Friday, February 05, 2010 

BAE and Saudis finally brought to book.

Away from the country's obsession with what's happening in other people's bedrooms, BAE Systems was today finally forced into admitting what we all already knew: that its deals involving both Tanzania and Saudi Arabia were sweetened by massive bribery and corruption. Not that it was our dogged and determined investigators at the Serious Farce Office that managed to get the company, which may as well be nationalised considering just how closely it works with the government, to own up to operating a massive slush fund which enriched the already filthily wealthy Saudi royal family, but instead the far more tenacious US Department of Justice.

Blair of course forced the SFO into dropping its own investigation to the Al-Yamanah deal, on the grounds of national security, based on spurious but outrageous threats from the Saudis, and also on deeply questionable claims that there was no guarantee of a successful prosecution resulting from the inquiries. The opposite was the case: the SFO had just succeeded in persuading the Swiss to give them access to bank accounts which would have provided prima facie evidence of the payments from BAE to the intermediaries of the Saudi royal family. As the statement from the Department of Justice makes clear:

"BAE agreed to transfer sums totalling more than £10m and more than $9m to a bank account in Switzerland controlled by an intermediary. BAE was aware that there was a high probability that the intermediary would transfer part of these payments to the [Saudi] official."

To call that an understatement would be superfluous. It is though a withering indictment of both of our legal system when it comes to combating corruption and also our willingness to interfere with what ought to be untouchable: the rule of law itself. The Americans, whom we often sneer at, are both more prepared to stand up to threats from bullies and also to prosecute their own than our craven and opportunist equivalents are. New Labour has been responsible for many disgraces, but this really does rank up there, along with Iraq, as one of their very worst abuses of power.

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2/05/2010 11:17:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, April 10, 2008 

Contempt is a two-way street.

"Why do they hate us so much?" is one of those wails that occasionally wafts from Westminster and into the press, politicians and commentators alike wondering why our representatives are either spat on, denounced as all the same or just completely ignored. There is a good case for making that the vast majority of politicians are not in it for themselves, that they genuinely do believe in some tangible concepts, and that they serve us with a diligence which many of us ourselves could neither achieve nor would want to attempt to. Then there's days like today, when the case for the defence seems so utterly overwhelming.

As Mr Eugenides writes, it's almost as if Gordon Brown at the moment has a reverse midas touch, where everything he goes near suddenly turns to shit the moment he opens his mouth about it. Here's the former clunking fist, the man accused of being Stalin, and he's being repeatedly made to look as if he's like another fictional ruler, the emperor without any clothes, debasing himself in public in front of the baying and mocking crowds. Half of this is because of his scattergun approach: one day declaring that plastic bags will be banished because the Daily Mail's just started a campaign up about them, the next deciding that malaria is the world's most pressing issue. Tony Blair wasn't immune to this either, as anyone who can recall his plea for Coronation Street's Deirdre's miscarriage of justice to be rectified can testify. The power behind the throne then though was Alastair Campbell, who compared to Brown's current advisers and chief spin doctor Stephen Carter was a genius and rottweiler rolled into one. Where Blair's spin was assured, either because it was done so well, or because the media was still involved in its temporary love affair with New Labour, Brown's is fast becoming his biggest weakness and in danger of turning him into a laughing stock.

Yesterday's announcement that Brown wouldn't after all be attending the opening ceremony of the Olympics was seemingly designed, in light of the protests in London and his own failure to so much as touch the flame when it arrived in Downing Street while the Chinese shell-suit mafia obscured him from vision, to be a good news story. Prime minister does decent thing despite potential pitfall over Britain hosting the next games! Easily offended Chinese get political equivalent of blowing a raspberry! Strong-man Brown says no to human rights abusers! Only, the slightest deeper look at the story exposed it for the fraud that it was. Brown had never explicitly stated that he personally was going to attend the opening ceremony; rather, span Downing Street, he was only always going to attend the closing ceremony, so that the spirit of the Olympics could be passed on. In any case, Tessa Jowell, the truly hapless Olympics minister is still going to attend the opening ceremony, so there's not going to be any boycott of any sort whatsoever. Within minutes of Brown/his lackeys making the announcement on Channel 4 News the entire thing had fell apart. The Conservatives, already fusillading Brown with accusations of dithering have yet another weapon to use against him, while the public themselves, not to mention those whom the gesture was meant to please, just feel cheated and almost lied to.

