The Great Libya Folly

The Guardian has arranged a group of "leading thinkers" to give their views on the release of Abdelbasset al-Megrahi from prison on compassionate grounds. There is a quite a split in the liberal establishment over this issue.

I find myself completely in agreement with Geoffrey Roberston QC. Unfortunately this doesn't appear to be online, which is a real shame. But his first paragraph sums up my feelings exactly:

"It seems to me an utter perversion of the maning of compassion, both in law and morality, to suggest that an unrepentant, mass murderer of entirely innocent human beings should not be required to end his life in prison."

He also makes an important point about the morally corrupt thinking behind Kenny MacAskill's bizarre

decision:

"The decision to release him for what any person of any intelligence at all would forsee as a hero's welcome in Libya was lacking in compassion to every victim of terrorism and makes an absurdity of the principle of punishment as a detterent."

Those who approved this decision should also read the words of Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, the author of In the Country of Men.

"I am imagining my father today. For the past 20 years he has been a political prisoner in Libya. The Libyan government continues to deny his existence. This even though Amnesty International has documented the case. In this time he has not been able to see or communicate with anyone outside the prison. Then I think of him listening to the celebrations of the prison guards at the news of al-Megrahi's rturn. The prisoners might have been given presents to make the occasion. Then I think of al-Megrahi's children welcoming him home."

The Libyan regime funded IRA terrorism, pursued and murdered its dissidents on the streets of European cities and is the only foreign government I know that is responsible for the killing of a British policewoman.

This was a truly dark day for the reputation of this country.

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That Philip Hammond Email in Full

There was some interesting discussion on the subject of interns after my post last night about the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury's attitude to the use of free labour in parliament. Young people are now effectively paying employers to get on the first rung of their careers. I have no doubt that some people gain valuable experience in this way. But the question is, which people? As Alan Milburn's recent work on social mobility demonstrated, the professions are still largely inaccessible to all but the relatively privileged. 

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Visions of Life Under a Tory Government

A fascinating post on the Interns Anonymous website. This brilliant organisation is devoted to exposing the pernicious growth in the use of free labour. It shares many of the aims of my new outfit, New Deal of the Mind.

Philip Hammond, the well-respected shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury has been tipped to leapfrog George Osborne into No 11 Downing Street. 

According to the IA website, Hammond recently advertised for an intern post for which the terms were less than generous. When challenged by a member of the public about his failure to pay the national minimum wage he emailed back:

"I would regard it as an abuse of taxpayer funding to pay for something that is available for nothing and which other members are obtaining for nothing. I therefore have no intention of changing my present arrrangements."

So far only Private Eye has picked up on this story. 

I must say I find it staggering that a senior Tory figure is prepared to use free labour in this way. Even more awful is his suggestion that paying people for their work is an abuse of public money. 

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Meet the New Political Editor of the Jewish Chronicle

I was delighted, not to say honoured, when Stephen Pollard approached me to become the political editor of The Jewish Chronicle.

It is a great publication with a long tradition of campaigning for the Jewish community in this country. But above all it is good old-fashioned newspaper with all that this entails, including, of course, having an eye to the future. I was pleased to discover that the paper has an active NUJ chapel, which is welcomed by the management. All very progressive - as indeeed is the decision to appoint a non-Jew as political editor.

I am really looking forward to working with the fine team of journalists in the JC newsroom and, from time to time, finding my place in the paper alongside an eminent roster of columnnists.

In some circles my appointment will confirm the view that I have become a right-wing Zionist neo-con. The truth is, as the despairing readers of this blog will attest, I am none of these things. I will, however, continue to pursue an interest in radical Islam, a subject of clear interest to JC readers. My perspective will be, as ever, liberal and even-handed.

I will not agree with every editorial line the paper takes. But that was true at the New Statesman and The Observer and is certainly the case at The Spectator.

This is going to be something of an adventure for me and I'll keep readers of this blog informed.

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Stand up for Jim Fitzpatrick

Jim Fitzpatrick, the Labour MP for Poplar and Canning Town has probably just lost his seat to George Galloway who plans to challenge him at the next election. But Fitzpatrick was right not to attend a segregated Muslim wedding if he didn't want to. He wanted to sit with his wife, Shelia. I don't blame him for choosing not to be separated from her. Most of the reporting of this event has been absurdly ill-informed and sensationalist.  You can read the BBC's report for a reasonably straight account.

The condemnatory words of the Muslim Council of Britain are entirely predicatble. The ceremony was held at the London Muslim Centre, which is attached to East London mosque, the stronghold of the extreme right Jamaat-i-Islami movement in Britain. The MCB's spokesmen (for they are always men) have been the long-standing apologists for this south Asian Islamist organisation in Britain.

As an east London MP, Fitzpatrick knows more than more about the pernicious influence of segregationism in the area. It was very interesting that he mentioned the worrying growth in influence of Islamic Forum Europe, a group with close links to Jamaat and its middle-eastern parent organisation the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Let the Alan Duncan Incident Be a Warning to You, Mr Cameron

The last time I was invited to Alan Duncan's office in the House of Commons I took a film camera with me. I didn't hide it and took a film crew along with me. Duncan was charming, if a little cheesy, and talked eloquently about why Ken Livingstone's oil deal with Hugo Chavez was bad news for London and Venezuela.

