In My Humble Etc. - David Cullen

Ms Smith said human trafficking was a devastating crime: “Two hundred years after we banned the trade in slavery, it’s shocking that this is still going on.”

Pentameter 2 will focus on providing protection for victims who have been kidnapped, falsely imprisoned and raped and identifying the scale and nature of human trafficking in Britain.

Ms Smith said…she wanted to protect and support victims, but a blanket guarantee that none would face deportation “would be likely to act more generally as a pull factor.” She hoped asylum case workers would bear in mind their exploitation when deciding their futures.

Ummm. Can we get a rewind on that? Has Billie Piper in Belle De Jour got to the Home Secretary’s head a little bit here?

So - to repeat. We aren’t going to grant blank asylum to women who’ve been essentially imprisoned as sex slaves in this country….because it might act as “a pull factor”….to…

…the many women around the world who daily consider enforced prostitution as a possible  careeer move?

Is it possible for public policymaking to sink any lower than this? From the first female home secretary too? Repellent.

Fighting talk over at Craig Murray’s blog, which was recently forced to take down a post about the thoroughly unsavoury sort who recently bought into Arsenal. His response is entitled “Who ate all the pies”…

I know lawyers who would be delighted to have the chance to quiz Usmanov in the witness stand (if we can find one wide enough), about his criminal conviction in the Soviet Union, how he secured his pardon, his relationship with President Islam Karimov, Gulnara Karimova and Gafur Rakhimov, the sources of his wealth and the doings of Gazprom Investholdings. I should be interested in his views on the mysterious fall from a window of his employee Igor Safronov.

Class stuff. MyHumblePolicy stipulates that I direct you to what Alisher Usamov’s lawyers don’t want you to see. You can find it on Indymedia.

Technorati Tags:
Craig Murray, Alisher Usamov, Arsenal, bloging, censorship, Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker, Accused Rapist

An interesting and hiterto neglected angle on the Foot & Mouth outbreak is that the site where the outbreak seems to have come from, Pirbright, was entirely government owned until about 15 years ago, when it was part privatised and given to Merial.

As the smart money is on the infection having come from Merial rather than the Institute for Animal Health - winess the defensive slant to their statement that ‘it’s too early to determine the cause of the outbreak’ - it will be very interesting to see if incompetance or penny pinching is the root cause of the outbreak. It has long been a MyHumbleObsession that the field of human health is far too important to have organisations in thrall to the profit motive involved in it. Could this be evidence that the same could be said of the custody of viruses, animal or otherwise?

Technorati Tags:
foot and mouth, pirbright, whoops, merial animal health, privatisation, bad ideas #5238725093

When loosing the will to live doesn’t feel as extreme as it used to - there’s always the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2, stamped with a guarantee to fill you with such rage and disdain towards the rest of humanity that you probably shouldn’t be out on the streets. Perhaps fortunately, I was unable to untie MyHumbleStraitjacket again today, so I missed out, but one of my numerous sisters was interred in a shop, and was subjected to the whole thing.

Apparently poor old Cameron was having to defend his decision to go on a jolly gap-year style photo-op in Rwanda when the poor burghers of Gloucester are running short on the blitz spirit. Brushing over the fact that a more pertinent question might be to ask what he is doing in Rwanda when most of his party members probably still think the world looks like this.  I, as one of the unfortunates who grew up within a stone’s throw of Witney, can testify that two days marching up and down the high street in wellies is enough to break the strongest of men and send them screaming to the scene of a recent genocide for some light relief. It is the kind of place where the wrath of God seems like a much more likely explanation for biblical flooding than a freak weather event.

It’s not often you feel sorry for a Tory, but Cameron is beginning to cut a tragic figure of late, and while he doesn’t have that much going for him, set against the subhuman baseline of the Tory party he isn’t really that bad. Brown has been rather more interesting than anyone expected (part of the reason for MyHumbleCobwebs adorning this site of late is something akin to a stunned silence), and it isn’t looking that good for doughboy. As the leader of a party which purports to believe in small government, he came dangerously close this week to suggesting the government should legislate against bad weather. Someone that confused deserves a bit of pity, and let’s face it, being stuck between the twin desires of the majority of his party to never have to pay for any sort of public good through taxes, and yet to live in a tightly ordered and regulated world where none of their myriad neuroses could possibly be aggravated, is not a happy place to be. I promise you, he is actually sincere about the environment, however much he may appear phony, and you’ll miss him when he’s gone. Really? Just repeat ‘dog whistle politics’ to yourself a few times over.

