 2008, they also got a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights saying the MoD was wrong to expel them both for being gay.

Their story has come out as the U.S. votes to repeal it’s so-called ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ laws which allowed gay soldiers to serve in its military on the basis they kept their sexuality quiet.

But just ten years ago in Britain, the law was far more repressive. There was nothing about asking or telling, just a clear stipulation that to be a soldier you had to be straight. If you weren’t, you were liable to get the treatment Roger and Jean received.

Bear in mind, the government has still not apologised to either of them.

A stolen retirement

Just before he was due to retire, the Royal Air Force (RAF) began a witch hunt against Roger, to find out if he was gay.

They hauled in the Chief Technician for four long rounds of interrogation. They made him name and shame his partners. They humiliated him with graphic questions about his sexual encounters. He broke down and confessed all.

He told Kris Jepson at Channel 4 News: "Their investigation went into very personal details. They asked me was I still having sex with my wife, what sort of sex? They got me down on my knees – I was in a desperate state and I was forced to give names of men I had been with, which I regret to this day.”

They discharged him just over 100 days before he was due to stop work with a full army pension. A career that had begun in 1960 with high hopes ended in shame two days before Christmas in 1983.

"I was a real mess, psychologically, mentally and I suppose physically. The first few months after I'd lost my job, I lost my wife, my home. Those first few months of drinking I was in a real mess…I lost everything that was important to me, even recalling it now upsets me."

A career cut short

Jean was 20 when she joined the Royal Women’s Army Corps, which she hoped would be the beginning of a lifelong career. Four years later she had been dishonourably discharged for being gay.

In April 1981 an investigation began into Jean’s sexual orientation. She says she was interrogated by military police for 6 hours and not allowed toilet breaks or refreshments. Once again, the questioning was graphic and humiliating.

She tells her story to Channel 4 News: "They threatened me by saying they knew my twin sister was gay and said if I didn’t sign the discharge papers they would get her. They threatened to tell my mother. They said if I agreed to certain things that I would be safe. They said things like 'if I was in the same situation I would have experimented...' They basically convinced me I would be OK.

"They threatened to take me to the medical block because they claimed I had love bites down my back. They asked a lot of very sexual and intimate questions, including about sex toys and stimulations. It was just very crude and disgusting really.

"I got to the point where I would have done or said anything to get out of the room. I was very young and I just felt I had no other option but to sign the bit of paper. All I admitted was having a drunken fling with someone – I'd ended up in bed with another woman and we both had our underwear on and that's why they discharged me. I never admitted to being a lesbian because then I simply didn’t know."

In a desperate attempt to buy time to launch a legal challenge, Jean says she asked a friend to break her wrist so she would fail the army medical. After drinking heavily, they tried, but an Army X-ray showed it was not fractured.

She was discharged soon after. Later, her local hospital X-rayed the wrist again and said it was broken.

Discrimination in compensation

Both Jean and Roger had to rebuild their lives and start new careers. Jean still suffers from depression 29 years later. Roger is still working when he could have retired in the 1980s.

In March 2008, Roger, Jean and two other former members of the armed forces won their legal battle against the MoD at the European Court of Human Rights.

The decision is made quickly. Lacking resources, the ECHR simply makes a ruling and leaves it to the parties involved to decide upon compensation. The MoD would decide how much compensation it would pay for its breach of human rights.

What it offered the soldiers is, lawyers say, only a fraction of what they would have received in a UK employment tribunal.

Roger was offered around £88,000, less than the value of his pension and lost income, not to mention the impact his dismissal had on his personal life. Jean was offered, £35,000.

Bear in mind that Kerry Fletcher, a lesbian soldier who successfully sued the MoD in the UK for unfair dismissal on the grounds of sex discrimination and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, won £187,000 in 2008, on the grounds she intended to continue in the army for another 12 years.

But for Jean, the MoD based their calculations on the assumption that a typical, heterosexual female soldier served for only 6 years.

That does not take into account the fact that lesbian women served for longer in the armed forces, or that at the time the MoD had a policy of dismissing any women who got pregnant, which was later ruled illegal.

Ironically, the MoD used a discriminatory method to calculate Jean’s compensation for being discriminated against.

There was no apology. There seems to be no further legal recourse.

***

Watch this 1997 film starring Helen Baxendale about a Military Police officer assigned to rooting out lesbian soldiers, only to find out that she too is gay.

Wikileaks: A geek gets the new Watergate

2010-12-11T09:50:00.004Z

As the diplomatic documents spill onto our front pages day after day, writers furiously fuel the debate about whether the Wikileaks release was right, and what to do with Julian Assange.

Is he a hero? Or is he a criminal? Is he a journalist? Or is he a geek and a freak? Should he be celebrated? Or should he be jailed?

This all conflates the two issues of whether the Wikileaks release was justified and whether he is a rapist. It does so on the assumption the charges are trumped up or were the result of a honey trap. Who knows.

But do many men who fail to use a condom end up on Interpol’s red list? More to Interpol’s shame, do many rapists? No. Western governments are pursuing him with remarkable zeal. And by doing so, they throw up all sorts of “delicious ironies”. Hillary Clinton’s statement on the issue reads, as John Naughton points out, like a “satirical masterpiece”.

Of course, the comedy has been helpfully highlighted by America’s rivals. Russian President Vladimir Putin has noted the hypocrisy of a nation which superficially champions freedom of speech but also pathologically pursues a man who has asserted the people’s freedom of information.

U.S. duality in its dealings with free speech are clear to see. And in the cables, a similar hypocrisy is unveiled. A nation notionally concerned with human rights asking the Ugandan army not to commit war crimes using its intelligence is a shocking example. The message: if you’re going to rape and pillage and worse, fine, but don’t implicate us, OK?

While it shocks, it might not surprise. The U.S. has sought to capitalise on that, insisting these leaks are ‘no big deal’. But that itself is inconsistent with the angry pursuit of Assange. And if it’s no big deal, why is the CIA is checking out the cables so much.

Aside from governments’ aggressive response, I have been surprised by how many journalists have turned on Assange. Some – like the Washington Times - have called for his assassination. Many say he has been reckless, churning out a tonne of data without interpreting it or redacting it. That it not true. He fed it through ‘professional’ journalists who have gone through the cables and crafted articles to accompany them. And he has removed many of the names.

But there is one uncomfortable fact that I am yet to see any journalist point out. As far as I can tell, this is the biggest exposé since Watergate.

It might not bring down the U.S. President, like Watergate, or expose criminal wrongdoing (depending on your opinion), but many politicians and civil servants' heads may roll.

The U.S. has had many cards stolen from its hand. Suddenly, other countries are holding the aces. They know what the Americans are thinking, and they can use it to their advantage. Power has been shifted.

But unlike Watergate, this didn’t come from journalists and their hard work and research. It came from a geek. Hundreds of thousands of journalists all over the world, and it is a reclusive nerd who gets the biggest scoop for decades.

Assange managed to cultivate a contact who gave him access and insight to the workings of the U.S. State Department. He used his knowledge of technology to expose it. He shone a floodlight into the dark corridors of power.

And journalists had barely managed to light a candle.

Venezuela's Lust Hotels

2010-08-23T20:50:00.011+01:00

Rachel Jones has a rosy view of Venezuela's "rent-'em-by-the-hour" hotels. She calls them 'Love Hotels.' I'll call them 'Lust Hotels.' This is my little story about one of them.

Back in 2006 I went off to Caracas. On a budget, I checked into a cheap-as-chips hotel downtown. A few days later, having been followed home a number of times and reminded of the less-than-safe situation in the city, I moved.

Opposition supporters march in Caracas. There's a sexy hotel to the right.

I had already scoped out one that looked safe and solid. It was in the mid-range part of the city, Sabana Grande. It was built with red bricks and didn't have many windows. It looked secure.

I went in to find the receptionist behind a solid-glass screen. I asked to check in. She looked a little perplexed from the start. I asked if I needed a reservation. She gave a wry smile and said no. I paid for the night and took the key.

My room wasn't far away, but when I got in I realised the error of my ways. There was no window. There was a mirror on the ceiling. The bed had a plastic sheet between the mattress and the top sheet. The TV, facing directly at the bed, beamed an array of hardcore pornography direct into the room. I knew this was not a place to visit on your own.

After one night on the crackly plastic sheets, I moved. But there was big demand for hotel rooms at the time, so I spent the rest of the time moving from hotel to hotel in the Sabana Grande area.

One evening I met up with the BBC's Man in Caracas. I had spoken to him on the phone and told him where I was staying. He said he would come with his driver and pick me up. I met him in the hotel reception. He then announced in an unusually deliberate fashion that we were ''going to go to the car now.'' This I had assumed.

He opened the front door of the hotel and ran to the car. I walked behind, bemused. He leaned out of the car and told me to hurry up. When I got in and closed the door, he exclaimed: ''Bloody hell! You chose an interesting place to stay!'' I declined to explain that this was one of the higher class hotels I had frequented.

All of this, as you might have guessed, illustrates that Caracas can be a violent place. In fact, it is so violent the newspapers have a separate section to report the daily blood letting. It's on the back page, where many other countries' newspapers put their sport.

Today, for example, tucked away at the bottom of the page is a story about two kids who burst into a 38-year-old army major's house, shot him dead and robbed him.

Back in 2006, I remember sitting in the reception of that same hotel, reading about a 'by-the-hour' hotel in the 'sucesos' section on the back page. The story was so brutal that it stayed with me.

It was the early hours of a Sunday morning. After a night of partying, couples were queueing at one of these hotels on the outskirts of town, waiting to rent a room where they could go crazy with one another.

But the hotel was full. And when one couple rented the last room, which the man behind them had wanted for himself and his lady friend, he shot them both dead. He then rented the room instead.

Caracas hotel rooms are cheap. Sometimes, it seems, life is too.

Political plots threaten to bring down Maldives government

2010-07-01T09:12:00.006+01:00

At 5pm local time on Tuesday, the entire Maldives cabinet resigned. Hours later, the police issued arrest warrants for former President Gayoom's half brother, Abdulla Yameen, and his billionaire protégé, Gasim Ibrahim. They face charges of bribery and corruption and are suspected by police of 'attempting to topple the government illegally.'

It looks unlikely there was any 1988-style attempted coup, complete with mercenary foreign forces poised to storm the capital Malé and seize the President's Palace. That was a disaster which led to deaths, failure, arrests and exile.

Instead, the allegations point to a plot to cripple the minority government of President Mohamed 'Anni' Nasheed by paying off Maldivian MPs to obstruct privatisation projects. 'The opposition MPs are operating a scorched earth policy, trying to stop the government from doing any work to help the people', says Foreign Minister Dr Ahmed Shaheed.

Sources close the government say the motive is to block a deal to contract management of Male' International Airport to an outside consortium led by GMR. The plans threaten local tycoons' business interests providing services to Maldives Airports.

Usual suspects

Police are still investigating while Abdulla Yameen and Gasim Ibrahim are held under house arrest. They are two of the Maldives most colourful characters. Their web of influence and wealth reaches far and wide. They have been on the scene for decades and are now both leaders of opposition parties, the People's Alliance and Jumhooree respectively.

Yameen is the half-brother of former President Gayoom. He held many portfolios during Gayoom's 30-year rule, including Home Minister. He was renowned for his hard-man image and his readiness to crush political opposition using the paramilitary 'Star Force'.

His aspirations to be the top man in the Maldives are also well-known, and during the period of transition from Gayoom's regime to the next, he was jostling for position and power.

Gasim's is a rags-to-riches tale. It begins with him working as a house boy for Gayoom's wife's family. From there, he is spotted by Gayoom and in time given the tools to make himself a rich man. He founded the Villa company, which provided gas, diesel and other imported products. He was also given resorts to run when the Maldives first tried out tourism in the 1970s and ‘80s. Both those businesses boomed.

He rose to become Finance Minister under Gayoom, a role that was created especially for him, despite a lack of qualifications. Today, Villa has a huge portfolio of companies, providing everything from resorts to schools.

It was, in fact, Gasim's money which helped form the opposition group now known as the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP). When Gayoom found out the man whom he had made had betrayed him, he threw him in jail. An eyewitness who shared the cells with him tells me that for the week he was behind bars, Gasim was a wreck. Unable to cope with prison, he broke down and gave up his aspirations to rule. He was released and never again betrayed his boss.

Dilemmas

But if these two are both now found guilty, the question is: what will President Nasheed do with them? And what will he do about his lame-duck minority government?

'Anni' himself spent years in prison under Gayoom's rule, at least one of those in solitary confinement. He rose to power at the helm of an opposition movement which deplored the repression of Gayoom's government and the human rights abuses it committed. He assembled a party of former political prisoners and ran in the 2008 elections on a platform of democratisation.

If he now begins banging up his political opponents, his image as South Asia's democratic golden boy will be tarnished. But if they are proven to have carried out this plot, and he doesn't punish them, they may well bring down his government.

This is a dilemma Maumoon Abdul Gayoom is familiar with. Many times during his rule he faced a situation where close allies and rivals tried to rise up against him. He knew he had to slap them back down but not keep them down, especially in a small country like the Maldives. So he kept many of his rivals close.

For Anni, it's not quite that straightforward. Gayoom didn't have to worry about his image as a democrat, because he didn't have one. Anni does. And he also has to contend with the fact his government is without a cabinet and without a way of cooperating with parliament. What can he do?

Gayoom's former information minister, now an independent MP also called Mohamed Nasheed, has told Minivan News: “I have also heard from a highly reliable source that the president has been considering a cabinet reshuffle and will use this opportunity to appoint new ministers, and remove non-MDP cabinet ministers in the new arrangement. That, and threats and intimidation.”

But will it work? Or has Anni's power base been undermined too much already? He may simply have to resign and hand government to the DRP and PA alliance, declaring himself the victim of a plot he was powerless to stop, and one that was masterminded and carried out by MPs within the next government.

Or he may be able to trigger another round of elections, hoping he can secure a new mandate. That will be hard to do, though, with a majority ready to form a government. And even if he can call elections, he faces an electorate that never gave him a majority in the first place, even when the reformist mood was at its height.