A very different sort of contempt but still one which reverberates around the country was thrillingly and damningly exposed by Lord Justice Moses and Lord Justice Sullivan in the Royal Courts of Justice. Although ostensibly the case brought by Corner House and CAAT was against the Serious Fraud Office's Robert Wardle after he caved into pressure from Downing Street and the Attorney General to drop the investigation into BAE's slush fund to the Saudis, this was a judgement that exposed the sham and sheer mendacity of Blair's government in its dying days. Prince Bandar, the man since revealed as receiving up to £1bn through the Al-Yamamah deal, waltzes into Downing Street, feeling the heat on the back of his neck because the SFO is close to accessing Swiss bank accounts that would confirm the allegations against BAE, and says that unless the investigation is abandoned, not only will the Saudis take their next big order of armaments elsewhere, but they'll also cut off diplomatic and intelligence relations. Instead of telling Bandar to get lost and take his blatant blackmail with him, Blair writes directly to Lord Goldsmith, who gives in and orders Wardle to drop the investigation.

It's worth quoting directly from the judgement, so sneering as it is of the government's action:
# The defendant in name, although in reality the Government, contends that the Director was entitled to surrender to the threat. The law is powerless to resist the specific and, as it turns out, successful attempt by a foreign government to pervert the course of justice in the United Kingdom, by causing the investigation to be halted. The court must, so it is argued, accept that whilst the threats and their consequences are "a matter of regret", they are a "part of life". (§ 6)

# So bleak a picture of the impotence of the law invites at least dismay, if not outrage. The danger of so heated a reaction is that it generates steam; this obscures the search for legal principle. The challenge, triggered by this application, is to identify a legal principle which may be deployed in defence of so blatant a threat. However abject the surrender to that threat, if there is no identifiable legal principle by which the threat may be resisted, then the court must itself acquiesce in the capitulation. (§ 7)

and
Had such a threat been made by one who was subject to the criminal law of this country, he would risk being charged with an attempt to pervert the course of justice. (§ 59

The rule of law is nothing if it fails to constrain overweening power.(§ 65)

The government's response to this tearing apart of its decision, this exposition of how they broke the rule of law itself so that one of the most vicious dictatorships on the planet could continue to be sold arms it doesn't need and so that its demagogic royal family can continue to receive vast payments courtesy of the UK taxpayer to be used on prostitutes, private jets and all the other trappings of unearned wealth while their own citizens are not even afforded the most basic of human rights? None. It's refused to comment. As has BAE, and the Serious Fraud Office itself, not to mention Prince Bandar. Perhaps it should be said that all those mainly involved have either gone or are about to go: Blair took Lord Goldsmith along with him, and Wardle himself is shortly to be replaced at the SFO. Even so, it doesn't slightly begin to justify the silence not just from the government, but from the Labour party as a entirety.

Dave Osler has already said this, but it's a point well worth repeating. This week much attention has been paid to events in Dewsbury, and discussion of whether the alleged abduction of Shannon Matthews was a scam from the very beginning. Her mother has been charged with perverting the course of justice, for not informing the police of all she knew and when she knew it. The government back in December 2006 did almost exactly the same thing, except on a scale completely alien to anyone in that part of Yorkshire. The difference is that Matthews is just a member of the underclass; Goldsmith and Blair were the land's highest legal adviser and the prime minister himself, yet they conspired to pervert the course of justice and in doing so broke the rule of law irrevocably. Some of those in Dewsbury have been warned not to take the law into their own hands as a response; who could possibly blame anyone for having complete contempt for the politicians responsible in this much larger and much graver case?