Anyway, the most offensive line in the wretched Vine phone in was an apparently genuine caller asking why places like Rwanda and Pakistan haven’t rallied to us in our hour of need, when we have so often showered them with aid. Staggaring isn’t it? I’m all for the democratising of opionion, but what merit is there in squandering the license fee in giving a platform to such idiocy. Doesn’t public service broadcasting extend to educating the public when it is so patently wallowing in ignorance? I know they didn’t get the full license fee extension they wanted, but it’s not like employing someone to deploy some desultory counter-arguments would be very taxing. I don’t think in this case it would require much research.

Of course, if they are feeling really flush - how about some reality TV? We decant the whole of the listenership of Jeremy Vine’s program to some godforsaken earthquake zone (along with the good man himself), and exchange them with a commensurate number of locals who can suffer the miseries of several days without tap water and being photographed canoeing up the street. They’ll laugh, they’ll cry, with any luck Jeremy will pull the short straw end up as luncheon somewhere around day two. At the end of it all, they can all get together for a debrief and talk about everything they’ve learned. Magic.

Technorati Tags:
tories, cameron, rwanda, flooding, jeremy vine, shut the fuck up

We need more people like this in the media

Excellent stuff

Ding Dong indeed. Apparently the Cabinet meeting yesterday was a sickening display of self-congratulation and rousing speeches. For one glorious moment each New Labour goon had a captive audience for the rotten little list of achievements that they have all learned by rote, and flushed with the joy of not being interrupted by some impertinent feral media type, they just went on for hours. You can imagine them all in there chanting away like acolytes in a cabal - “minimum wage, new hospitals and schools…etc. etc.”, all desperately looking round, waiting for John Humphries to leap out from behind a bust of Walpole and break it up by reminding them that they are actually supposed to be answering serious questions about some dreadful fuck-up for which they are directly responsible.

Milliband was late for Question time in the commons and put it down to a flash flood of tears in Downing Street. Jibes about freak weather events and Blair’s hot air Climate Change policy aside, do I detect something of amusement at the disgustingly mawkish spectacle that he had just witnessed? I suppose it came across slightly better than a line about needing to clean the baby oil of the cabinet table would have. It is possible however, that he was referring to the imminent breakdown that we all ardently hope is in store for Blair when it all finally ends. We have already heard that he doesn’t even know where he is going to sleep the night after he leave Downing St, and for someone so self-centred, one can only assume that some lonely nights are going to beckon ahead. Can it be too much to hope that some glimmer of moral responsibility might flicker behind those eyes, that the fervent armour of certainty will buckle without being continually shored up against a hostile world?

Unfortunately news from the US bodes ill for a Damascene conversion any time soon. Like a bad joke from beyond the void, Blair is apparently being considered as the ‘Quartet Middle East Envoy’. Of course, it is the hallmark of the US view of the world that the Quartet as such, has not been consulted - the views of Russia, the EU and the UN being naturally of marginal import when the Yanks have discovered such a singular talent. Presumably his role would continue in this vein, and in the idiom of his premiership; mindlessly parroting the Bush administration line, without any regard for the saner manifestations of world opinion. It is, when you consider it, somewhat fitting that rather than the well deserved quiet time to sit in the corner and think about what he’s done, Blair’s retirement job will be playing Bush’s evil ventriloquist’s dummy.

It fits perfectly - for a start the chair has been empty for a full year, so the role is obviously indispensible - in terms of prestige, rank it somewhere below Silvio Berlusconi’s court jester. Of course the Quartet is a large and unwieldy joke anyway - completely hamstrung by the US’s ‘difficult’ relationship with reality and incestuously close relationship with Israel, it has floundered in the face of events like a fat man in a Jaws film; it’s reputation as an honest broker is almost equal to Conrad Black’s. Who would you chose for a position such as this? Outside the US, can there be a politician on the global scale who has done more harm to peace in the Middle East than Blair? Let’s not forget that he is out of a job in part because of his steadfast support for Israel’s war on Lebanon last summer, and his memorable insistance that a ceasefire (i.e. stopping fighting) was obviously not the way to achieve peace. I suppose if we exhumed the body of Ayatollah Khomeini and nailed it to broom handle before wheeling him around the Middle East, it could conceivably cause more offence to all concerned - Blair has at least the enthusiastic support of the Israelis (and well he might, considering his behaviour last summer). The Israeli ambassador to the UK described his approach to the region as ‘balanced’ - ‘unbalanced’ would be nearer the mark. From amongst the ranks of the living there can be few people less acceptable to Arab opinion - the sidelining of which is, naturally, fairly high up the Quartet’s guiding principles.