Besides those two options, all he could do is make an audacious swoop for power by rushing these charges through court, finding Gasim and Yamin guilty, jailing them and weeding out all the complicit MPs. But that is the approach of his predecessor, not of an enlightened democrat.

Resign or repress. That is his choice.

Political parlance: Change that ain't revealin'

2010-06-25T16:02:00.010+01:00

Being a politician is a difficult job. To be a successful one requires a myriad of skills based on the objective need to make tough decisions and the subjective need to satisfy a fickle electorate.

One thing it often, but not always, requires is originality. The problem is that it is exceedingly difficult to be original.

Politicians know this, and so they try their hardest to be so in various ways. Often, they hire pioneering thinkers to furnish them with original thoughts. They can then translate those into rhetoric and policy and satisfy the masses.

Barack Obama hired one of these people, 27-year-old Jon Favreau (he shares his name with another original thinker responsible for the cult movie 'Swingers') He was, in part, responsible for Obama's inspirational message of change.

It was a simple message that resonated with an American public that was, to a large extent, fed up with the simplistic and misguided policies and practices of George Bush's Republican administration.

But it was also a message that meant something more in its specific context. It meant a shift to the left. It meant a move away from what George Soros has called 'market fundamentalism' and a move away from black-and-white neo-conservatism.

It happened immediately after a global financial crisis and while America was mired in two conflicts in the Middle East. And it happened after Hurricane Katrina, which forced America's forgotten poor to centre stage.

Of course, it meant an awful lot more, in terms of race relations, social policy and so on. But in short, it signified a realignment of the American role in the world and the government's role in America.

But it was articulated with the simple word 'change'.

The election results of November 2008 show how successful the message was. It won Obama the presidency.

And so many other politicians around the world began to copy the message. Change, they said, was what they offered an electorate who they knew was fed up with the status quo.

It was a message the Conservatives used in the UK, David Cameron promising "a modern Conservative alternative that is about voting for hope, voting for optimism, voting for change".

And on Wednesday, Australia's new Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the victor of a party coup, was echoing the same, tired message. "I asked my colleagues to make a leadership change. A change because I believed that a good government was losing its way."

But this message of change, apart from lacking any originality and being shameless plagiarism, also lacks any equivalent cultural context. Gillard replaces her boss, who shared the same political stance and ideology.

David Cameron's chant of change also misread the national mood. It only garnered a partial victory and ironically forced an unwelcome change upon his party in the form of coalition government.

His was a plea for change in the opposite direction to Obama's, from left to right wing. It was a plea for change for change's sake. It was a call for a refreshing of personnel but not a re-evaluation of policy.

It was an intellectual dead-end. And it failed.

And so our global political dialogue has once again got stuck in a rut, a post-optimism, post-change rut. There is a dearth of politicians who have original ideas, or at least political aides with original ideas.

Once again, a vacuum of original political discourse, insight and policy is opening. It is one that demands a more concrete political philosophy, one that comes with policies and practical proposals.

Who will fill it?

Back to Baghdad and be damned

2010-06-23T08:02:00.005+01:00

Last October, the British government decided it was appropriate to start forcing failed asylum seekers from Iraq to return to Baghdad. This, in spite of the fact it was Britain which destabilised the country by invading. And in spite of the fact Britain still advises its own citizens “against all travel to specific parts of Iraq, including Baghdad”.

So it took dozens of Iraqi refugees out of the detention centre where they were being held, put them on a plane against their will and flew them back to Baghdad. When they got there, they refused to disembark and the Iraqi officials did not force them. So most were flown back to Britain, to spend more time in a detention centre. Not a great place to be, but better than being dead.

(The BBC says 40 went to Iraq and 30 came back. But I think they got their numbers wrong when they rewrote the news agency reports without any independent research. New York Times says 50 went out, 41 came back.)

The tabloids barked that the whole botched flight had cost £250,000. Ironic, considering they were being deported to save money. Britain needs to make big savings so we can pay for giving our banks £850 billion.

But the tabloid number was a guess. How much did the failed flight cost really, I wondered? I wanted to know. So I asked the UK Border Agency.

They looked at my request and said: “after careful consideration we have decided that this information is exempt from disclosure by virtue of Section 43(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This provides thati nformation can be withheld where disclosure would, or would be likely to prejudice the commerciali nterests of any persons” (sic).

They argued that telling me how much the flight cost to charter in total would give away how much they pay, and that would mean contractors would know how much to quote and might fix their prices. I don’t think so. I was asking how much in total. That means security goons, in-flight halal meals and entertainment for the Iraqi deportees, and all.

The UKBA went on to tell me all about the public interest: “There will be a public interest in immediate disclosure to ensure that there is full transparency in the UK Border Agency’s use of public funds and in particular to maintain the Agency’s accountability to taxpayers. Disclosure of this information would also enable the public to assess whether or not the UK Border Agency is getting best value for money in terms of its contracts with the broker/agent” (sic).

This was heartening. The UKBA could see why I wanted to know. But although they could, commercial interests, it seemed, were more important:

“However, we have also considered the public interest in maintaining the exemption to communicate. There is a public interest in Government departments being able to securec ontracts that represent value for money and anything that would undermine this is not in the public interest” (sic).

So it seems getting cheap flights for the Border Agency is more important that knowing how much they waste on failed deportation flights.

I went on to ask them how many of these deportation flights had failed, wasting lots of people’s time and our money. They said: “I regret to inform you that the UK Border Agency does not hold the information in the format that you have requested.”

So it appears the government is not keeping count of how many asylum seekers they actually deport, and how many come back after a failed flight debacle. The UKBA said if they looked through every file of every individual asylum seeker they could work it out. But the would not do so, as it would cost them too much.

I had wanted to know how much all these failed flights had cost in total. But they could not tell me that either, of course.

They did tell me how much they spent in total annually on chartering flights to deport failed asylum seekers:

In 2005 - 2006 they spent £4,339,865.31
In 2006 - 2007 they spent £4,149,294.35.
In 2007 - 2008 they spent £4,811,162.12.
In 2008 - 2009 they spent £8,227,553.38 - almost twice as much.

This does come with the proviso that: “The information has not beenq uality assured under National Statistics protocols and should be treated as provisional and subject to change” (sic).

But I think it shows something interesting. In 2008 the UK government stepped up its deportation of failed asylum seekers a lot.

And it still upping its deportation rate. The government seems really desperate to get rid of the Iraqis now. They are deporting them to Baghdad at a rate of at least 3 flights a week.

And if the asylum seekers don’t want to go back? Well, they are beaten and kicked until they get off the plane, allegedly. And it seems the Iraqi officials are now more cooperative too, with eyewitnesses alleging they are helping to ‘persuade’ the Iraqis to get off the plane.

So to recap, we invaded Iraq. We made it too dangerous to live in. And then those who fled to our country for safety we are forcibly deporting to face the danger we created. It is costing us at least £8 million a year to fly these people back against their will. And we are telling our own citizens not to go to Iraq, because it is too dangerous. Iraq is currently languishing in a political vacuum after inconclusive elections delivered no clear mandate.

So no security, no government, and no national airline to pick up the UK’s unwanted Iraqis, because it went bust – thanks to a British court ruling, of course.

Tony Baldry MP, working for you. And James Ibori

2010-03-05T08:58:00.020Z

Interesting post by Craig Murray about another attempt to silence some journalists using Britain's libel laws - ever popular with users, if not those who fall foul of them.

They've got Geraldine Proudler of Olswang - who specialises in "reputation management issues" - to write to various publications who have chosen to highlight the work Tory MP Tony Baldry has done for one James Ibori.

He, for the record, is a Nigerian politician. The UK government has frozen £21m of his assets. They are a lot of assets for a man who earned $25,000 per annum as Governor of Delta State between 1999 and 2007.

Some of his chums are facing money-laundering charges in the UK, which "overjoys" Nuhu Ribadu, long-term enemy of James’s and Senior Fellow at Oxford University.

But it does not overjoy Mr Ibori. So he enlisted the help of some chums in Westminster. So Tony Baldry, apart from "working for you in North Oxfordshire", also went to work for James Ibori in Nigeria.

He reportedly wrote to the Foreign Secretary and others. What he said is the subject of some dispute. Geraldine says Tony said that “perhaps after the outcome of the criminal proceedings is known, relevant agencies might want to reflect on lessons learned". Craig Murray has paraphrased: “We can't turn up our noses at money looted from the African people, old boy. Think of the effect on the City.”

Others say Tony went further in what he urged the government. But we can’t know because the Home Office has refused a Freedom of Information request. Shame, as it would let us see the letter, dated 24 September 2009, and copied to the Attorney-General, Baroness Scotland QC, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Jack Straw MP, and the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Alan Johnson MP.

Two of them are also barristers. One is a former postman.

Key point

But the key point to stress here, as I'm sure the Rt. Hon. Mr Baldry and Ms. Proudler would want me to, is that while he is working for you in North Oxfordshire in his capacity as an MP, he is working for Mr. Ibori in his capacity as a barrister.

You see, as an MP you can have a second job. So you can defend someone from Nigeria and you can write to the government. You just have to make sure that you do so in your capacity as an advocate.

The fact that you may well be chums with the Foreign Secretary, the Attorney General, the Home Secretary and lots of other friendly politicians all working for you, the people, in Westminster is by-the-by, because you are doing this in your capacity as a barrister.

You see? I hope so. Because you certainly should. If you do not, and if you detect a conflict of interest, you may well have to have a chat with Geraldine.

The Independent had a chat with Geraldine. Then they said sorry and deleted their article. WordPress had a chat with Geraldine (here), who in turn had a chat with Richard Wilson. He deleted his article.

James Ibori, working for James Ibori in Nigeria

Here's a little more about James. He is a Nigerian politician. He is a good friend of ailing president Yar'Adua. He was key in helping him rise to power. He funded him. Don't ask where the money came from. Mr Yar'Adua probably didn't.

James was governor of the oil-rich Delta State between 1999 and 2007. He got rich, even though his job paid less than $25,000.

He developed a taste, it is said, for fast cars, big houses (in London among other places) and jets with iPod docks.

In 2007 he was arrested in his home country. The case focused on corruption and money laundering and led to 170 separate charges. By the end of 2009, all of the charges were dropped by Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

But James must now be worrying that these charges might resurface. That's because his chum, President Yar'Adua, seems to be pretty ill. He hasn't been seen in public in Nigeria, since flying back from a 3-month spell in a Saudi hospital.

To make matters worse, James' foe Goodluck Jonathan has taken the reins of power, maybe temporarily. So the charges might reappear. And another governor, Abdullahi Adamu, has just been charged with corruption. It’s all, no doubt, disconcerting. So James will try to stop it going too far.

But now there are even reports the UK government is thinking about applying for James' extradition from Nigeria. Blimey.

But if you, like Tony Baldry, want to work with James, why not become pals with him on LinkedIn? He's apparently interested in business deals.

Tony Baldry, working for you in North Oxfordshire

There's also lots to learn about Tony Baldry. Ten years ago he had to apologise to the House of Commons for "not making clear to the Lord Chancellor's Department, when giving a reference for a person for an honour, that the person concerned had recently given him a loan".

He urged the government to give a CBE to a London-based solicitor who works for Mr Ibori. Thing was, that solicitor, Sarosh Zaiwalla, had just lent him £5k. Oops, sorry, he said. "I hope that it will be appreciated by all concerned that it is not always possible to have total recall of events." Mr Zaiwalla still keeps Mr Baldry in work. He gave him more than £30,000 worth of work last year.

In 2005 Tony said sorry again, this time for breaching the Code of Conduct for Members as Chairmen of Select Committees. It turned out his public concerns as an MP didn't rub along too well with his private concerns in Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone? Yes, that's right. You can see all his registered interests here. He appears to have lots of shares in a diamond and gold mining company there.

He also seems to charge around £1,000 an hour for his directorial duties and a little bit more for legal advice. Good work if you can get it, as they say. Good for Tony, anyway. And remember, as he told the people of North Oxfordshire, he's not corrupt.

Still, it's a shame he has had to make that clear.

The last decade: Bye-bye British power. Part III: Wars

2010-02-01T16:17:00.003Z

Friday 29 January, 2010, was a remarkable day. For unlike when Anthony Eden led Britain into the foreign policy disaster of Suez, the Prime Minister at the time of the Iraq invasion was called in front of an inquiry. Tony Blair was, to some extent, being held to account for his particular foreign policy disaster.

He was nervous. On arriving, his brow was cut sharply with concern and his hands shook as he leafed through his meticulously ordered and annotated papers. In spite of all the talk of a toothless Chilcot Inquiry, Blair clearly did not see it that way. I assume he worried the questioning had the capacity to lacerate his legacy.

Britain never formally learnt any lessons from the Suez Crisis. As Howard Denton says, we never held an inquiry into that disaster. As Robert Fisk observes, the years after the Crisis were too soon, and a decade later was too late. But perhaps we learnt at least one informal lesson, that it is best not to freeze out the United States when it comes to war. We didn’t make that mistake in Iraq.

Of course, this is not to say that Iraq was as disastrous for Britain as Eden’s secret collusion with some powers and diversion of others, namely the US and the UN. But there remain parallels to be drawn between Suez and Iraq. Was there collusion? Maybe. Was there diversion of the UN? Eventually. Neither were as bare-faced as with Suez. But of course there was no ignoring the US, instead an obedient following of their bellicose footsteps.

And of course both Suez and Iraq had a catalytic effect on the erosion of British power in the world. Both brought to the attention of the crowds the fact that the emperor was naked. Britain was not the Great power of old, but just another nation, reliant on other nations in turn. The emperor is still parading through the streets, refusing to believe he is naked.

We were, Blair says, preventing the potential risk of Saddam and his sons going on a global rampage. As Michael Mansfield QC observed on Friday, 'Blair has changed his stance'. No longer does he talk of actual weapons of mass destruction, but about the reconstitution of an old weapons programme. “This was about preventing a risk, a possibility. This was a pre-emptive exercise”, Mansfield paraphrases.

