Gordon's got a hard hat and two pairs of brown trousers, more than the army had when they were sent into Basra.

In the past week the clueless yet relentlessly authoritarian UK government scaled new heights of ineptitude and plumbed new depths of contempt for public sensibilities. Announcing the long-awaited Iraq War enquiry on a timetable that would ensure its publication only after the next election is one thing. Appointing five government/Whitehall stooges to hold said enquiry, at least two of whom were responsible for the policy and strategy which led to Britain’s involvement in the war in the first place is another. Claiming on national radio, as did Blairite Foreign Secretary, ‘banana boy’ Miliband, that ‘every secret service in the world’ thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that ‘if you’re looking for a conspiracy, you won’t find one’ gives a further clue to the ‘outcome’ of the enquiry. Announcing that this epic search for truth would be held in secret on the twisted logic that this would ensure that those questioned would feel more inclined to tell the truth on the precondition that nobody would be held accountable sums up the depths of degradation into which the current government has sunk our ‘democratic’ system. Had enough yet? Well think again, there’s more.

The familiar excuse that the enquiry needed to be held in camera ‘in the interests of national security’ was a spin too far for the men in black glasses and the men in nylon khaki. It is an open secret that the spooks felt hard done by at being blamed for the amateurish and deeply mendacious ‘dodgy dossier,’ lifted from a PhD student’s C grade essay and allegedly sexed up by Alastair Campbell, which Blair brandished as his ultimate casus belli. (Had they been involved, the document would at least have been spellchecked).

Every security service in the world thought this was Yellow Cake Uranium when in fact it was a deadly weapon of my image destruction.

Though Austin Powers (aka John Scarlett) was the source of the Yellow Cake Nigerian uranium nonsense which Bush used as part of his ultimate casus belli, this appears to have been a combination of wishful thinking and routine incompetence, rather than politically-motivated mischief. ‘In the interests of national security,’ we might never know whether the sources and judgment of the UK security services were corrupted (think Mossad) and its advice overridden (think Blair/Campbell) in the haste to rush to war and support the carpet bombing of tens of thousands of civilians and cause an insurgency which took the death toll to more than 100,000, not to mention the turkey shoot of over 22,000 Iraqi soldiers in the first glorious ‘victory week’ of an engagement which has lasted far longer than WW2 and Vietnam.

The British army, justifiably angry at having held their tongues after holding Basra for five years with cheap equipment, clown cars, mail order uniforms and armour that wouldn’t pass muster at a girl guide’s paintball party, then ridiculed by the US for leaving the place in a mess – ie. with lots of Iraqis left alive – also declared themselves off side. With (Sir) John Chilcot, a dab hand with the Persil, cf the Butler Report, at the helm, Professor (Sir) Lawrence Freedman (co-author of Blair’s 1999 Chicago ‘Humanitarian Intervention‘ speech and alleged architect of the government strategy on engagement in Iraq) riding shotgun and three other sockpuppets to make up the numbers, there was little chance of a fair hearing. Faced by a mutiny led by General (Sir) Richard Dannatt and dark, professionally deceitful Oxbridge twats turning against their lords and masters, the government executed a partial U-Turn (which could yet become a full one).

How, or why, did they ever think they could get away with another cover-up? God told them to do it. In today’s Observer, it is alleged – and predictably denied by this Pinocchio government – that Brown was asked by Tony Blair (through Mandelson, one presumes) to hold the enquiry in secret, for fear that he (Blair) would be tried in the court of public opinion. Well, yes he would, should and well might be, except that a more appropriate and less biased place might be the International Criminal Court at the Hague, where the tribunal would not be stacked with Blairite cronies.

Meanwhile, Thus has thought long and hard as to how to drag the truth of the situation out of Blair and his fellow alleged war criminals. Since it was also revealed this week, in the first of a series of leaks designed to soften the impact if and when they are later confirmed, that while Blair had not authorised the use of torture by UK forces or agencies, he had not stood in the way of other countries who chose to use it, we have our answer! Hold the enquiry in Morocco. Transport can be arranged. After a professional application of waterboarding, a spot of Binham Mohamed on the Old Man, electric shock therapy and constant repetitive exposure to loud music – may we suggest ‘Things Can only Get Better? (Thus passim) – we won’t need any high fallutin’ experts to tell us who did what and when. After all, as any Blairite will tell you, torture works. It formed the basis of much of the intelligence gathering behind the War on Terror, after all.