It makes sense in terms of US foreign policy - as the middle east looks set to erupt into a prolonged and multi-faceted conflict bearing the proud stamp ‘product of the Bush administration’s foreign policy’, who better to send as a final insult than the ultimate bit-player in the long disaster. We discovered last week from the leaked report of Alvaro de Soto that Hamas were, in the immediate aftermath of their election in 2006, keen for a national unity government, but were rebuffed by Fatah under US pressure. Continual attempts to undermine Hamas have lead to last week’s violent coup in Gaza, undoubtedly welcomed by the same US officials who told de Soto that they liked seeing violence in Gaza, because it meant Palestinians were resisting Hamas. In the demented self-fulfilling prophesy of the US anti-terrorism stance, Blair as the most eloquent perpetuator of their manichian world view is the obvious choice to play the harpie of doom. A perfect follow-up to Condi’s scythe and her empty suitcase of ideas - after starving the Palestinians out has delivered such results, Blair coming to patronise them into submission is the logical conclusion.

The effusive write ups of the Cabinet love-in portray it as not dwelling upon foreign policy, and obsessed with ‘History’ - the natural refuge of the New Labour, now that the present has well and truly rejected them and all their works. It is laughable, and yet little comfort, that they somehow believe that Blair will be more notable in historical terms for Civil partnerships (which like most of his ‘progressive’ policies emanate from wider social trends and the momentum from the Labour movement which he has slowly emasculated), than for his role in the Middle East, which he has helped consign to another generation of conflict. History will not give a fuck that he bequeathed a renamed equivalent to marriage on the gay community, not when compared with the disasters his simplistic and naive view of the world has visited upon that sorry region. When the dust and smoke clears he will be remembered as a fool who lied in the service of his own convictions, an innocent abroad who should never have been let out of the sandbox; a dummy with Bush’s hand shoved up his arse. The joke, as I have so often pointed out, very much on us. Sweet dreams….

Technorati Tags:
Blair, middle east envoy, ventriloquism, poor humour

Just a little elaboration - in my post before last I talked about the Militia dominance of the Iraqi security services:

Western correspondents naively reffer to the security services being ‘infiltrated’ by ‘insurgents’, when the situation is more a question of largely independent militias all wearing the national uniform

The most recent ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ had a story by Paul Wood which backs that up & adds plenty more detail:

When crimes are blamed on men in police uniform most people take it as read that they are actually the police.

A government minister believes this was the case with the kidnapping of the five Britons. “This was a renegade unit of the police commandos,” he said, “but they were also the Mehdi Army”. “Actually,” the minister went on, “it is more complicated than that. This was a faction of the Mehdi Army, one close to the Iranian elements believed to be operating inside Iraq. That doesn’t mean Iran was behind this - although it can’t be ruled out.”

“In fact,” he continued, “these police officers were also members of the Dulaimi tribe, which has been linked to kidnapping for ransom. This could have been about money, or about blackmailing the government into giving the tribe more jobs in the security forces.”

Underlying this is the fact that the main Shia militia group, the Mehdi army is splintering.

Its spiritual leader, the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr has told his followers to set aside their weapons and stick to politics. But the militia commanders are ignoring him and a power struggle is taking place.

One of our translators told me that most of the fighting in his part of Baghdad is not Sunni-Shia but is between two factions of the Mehdi Army.

The contest is over who will control the property formerly belonging to Sunnis in the district who have been forced out or killed by the Mehdi Army.

The empty buildings are rented out again and the money funds weapons, militiamen’s salaries and the next round of sectarian plunder. This is a battle for spoils.

This is it - if Moqtada no longer has control, what hope have we? It’s a fantastic piece of journalism, and illustrates well how much more information there is in the space in between the news, rather than in the bulletins themselves. As an indicator of how bad things have got, it mentions that Westerners no longer consider it safe to walk around inside the Green Zone, which is news to me, and hugely disturbing. If anyone had any doubts that the wretched mess that is the coalition is just treading water, wating for the changing of the guards in the US and in Britain, this piece of information is the clincher.

In my previous post I predicted an embassy roof moment in early ‘09 (Bush’s successor will be sworn in early January), but this could really put a spoke in that wheel. Let’s hope they have enough armoured Humvees to drive everyone there….

Technorati Tags:
iraq, kidnapping, green zone, it’s all over, from our own correspondent

Your line that you can’t bring yourself not to be glad that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, is not as clever a riposte to questions about Iraq as you think. I personally am rather glad that Stalin is not still in charge of Russia, but if this had been achieved by nuclear Armageddon, I might be forced to alter my view of it as a ‘good thing’. In a similar fashion, in the abstract I would regard it as a positive development if I no longer had nostril hair, but not if this were to be achieved by removing my nose with a blowtorch.

Viewing the situation in Iraq as one merely of subtraction - ‘remove the evil dictator and all will be well’ - was the greatest fallacy of the war, and is exposed as such with every stone of bad news we are forced to swallow. As a central part of one of the most pernicious false choices ever visited upon the British people - that we had to acquiesce to his removal in the proposed fashion, or be complicit in his continued reign, it’s something of a sore point. Continuing to perpetuate it as if you’ve just done something clever, like a toddler showing off a turd, might not be the greatest of ideas, hmmm?