But of course we, Britain, were not in a position to get pre-emptive. The most powerful nation in the world might be, regardless of international law, but not Britain. We were not in a position to play the role of the global policeman. As part of Europe, perhaps, but we parted company with Germany and France on Iraq, and in that sense actually froze ourselves out of the most compelling union on offer.

And we were not in a position to counter an unexpected insurgency. Having to do so strained our military and our economy and exposed our weaknesses. Blair says he was expecting a humanitarian crisis (which itself makes you wonder why he still thought it was worth going to war), which also speaks to our lack of regional understanding.

But to counter an insurgency required a holistic approach to our presence in Iraq. It needed not only military might, but persuasive cultural and social influence and reconstruction of an entire political and economic system. It was largely beyond us, because we did not have the money or the power, and we were exposed as lacking both.

These weaknesses have only been highlighted by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. And today, while it is too early for an inquiry, we are reassessing our conflict aims and are now at the negotiating table. Once again, Britain’s power is eroded.

The decision to go to war in Afghanistan in 2001 was perhaps more easily justified than that to go into Iraq. As Blair said, after 9/11 “the calculus of risk changed.” And there was a link between the Taliban and the aggressors, Al Qaeda.

But still there was little consideration of the consequences of all-out war in Afghanistan. Did we expect in 2001 to be negotiating with the Taliban in 2010, offering them a seat at the table? No, we expected, far too optimistically, to establish a new government which would be strong enough to resist the Taliban.

Our misreading of both events has left us quietly trying to tiptoe out of the Middle East. At home, the population is angry at the bloodshed. And the politicians are left to learn lessons.

The wars of the previous decade did the most to damage Britain’s power in the world. The spectacular financial boom and bust only added to that. And our floundering education system makes it hard, if not impossible, to reverse the trend.

Looking to the future, our apparent inability to deal with the inherent instabilities in our financial system threatens Britain’s power. So too do the cuts that will come after the crash. Add to that an educational system which is no longer geared to providing a population of pioneers, and things look stormy for the United Kingdom.

We will be even more reliant on our allies in the future, and as I said in Part II, we may well have to seek shelter from the rain under the umbrella of the EU.

The last decade: Bye-bye British power. Part II: Economy

2010-01-27T18:04:00.003Z

So we have seen how in the last ten years the Government’s education policies failed to help Britain maintain its competitive advantage, something which experts agree is “of great concern”. The effects of this will be felt for some time in the future, and so too will Britain’s economic problems.

Britain came out of recession on Tuesday, just. And here’s hoping that the 0.1 per cent growth rate doesn’t collapse into a negative figure next quarter, as happened during Thatcher’s recession.

And as we do so, we emerge as less of a major economy than before. Britain is now the world’s 7th largest economy, down a couple of places. It has been overtaken by the Russian Federation and is on the way down while Brazil, Mexico and others are on the rise.

And not only is the size of the British economy being outstripped by other nations, so too is our spending power. Britain is now saddled with a debilitating debt, courtesy of the bank bailouts.

It means Gordon Brown and David Cameron can only fight this election on the issue of cuts. Neither is offering a sparkling new set of positive policies. Instead, one is simply offering to cut less than the other. British politics is entering a period of frugality.

Early in, late out

We have paid a premium for education, war and our financial centre – for trying to assert a more influential role in the world than we can justify. Now we are paying off our debts. We will have to do so by offering up both money and power.

All through this slump, Gordon Brown insisted Britain would “lead the world” along the path out of it. It didn’t. He also insisted, slightly incoherently, that we had not led the world into this recession. It was all America’s fault, he said. That is debatable. But it is unequivocal that we did not lead the world back out of the trough. We are the last major economy to emerge from recession.

When it comes to the economy, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair spent the last ten years demonstrating to a T the folly of the democratic politician who believes his own hype. Gone, we were told, were the days of boom and bust. This was while we were enjoying a big old boom.

But it was only in the bust that they noticed that night follows day.

The short-term plan to attach a turbo-booster to the economy in the form of the City of London failed. Now we’re left trying to tweak more out of the economy by making all the other constituent parts more efficient.

And we are caught in a difficult situation. Part of the reason Britain was able to be artificially rich was because it worked hard at courting big business and bankers and creating an ideal environment in which they could trade. The problem was that it was an under-regulated environment.

So now the leaders need to regulate more, but doing so might push away the big businessmen, financiers and oligarchs who have helped make Britain wealthy. This means that if we attempt to solve the inherent instability problem, we run the risk of making ourselves comparatively poorer.

For the democratic politician, the choice between doing something that will be good for the nation in the long-term, or good in the short term, is an easy one to make. The short term fudge is preferable every time.

It has taken Barack Obama’s announcement in the US to embolden the British government enough to even talk of limiting the size of the banks, despite calls coming from the Liberal Democrats for months. Britain doesn’t even lead on ideas to fix the problem.

And no doubt the words will be watered down by the time they are turned into reforms. The government here, for all its talk of getting tough, looks weak. It knows it can’t curb the banks, because it needs the banks. So instead Brown suggests a Tobin tax. At least that way, when the crash comes again, we’ve saved up some bailout cash.

Budget slashing

Part of the reason Britain was able to punch above its weight in the international ring in the past was because it could afford to. No longer. “Budgets will be slashed at the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, affecting Britain's ability to project power, hard and soft,” observes Newsweek.

In Afghanistan, it means we are now planning to talk to the Taliban – a cheaper option than battling against them. The FT says they are increasingly casting themselves “in the role of Pashtun nationalists”, but I believe the British government is also quietly doing the same.

It is easier to negotiate with nationalists than religious extremists. It is easier to make concessions to them than to terrorists linked with Al Qaeda, with whom we are supposedly still in a semi-permanent state of war. And then we can extract ourselves from a costly war, and era of war, and beginning cutting defence costs in a new era of peace.

That will also have implications for our costly nuclear deterrent. Whether Trident is decommissioned or refurbished is a looming political issue. Given the cost and public ambivalence towards it, it may well go.

Another looming issue is Europe. As our power is pared down it makes sense to seek refuge in a union, and not a transatlantic one, but something more European. It will be time to admit we are not able to stand aloof from the EU, but will have to become part of it.

How easily that happens depends on who wins May’s elections. If it’s the Tories, we will struggle to make the shift. If it’s Labour or a coalition borne of a hung parliament, the transition might be easier. Either way, moving closer to Europe will also mean the glory days of the City of London are over.

For the economy, the last ten years were tough. They started with such promise. The boom was underway and the bust so far off the radar the government assumed it wasn’t there. But it was. It ran up and slapped the government in the face.

And it left Britain, already adjusting from 50 years of decline in economic might, to adjust down some more. Just as Blair and Brown believed their own hype on the economy, so they did on war and hard power. They believed Britain could achieve militarily something that it could not…

The last decade: Bye-bye British power. Part I: Education

2010-01-21T13:01:00.008Z

On the way into 2010, a new decade, the media encouraged us all to reflect on the ten years past, what they had brought and how they would be defined, even what this decade would be called. But somehow it seems they failed to extract any really keen insights, at least as far as I saw.

Here’s what I think was missing. In Britain, it was New Labour’s decade. But in amongst all the chatter generated I heard nothing about what Labour had done for Britain’s power in the world. It has degraded it considerably.

Of course, it had been steadily on the wane for some time before 2000 rolled around, which might be why nobody wanted to talk about it. And the belief that Britain is slowly losing its power and influence in the world is one that is now mainstream.

But in the last ten years it has been accelerated by three things; ill-advised and over-ambitious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial and economic crash known as the Credit Crunch and by a general degradation in education.

Could do better

Let’s take the last first. In many ways education is the least obvious way in which British power is on the wane. But while it takes a long time for a population to become educated, it doesn’t take so long for it to get stupid, and fall behind in the transnational class. So in the long term, education policy gives Britain its competitive edge, and it has serious implications for the maintenance of British power in the world, or at least the attempt to slow its degradation.

Tony Blair came to power in 1997 promising a sharp focus on education. But it wasn’t long before disgruntled teachers were taunting him with his own chant of ‘education, education, education’.

Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown thought the best way to boost education was to boost spending by 75 per cent. Most went into schools. But despite the kids having shiny new interactive whiteboards at the front of their classrooms, results didn’t really improve. Teachers started chasing even more targets, and hitting them, but every time they did they were met with a wave of cynicism.

The exams were getting easier, the critics said. Other critics said that in fact, even if they weren’t getting easier, the improvement in results certainly didn’t represent value for money.

And there were far more exams. Too many. And not only did the kids have too many tests, like SATs, so did the teachers. They were unpopular all round. And league tables, something Labour had promised to do away with, actually became more prevalent.

Testing times

What’s more, while the kids and teachers were being put to the test more than ever before, so they were also losing the power to make their own decisions. Power was taken from schools and local authorities and accumulated at the centre and with big business. In Academy Schools, men who owned football clubs and sausage roll factories became sponsors.

And the Westminster politicians and the businessmen introduced a managerial approach, based on targets and results. It offered a narrow measure of success divorced from a wider concern for the general quality of the education. In many Academy schools, teachers weren’t allowed to join a union and kids were allowed to redo their coursework, better this time. It all helps hit the targets.

Then the Government said half of all children should go to university, and so it began turning colleges into universities and telling them to offer courses on a supply and demand basis. But with all the spending on schools, it couldn’t afford to pay for all those extra students, so in came the tuition fees. Labour conveniently forgot about the effect they might have on social mobility.

And with a new supply-and-demand approach to university degrees, Psychology boomed, so did Sports Science, but Maths, Science and Medicine sank. ‘Soft’ courses were all the rage.

Suddenly careers which had never needed degrees had them anyway. Secretaries went into the world of work with degrees in Administration Studies. But did they really need to go to university? Did it benefit them? Did it make them richer, or did it make them poorer? And did it give them any greater prospects?

As Patrick Ainley of the University of Greenwich complained to the Guardian on Tuesday, a “lost generation” was created “of over-schooled but under-educated young people leaving schools, colleges and universities overqualified and underemployed”. They were also overleveraged and under-earning.

And, it seemed, offering students the chance to study whatever they wanted didn’t help the individual or the country. The kids came out with spurious qualifications that were neither needed nor wanted by employers, and which gave them unrealizable aspirations. And the country came out with a population that was not very well trained in the skills that would give it a competitive edge and help it pay off its debts.

Money management

The basic principle that voters felt education was extremely important is right. So too was the belief in its importance for the nation. On a social level people should have the right to be educated and so fulfil their aspirations.

But education is also important in power terms, because as managers are fond of saying, a company (or a country’s) biggest asset is its people. A well-educated, skilled population puts Britain at a competitive advantage.

But Blair and the Labour Party didn’t plan their education policy with this in mind. They planned it on populism at first and pleasing big business later.

Their spending wasn’t sustainable, so after signing up big business and making students pay, they still needed to tighten their belts. The recession made it even more pressing.

But in election year you can’t take money away from the kids, so you take it from the students. University funding is being cut, and as the deans and rectors say, it has implications for Britain’s power in the world.

"Other leading economies are investing money in universities in order to help economic growth and improve social mobility, yet our government seems intent on doing the opposite. If higher education is allowed to go to the wall, the dreams of many hardworking parents for their kids to go to university and make the best of themselves will be over."

Some say this warning is hyperbole. But in the long term it is right.

Blair and Brown’s education policy has created a corrosive concoction of too many classes and not enough education. At school level, it is narrow. At university level, it is too wide and neglects the most important core subjects.

This neglect is now so serious the Government advertises on the radio and TV for kids to do maths and science. It pleads with the kids to help them plug the gaps its poor policies have created.

And of course, all this has implications for Britain’s power in the world. If the population isn’t as well educated as before, it doesn’t have the competitive edge it had before, and Britain is not the cultural, scientific, technological pioneer it once was.

This has happened over the last ten years. It has helped degrade Britain’s power in the world, just like the recession…

Helping to beat Trafigura & Carter Ruck

2009-12-14T23:45:00.001Z

More on Trafigura gagging the BBC and the rest of the UK media with the help of law firm Carter Ruck here.

The Criminal Legal Aid budget: 'Growing exponentially'?

2009-11-27T09:36:00.004Z

On Friday morning the government number crunchers released a report which shows what our piece for More4 News also showed, which is that the amount the government spends on criminal legal aid "has fallen in real terms by 12 per cent over the past five years."

So why, I wonder, did Bridget Prentice, Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice, tell the Today Programme last month that the criminal legal aid spend was 'growing exponentially'? And why did Evan Davis, in his question to her on that issue, say it was as well?

And why, did the Legal Services Commission, on hearing that the legal aid spend on magistrates court and police station work in Greater Manchester had fallen, say the trend "was not borne out nationwide"? It is.

On the second point, I was able to ask the LSC. The response was two fold. Firstly, er, we're not exactly sure what was said to the Gazette back in September. Secondly, er, we were probably talking about the police station spend along (which has gone up and down, on its way down).

One week

Both points go some way to explaining how the government and its quangos have managed to cultivate the impression that criminal legal aid spending is spiralling out of control. But it is not.

Bear in mind the NHS budget is around £100 billion. The total legal aid budget, criminal and civil, is £2bn. So it would pay for around one week of the NHS.

Bear in mind also that the legal aid budget gives people access to justice, the ability to get justice, regardless of wealth, and the ability to live in a just society.

Immeasurable value

People's small justices, their day in court, their wrongs righted, are valuable to us all. And if they slowly evaporate, we don't notice. But if you cut the NHS budget, the quality of healthcare falls, people die, and we notice.

Rather like investigative journalism (a post for another day) people’s small, individual justices are of immense value to society, but if they disappear, you can't measure it happening, quantify it, or see it.

Until one day people are only getting small injustices, and suddenly there lots of small problems become one big problem.

So if we end up, as many lawyers fear we will, with a two-tier legal system, where the rich get the best legal representation, and the poor get the rest, because of legal aid reform, then the chances of that happening increase.

And if it does happen, then the government has failed us.

Greedy lawyers

Another impression the government likes to cultivate alongside the one that criminal legal aid spending is ballooning, is that of the fat-cat lawyer.