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4/10/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, March 13, 2008 

Citizenship: Gordon Brown he say yes!!!

And so, less controversially then, to the question of Britishness. Lord Goldsmith produced the usual nuanced, in-depth 138 page report, but all anyone's going to remember about it is that he proposes teenagers in a "coming of age ceremony" pledging allegiance to either the Queen or to the country.

This is of course a fantastic idea for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because the kids that actually turn up to it and go through with it without having their fingers crossed behind their backs or reciting the Sex Pistols instead of the actual pledge can be identified by a loony left teacher for a re-education session, but also secondly because it would make a big difference to that other great coming of age ceremony; getting drunk, falling into the gutter and making other statements of patriotism about the wonderful monarchy that this country has so much to be thankful for. All right, I might have stretched the truth a bit with that last one.

To be fair to Goldsmith, although he doesn't really deserve it considering his record while attorney general, he does recognise that this statement of allegiance might well be "problematic" in both Scotland and Northern Ireland, where half of the population is about as likely to pledge allegiance to the Queen as Allison Pearson is to say a kind word about someone other than her mirror image who's lost a child.

That, after all, is the problem with this whole concept of Britishness. There are two reasons why this has emerged in the first place: the belief that multiculturalism, a "policy" that has never in reality been a policy and that has was adopted by all political parties has failed as a result of the 7/7 attacks and the plots since then, not to mention the strains that immigration has put on the notion of identity; and rather more pertinently to the huge number of reviews about citizenship and "rights and responsibilities", Gordon Brown's apparent inadequacy concerning him being Scottish. Blair was never much that interested in Britishness, amazing as it seems now, and despite him declaring that the "rules of the game" had changed after 7/7. No, this is certainly all Brown's doing, triggered by the murmuring about the English being ruled by Scots while Scotland has its own parliament. That this doesn't seem to make a scrap of difference to those who aren't horribly anally retentive, as important as the "West Lothian" question is, doesn't seem to matter that much when Brown's own qualms have to be soothed.

We are all British now then. Or rather, we certainly aren't, to go by the very polling which Goldsmith commissioned for his report. This more than anything is the report's main failing; nothing that it actually prescribes, from the allegiance coming of age ceremony to giving students a rebate on their tuition fees if they volunteer, or even designating a national British holiday will do anything to change that. You can't be kicked, harried or forced into belonging, and like when, shock horror, teachers objected to teaching patriotism, the real issue is not that they didn't think they could do so without giving both sides of the debate, but rather that you can't enforce belonging the same as you can't make someone patriotic. You have to feel it to begin with, and only a certain number do. True, this seems to be more prevalent in some societies and cultures than others, but as so many others have pointed out, the one thing that is most un-British of all is to impose something by diktat. Failing that, you do it to the forgotten or undesirables in society first; the foreigners and other scum essentially. Hence why they're getting the ID cards first and already have to swear allegiance to her Maj to gain citizenship, with the students, the same ones that will have just pledged allegiance to Brenda, up next for a fast track onto the database state. It might not make sense to begin with, but New Labour has this funny knack of making things just so.

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3/13/2008 12:04:00 AM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 

United in opposition.

Probably more on this tomorrow, but Lord Goldsmith's idea of children pledging allegiance to the Queen has united opposition from Grauniad to Sun, which should certainly be its death knell.

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3/11/2008 10:34:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, November 21, 2007 

56/8 days dies a further death.

The government's trying to sell more than one kind of cold sick.

Moving on from one abuse of power to a potential other, the plans to extend 28 days must lay even further in tatters following the evidence given to the home affairs select committee by both the director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, and the former attorney general, Lord Goldsmith.