]]> http://thusmagazine.com/2009/06/we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk-mr-blair/feed/ 0 http://thusmagazine.com/2009/03/an-open-letter-to-gordon-brown-saviour-of-the-worlds-banks-apart-from-iceland-and-the-uk/ http://thusmagazine.com/2009/03/an-open-letter-to-gordon-brown-saviour-of-the-worlds-banks-apart-from-iceland-and-the-uk/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:52:07 +0000 John Kelly http://thusmagazine.com/?p=2535  

Stan and Ollie save the world

As Gordon and Alastair puff out their chests and iron their M+S Let’s Pretend We’re Businessmen suits (made in Indonesia) to host the G20 Global Summit on the global economy, a letter from Steven Katirai, whose Google search reveals him as a capital markets consultant based in the North East of England, has been doing the rounds on the internet. I publish it here with no guarantees as to its provenance, but with no party political line or biased intent, at least on the part of Thus. Whatever his motives, Mr Katirai professionally indicts, fillets and condemns the performance of the Brown government in a way which the Opposition have largely failed to do. Most of what he says is economic fact, much of which has already been covered in Thus and a small part is ad hominem, which I’ve left in, but don’t necessarily agree with (my attacks are more in the spirit of knockabout fun). Some of his observations scream to be in the public domain. I for one did not make the connection between Andrew Brown (whom I have met in his role as Public Affairs Director for EDF) and his BROTHER, Gordon. Neither did I realise that Tony Cooper, a top nuclear industry lobbyist, is the father of Yvette. Apart from revealing  how little I know – it shows how casually we have descended into elitism and cronyism in the war-torn years of Tony, Gordon, Mandy, Ballsy and the other Alastair. The letter was written on 15 February and is presented more or less as written.

An open letter demanding your resignation.

Prime Minister
Your position is untenable and I, as a citizen of Great Britain, demand your instant resignation. You are unelected, have no popular mandate and lack the moral authority to be Prime Minister. Your terms as Chancellor and Prime Minister have been a total disaster for this nation and your attempt to cling on to power at all costs show a complete contempt for this nation and displays your absolute vanity and thirst for political power. I list below some of the mistakes made by you during your time in public office. If as a director of a limited company you had made similar mistakes you would be subject to criminal prosecution and banned from being a company director. As a Government minister the standards exercised should be significantly higher than those exercised by a company director, you have failed to maintain those standards and are unfit for public office.
• Banking Supervision: You transferred responsibility for banking supervision to the Financial Services Authority from the Bank of England so directly laying the seeds of the current banking crisis.
• Banking Crisis: The initial response to the Northern Rock crisis was so slow as to be glacial and ultimately led to the damage done to the whole banking sector. A strong Prime Minister would have provided depositors with a guarantee that their deposits were safe and the bank run would have stopped. Ultimately the same guarantee would have ensured that the HBOS and RBS debacle would not have been so severe.
• Criminal Negligence: The entire UK banking crisis has been caused by a lack of supervision under the regulatory regime set up by you, any man of honour would have resigned upon seeing the damage caused. You however have tried to blame everyone else and accept no responsibility. You are criminally negligent.
• Vanity: You have used the banking crisis to attempt to advance your personal standing and political career at the expense of the nation.
• Lack of judgment: You have made three serious errors of judgment in your appointment of advisers on the current financial crisis.
1. Your choice of banker to compile a report on ideas for improving public health was Sir Derek Wanless. a Northern Rock director when it imploded in 2007.
2. You appointed Sir James Crosby, the former HBOS CEO, to the board of the FSA who then had to resign after becoming embroiled in the row over failings of risk management at HBOS.
3. It now also appears that Glen Moreno will be forced out of his job, as chairman of UK Financial Investments Ltd, the company set up to oversee the government’s stake in the bailed-out banks, because of his links with a Liechtenstein trust accused of tax evasion. (NB Moreno did resign).
• You fantasise: by clinging to the idea that, thanks to your genius, British citizens are far better placed than competitors to handle this crisis. The following two facts demonstrate that this is a fantasy:-

1. The Office for National Statistics’ revelation that while the number of foreign workers getting jobs in the UK continues to grow (up by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year), domestic unemployment is rising sharply.