He exists. He is paid too much. He is fat, white, lazy, underworked and overpaid. But he works mostly on private legal cases and shares his industry with others who are not like him.

They earn far less, and care about providing people with their small justices, so as to provide society with its big justice. They are a dying breed. Those that already do this sort of law are finding it tougher and tougher to stay profitable. So they stop doing the legal aid work.

Those that may do this sort of law in future, the students, don’t fancy it. They cannot make enough money to pay for their long education to get the necessary qualifications. And because many law students just want to be fat-cat lawyers. A junior legal aid lawyer earns £25,000.

Flat fee

But some still do legally aided work, like the people at Just For Kids Law, who represent under-privileged kids.

They receive a flat fee for each case they work on. It doesn't matter whether the kid (or defendant if you prefer) in question is a genius or has learning difficulties and an IQ of 55.

Either way, his solicitor will receive the same amount of money to prepare his case and will be expected, by the government, to devote the same amount of time to preparing their cases. Will the kid with learning difficulties have such a solid, well-prepared defence as the boy genius? It’s doubtful.

And what is more, Just For Kids Law will be paid to prepare a defence according to how many papers the prosecution submits, with a certain amount of money paid for each sheet.

So if they are working on a case which doesn't involve a huge amount of prosecution paperwork, like for example a rape case, where there is only one statement and limited additional evidence, then they will be paid relatively little. It doesn't matter that the case may be hugely complicated but the prosecution paperwork doesn't reflect that. In the eyes of the state, it is another uniform case which receives another flat fee.

Easy targets

Cutting the legal aid budget, in public relations terms, is relatively easy. Nobody much knows or cares if you reduce the amount the taxpayer spends on criminals (and those just accused of being criminals) and the greedy lawyers who represent them.

It all sounds fair enough in principle. If they can't live within the rules of our society, why should we pay the costs for them to live outside those rules? And why should we pay already well-paid lawyers over the odds to help them on their way?

But of course, things are not that simple. Criminals aren't always criminals, greedy lawyers not always greedy. And the innocent are not always acquitted.

Spain and Franco’s legacy: A polarised past, a precarious present

2009-10-30T11:12:00.007Z

Have a look at two reports, above and below, I produced with Joanna Simpson for More 4 News on Spain’s struggle with its past.

Part I deals with the excavation of the presumed grave of executed poet Federico García Lorca.

Part II deals with growing calls for dictator General Franco to be removed from his resting place at the monument he had built for the Nationalist dead, the Valley of the Fallen, and given to his family for private burial.

Holding on to history

When you live in a stable democracy, and in a region of stable democracies, like Western Europe, you forget how precarious such a situation is, and how hard some have fought for it. You also forget how recently things were not like this.

Talking to left wing victims of Franco’s repression, like Josefina Cordal whose brother was murdered when she was nine, or Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, who was arrested and put in a labour camp to build the Valley of the Fallen while in his twenties, you realise the pain of the past.

As they talk, occasionally their eyes glaze over as they summon up painful memories. Josefina knew who had killed her brother, she knew where his grave was, and she passed the site regularly for 73 years before she was able to exhume Castor. It is an example of how the legacy of a civil war stays with a nation.

In international wars, one fights an invader, or invades. And if you survive, you return to a nation as a hero, with most around you on your side.

In a civil war, the conflict remains. You return to a community riven by the same divisions of before. You pass your brother’s killers and your family’s persecutors. Much time is needed for the nation to heal.

Old wounds

In Spain, it is 70 years since the end of the Civil War, 34 since the death of Franco. But this journey has shown me how more time is needed.

Not only do people like Josefina and Nicolás harbour the hurt from decades past, but their families do too. They were fiercely left-wing, and committed to the ideology in a way few are in the UK, because here political affiliation does not come with such historical baggage.

And the political parties still struggle with that past. Manuel Fraga, the 86-year-old found of the Partido Popular (PP), the conservative party, is a good example of this. He was a minister under Franco and a reformist at that time. But when in 2007 the Socialist government, led by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose Republican grandfather died in the Civil War, passed the Law of Historical Memory, Fraga railed against it.

It began a process of removal of Francoist monuments, gave further recognition to those who died on the Left, and lent support to those seeking to trace and exhume their dead Republican relatives. The PP was split on the issue. In parliament, it voted for some parts of the law, but not others. Its leader, Mariano Rajoy, urged Spain not to reopen old wounds.

History, warts and all

During the Spanish transition to democracy in the late ‘70s, the country chose deliberately not to travel down the path of recrimination. There were no war crimes tribunals, nobody in the Hague. And so Spain managed to reach today’s state of stable democracy, and is proud of its achievement and prizes its political system.

But if Europe is the British Conservative Party’s weak spot, where it struggles to find a unified position, so the past is for Spain’s conservatives. Chasing spokespeople at the PP, I came quickly to realise how prickly they are about the issue of ‘historical memory’. I didn’t manage to get a statement from them, and in my discussions with them, was told that a policy ‘no esta manifestada’ – it is not declared.

Quite so, as El Pais has highlighted. The paper talks of one PP mayor building a monument to Miró and 2,000 Republicans shot by the cemetery walls of his town, and of another who at the same time is trying to build on a mass Republican grave - two completely different approaches to the past.

And so, for all this resentment to settle will take even more than the 34 years that have already past. And there will be more difficult hurdles for Spain to leap, like the exhumation of García Lorca and the issue of what to do with Franco’s remains.

Do you try to erase the undesirable parts of your history, or do you face up to them and learn from them? I feel you have to do the latter, in the hope that while it might be divisive in the short-term, it will bring greater unity in the long-term.

(Opinions expressed here are my own)

Bell Pottinger, Trafigura, The Guardian, that injunction and of course the toxic waste dumped on the Ivorians

2009-10-13T19:41:00.008+01:00

So it's been a remarkable day for social media geeks, free speech, The Guardian, Trafigura and Carter-Ruck, and not necessarily in that order.

Trafigura, an international oil trader, represented by Carter-Ruck's Adam Tudor, gets an injunction to stop The Guardian reporting a question in Parliament. The question concerned their allegedly dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.

That is a particularly unpleasant story of the rich world exploiting the poor because it's cheaper to dump waste there. The dumping of toxic waste is at the centre of the story.

But today the story grew.

The gagging order appeared, as The Guardian and its editor Alan Rusbridger pointed out, to fly in the face of the 1688 Bill of Rights, and trampled the freedom of the press. It left many furious, and as the crux of the story had already been reported in the media, it wasn't hard to guess the content of the question in Parliament. In fact it was actually on Parliament's website.

Within hours Twitter was alight with geeky and media-ery rage at what had happened. #trafigura, #guardian and #carterruck rose to be among the most discussed topics on Twitter.

The Spectator and Guido Fawkes' Blog defied the injunction, alongside thousands of Twitter-ers. Good for them. By the afternoon Carter Ruck had given in. The injunction was lifted.

It was a sorry episode for Trafigura, Carter-Ruck and the judge who granted the injunction.

But there is another party in this who also didn't cover itself in glory - Bell Pottinger. They are Trafigura's lobbyists, PR guys, whatever you want to call them, and Neil Cameron appears to do the Trafigura account.

The PR types are already pointing out that today hasn't been a great example of how to ply their trade. And the question remains, did Bell Pottinger know of Carter-Ruck's scheme to get this injunction?

If it did, and I suppose there is the possibility it even suggested it, then, well, whoops Belly P. Just to make it absolutely clear, Bell P's job is to keep all this nasty toxic-waste-dumped-in-the neighbourhoods-of-poor-Africans stuff on the quiet.

They had done an alright job till today. To their credit, only BBC's Newsnight, The Guardian and Al Jazeera had really bothered to sniff out the story, as far as I can tell. So it was under-reported.

But today it was thrust to the centre of British politics. Now MPs and all sorts of important types are cross about what has happened with all this injunction stuff and won't be too happy about all this toxic waste stuff either. What's more, lots of Joe Publics who didn't know about Trafigura's dalliances in waste disposal on the cheap now do know about it.

That, as the Twitterati are pointing out, is called the Streisand effect.

So maybe Bell Pottinger ought to have recruited Babs to their team to balance out the greying Tories. Or at least someone who can work that internet thingy.

Privilege, Trafigura and Carter-Ruck

2009-10-13T10:13:00.006+01:00

Usually I try only to blog when I can add something to story, or if it is in itself an under reported story. This one? Well it is just too important not to blog about.

Carter-Ruck appears to have taken out an injunction, or gagging order if you prefer, banning the Guardian newspaper from reporting on a question asked in Parliament.

It cannot report the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

But the rebellious geeks that roam the internet have decided to side with the 1688 Bill of Rights, rather than "the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations".

Why is this important? Because if you can't report what is said in parliament, a forum which is supposed to be openly reported for all, then where can you report what is said? How can the press be free if it can't report what our own lawmakers are discussing? How can society be open or democratic?

So if you want to know all about the question in question, it's all on good old Wikileaks. Comment on the Spectator.

And guess what? Guardian, Carter-Ruck and Trafigura are all top trending topics on Twitter. Will #trafigura become the new #iran then? I do hope so. But I bet Carter-Ruck doesn't hope so.

And here's a post of mine from May when the BBC first reported the story on Newsnight. Well done BBC for May. Not so well done for not reporting today's story. There's still time.

Government moves to stave off row over Forces Post Office

2009-10-02T08:51:00.005+01:00

The Government has moved to avoid another embarrassing row over treatment of the armed forces which could have inflamed public opinion as much as the Gurkha affair.

It was proposing to cut postal services for forces members in Europe and America. One UKIP member called the decision 'vile' and 'venal'.

Given the ongoing row over military resources in Afghanistan, the previous row over settlement of Gurkhas in the UK and a general feeling among many forces members and their families that the government is not fully behind them, this had the potential to become another serious blow to the government.

But a small article on Newsletter.co.uk suggests the Ministry of Defence has reversed its decision. Not before 30,000 people signed an online petition on the 10 Downing Street website, urging the Prime Minister to reconsider the decision.

This will largely go unreported now the Government has nipped the problem in the bud. But it could have been a lot worse, and it could have lost Gordon Brown even more points in the polls.

Paid-for content online: Of course we'll pay

2009-09-29T13:49:00.003+01:00

There seems a tendency when businessmen and media experts talk about the Internet to characterise it as something so new and revolutionary that history can offer no lessons.

So now the debate is raging over whether consumers will pay for content online, with many arguing they won't, and News Corp arguing they will, people seem blind to the lessons of the past.

But what about satellite TV? It amazed me at the time, when I was still in school, that people would pay for TV when they could get it for free. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all offered good stuff. You even got some football and lots of other sport. But still consumers paid for Sky, and cable and all that was on offer. They still do.

So why should the same not be true of the Internet? Of course, I would not want to pay 20 quid a month for The Times online, but I would pay for a basket of websites, like The Times, The Sun, Sky News and The Wall Street Journal. That's even if I get BBC, Channel 4 and ITV online for free.

People pay for other content online. They pay for dating, data, pornography and photography, so why not news?

Of course, this means syndication, if that's the right word. It mean flogging a basket of websites, in the same way BSkyB and Virgin sell a basket of TV channels. That way, and with the supplement of advertising revenue, the future of news is online, and it is bright and it is profitable.

So hopefully we can stumble onwards and reach that point in the not-too-distant future and avoid all the myopic media analysis in the mean time.

The BNP, The British Legion and using veterans for votes

2009-09-26T18:12:00.006+01:00

The BNP has a strategy of offering help to war veteran charities in a bid to cast itself as an altruistic party helping the heroes who the government and the establishment have neglected. "Cynical use of social action," Nothing British calls it.

Whatever you call it, the fact is the BNP has identified this issue as one where people feel strongly, and feel the government hasn't done enough. The party sees a space in the political sphere where it can win votes.

And sadly it seems to be an accurate calculation. But it puts the charities in a difficult position. Obviously they want funding, but they don't want to be politicised. Supporting veterans is not a political issue, or at least it should not be, as it goes without saying they should be supported as best as Britain can.

In June this year, the British Legion berated the BNP boss Nick Griffin for wearing a poppy. It made a bold statement urging him to avoid politicising the poppy. "Stop it, Mr Griffin. Just stop it," they said.

But then in September the BBC found the British Legion had in fact knowingly accepted a donation from a BNP member.

Now, the BNP is targeting a Scottish organisation helping veterans, called FEBA. It looks likely that Tommy Moffat will accept the gift. And the BNP may make inroads in Scotland.

Does it matter? I think there are two ways to look at this. One is to criticise the charities for taking the cash, and urge them not to do so, while also criticising the BNP for being a bunch of cynical fascists. That's fine, in as far as it goes.

But a better assessment is to realise that whatever is done on this issue, the BNP will continue to sniff out these sorts of mobilising issues where the government policy is weak and people feel strongly, and will exploit them for votes.

A better way of nipping the problem in the bud is to simply back the charities, make sure they are funded properly, and squeeze the BNP out. Go to the source of the problem and deal with the cause, not the symptoms.

It seems to me that too often people attack the BNP per se without realising that the only reason they are making electoral ground is because of the wider failings of the other parties and, primarily, the government.

They are the ones who have created these issues the BNP exploits. They are the ones who have angered normal British people who are not normally politicised. They are the ones who push people to the BNP.

Don't just look at how the BNP pulls people in, look at how the establishment pushes people to the fringes, and to the BNP.

Hugo Chavez, Oliver Stone and 63 closed radio and TV stations

2009-09-08T22:29:00.006+01:00

So, while Hugo Chavez treads the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival, enjoys the limelight and jokes about James Bond with his pal, Oliver Stone, staff at another 29 radio stations in Venezuela ponder their imminent closure.

They are among 200 broadcasters facing administrative procedures from the regulator in Venezuela.

And Chavez's administration is not just cutting back on the broadcasters, but substituting the ones he closes with 'Bolivarian' equivalents, staffed by 'revolutionaries' who sing his praises and promote his brand, as he is doing in Italy.

There is TeleSUR, the international 24-hour news channel, the national networks - Venevision and others, the various regional channels all funded by the state and the community TV and radio stations. It is a whole integrated media infrastructure funded by the government. And it more than counters the anti-Chavez voices in the country.