While yesterday saw the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, fresh from predicting new doom to the press having to give evidence in private, believed to have said that it was not his role to comment on whether an extension was needed, which raises the question of why he needed to say such a thing behind closed doors, today's evidence was also expected but no less compulsive for it. Ken Macdonald, who previously made a principled and more than welcome call for the end to the war metaphor when tackling the terrorist threat, one that seems to have been accepted and put into practice, could perhaps have been expected to say that he saw no evidence for a further extension and that the CPS was happy with the current limit.

Lord Goldsmith, on the other hand, the man who rubber-stamped Blair's war through the swift modifying of his legal advice that had previously tied itself in knots, and also gave the OK to the dropping of the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into BAE's slush fund for the Saudis, would have been expected to stay loyal regardless of his departure from government. It's also astounding just because of what else Goldsmith got up to while attorney general, arguably tarnishing the post for good. Why be principled over detention without charge when he has had a hand in the enormous bloodshed in Iraq thanks to our unnecessary joining of the US invasion that his changing of his legal advice permitted? How could he have been prepared to put BAE above suspicion and make the rule of law a laughing stock yet resign over 90 days? Also, in general, to make your point about how you disagree with a government policy if you're a minister is to resign prior before it going before the House of Commons; can Goldsmith really be excused from doing this just because he was a peer? Was he perhaps motivated by the belief that if he did so, and the vote was lost, as everyone expected it would be, that he'd force Blair to resign with him?

It's impossible to know, but his intervention now is still welcome, if only because of the huge embarrassment it will cause Brown, especially at a time when the whole government is under pressure due to its startling incompetence. Revealing also was that he believed he was the only one in cabinet to feel so strongly; an indictment on the illiberal and supine nature of Blair's chosen few, especially those such as Patricia Hewitt and Peter Hain who had backgrounds in campaigning on civil liberties.

The only people now still calling for an extension seems to amount to Sir Ian Blair, a man responsible for the most heinous behaviour dolled out to a man shot dead in an anti-terrorist operation, some chief police officers who previously phoned up MPs' and so annoyed some that they felt they were being lobbied, and the government, with Brown sitting on anyone who betrays a moment's doubt, backed up by the Sun newspaper, the Times, the Express and probably the Mail. Everyone else is completely opposed, although where the public itself stands at large is unknown. In the current climate you can't quite believe that Brown would still attempt to force through the measure, but if all has died down again by next year all bets might once again be off.

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11/21/2007 10:48:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, December 15, 2006 

The death of Blair's essential values.

Lord Bell, described by the Guardian as an "arch-propagandist", who led the hysteria for the SFO investigation to be dropped.

December the 14th will go down in history as the day that the prime minister was questioned by police over the loans for peerages scandal, but the real outrage should be over two things: the shameless and overt attempts to overshadow the prime minister's questioning, and the decision to cancel the Serious Farce Office's investigation into corruption involving BAe Systems and Saudi Arabia's despotic monarchy.

The Grauniad reports that the Dear Leader hadn't informed other members of the cabinet that he was to be interviewed by Inspector Knacker yesterday, meaning that Alistair Darling, announcing the plans to close 2,500 post offices, and Douglas Alexander, publishing a report recommending new runways at Stanstead and Heathrow most likely had no inkling of how they were going to be pawns in Blair and 10 Downing Street's spin game. They had known for weeks that Lord Stevens was also going to be holding a press conference stating his findings from the inquiry into the death of Princess Diana. That meant that the tabloids were the following day bound to be heavily distracted in the least, and lo and behold, so it came to pass.

The broads and television news had to be additionally bought off, though. Enter stage left Lord Goldsmith, who decided to pick yesterday afternoon to inform the House of Lords that he was dropping the investigation by the Serious Fraud Office into allegations that BAe Systems was running a slush fund through which notable Saudis were getting such perks such as prostitutes, Rolls-Royces, and holidays in California.

His statement to the Lords is one of the most mendacious of recent times. He said:

"It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.

The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East."