2. According to Business Monitor International, a research company specialising in country risk, “Britain is facing an unprecedented fall in its economic world ranking … from 12th place in 2007 to 21st in 2010″. “Despite enjoying 11 years of growth between 1997 and 2007, the UK ran a budget deficit of 1.7 per cent of GDP over this period, fuelling a fiscal time bomb. Faced with the financial burden of bailing out the banking sector and kick-starting the economy, the budget deficit will swell to an unsustainable 9.3 per cent of GDP in 2009.”

• Public spending: Your 2000 Spending Review presaged a major expansion of government spending, without any significant benefit to public services, directly leading to the UK being in the worst shape of any industrialised nation to weather the current financial crisis.
• You have colluded in hiding the full extent of public borrowing by using PFI initiatives to hide the borrowings off balance sheet. PFI is the most expensive and inefficient form of finance possible, and you have saddled the country with a debt that you cannot even quantify. Jeremy Pocklington, leader of the Treasury’s corporate and private finance team, could only give a rough estimate to Richard Bacon that the total liabilities, but not debt, from the vast majority of PFIs, but not all, from 2006-07 to 2032-33, but not beyond, is £157.9bn. That is not only astounding but unbelievable.
• Public sector Employment: The office for national Statistics shows Public sector employment was 5,846,000 (20.4 per cent of all in employment) in June 2005, 680,000 (13.2 per cent) higher than in June 1998, whereas from 1998 to 2005 private sector employment only rose by 1,241,000 (5.7 per cent). This growth is unsustainable and wrong.
• Growth: An OECD report shows UK economic growth averaged 2.7% between 1997 and 2006, lower than in any other English speaking country.
• Gold sales: Between 1999 and 2002 you sold 60% of the UK’s gold reserves at $275 an ounce, close to a 20-year low, a disastrous foray into international asset management.
• Your spectrum auctions gathered £22.5 billion for the government which caused a severe recession in the telecoms development industry, leading to the direct loss of 30,000 UK jobs. Two auctions were run in the USA, the first being cancelled and re-run (for less revenue) due to damage caused to the industry. The Americans realised their mistake and tried to rectify it. The British and German chancellors copied the North American first auction; which had failed. To copy a failed economic model is normally considered a serious error of judgement.
• Your East Coast Mainline franchise auction led directly to the demise of GNER, an excellent company, which was replaced by National Express who offer East Coast mainline users a significantly poorer service. Your duty was not only to maximise revenues, you also had a duty to the shareholders, employees and customers which you completely failed.
• Anti-poverty: The Centre for Policy Studies found that the poorest fifth of households, which accounted for 6.8% of all taxes in 1996-7, accounted for 6.9% of all taxes paid in 2004-5. Meanwhile, their share of state benefit payouts dropped from 28.1% to 27.1% over the same period.
• Tax: According to the OECD UK taxation has increased from a 39.3% share of gross domestic product in 1997 to 42.4% in 2006, going to a higher level than Germany. This increase has mainly been attributed to active government policy, and not simply to the growing economy.
• You pledged to not increase the basic or higher rates of income tax however in all but your final budget, you only increased the tax thresholds in line with inflation, rather than earnings, resulting in fiscal drag.
• You abolished the 10% tax band so that you could reduce the basic rate from 22% to 20%, to make it look like you were decreasing taxes. However in fact it led to increased tax for 5 million people, and, left those earning under £18,000 as the biggest losers.
• Pensions: Your changes in 1997 in the way corporation tax is collected, directly led to the taxation of dividends on stock investments held within pensions, thus lowering pension returns and contributing to the demise of most of the final salary pension funds in the UK. This act alone has single handedly damaged the pension of every person with a pension in the UK but also saddled UK corporations with a an ever growing pension liability, so much so that many companies futures are imperilled by these debts.
• Falsehoods: You used the Laura Spence Affair to beat up Oxford and Cambridge about their admissions procedures, Lord Jenkins, then Oxford Chancellor and himself a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, said ‘nearly every fact you used was false.’
• Inappropriate links: Given the finding that the government did not carry a proper public consultation on the use of nuclear power in its 2006 Energy Review, your brother Andrew’s links to one of the main nuclear lobbyists, EDF Energy, could be construed as inappropriate.The father-in-law of your closest adviser Ed Balls, Tony Cooper (father of Labour minister Yvette Cooper) has close links with the nuclear industry. Cooper was described as an ‘articulate, persuasive and well-informed advocate of nuclear power over the last ten years’ by the Nuclear Industry Association on his appointment as Chairman of the British Nuclear Industry Forum in June 2002.
• Iraq War: You supported British involvement in the Iraq War against the wishes of the UK population and helped to justify that involvement by publishing false intelligence. This war has directly increased the odds of terrorist attacks on British subjects and the financial cost has had a significantly detrimental effect on the British economy.
• Military Covenant: You have not adhered to the ‘military covenant’,leading to a significant decline in the moral of the armed forces due to poor housing, lack of equipment and adequate healthcare provisions. The lack of equipment has directly led to an increase in the loss of lives,
and serious injuries, compounded by a lack care following serious injury.
• The 15% VAT Rate: introduced to counter the effects of recession demonstrated a total naivety and breathtaking stupidity. Far from digging the nation out of a hole, it has saddled the country with a huge unsustainable debt.• No one should benefit from failure: You have on numerous occasions stated that no one should benefit from failure, however your tenure as chancellor was universally recognised as a failure, but you were rewarded with the Premiership and had the gall to accept.