Whether he is a dictator or not is another question for people like George Bush and Oliver Stone to argue.

But that he is a friend of free speech is a claim that I, for one, refute.

Michael Lord-Castle and the Mirror

2009-09-07T23:36:00.007+01:00

So Michael Lord-Castle has made it into the national papers again.

This time, once more, it is The Mirror. Penman and Sommerlad have been keeping an eye on him.

So have the Advertising Standards Auhtority, which has upheld two complaints about a fax which appear to have come from one of him many ventures, the Insolvency Advisory Service LLP.

Turns out they were misleading, although he claims the faces weren't sent by the IAS.

"The fax breached CAP Code clauses 7.1 and 7.2 (Truthfulness)."

Penman and Sommerlad reckon they could write a book about Mr Lord-Castle.

I'm not surprised.

See also: GPC and Michael Lord-Castle revisited and Michael Lord-Castle again

Swine flu pandemic: Who benefits? Part II

2009-07-23T12:11:00.003+01:00

I refer you to my post back on April 28, when I posed the question 'who benefits from swine flu?'

Now, epidemiologist Dr Tom Jefferson has raised the same issue. He told Channel 4 News last night that 'vested interests' had declared a pandemic at an earlier stage and at a 'lower threshold' than they would have done in the past, and have created a 'juggernaut'.

The accusation is that the pharmaceuticals, academics and even the World Health Organisation all stand to gain from a pandemic which has people full of fear, but relatively far from death.

Virologist Professor John Oxford denies there is any profiteering going on, although they will of course make money. That is what companies do.

At the moment, though, we have very few deaths on a relative scale. Seasonal flu would be expected to kill more, and we have a very 'robust' response, to use the Prime Minister's words.

Too robust? There is a complex and deep network of beneficiaries here. Lets not travel down the conspiracy theory path. But sexing up swine flu? That might be a valid charge.

Guinah's story: An asylum seeker's experience

2009-07-14T19:39:00.002+01:00

Guinah Hussein tells of his experience of unexpectedly arriving in Britain after fleeing Togo aged 16

London on a phone

2009-07-14T17:11:00.003+01:00

The Chap Olympiad, 2009: Pipes, monocles, charm and wit

2009-07-13T18:31:00.008+01:00

Gentlemen with monocles, pipes and wit even sharper than their trouser creases. It can only be the Chap Olympiad, 2009.

In attendance were lots of dashing sorts accompanied by some charming young ladies.

And so they passed a damp day in Bloomsbury in fine style by sauntering along the course mixing G&Ts, offering caddish chat-up lines to the ladies and playing tug-o-war over a whopping great moustache.

A wonderful day was had by all and so I thought I would share some of the frivolity and fiendishness for your perusal.

If you missed it,but you feel attracted to the Anarcho-Dandyist way of life, you can learn more by reading The Chap.

Video shot, written, edited, and voiced by me.

Photos taken by me and a beautiful assistant.

Good day.

Pamplona Running of the Bulls: Man gored to death

2009-07-12T17:09:00.007+01:00

So I put this video together, after finding a man via Twitter who had witnessed the immediate aftermath of Daniel Jimeno Romero, 27, being gored to death by a bull.

He was attending the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, northern Spain, which I myself attended in 2007, and ran with the bulls.

First and foremost, and regardless of your feelings about bullfighting and the like in Spain, it is a tragic accident. But yes, it is also a form of Russian roulette, even if the odds of dying are considerably longer than with a gun and one bullet.

Secondly, from a news perspective, this is the first time I have used Twitter to track down a speaker. It has been a success. Phillip Heenan gave a good interview and explained what happened well. The video has over 30,000 hits and counting on YouTube, and it is clearly an issue people are interested in.

It is also one which sparks extremely strong feelings and the comments on YouTube reflect that.

Having done the bull run, there is no doubt it is cruel. I would say it may even be more cruel than a straight bullfight. I have seen a number of those in Spain and Portugal, and at least the bulls are not so confused and panicked.

They are in Pamplona, and when one is separated from the herd, as happened with this bull, Cappuccino, they panic and cause carnage.

There is clearly a strong argument for an end to this Spanish tradition, sport or art form, depending on your perspective.

But ultimately, characters like Ricky Gervais are not the ones to lead the argument for an end to bullfighting.

It is a Spanish activity and the Spanish must be those who decide if it stays or goes. Having lived in Spain and discussed it with many people there, some are dead opposed to it, others passionately for it.

It is their activity in their country and it is the Spanish people who have the right to decide to carry on bullfighting in their own sovereign territory or to end it.

Sperm and science and journalism: We're all doomed

2009-07-08T21:41:00.004+01:00

Sperm, science and journalism were three of my main concerns today, as I awoke to a rash of headlines about the latest scientific breakthrough, the most alarmist of which was The Sun's 'Men Doomed as lab grows sperm'.

Of course, it is not accurate. Men are not doomed and, some argue, a lab hasn't grown sperm, or at least not fully functional sperm. Still, best not let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Ben Goldacre has made a good career out of pointing out the considerable shortcomings of science reporting by journalists. I imagine today would have been one of his busier days.

It took me ages to make the video above, and despite my best efforts in a very limited amount of time and with the very limited resources at my disposal, I imagine it is not entirely accurate either.

Still, I saw two interviews with Prof. Karim Nyernia, and his message was different in both. One was far more muted on his ambitions than the other.

I think, based on those, that he has aspirations to create sperm from skin cells and ultimately humans from that skin and that sperm, but he is reluctant to say so too loudly and clearly because he knows there might be a backlash.

But in spite of the slightly varied message, the reporting has been lamentable for the usual reasons: journalists are crap at science, they all studied English Lit. and know bugger all about maths and science. They have no time, and so they don't really check if what they say is true. And probably, if we're honest, many don't care.

And so when something as significant as genetic engineering, and all that it entails, hits the headlines, all we get are some miselading headlines and some screaming alarmism.

Today that happened again, but at least the 'we're all doomed' headline caught your eye.

Violence in changing China

2009-07-07T16:38:00.006+01:00

Another flare-up of violence has Chinese authorities on the defensive at home, and on the offensive abroad, accusing outside influences of fomenting the trouble.

This time, instead of Tibet, it is Xianjing and the Uighur people in that province.

But unlike last year's trouble in Tibet, this appears not to have been a story which goes: people oppressed, people protest, authorities crack down, oppressed people die.

This time, it seems more like: people oppressed, people take law into their own hands and go on the rampage, riots and murders hurt Chinese, Chinese seek revenge, Uighurs die.

That is not quite as straightforward and sexy a story for the international media, and so I suspect it will not be covered adequately, or in as much depth as Tibet.

As Melissa Chan says, this latest episode is the result of 'complicated ethnic tensions'. So it is not quite as clear a dichotomy as perhaps first thought.

But once again, it is a case of a minority ethnic group which feels aggrieved rising up against what it sees as the Chinese oppressors.

For the Communist Party the question is: Do you crack down even more, or do you give them greater autonomy? It is very likely they will opt for the former, although the latter might be a more judicious move.

'Fuck the BNP'

2009-07-02T17:46:00.005+01:00

'Fuck the BNP' - London, 17/06/09

Michael Jackson: Profit from a loss

2009-07-02T16:35:00.003+01:00

Michael Jackson was a remarkably talented man.

But he was also a business, maybe even a whole industry.

And now, with more attention on him than there has been for decades, that industry is in overdrive:

Iraq's Oil, BP's challenge

2009-07-01T16:20:00.002+01:00

After 37 years, Iraq has put its oil out to tender.

A consortium headed by BP has won an oil contract in Iraq.

It beat Exxon Mobil.

But that is just its first challenge.

Bernard Madoff: Victims demand more investigation and tighter regulation

2009-06-30T16:47:00.002+01:00

As Bernard Madoff goes down for 150 years for the biggest fraud in history, his victims demand further action.

They want more work done to establish if anybody else assisted him with his crimes and a tighter regulatory framework established.

One of their placards reads: "Madoff stole it. SEC ignored it. IRS kept it."

Setanta sinks and Bercow bites

2009-06-24T17:47:00.004+01:00

Video for today, and first up, a package I did on Irish sports broadcaster Setanta's collapse.

And second up, a remarkable spat between ITN's Political Editor, Tom Bradby, and The United Kingdom's new Parliamentary Speaker, John Bercow, full of his new-found importance.

Hats off to poiht87hfg who wrote: "He's not quite so servile when chatting with one of his perceived inferiors". Quite.

Blogger anonymity

2009-06-17T16:44:00.003+01:00

Hats off to former university pal Gary Andrews for a great post about blogger anonymity.

It's in reaction to a ruling by Mr Justice Eady to reveal the identity of blogger NightJack.

I can't help feeling the biggest victim here, but certainly not the only one, is truth.

The Maldives' 'Baby P'

2009-06-12T14:17:00.004+01:00

It is a case of apparent child abus e that led to the death of an eight-month old baby, and it has echoes of the 'Baby P' case that shocked Britain.

"An eight-month-old baby boy who had been severely beaten by his mother and her boyfriend died this afternoon [12 June] in the intensive care unit of Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital (IGMH).

"Addressing press this morning, Inspector Hamdhoon Rasheed, head of the police investigation unit, said initial test results revealed the baby had extensive injuries, and also showed signs of having been sexually abused".

Unlike here in the UK, the police have chosen to name the suspects. Can we really be certain it was the mother and her boyfriend who beat the child? Is that not for the judicial process to establish?

The mother of Baby P and her boyfriend were not named in the UK because of fear of reprisals. Her lodger, who was also involved, was named - Jason Owen.

In one sense, it is a hopeless aim. A quick search on Google and it is easy to find the names of Baby P, his mother and her boyfriend. In the Maldives, it would not even take a Google search - it is such a small place everyone would know who was involved before too long anyway.

But this will be a difficult case, not only because of the public outrage it is likely to generate. What specific crimes have been committed? Can a charge of murder be established? Baby P's mother and boyfriend were charged with 'causing or allowing his death'.

"All three suspects were taken into police custody and they all tested positive for morphine". It is something which again highlights the scourge of drug abuse in this small country and its miserable social effects.

But on a positive note, the opening up of Maldivian society is allowing these crimes to be found out and punished.

“Considering the increase in the number of cases being reported, you could say it was because people are becoming more aware,” said police spokesman Ahmed Shiyam.

So hopefully we are seeing a fall in the levels of child abuse in the Maldives.

Proportional representation, perverted

2009-06-10T06:05:00.002+01:00

There is something rather perverse about the fact that it seems Labour is planning to rush through parliamentary reform, not least a form of proportional representation as an electoral system, by relying on the excessive executive power it has.

By this I mean that the issue of the MPs' expenses scandal and the problems associated with it and raised by it, not least a legislature of diminished power, are in part caused by the executive having too much power.

This is a trait of the British political system - the executive is all powerful, the legislature less so, in part due to the first-past-the-post electoral system.

This is a headline-chasing government. It works like this:

Problem arises - bad headlines hit the press - public becomes angry - government placates them by rushing through reactive 'reform' - government wins positive headlines to replace negative ones - problem solved on the surface.

Of course, the executive is able to do this because the governing party dominates in parliament, so they can rush through flawed legislation with minimal scrutiny in order to be seen to do something.

They are now repeating this process to deal with that very problem.

And this, my friends, is perverse politics.

The beginning of the end of a Labour era?

2009-06-05T10:25:00.002+01:00

Here's a video I made today. More on the crisis in Gordon Brown's leadership here, at ITN.

Tiananmen Square: 20 years on

2009-06-04T17:23:00.003+01:00

A video piece I did today.

From farce to reform

2009-05-26T12:08:00.004+01:00

A typically British political row over MPs' expenses appears to be turning into something remarkable, the beginning of an era of genuine constitutional reform.

So far, we have had the 'sanctimonious nonsense' of a superficial row over MPs' expenses, the resignations and the repeated claim that the public is 'angry', 'very angry,' and even 'apoplectic'.

But now the hysteria has morphed into a serious debate about the future of Britain's political system.

The Guardian newspaper led the charge in calling for serious reform.

And now the Tories seem to have entered into a marriage of convenience with the left-wing paper.

David Cameron has poured praise on their columnists and used a double-page spread to unveil his calls for 'a dramatic redistribution of power.'

Of course, this is another sensible strategic move for the Conservatives, stealing the reform initiative from an under-fire Labour government which brought you 'devolution 1.0'.

What's more, by laying out their plans in the Guardian, including a cut in the number of MPs to around 400 and an easing of the whip system, they have stemmed potential criticism in a Labour-leaning daily.

It is likely to bolster Cameron's already solid poll lead and is an astute way to harness the hysteria and steer it to something more constructive.

David Cameron is right in his analysis that the legislature is devalued.

The Commons is full of MPs who loyally vote with their party and rarely upset the apple cart.

Labour MPs nearly always vote for the government.

A backbench rebellion is a rare thing that political hacks relish.

But it should be more common and, if it was, it would allow parliament to scrutinise legislation better at all stages.

But in order to achieve this, we don't just need fewer MPs on a longer rein, fewer political aides and a less-empowered prime minister.

We need electoral reform.

We need a progressive alliance in Parliament.

The first-past-the-post system, combined with the two-and-a-bit party system and a boom-and-bust economic cycle deliver a landslide alternately to Labour and the Conservatives every 10-12 years.

It also puts huge emphasis on a few key constituencies while diminishing the influence of others.

The only way to break the cycle is to revamp the electoral system, to make it more equitable for each voter wherever they are.

Until we do so, the Government will continue to force flawed law through Parliament, where it will not receive the scrutiny it needs and we deserve.

Such a system may prevent the government of the day getting an idea in its head and laying it out in law without due consideration.

It may avoid the target-driven culture that has ravaged the morale of the health service, the education system and other areas of the public sector.

It may avoid bureaucratic baloney becoming spirit-sapping reality.

And it may help bring the political process out of the gentlemen's clubs and closer to the people on the street.