The only conclusion that can be come to, other than the one that Lord Goldsmith is a fucking liar, is that the Saudis had threatened to withdraw from the intelligence pact which means that all "intelligence" is pooled between the security services. Rather than call their bluff and accuse the Saudis of blackmail, interfering with the right of another sovereign nation to investigate possible corruption, Blair and Goldsmith rolled over. The message seems to be that even if you're a despotic regime that practices torture, bans women from driving cars, and stands for pretty much everything that the Labour party has historically opposed, all you have to do is threaten to stop cooperation and our politicians will drop everything to make it right.

OK, let's face it, the above is a load of bollocks. Goldsmith is a fucking liar. We already know this from when Blair more or less told him, or to give it Lord Hutton's take on why Alastair Campbell sexed up the Iraq weapons dossier, subliminally inferred that he had to change his mind over the fact that it is was possible war would be illegal. The Saudis may have threatened to withdraw cooperation in the wider "war on terror", but it was an empty threat. There's no way that the Saudis would have stopped giving the same material to the CIA, and the CIA would have passed it on to MI5/6 as a matter of course. The reality is that the SFO, for once, was very close to getting to the bottom of the whole corrupt concealed payments and perks packages which have been wetting the Saudis' whistles for decades. They'd either got the Swiss to hand over the details about Swiss bank accounts, or were just about to. Potential charges for current/ex-BAe salesmen/board members/executives might not have been that far off (the SFA apparently had informed Goldsmith they would need another 18 months, but that they were certain a case could be put together), with all the bad publicity and revelations about just how the taxpayer has been paying through subsidies for Saudi princes to bang whores likely to come out in the midst of any trial. This was something that BAe and the Saudis could not allow at any cost.

Hence the hysterical campaign by BAe, taken up nobly by the Daily Mail and the Sun, as described here by Unity, that tens of thousands of jobs were at risk, with the Saudis threatening to go elsewhere. It was all bluster. There had been some negotiations with the French, but they hadn't got anywhere. Local constituency MPs, worried that anger would be directed at them, also took up the cause, as Lyndsay Hoyle continued to do today, showing that he didn't have the faintest clue what he was talking about:

"Quite rightly they were happy with the news," he said, adding that it was a boost to a wide range of companies including Rolls-Royce, which builds engines.

"Tens of thousands of jobs were put at risk by a 1980s issue."

He said that the investigation had been going on for too long and there was no evidence of any wrongdoing. "Jobs would have gone," he added.

On the contrary, documents seized from a warehouse in Hertfordshire and obtained by the Guardian back in 2004 showed that payments from the alleged slush fund had contained past the date when corrupt deals were made illegal in 2002. As for evidence of wrongdoing, there was plenty of circumstantial, and it was the possibility of the SFO getting access to Swiss bank accounts that resulted in BAe and the Saudis realising they were deadly serious.

Whether Goldsmith's announcement was brought forward once Blair and Downing Street realised that the amount of cover they had counted on hadn't done the job, or if it was just a happy coincidence, we probably will never know, although we all know about this government's record.

The lie still had to be decided upon though for cancelling the SFO investigation. Whether doing so on the basis of jobs and "saving" the deal was potentially against international law is uncertain, but was likely to cause further anger among those who wanted to see the SFO finish its probe. Instead, the government hid once again behind "national security" and "counter-terrorism", when its clear that it had absolutely nothing to do with it. This was a political decision taken from up high, with Goldsmith playing the fall-guy and our "strategic interest" providing the fig leaf. That the courts are also less likely to disagree with a decision in the "national interest" was also a factor. The lefties are pissed off, but the majority of the right agrees with the decision, and everything balances out.

The further explanation given today by Blair 'n' Goldsmith is laughable. How could they possibly know that if the investigation had been allowed to continue that it wouldn't have resulted in a successful prosecution anyway? The attorney general could have waited until it was finished, then decided that there wasn't a case to prosecute, as would be within his rights. Instead he's brought further shame on his supposedly independent position by discontinuing it before it was even finished.