• ‘There will be no more Boom & Bust’: In your hubris you made a statement that was patently untrue, and counter to any economic theory. You either knew that statement to be untrue and lied or if you believed it then you clearly demonstrated your foolishness and proved that you were unfit for office.

• ‘The UK is in a better position than any other developed country’: this again is completely untrue, we have more than double the debt per head of population than any other country in Europe.
• Public Services: You have destroyed Public Services by a raft of inappropriate targets, which have led to resources being wasted by the attempts to meet those targets.
• Surveillance society: You have presided over and led to the creation of a surveillance society in which any perceived wrongdoing is used as a pretext to pass oppressive laws. You and your predecessor have both single headedly succeeded in making the UK an unpleasant place to live in.
These are but a small sample of your failings any of which make you unfit for public office and for which you should immediately resign. You sir are a fraud and I am forwarding this letter to as many people as I can, via the internet in an effort to shame you into accepting your failures, Prime Minister.

Steven Katirai

Journalist retraining scheme for Muntadhar-al-Zaidi?

Unfortunately, my playful prediction that the Iraqi authorities would meet out summary justice to the shoe thrower was justified, as this BBC report illustrates: Shoe thrower ‘beaten in custody’. Apart from demonstrating absolute contempt for any civilised behaviour, this shows that George W Bush was either powerless to influence the actions of his ‘hosts’ in Bagdhad, or complicit. I would prefer to believe that he is just dumb, and the situation is out of control, but either way, it’s sad. Meanwhile, several Arab potentates are vying for the right to buy the shoes. Touching one’s enemy with shoes is a traditional sign of contempt serious matter in Iraqi custom, I’m told. Munthadar-al-Zaidi was not engaged in a copycat version of the notorious Alex Ferguson boot throwing incident which led to the departure of Golden Balls David Beckham. This was much more serious and for that reason we’ll hear no more from him.

John J Kelly

Gordon Brown looking sad in Helmand. 'This is paradise compared to Brussels'

We heard this morning that UK Gordon Brown has broken off his constructive discussions with EU leaders to appear in Afghanistan to mourn the death of four British soldiers, killed in two bomb incidents, one where a 13 year old suicide bomber killed 3 Royal Marines. We also heard that yesterday’s government announcement that UK knife crime had plunged by 14 per cent in a month was based on fraudulent statistics and that the ‘decision’ to withdraw the remaining 3000 British troops in Iraq was leaked to the press but not announced to Parliament (therefore might not happen). We heard that the jury in the de Menezes inquest returned an ‘open verdict,’ having been barred by the coroner to return a verdict of Unlawful Killing, but had rejected the mendacious accounts of the Metropolitan Police murder squad. We heard, we heard . . .