20.05.09: Selected reading & viewing

2009-05-20T08:48:00.004+01:00

First up, this extremely well researched report by Simon Israel on the remarkable story of how a Russian millionairess evaded justice in the UK. I also liked the technique C4 news use of projecting the faces of the story's protagonists onto walls.

Second, how the BBC and others invented a famine that never was in Niger.

Third, an interesting comment article by Gideon Rachman in the FT on the ugly side to India's democracy, at a time when we're also seeing the ugly side of British democracy.

Next, blueprints in the Guardian for reforming Britain's ugly and disengaged political system.

Next, the Maldives, and excellent analysis from blogging hero Simon Shareef on the outcome of the parliamentary elections. More analysis, delivered with typical acuity, from Mohamed Nasheed. A question which interests me is will the Maldives' young democracy become a two-party system, or will it be multi-party?

I think the first-past-the-post system will ultimately lead to a consolidation of the political parties and a two-and-a-bit party system like in the UK. The DRP and MDP can both see that they would be well served to try and cooperate with some of the independents and smaller parties to secure seats. In the future, I think they will.

And on the social side, something on 'sexting' in the Maldives from Abdullah Waheed. Enable your bluetooth in Male', and you can receive all sorts of unsolicited filth.

And staying in South Asia, more on Nepal's political crisis.

Aside from that, I think the story of the thousands who are still missing since Nepal's civil war is fascinating. What's more, many more young children are still disappearing. Will we ever find out the truth of what happened to those who disappeared during the war, or these children still vanishing?

Funny blog comment

2009-05-17T16:16:00.007+01:00

Today I logged into by blog account to find three comments, two about the clothing scam and one which I can only describe as remarkable.

Under a post from over a year ago, Maldivian cops and robbers, came the comment I have captured above as an image.

I moderate my comments for obvious reasons, and rejected this one, but not before saving a copy.

It has some wonderful, defamatory allegations about me, which are all untrue but certainly eyebrow-raising.

They are:

1. DRUGS: That I used and sold performance-enhancing drugs at Reading Rowing Club, forcing them to 'pull out of future events'. If I did, they were pretty useless as we didn't win anything! They also still compete in the UK. I was also arrested, apparently, for both possession and sale, including to children.

2. BAD JOURNALISM: That I lied, created 'misleading stories' and hacked into the Maldives Election website 'and planted Devil Horns onto the New President Anny' (sic).

3. MORE DRUGS: I was also apparently arrested and cautioned for possession of illegal drugs in Venezuela, where I went in 2006, not 2005 as claimed.

There's also lots of minor misinformation like the idea that there's a 'young boy' living at my home and that I have worked for several local newspapers (I have worked for none).

The question is, why?

Writing in the Maldives I annoyed a lot of people, at a time when a 30-year-old government was on its way out.

The country was undergoing vast changes - democratisation, the opening up of previously closed institutions, a shift in power from one section of people to another.

I suppose during that time I managed to make a few enemies, and this is one of them.

Still, the comment makes for entertaining reading.

The rebirth of news?

2009-05-16T14:33:00.003+01:00

In its article this week, The Rebirth of News, the Economist claims news will, "no longer be dominated by a few big titles whose front pages determine the story of the day.

"Public opinion will, rather, be shaped by thousands of different voices, with as many different focuses and points of view".

It concludes we all "will have less in common to chat about around the water-cooler".

I disagree, and feel this proliferation of news outlets has an alternative, narrowing effect.

We all now talk about similar things at the water-cooler the world over.

We have the same cultural markers, a consequence of the West's exercise of its 'soft' power.

Fighting for 'eyeballs'

One basic problem with with news industry today, is that there is growing supply which is not accompanied by a growth in demand, as the Economist discusses in its analysis.

Sure, more people consume more media than ever before because they have greater access to it, but there is no marked growth in their appetite for news.

Among the young, there is arguably less.

What that means is there is an ever more aggressive battle for viewers, or 'eyeballs' as the salesmen say where I work.

And while the battle plays out, margins have to be cut and expenses limited.

The result is far less investment in news gathering - far less research for far more output.

The agency problem

In fact, what is happening is an increasing reliance on fewer news agencies to supply all the other outlets.

The Press Association has a monopoly as the UK's only national news agency.

Associated Press (AP), Reuters, Agence France Presse (AFP) are the three main players supplying news to the world's news outlets.

The BBC is joining them in the wire service business.

In my last post, I mentioned the story of Trafigura's toxic dumping.

The reason BBC's Newsnight was able to get a scoop on the story is it was one of the few places where journalists were keeping an eye on what is happening in the courts.

Court reporting has been one of the first casualties of the cost-cutting exercise in news.

If the Press Association isn't there, it didn't happen.

Or so it often appears in the UK.

In short, this causes a narrowing of primary sources.

"What are they running?"

The next issue is that editors are often lacking in original thought.

They look for a steer on the big stories of the day by comparing their output with their competitors'.

The result, again, is that we all run with the same big stories.

A few big titles still do determine the story of the day and will continue to do so, while the smaller, less self-assured titles seek out the agenda.

Boob jobs and face transplants

What is more, with greater commercial pressure the main story of the day has to be the story that attracts the most 'eyeballs'.

The notion of what is the most important story, as opposed to the most popular, loses out more than before.

That has an effect of promoting the frivolous and the inane.

What are MSN's most popular videos this week? Ones featuring a face transplant, a glamour model, music, a movie and luggage sucked into a plane engine.

What was the biggest story of the week here in the UK? MPs' expenses.

So I guess we're all talking about the face transplant and Jordan's love-life around the water-cooler.

Or if we're higher brow than that, we're taking the agenda from "a few big titles".

The biggest toxic dumping scandal of the 21st century

2009-05-14T11:17:00.004+01:00

And is it all over the world's media?

Well, no, not exactly.

But it is on the BBC and the Guardian.

Newsnight's piece last night was excellent.

Sadly, it is the same old story of a rich Western company - Trafigura - exploiting an African country.

Trafigura's turnover, at 73 billion dollars last year, is twice Ivory Coast's GDP at an estimated 34 billion.

It saved about half-a-million dollars by dumping toxic waste near Abidjan, rather than having it properly treated in the Netherlands.

Of course, the company denies the claims: "Trafigura was not responsible for dumping the Probo Koala's slops in Abidjan."

A case in the High Court in London will ultimately decide if that is true, as thousands of Africans pitch themselves against the multinational.

Canon EOS D5 Mk II: The future of online video?

2009-05-13T09:23:00.005+01:00

The Canon EOS 5D Mk II is an SLR digital stills camera with the capacity to do video, and do it very well.

This is a great video on the Guardian which I would be money was done with a D5.

You can tell by the rich colours and the low depth-of-field used to such great effect.

Dan Chung, who works for the Guardian, has a great portfolio of work on a 5D.

Canon EOS5DmkII, One night in Beijing. from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

There were a few people at the G20 protests using these cameras with shotgun microphones clamped to the side.

It gives you a very high quality stills camera and video camera, which is also in many ways more portable and easy to use than a DV camera.

What is more, it does more for less money.

So, for the unique area of online news video, is it not the best option?

I can't help thinking it is.

Now I just need to find a couple of thousand quid!

Sri Lanka 'bloodbath'

2009-05-12T11:06:00.007+01:00

So the weekend's artillery attack in Sri Lanka's so-called 'safe zone' has killed up to a thousand.

It seems, if we didn't have it already, that we now have the bloodbath scenario the UN feared.

Today, a hospital is reportedly hit, and 47 more people are added to the list of dead.

And the Sri Lankan government literally sticks to its guns while claiming the hospital attack report is a fabricated stunt by the Tamil Tigers to force a UN resolution.

Is it not the case that the Government has now as good as won this war?

Do they not need to develop new strategies to bring the conflict to an end?

And do they not need to look at other methods, beyond just violence, to resolve the Tamils' grievances?

Like any internal dispute, they will not be able to stamp out all opposition, but need to find a way to calm it.

They will need to make some concessions.

And until they do, the bloodbath will grow larger, and the number of dead, starving and wounded will grow.

The photos were sent to me by Tamil groups here.

I have displayed two the mainstream media don't seem to have published, apparently showing a malnourished 3-month-old baby and a shell crater.

Clothing scam?

2009-05-10T20:57:00.003+01:00

So this leaflet came through our letterbox the other day.

As you can see I screwed it up to throw out - more junk mail.

But then I thought, is this a scam?

Here's a few giveaways:

1. Note the misspelling of Friday - Fry.

2. It is not a charity, but a registered company, which is now apparently dissolved.

3. Google search W&W Help Ltd. and it doesn't look good.

So I guess we can assume this is one of a number of commercial outfits making money from supposed charitable clothing donations.

In fact, they are just diverting money away from real charities, and into the pockets of a few unscrupulous people.

Maybe I'll email helpline1000@yahoo.co.uk, and maybe I'll see if I bump into them on Friday.

Then maybe I can ask just exactly what it is they are up to.

Laos, Samantha Orobator and a dodgy fax machine

2009-05-09T15:31:00.004+01:00

The story of Samantha Orobator, who faces a possible death sentence for drug smuggling, has put Laos in the spotlight.

There are still a lot of questions hanging over the case: Was she smuggling drugs under duress? How did she get pregnant?

But another two are how did she suddenly hit the headlines and when did the Government learn of her detention?

One answer is through the efforts of legal campaigners Reprieve.

"Due to a lack of funding for the FCO, Britain has no Embassy or Consulate in Laos, instead relying on the Australians for day-to-day matters. The nearest Embassy is in Thailand, which handles more serious matters.

"The British government has never been given the notification of Samantha’s arrest, as required by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (which Laos signed in 1973).

"The FCO only found out about her case coincidentally, and months after her arrest, from the Australians, who were told by another prisoner in Phonthong prison.

"The Laotian officials have supposedly suggested that they could not inform the British because they do not have a fax machine".

Alastair Leithead in his article on the case sounds unsympathetic towards Reprieve's efforts.

"Campaign groups, like Reprieve in this case, are paid to raise the alarm, and they have certainly brought plenty of attention to the story of Samantha Orobator".

They have. And why not?

Here is a woman who faces a death sentence, even if that does not necessarily mean a firing squad, who is a British citizen, and may not be receiving a fair trial.

Despite running the risk of a "little hangover of colonialism", as Leithead puts it, Repreive have taken Orobator's case from obscurity, allegeldy caused by a dodgy fax machine, and put it centre stage.

And that may well mean that the Lao authorities will achieve their aim of getting the case 'to go away' in a manner which does not lead to Samantha Orobator's death or injury.

That, surely, can only be a good thing.

Nepali PM resigns, sparking fears of violence

2009-05-04T19:30:00.004+01:00

That Nepal is now thrust into more instability is a shame but perhaps not surprising.

I think it shocked many that the Maoists managed to win the elections last year at all, and the turn around from rebels to politicians is remarkable.

But it was always going to be difficult to reconcile the Maoists with other political forces and integrate them into the mainstream.

Dahal was leading an "opportunistic coalition of incongruous partners" according to Nepali journalist Kanak Dixit in the wonderful magazine Himal.

If, as Dixit suggests, a stable national unity government can now be established, then things will look up.

But as an outsider, and it's probably fair to say as a Westerner, what I find remarkable is the lack of energy security in Nepal and the chronic problem of electricity supply, which, in a very different way, also destabilises the country.

Aside from the power struggles and the political rivalry, the politicians would do well to tackle this problem head-on.

Tamil Protesters, Brian Haw and Parliament Sqaure

2009-05-03T11:55:00.005+01:00

Below is a report on Tamil protesters in London I shot and edited myself.

One angle I didn't look into, but want to write about here, is that of Brian Haw.

As hundreds of Tamil protesters chant and claim the limelight in Parliament Square, Brian Haw is now a solitary figure, sitting there along with his shrine to protest all around him.

But, being there since 2001, it is he who has fought the legal battles which have allowed the Tamils to take this stand in Westminster.

Now, the limelight is away from him, and the debate, both FOR and AGAINST the Tamil protests, is the main focus of Parliament Square, even if it not top of the agenda in the UK media.

Governments at war are winning the battle of controlling the international media

2009-05-02T10:14:00.003+01:00

Sad but true. Probably.

I attended a debate at the wonderful Frontline Club on Friday to address this question, and the proposers won.

Although I love the analogy that the battle for control of the media in war is like a game of cricket - you never can tell who's winning - and that it's a constant tussle between the two, I feel that, at the moment, governments have the upper hand.

Andrew Gilligan's central point was that when war breaks out, supply of news dwindles, and demand rockets.

The result is a situation in which governments can win the battle to control the media and can therefore win the propaganda war.

Jeremy Dear argued that the irrepressible spirit of independent journalism will never be crushed, and that bloggers, local people, anyone, will always ask the killer questions and the truth will, more often than not, out.

Jamie Shea was painted as the baddie - Big Brother's representative on earth.

He disputed the argument that technological innovations had somehow democratised the media.

Instead, he said, it had allowed the governments to flood the journalists with information, pictures, material which 'keeps the journalists busy' and steers them away from the inconvenient truths.

"Increasingly we are realising that to get our message across we no longer need to work through the press or the media in the way that we did 20 or 30 years ago. We create our own media distribution networks."

And Alan Fisher made the astute point that it was an ethnocentric debate, where we assumed that the western media is all that matters.

"People tend to think that if a tree falls in the forest, and an American broadcast network isn’t there to record it, did it really fall?"

But that, I felt was an aside.

He did argue that a boom in the number and range of media outlets means governments have a tougher time in controlling the international media.

But it was telling that we had a contributor from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Norbert Mbu-Mputu, who wasn't seeing legions of bloggers filling in the information vacuum using their laptops in Kinshasa.

Take Sri Lanka, an example that was barely mentioned and only brought up by a representative from Medicins Sans Frontieres.

While the Gaza conflict might have been an example of how local journalists can take up the mantle and feed the world the news they demand, not so in Sri Lanka.

It is, as Foreign Minister, David Miliband, has said, 'a war without witness.'

The Sri Lankan government has the 10 square-mile patch of land where it has hemmed in the Tamil fighter in lockdown.