Technorati Tags:
hilary benn, iraq, labour deputy leadership, bullshit

In the spectacular dunderhead style which is it’s trademark, the US military has set a new benchmark for buffoonery. The news in yesterday’s Guardian of a new strategy to arm Sunni militants who promise not to attack US troops is remeniscent the old army trick of intentionally shooting yourself in the foot in order to get sent home. It is tantamount to an admission of defeat.

Arming a belligerent in a brutal civil war is an old US trick and is about as ineffective as it is morally reprehensible. Having brought peace, democracy and harmony to Nicaragua, Somalia and Angola, you can see why they want to give it a try in Iraq. They also have been arming the Fatah faction in Palestine (along with Israel, and with British support) in an attempt to undermine Hamas, fueling what is looking more like civil war every day.

The theory in Iraq is that more ‘moderate’ Sunni militants can be turned against al-Quaida in Iraq, and so isolate them. Encouraging such a split was actually one of the main recommendations of the recent Chatham house report on Iraq, but doubtless it envisaged wiser means. Thing is, these Sunni militants are engaged in a low grade civil war against the Shia political groupings, most of whom are tied to the Democratically Elected Iraqi Government™, which the US is supposedly supporting, as well as said Government’s troops and Police. So the US is going to be arming both sides. Way to go, US army.

The move is a useful index of how much authority is judged to have evaporated from the façarde which is the Iraqi government. With the parliament meeting in a leaking warehouse in the green zone, and with little effective control of the country, it’s clear that their primary role is to distract attention, rather than to govern. Western correspondents naively reffer to the security services being ‘infiltrated’ by ‘insurgents’, when the situation is more a question of largely independent militias all wearing the national uniform. This is not to say that no-one in the government has power, but that the locus of power is not in the government, indeed there is no national locus of power. Instead Iraq has collapsed into warlordism, where legitimacy, political power, monopoly of criminal enterprises and military power are indivisible and wielded by a multitude of actors on the local scale. Book yourselves a place on the embassy roof in ‘09 folks, because it’s downhill from here. The US move is an admission of this reality. Instead of obstinately persevering with their support for the government as the sole acknowledged power broker, local commanders are being given a free hand to try and cut a deal with their local ‘big men’.

How fitting then that Gordo is standing up for keeping the intelligence out of Politics (ten glorious years and all that). Did anyone else hear him drone on about how there was a political process in Iraq which he wanted to support, or did his tone put everyone to sleep by the third syllable? Riddle me this: what’s the greater crime, that we started this goddam war in the first place or that we persevered with the benighted enterprise for years after it was obviously lost, out of embarrassment? (Clue: there is no answer - we don’t even know what side we’re on anymore, it’s official).

Technorati Tags:
iraq, us, militia, arms, stupidity, gordon brown

An exciting weekend for all concerned. First of all we hear that our gracious overlords have indeed developed telepathic powers. Of course, keen New Labour watchers have suspected as much for years. The first clue was Lord Hutton’s conclusion that John Scarlett had - rather than brazenly colluding in bullshitting the British people - been ’subconsciously influenced’ by the desire in Downing St for some substantial reason to attack Iraq. Now the good Lord was clearly at some kind of a loss to see what was in front of his eyes, owing to some critical mental defect, but the X-Files fans amongst us spotted it straight away. Already the higher mental powers of the inner circle were in evidence - the beginnings of telepathic communication at the heart of government.

Developments this week, however confirm our suspicions. Without ever telling the Serious Fraud Office not to mention to the OECD the little matter of government sactioned corruption by BAE Systems to the tune of £1 Billion, Lord Goldsmith somehow managed to convey to them that it might be a good idea to sit on that particular bit of information. It is sad to see, that in today’s cynical age, where the Media destroy all that is good and right in this world, that rather than be recognised for his singular gifts Goldsmith is being hounded by those who clearly don’t understand him. Clearly having been granted such powers is a sign - we should accept that we are only fit to be ruled by such demi-gods and bow down to our natural rulers.

In related development, Humble Towers rejoices at the overwhelming news that BAE systems is going to appoint an ethics committee. Sell your shares now folks - it can only be a matter of time before they stumble upon the fact that the raison d’etre of the entire company is completely unethical, it gets wound up and everyone can go home and live happily ever after. I love a story with a happy ending - unlike grumpy old John Rentoul in the Independent, a man with an outstanding talent for being wrong, who blathered in his column about how insisting that BAE observes international standards on corruption would put British jobs at risk. Every job in the arms industry in the UK is subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of £13,000. Every job. So, brothers and sisters - when BAE accept the inevitable and go out of business, we’re all going to be richer. Hallelujah.

Technorati Tags:
BAE Systems, Bandar, Corruption, Goldsmith, Telepathy