Head shot of Cressida Dick of the Met SO13 Shoot to Kill team. Scary name, scary hair, scary job in an institutionally racist, sexist force with no real accountability. Just plain scary, in fact. Dumb dumb bullets all round.

We heard former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, break his (unusually protracted) silence to state that he sincerely hoped this setback would not affect the promotion prospects of Cressida Dick, the Calamity Jane in charge of the Operation Kratos SO13 Licence to Kill gang. Last Thursday we heard of a foiled Al Quaeda plot in Belgium to allegedly blow up the EU Ministers gathered this weekend, a potentially huge outrage, but, mysteriously, having categorically stated that the target was Gordon Brown, the UK press have subsequently virtually ignored the story (including omitting to mention that 8 of the 14 suspects have been already released). The international press had no such emphasis on Gordon Brown. Apart from signalling the return to full fighting form of spinmeisters Mandelson and Campbell, all this whirling might mean that Brown intends to ease out of Iraq with a diplomatic cough (‘mission accomplished?’) but almost certainly ‘redeploy’ the troops to Afghanistan. On the basis that the War on Terror is continuing to pose clear and present danger to the UK we can expect continued pressure to proceed with the Identity Cards project and lots more sirens in the middle of the night to keep us in a state of fearful preparedness for – a UK general election. While in Afghanistan, Brown pledged a whopping £6 million to ensure free and fair elections (less than the cost of a Mayfair townhouse for an Afghan warlord) but nearer to home, the Tories are applying pressure for an early election. In the fog of war, we seem to forget that the glorious leader of the free world was not himself elected by the UK populace.

John J. Kelly

PS. THUS POLICY STATEMENT. My new policy is to byline opinion pieces (most of THUS falls into this category) since it is counter to free speech to hide behind anonymity when making speculative comment. We try to attribute sources wherever possible, hence the plethora of references to sources in the public domain but it’s mostly just me spoofing around acting the giddy goat. Believe nothing, believe me.

He did what pappie should have done to win a second term, but in eight years, he made America the world’s most hated nation.

So why don’t we hate George W Bush even more after this movie? At least the Iraqis got to watch mobile phone videos of Saddam’s long drop. All we got was a thoughtful portrait of a likable if somewhat self-centred guy who only wanted to make win his father’s approval.

One reason is that is that ‘W’ is not a political documentary. Another is that one man was not responsible for the collective insanity of US foreign policy over the past decade. It took a dedicated team of mountebanks scheming round the clock, a hideous, spectacular act of terrorism, a suspension of disbelief, creeping totalitarianism and the absence of credible opposition to serve up such a witches’ brew. By painting a credible picture of a man of instinctive populist genius, born-again conviction but no interest in the wider welfare of the world outside America, ‘W’ fillets and indicts the Bush administration far more subtly than a spit-flecked Michael Moore attack. In any event, that movie – Team America, World Police – has already been made.

If we take time out from hating, we learn all the above during the course of this thoughtful exposure of hubris and the Peter Principle. George W. took the temperature of the nation and gave the majority what they wanted at the time: Shock and Awe. His End-of-Empire antics were not dissimilar to those of any over-reaching dictator, except that they were enacted in a seemingly genuine belief that he was empowering democracy. He acted in the god-given belief that America First was best for the world. Stone’s ‘W’ is not stupid, but he’s no Einstein; no choirboy but not deliberately malicious. He gambled, high stakes, Texas Hold’em. Fate bit back. 

His advisors are another matter. Cheney is portrayed as a recidivist cold warrior, a consummate Iago, bent on total world domination. Rumsfeld is a lizard, prosecuting war on a strategy borrowed from WalMart. Colin Powell is the Imperial general whose loyalty to his commander in chief overrides professional misgivings. Condi Rice graduates from intellectual doubter to malicious Tinkerbell, spinning scenarios to fit the desired outcomes. General Tommy Franks is Paton. Carl Rove is Gollum.

‘W’ the movie resonates deeper because it does not preach nor condemn. Hitler was a failed painter. George W wanted to be a baseball hero. Both liked dogs. Both stepped up to the plate when the nation demanded vengeance for real and perceived ills. Both caused epic misery by aggressive, unprovoked warfare. One of them will be rehabilitated. It wasn’t America’s fault that they whacked the wrong guys. God told George to do it. He’s comfortable with that.