Little information gets in, or trickles out, without passing through the army.

In Sri Lanka, the government has won the battle to control the international media.

The fight for freedom of speech, for the truth, is one to be fought on many fronts, not least against apathy, but it is one that must and will be fought.

So while we are not winning the battle at the moment, you can at least be reassured by Jeremy Dear and Alan Fisher's arguments, that the battle will continue to be fought.

There will be no white flags here.

In response to 'Give the guy a break'

2009-05-02T10:07:00.003+01:00

This is a letter I wrote to Minivan News on April 27 in response to their comment piece entitled "Give the guy a break."

It hasn't yet been published so I thought I'd post it here:

Dear MN,

In response to your article, "Give the guy a break", I disagree with any sentiment that criticism and scrutiny of President Nasheed, or his government, should ease.

Would Nasheed have given the previous administration any let up? No.

Should he get an easy ride? No.

To read the Maldivian media from abroad, one gets the sense that another paternalistic government is in the making. If it is, that is a great shame.

Nasheed and his band of men have always said they are committed to 'liberal democracy'. Now is the crucial time for the establishment of such a democracy, difficult though it might be.

What has happened over the last couple of weeks appears to amount to a litany of failures by the heads of so-called 'independent institutions'.

As such, any commentary on Minivan News should lament this abdication of responsibility by all involved.

Far from urging any 'break', it should suggest all involved redouble their efforts to create a democracy built on firm foundations.

Why was the Auditor General's report released just before the elections? Why was it filled with "commentary unbefitting to an independent institution'? Why is such inflammatory, 'unprofessional' language being used? Have these questions been put to the self-declared guardians of Maldivian democracy?

They should be.

Do not give these people a break. Make their lives twice as difficult. They carry out their work on behalf of the Maldivian people, and they should at all times be held accountable for their decisions.

Are their actions in the interests of the Maldivian nation, or are they based on more narrow interests? If they are, they there is a story to be written, and commentary to be made.

My apologies if I sound pompous, but this is an important issue.

Swine flu pandemic: Who benefits?

2009-04-28T20:14:00.003+01:00

Obviously there are many questions thrown up by the spread of the swine flu virus, not least, what exactly is it and what actual risk does it pose?

But another question, perhaps not an immediate one, is who will benefit from this outbreak?

Obviously not those who contract it, nor the tourism industry or the airlines.

This is a serious issue, which will adversely affect many.

But some will do well from this.

First up, the journalists and the media. It is big news, it potentially affects everyone, and there is a big hunger for knowledge and information. Big audiences mean big income.

Second up, those who provide the vaccines will do well: Tamiflu - Roche. The outbreak occurs, their share price rises. Relenza - GlaxoSmithKline. Same thing.

Of course, those who work for the pharmaceuticals, like the PR agents, also suddenly find themselves in demand.

For Roche, Ketchum will be busy spreading the word. For GSK, I don't know who's doing their Relenza PR. Try and find out. It's not immediately available. Funny how PR agencies don't like to shout about who they represent.

Of course, I don't think there's any need for conspiracy theories, but isn't it funny how even with the most serious public health issues, just like with wars, some companies will always do well.

Fox News will get lots of viewers as well:

And hey, if you like conspiracy theories, you'll love the Retard Zone.

ABC: Torture Tape Implicates UAE Royal Sheikh

2009-04-27T16:08:00.010+01:00

Frankly, I am amazed that this horrendous story has not got more coverage.

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan is the brother of the owner of the British football club, Manchester City, and he is accused of being a torturer.

That in itself is a big story, and I suspect the business links he has in Britain spread wider and deeper than that.

US congressman James McGovern of his "horror and revulsion" at the tape. "It shocks the conscience," he said.

The UAE has acknowledged the 'involvement' of Sheikh Issa.

"In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed".

"The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior," the Interior Ministry's statement declared.

Does that matter?

Now, a site purporting to document more about Sheikh Issa and the sadistic torturing is online.

www.uaetorture.com

Why are more people not speaking out?

Why are governments not speaking out?

Why are the NGO's so quiet on this?

Why, when there is an obvious UK link to this story, are the UK media not covering it?

Why are those with links to Sheikh Issa not speaking out?

Does money buy silence?

Lampard, LBC, the Daily Mail and vituperative bile

2009-04-24T14:55:00.005+01:00

LBC, the London Broadcasting Company become London's Biggest (and perhaps most offensive) Conversation, was taken to task today over just one drop of the gallons of vituperative bile it pours out daily.

DJ James O'Brien, in the shock-cheap-radio-phone-in format for which LBC is now well-known, accused England footballer Frank Lampard of being one of the men who are 'scum' and 'weak' for not doing enough to support their children in the midst of a break-up.

He was reacting to an interview published on the pages of hate-merchant, the Daily Mail, from Lampard's ex-girlfriend, Elen Rives, in which he was also branded a 'bastard' and 'heartless'.

O'Brien unwittingly chose the anniversary of the death of Frank Lampard's mother to launch the attack.

It upset Lampard's sister and prompted the Chelsea star to phone in and exercise his right to reply.

The unfortunate choice of date betrays how little research O'Brien appears to have done about this.

He admitted in an interview on Sky News that he hadn't spoken to Lampard or any of his representatives to verify the details of the accusations before he set about abusing him.

I imagine Lampard and his people are now considering whether or not O'Brien and LBC have actually defamed him, breached his right to privacy, or something else.

I wouldn't be surprised to read of an out-of-court settlement over this in the future.

But isn't it sad that a radio station that was once breaking the mould, moving the media forward, and producing great journalists like Jon Snow and Julian Manyon, has resorted to such an awful format.

It is also interesting to hear Lampard's version of how the Daily Mail got the Elen Rives interview.

He says she was 'conned' by a close friend when she was 'a little bit drunk' into talking about her break up in what she thought was a private exchange and is now 'very upset'.

Lampard goes on to lament the state of British society when this sort of thing happens.

I can't help but agree with him.

And while there is an argument to be made that if you choose to live your life in the public eye then you have to live with this sort of thing, there must be a line drawn.

Today, I feel, LBC and probably the Daily Mail, have both crossed that line, not for the first time, and almost definitely not for the last.

Censorship in Sri Lanka

2009-04-24T12:04:00.004+01:00

A video piece by CBC on the killing of Lasantha Wickrematunge and the stranglehold on the media in Sri Lanka.

And his moving prediction of his own death:

"People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted."

The Sunday Leader

Video: Budget '09 - Roundup

2009-04-22T16:08:00.001+01:00

A quick roundup I did of the 2009 'credit crunch' budget.

Cynical advertising

2009-04-20T17:05:00.004+01:00

Look at this advert for Russia Today on guardian.co.uk today.

'US to strike soon' says the headline, the standfirst: 'US to go into war any day now? Read this story here!'

And off it sends you to Russia Today, where you promptly realise it is a false and alarmist story from 12 September last year.

What a cynical way to promote your website.

Still, they promote a cynical regime, so what do you expect?

Looting the Maldives

2009-04-20T11:45:00.004+01:00

Photo courtesy: Abdullah Waheed

My congratulations to the Minivan News team and the Maldivian Auditor-General on some superb work in exposing the extent to which Maumoon Abdul Gayoom looted his country during his 30-year tenure as president:

Part 1: Auditor-General exposes cronyism
Part 2: Funds unaccounted for in Theemuge budget
Part 3: Ex-President squandered public funds on family

Also see Maldivians touring the palace which their money built here.

This is confirmation of what everybody said and knew in the Maldives, which is that Gayoom led an overindulgent life and used the state's resources not just to live like a sultan, but to consolidate his power-base and buy loyalty.

"Corruption and misappropriation of public funds"

With the publication of this report, which the DRP claims is timed to coincide with upcoming parliamentary elections, any remaining shred of legitimacy Gayoom had has gone.

Continuing to lead the DRP smacks of arrogance and hubris.

If he was doing so to continue to work for his country and its progress, the move could be seen as admirable.

But as the Auditor-General's report shows, Gayoom is motivated by a desire to feather his own nest and is not interested in consolidating Maldivian democracy.

He must now leave the DRP, and take his position either above, or below, "the business of day to day politics of the country."

As former Information Minister Mohamed Nasheed has said: "It is best for an ex-president, who has served the country for so long a period, to be a leader that unites rather than divides his people - to be a leader of all people rather than a leader of a single political party - to be a catalyst that heals divisions and not one that deepens them. It is best for such a leader to be above the business of day to day politics of the country. It is best that such a leader be a proud asset of our nation rather than a character ridiculed in the media".

And Gayoom's stooges in the DRP, who continue to blindly defend and support him, like Aneesa Ahmed, who described the corruption allegations as “unsubstantiated”, must move on.

Legal limits

What is more, as the eloquent Abdullah Waheed says, the Maldives must now pass a law outlining presidential entitlements explicitly.

"From time immemorial right up to this day, Maldivians believe that state property belongs to the ruler. Up to the dawn of 20th Century it was the King; afterwards it was the Prime Minister and finally now it's the President. The conviction runs so deep that despite the current Constitution requiring that presidential entitlements must be limited by law, such a law remains yet to be passed eight months into the Constitution".

That must now change.

President Mohamed Nasheed needs to ensure that he establishes laws that strengthen the foundations of the Maldives' young democracy.

If he does, the country and its people can thrive.

If he doesn't, those voices which say his long struggle was simply for himself and his family will grow louder.

VIDEO: G20 protest fallout & Journalist sentence in Iran

2009-04-18T17:05:00.003+01:00

Met Police under pressure as officer is questioned for manslaughter and one protester describes their actions as 'violent and unnecessary'

A court in Iran has sentenced an American-Iranian journalist to 8 years in jail for spying

Problematic policing: Britain and the Maldives

2009-04-17T20:30:00.006+01:00

I have watched the controversy of the policing of the G20 protests in London on April 1 unfold, to the point where there are 145 official complaints, one officer has now been questioned under caution on suspicion of manslaughter, and a study of tactics on the day has been commissioned.

Now, I can't help but compare my experiences of British and Maldivian protest policing.

The British coppers, of course, were until recently busy telling the Maldivians how to police protests.

Maldivian officers have for a long time been besieged with claims of brutality and incompetence. They are working hard to overcome them.

It is undoubtedly a difficult task to police a protest for any force, but I can't help wondering now whether British coppers really have enough experience of protests to be advising foreign friends.

I attended the G20 protests as an observer (photos here) and saw officers with the same look of worry, fear and uncertainty in their eyes that I saw in various demonstrations in the Maldives.

The result can sometimes be that an officer lashes out. Rather like cornered animals, they become dangerous.

At the G20 protests, the police decided to barricade everyone into the square, refusing to let anyone out, be they reporters or mothers with young children.

This had the effect of inciting a mostly peaceful crowd and angering many. Individuals goaded police and tempers frayed. Eventually, inevitably, the crowd broke through the flimsy, one-man deep line of policemen.

I rushed through with everyone else. The police looked panicked. As my video shows in the original G20 post, officers scream at each other to get in line and number off. They are worried, their lines have been broken, and they are trying to re-form.

In situations like this they understandably feel under threat, far outnumbered by the crowds.

But did they need to barricade everyone in? Was it the best method, or did it actually fuel the violence, extend the duration of the protest and later leave them feeling vulnerable and exposed?

The next question is whether there was a cover-up immediately after Mr Tomlinson's death.

His family were told that he had no contact with police before his death. That has been proven to be false. They were also told he died of a heart attack. Today, that too has been proven as false.

Once again, questions of a cover up show the problems of the Maldivian police and the British police might not be as far apart as everyone once thought.

New Labour critical discourse: Nanny state becomes draconian

2009-04-17T14:35:00.003+01:00

When New Labour swept to power under Tony Blair in 1997, the vocabulary used to describe the overweening power the government exercised generally focused on the 'nanny state'.

So now, 12 years later and under Gordon Brown, it tells you a lot that the phrase has fallen out of fashion, and in its place comes 'draconian.'

When was the change? Around 2001 perhaps?

Bad week for media freedom

2009-04-16T11:42:00.004+01:00

The Maldives might slowly be improving its press freedom, with lots of steps forward and few steps back, but around the rest of the world it's been a bad week.

Top of the headlines were Moldova and Thailand. It was bye-bye Facebook and bye-bye foreign journalists in Chisinau.

And while that happened, the Eton and Oxford educated prime minister of Thailand issued a decree which allowed censorship, as part of the state of emergency.

And in another island nation, Fiji, the court of appeal ruled that a December 2006 coup led by Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama was illegal, and the state of emergency and accompanying censorship began - deportations, arrests and "information officers" in Fiji's newsrooms.

And what's more, in East Timor, draft laws drawn up by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on behalf of the government "are rife with dangerous provisions that would undermine the media's ability to perform their vital role".

Among them, restrictions on who qualifies as a journalist, sections protecting people's 'dignity' and hefty fines - all tools used in the Maldives to limit media freedom.

"A section outlining journalists' "duties" are potentially prone to abuse by authorities and are not justified by public interest, say the IFEX members. Journalists are required to use two sources and refrain from gathering information that affects the dignity of others".

Of course, developing a stable emerging democracy and a free media alongside one another can be difficult and a free media can add to the challenges of establishing a stable democracy, but one would hope, from the UN at least, we could at least draw up law which don't include lots of loopholes ready for exploitation.

Using the BBC to break down a monopoly

2009-04-15T16:10:00.004+01:00

The consolidation of media ownership is well documented, and along with various other problems of modern journalism, has the effect of turning the media into something of an 'echo chamber', short on original reporting.

But in one area there has been a monopoly for quite some time. Ironically, the Press Association was set up as an 'alternative to the monopoly service of the telegraph companies', but now has a monopoly on the national news agency business.

Everybody takes PA copy, because nobody else is doing national news agency work. There are no commercial alternatives. So it's a worrying sign when PA is making cuts.

But it's also worrying because their monopoly contributes to the consolidation of the media message. Churnalism relies heavily on PA, and PA has quite a lot of power in setting the agenda.