In the midst of all this the death of the Labour party becomes apparent. Cozying up to brutal dictatorships, selling them weapons and allowing them to torture our citizens without them then being able to seek recompense is one thing, but interfering blatantly with the rule of law and the right of government agencies to investigate when a crime has believed to have been committed is quite another. It's effectively given the Saudi royal family the right to do whatever they want, as it obviously won't effect them because of the "strategic interest". We've made clear that they and BAe are entirely above the law. Last week the following passage made up a part of Blair's speech on multiculturalism:
But when it comes to our essential values - belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all

By Blair's essential values, he is no longer British, and no longer is the Labour party. It is now nothing more than a vessel used by those who are doing so for power, and for power's sake only. If yesterday isn't the beginning of the end for this government, then something really has gone wrong.

Related posts:
Chicken Yogurt - The Pariah Sketch
Nether-World - A Shameful Day for Blair and Britain

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12/15/2006 07:04:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, November 20, 2006 

90 daze.

Remember, remember the Scum of November (2005).

Just over a year ago, Blair was facing down the possibility of a huge rebellion, and even defeat, on his plans to introduce 90 days detention without charge for terrorist suspects. He would lose the vote emphatically, but before then he put up another one of his fights to the death. Among the arguments he used was the following:
"If we are forced to compromise, it will be a compromise with the nation's security."

"We do not want to compromise on the 90 days at all," he said. "It is not the right
thing for the country. Be under no doubt about that at all."

12 months on, and we're facing the possibility of 90 days being reintroduced. We're told again by "Sir" Ian Blair that 90 days is needed. The MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller didn't actually call for it, but there's little doubt that her speech was part of a campaign, even if it's a covert one, for the legislation. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are both saying it's necessary. The Sun, the chief cheerleader for 90 days last year, which called the MPs' who last year voted against "traitors", said that it should be Blair's first action on returning from holiday in August.

Well, that's all academic now. Lord Goldsmith, speaking in a media briefing, said that he has seen no evidence to justify 90 days. His reasons for doing so ought to be examined. He has in the last few weeks come in heavily for criticism over his apparent refusal to stand aside from having a role as attorney general in the possible prosecution of those alleged to have broken the law over the loans for peerages scandal. The same people angered over this just also happen to be those who are opposed to the reintroduction of what amounts to internment.

There seems little other reason why he would have made his views perfectly clear over the matter. Goldsmith has to at least show signs of independence, even though he is directly appointed by the prime minister. His spinelessness showed through over the war in Iraq; his previously extended, nuanced arguments for why war would be illegal without a second resolution suddenly charged into a single page of why it would be legal under the previous resolutions when the army demanded that Blair make clear that the attack would be permissible under international law. Goldsmith's briefing seems to have been a strategy to buy off some of the opprobrium likely to head his way if he remains steadfast in his having the final say over what could be the prosecution of Blair himself, however unlikely that seems.

Unfortunately for Blair, it means that he's either a liar, a fool, a knave or all three. Blair made clear that he found the case made for 90 days last year "compelling", and his resolve doesn't appear to have changed. Either he's so desperately in bed with "Sir" Ian Blair that he'll listen to his most ridiculous ideas, and if he supports the banning of flag burning then he almost certainly is; or he's playing politics with the terrorist threat, attempting to make the opposition look indecisive and more interested in boring old habeas corpus than in protecting the public from suicide bombers, even if it means his government's defeat.

Whichever the answer, it's worth seeing what the Sun made of Goldsmith's comments. Last year, in their determination to support Blair they used the photograph of John Tulloch, the man horrifically burned by the 7/7 bombings to illustrate why 90 days should be supported. That Tulloch oppposed 90 days and that they hadn't bothered to actually ask his permission to use his image didn't matter; the complaints made to the toothless PCC were rejected.

To the Sun's search engine then:

Hmm, nothing for "Lord Goldsmith". That's odd. Let's try "attorney general":



Well, how very strange. I just can't imagine why the Sun wouldn't report the good news that 90 days detention without charge isn't needed after all.

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11/20/2006 10:45:00 PM | | | links to this post

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