As any good PR will tell you, get your story on 'the wires' and it'll be in hundreds of newspapers and sites, because they all get their news from PA. It's as if all the journalists read the same newspaper, but the public aren't allowed to read it.

At least on the international stage there are a few more players, but not many - Reuters, AP, AFP, although they are all up against it too.

But while this problem isn't discussed in much depth, the dialogue on the downfall of the BBC is endless. Should its commercial arm be allowed? Should it bail out Channel 4? Should the licence fee be cut? And so on.

But why, then, if we have a national news agency monopoly, and we have a sprawling media giant in the BBC that is there to serve the public good, is the question not asked: Why don't we get the BBC to run a national newswire service as well? Come to think of it, why not an international newswire service?

It makes sense. As any bad churnalist knows, everyone copies the BBC website anyway, though they would never admit to it. So why not get them to flog a commercial newswire service. If it was run without subsidy, it would give all those people at Worldwide something to do, and it might challenge PA's monopoly.

And hey, while we're at it, why doesn't Murdoch set one up too?

Yesterday a victim, today an oppressor?

2009-04-14T16:18:00.005+01:00

There was an interesting article and response in the Times last week which I have meant to pick up and comment on.

Diplomatic Correspondent, Catherine Philp, writes a sharp article which outlines how British aid to Rwanda, at the rate of 46m pounds a year until 2015, has indirectly funded rebels in Democratic Republic of Congo.

The article highlights some remarkable points:

E-mails between General Nkunda's men and a close associate of Mr Kagame, Tribert Rujugiro, detail the transfer of funds to the general.
Nkunda was arrested, diplomats say, not as he fled Congo, as widely reported, but in a trap set for him by the Rwandan army chief of staff, who called him to an urgent meeting at a house in Rubavu, just over the border in Rwanda.
Two months later, he has not been handed over to Congo, as expected.

The British Government retorted the next day.

It argues the aid has achieved good, not least a drop in poverty levels "from 70 per cent in 1994 to 57 per cent in 2006", and "19 out of 20 children of primary school age are now enrolled in school".

Mike Foster, a Minister for International Development, also posits that "increasingly, Rwanda is playing a positive role for peace and security in the region".

You can detect the frustration of a diplomat in his voice, annoyed that journalists have to be so undiplomatic.

The Government is trying the softly, softly approach, and trying to coax Rwanda into behaving well on the international stage. But as the article says, that may be morphing into "a gross indulgence" of Rwanda's worst behaviour.

I can't help at this point also wondering about Kagame's work with Dambisa Moyo, the academic who renounces aid as a failed experiment. Does that mean Kagame agrees with her? Or does she just provide a useful academic pretext to him weaning Rwanda off Western aid so he doesn't have to answer their awkward questions? The Netherlands and Sweden have boldly and bravely told Kagame what they think, and acted.

As we cross the 15th anniversary of the genocide, there are two faces to Rwanda, but still optimism.

But as we hear the sad stories of the past, Britain needs to question its role on two fronts. Firstly, is it funding further violence? And secondly, is it a haven for those who perpetrated the worst in the first place?

Al-Qaeda terror plot: searches continue over alleged plan to bomb Easter shoppers

2009-04-10T16:48:00.001+01:00

G20 Protests again

2009-04-02T16:02:00.005+01:00

More protests today, although I'm not there.

First up, my photos got picked up by a banker recruitment website - here.

They also linked to photos from the LSE student newspaper, which makes me think the article was probably written by a former classmate, but who knows.

Aside from that, it seems I missed a lot of the action yesterday.

Although I did see some of the scuffles and police-protester battles, I missed the blood-soaked baton charges and the smashing up of an RBS branch. I didn't see any of the 90 arrests, and I didn't get near any trouble.

I suppose the lesson is to get deeper into the thick of it next time. Although I'm not planning on going to any of the protests today or tomorrow.

Most of the comment I have seen, including on the site that linked to my photos, has been highly critical of the protesters.

I can't help thinking of the old gent standing by RBS as the thugs smashed it up, pleading with them to stop and saying 'you'll give us a bad name', was right:

And now the protesters have a bad name.

But they probably did have beforehand.

Don't get me wrong, I think expressing anger over the credit crunch and the recklessness of the banks is fair enough.

But that's not quite what everybody was doing. The protests have had a confused message and zero leadership. One hundred and fifty groups, all with their own narrow agendas have come together to cause some trouble, rather than communicate a clear message.

But don't forget that while the anarchists smash up RBS, only weeks earlier the government was stoking anger over Fred the Shred's pension, knowing full well it deflected anger away from the ministers.

While the violence hasn't achieved anything, and has probably hurt the protesters' image more than anything, the government should also be careful what it wishes for.

Oh, and I mentioned lefty comedian Mark Thomas in an earlier post. Here he is on AudioBoo, an innovative new site which I hope to make use of soon.

Listen!
And here's his speech in Hyde Park last Saturday, bashing Brown, Thatcher and the banks, telling the protesters exactly what they want to hear. If the protesters lack leadership, maybe they ought to make him chief spokesman.

And finally, a lighter-hearted look at it all...

G20 Protests

2009-04-01T16:43:00.005+01:00

I spent today rubbernecking at the G20 protests at the Bank of England.

I only intended to be there for an hour or so to see what was going on, but the police blocked us in, so I was there for four hours.

Here's what I saw:

The BBC and "intellectual larceny"

2009-03-31T16:52:00.011+01:00

The BBC, I feel, is losing the argument for the maintenance of the licence fee at current levels, if it has not completely lost it already.

I would pay 135 quid odd each year just to guarantee Britain didn't have as many adverts between programmes as America or other parts of the world.

But frankly, the consumer wants more for their money, and rightly so.

The BBC is currently under attack from all sides. Its stars' gaffes have grabbed headlines and embarrassed many, and given the Daily Mail a stick with which to beat the broadcaster.

The papers bash the Beeb in any way they can because they fear its expansion. Aunty can't go more local, or it will hurt their businesses, they say. And so it has been told to hold back.

Copy cat, copy cat

Now, the BBC is under attack for being a great big copy cat. Not only does it copy the papers' stories, but it copies the commercial broadcasters' ideas as well.

Both accusations are undeniably true, even if Richard Sambrook "can't be bothered" to argue back.

Churnalism is, to my mind, the scourge of British journalism. The BBC was founded in one sense to protect against it. Instead, it now indulges in a copy-the-papers, rewrite-the-press-releases , report-what-people-say, not-what-is-true journalism, which it can and should avoid, if only because it can afford to.

Now, Martin Le Jeune for the Centre of Policy studies, accuses it of a wider 'intellectual larceny'. "The BBC is too often a parasite on other’s ideas to allow its claims of creative contribution to be taken at face value", he says. Quite right.

He highlights the "copycat reality shows and competitions", the "imported US programming" that drives up the costs for commercial buyers. Not only that, but the wider copycat commercial-style broadcasting.

"If people argued that the new BBC should also run commercial-style radio stations, or offer general entertainment programmes, or cover Formula One, or buy US imported programming, or show celebrity dancing competitions, they would be politely reminded that there was no purpose in mimicking the commercial sector with taxpayers’ money".

BBC News 24 is a rip off of Sky News, Radio 1 of the commercial radio model and so on. What's more, the private sector can often do a better job, like Sky News or even in innovative ways like Al Jazeera English, which wipes the floor with BBC World, something one colleague told me he's embarrassed as a Brit to have broadcast around the globe.

"We have ended up with a monstrous bureaucratic machine rather than the delicate instrument of intervention merited by the circumstances", says Le Jeune.

And that is the key. The aggressive expansionism of the BBC must stop. At some point, its managers decided that the best way to justify the BBC licence fee was to make sure Aunty reaches as many people as possible, however it can.

Now the managers boast that BBC Radio, for example, reaches "more than 45 million people - or 90% of the UK population". Driving down the M4, I wish to God I could get anything but a BBC local radio station, or the drone of the BBC national stations for more than 5 minutes, But I can't. They dominate national radio, and I have little choice but to tune in.

The idea that reaching every individual across the nation and many more abroad somehow justifies the BBC's existence is flawed. As long as some media reaches them, and they are able to be informed, then things are ok. It does not necessarily have to be the Beeb.

Aunty should not be using that as a way to justify itself. It should instead be trying to fill the gaps left by the commercial sector, and thus force up the quality of the whole of the British media and its output.

The BBC has to spread itself wide and thin. It has to boost the number of outlets it has and aim them more directly and specific groups, like BBC Three and the teen market.

Inevitably, this means a drop in quality, where more cash for less output would mean more original and higher quality stuff.

How much non-commercial broadcasting content do we really want and need?

Le Jeune's question is key. And I would argue we want less. Much less.

The BBC must remain central to public service broadcasting, but it must stop the aggressive expansion.

"A brand new BBC would almost certainly be kept tightly focused on delivering what the market cannot do, or does only to a limited extent. That might indicate a smaller but rather more intellectually distinguished corporation: impartial news and current affairs, factual and documentary programming, children’s television, classical music, speech radio – and little more".

And surely that is what we want.

Religion and Freedom of Expression

2009-03-30T19:52:00.002+01:00

I'm back up on my soapbox about freedom of speech in the Maldives.

Why? Because "The government has blocked nine websites with anti-Islamic and pornographic content since coming to power, according to the telecommunication authority of Maldives (TAM)".

Of course, they can do this because "Article 27 of constitution states everyone has the right to freedom of thought, opinions and expression provided it is not contrary to any tenet of Islam".

That is a big condition. It is also one which is subject to interpretation, namely by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, dominated by the Islamist party Adhaalath.

Although Adhaalath is derided by the westernised liberals in Male', the party holds a lot of sway elsewhere in the Maldives.

The clause in Article 27 was debated at the time and concern was raised, but it went through.

To my mind, it goes to the heart of the clash between a conservative religious reality, and liberal democratic aspiration - between the government's claim to want a liberal democratic system, and the reality that society remains conservative and deeply religious.

It goes to the heart of the struggle for a 'new' Maldives.

For the President, Mohamed Nasheed, "a former prisoner of conscience and a journalist who was persecuted for his writing", things are not quite as clear-cut as they once were.

Going from poacher to gamekeeper, subverting power to holding power, has exposed the incoherence in Anni's political vision, and the cold hard reality of leading a broad and weak coalition.

He has not chosen to ban these websites himself, I imagine, but does not hold enough power to reverse the decision. Instead, he has installed an MDP scholar in the MoIA.

His approach, I imagine, will be to limit and dilute the influence of Adhaalath as much as possible, while trying to avoid forcing them out of the coalition. They are still useful to Anni, and lend to his government some religious authority.

But although that is the case, freedom of expression is still being limited by the state, as it has been for decades.

For those who understand the value of freedom of speech, they will have to continue the fight, and resist the government's attempts to further erode what freedom of expression they have.

Indeed, they will have to push forward, and carve out more space for freedom of speech. I wish them well.

G20 Protest, Hyde Park - 35,000? I think not.

2009-03-28T17:28:00.011Z

Well that was underwhelming.

I cycled through Sloane Square, past the Cartier and Tiffany jewellery stores, past the well-to-do crowds shopping in London's most exclusive outlets, and on to Hyde Park.

I followed the sound of the loudspeakers, expecting to find the crowd of 35,000 protesters the police have estimated were protesting as part of this week's G20 protests.

What I found was a small stage surrounded by about 1,000 people standing in the rain listening to some anti-capitalist speeches. A small gathering of a hard core of what appeared to be union activists.

This was not the week of 'very violent' political protest I had been expecting. Fears of middle-class protest for a middle-class crisis seem a little overblown. This crowd was full of the usual suspects.

What's more, as this video below shows, the crowd was no bigger than those I used to see in the Maldives. That country has 300,000 people. We have 60,000,000. This was not much of a protest.

The disappointment was palpable. "It's a very poorly attended demo", one middle-aged lady said next to me. She was clearly an experienced activist and protester and had hoped for more.

And the journalists we're also left disappointed. They had so hoped things would kick off. The satellite trucks were lined up and they'd picked their prime spots for live interviews, but the violence never came and nor did the crowds.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Lefty comedian Mark Thomas did his best to rouse the rabble. He bashed the bankers, he demanded we take proper control of RBS, that we stop it investing in polluting industries, that we make it a bank for the people.

But when he declared the end of the neo-liberal, capitalist system, he'd got a little ahead of himself.

Conformism amid crisis

For such a huge global economic crisis to have swept the country so quickly and so profoundly, you might have expected more. But clearly not.

Why? Well, this is just the first march, I suppose, and things might pick up on April 1, though I doubt it. I expect the thugs will come out and smash a few shop windows, but that will be about it. The media will tell us how the protests 'spilled over into violence' and the pundits will claim that it's evidence of how profound this crisis really is, but the foundations of the state will be far from crumbling.

Firstly, I think this 'credit crunch' has been met by many, from the politicians to the man-on-the-street, with confusion. Nobody seems to fully understand what happened and why. So they're not about to shake-up the system until they know exactly what's wrong with it and what needs doing to fix it.

Secondly, I think there's a prevailing consensus among the powerful that the system just needs tinkering with, not overhauling. Neoliberalism is not dead, it just needs better regulation, goes their thinking.

Thirdly, I think the British are pathologically incapable of protesting, striking, revolting. We are instilled with pride for our centuries-old democracy from a young age. The slowly-but-surely way it evolved is something that sets us apart from the world. It gives the British the innate arrogance on the world stage that many non-Brits complain about. Evolution of the political system is what we know and what we like. We're not French, we don't like upheaval.

Fourthly, it's easy to overplay the situation. When I was in Venezuela and saw the way everybody was politicised, how passionate they all were, and how well attended demonstrations could be, I had to ask why. The reason is a combination of the far more serious social problems there - grinding poverty and relentless violence - and a far more revolutionary sentiment.

In Britain, we are still affluent, and we still have the 'British dream'. It's not quite as brash as the American dream, but it's there. The vision of a nice little house in the country, 2.4 children, a dog and an Audi estate in the garage.

At the end of the rally, as the Trots trudged off, and the Lefties left, Tony Robinson, said farewell. "Go home and organise!" he pleaded to the crowd.

It would be a start.