But during the interview there was something that gave me a glimpse into Alan Duncan's soul. Not an off-the-cuff comment about MPs having to live on rations. But a framed photograph proudly displayed on a bookshelf. It was a screenshot from Prime Minister's questions of Alan Duncan alongside George Osborne and they were -- there is no other word for it -- braying. It was posh Tories in their full pomp and it sent a shiver up the spine. This, I thought, is what we have to look forward to.

There is a scenario that David Cameron and his inner circle should consider. In fact, they must be considering it already if they are half the politicians I think they are. The Conservatives could win the next election and at present it looks a near certainty.

But then someone will let it slip. Remember this is still the party of privilege. Most candidates (even the younger ones) are wealthy, privately educated and completely out of touch with the majority of people in the country. It is astonishing in the 21st century that they have been given even a sniff of power. Someone will bray or guffaw or sneer or in some way demonstrate how completely they fail to understand how people live. In the middle of an economic downturn, with unemployment over three million this will be political death for them.

It is quite conceivable that with months of a Conservative victory, the British people would despise a Tory government every bit as much as they did the present Labour one. That is why Cameron is lucky that Duncan's outburst came when it did. He now needs to inflict  a discipline on his party every bit as strict as the early years of New Labour. But where Tony Blair expunged traditional class hatred from his party, Cameron must stop his from justifying it.

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Akehurst v. Harris: The Labour Battlelines Are Drawn

As readers of a right-wing magazine there is no reason you will have heard of the following individuals, but as this is supposed to be coming to you from enemy territory, listen and learn.

Luke Akehurst (activist, councillor, Labour parliamentary candidate in 2001 and 2005) has always been a passionate advocate of the centrist New Labour orthodoxy. Funny thing to get passionate about, you might think. But Luke's Blog has been essential reading for those fascinated by the minutiae of Labour politics for some time. Now there is a real possibility of Labour meltdown, those of Luke's persuasion is convinced that the true enemy of the party is, wait for it, "the soft left" as represented by the fashionable pressure group Compass and especially the Guardian pop writer and political commentator John Harris.

If you want an example of some of the arguments that are likely to emerge within the Labour Party in the second half of next year, look no further than Luke's thoughts on Harris's most recent Guardian column.
Here is the bullet-point summary of the Compass/Harris line as provided by Luke's Blog:
 

• write off all the achievements of Labour in government as "outrages and disappointments" - the betrayal myth
• casually attack and insult the PM for "serial failures and Neanderthal style" - without naming the failures, possibly because there haven't been any?
• write off the General Election now and start planning for the mother of all faction fights
• drive false ideological wedges between leading figures in the party to exacerbate the factional split
• crudely smear your enemies as believing in "genuflection to business, an insistence on the market-driven reform of public services, a belief that Labour should dispose of its residual belief in equality"
• make veiled threats about leaving Labour for "a new life alongside a few potential allies: Lib Dems, Greens, the unreconstructed Old Left" (I'm tempted to react with an anglo-saxon invitation to do so)
• then, with complete hypocrisy, falsely accuse cabinet ministers with roots in the party going back generations of plotting a "realignment of the centre-right via the ultra-Blairite split that some Labour insiders have been mischievously predicting for a few years"
• elevate Jon Cruddas to the messianic status accorded to Tony Benn last time round - the problem being that like Benn he will probably lose his seat if Labour loses as badly as Harris seems to be willing us to

I take my hat off to the man for his heartfelt rage that clearly comes from a deep political conviction. I have never known anyone to be quite so fired up by the politics of the centre-left (except perhaps Jessica Asato at the Blairite think-tank Progress).

I can't quite decide whether this level of passion will save the Labour Party or destroy it.

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The Torture Debate

There isn't one. That was a trick headline.

The line between a state that tortures and the state that does everything in its power to avoid the physical abuse of individuals in its name is what defined the late twentieth century drive against barbarism. When the French were exposed using specially adapted field radios to pass electric shocks through suspected rebels in Algeria it rightly caused outrage in a world still recovering from the reality of the Holocaust. 

We are a little less easy to horrify now. But the revelation that our own intelligence services have been prepared to use the fruits of torture, however unwittingly, still has the ability to digust.

The response this story fascinates me, though, because we are still thinking about the way this intelligence has been used in a very limited way. Alan Johnson and David Miliband were able to write with some confidence for the Sunday Telegraph this weekend that:
"There is no truth in suggestions that the security and intelligence services operate without control or oversight. There is no truth in the more serious suggestion that it is our policy to collude in, solicit, or directly participate in abuses of prisoners. Nor is it true that alleged wrongdoing is covered up."But there is an assumption here that concerns about information obtained under duress refer only to the excesses of states alleged to practice outright torture. How about, for instance, the information obtained from detainees in US or British custody? What currency does that have on the international intelligence market?

I'll give you an example. What about information obtained about Morocco from an al-Qaeda suspect held in coalition custody? What if that information were passed from the US via the UK intelligence services to their north African counterparts? Is that legitimate? This, after all, would be the active transmission of intelligence rather than its passive reception.

I will never forget a meeting I had with two senior Moroccan security officials at the Rabat villa of the Interior Minister in June 2002 following an alleged plot to blow up British shipping in Gibraltar. Several Moroccan-based Saudis had been arrested in a series of dramatic anti-terrorist raids. When I asked the Moroccans where they had received the tip-off from, the three Moroccans rocked with laughter. "From your people, of course," they said. "Haven't you heard of Guantanamo?"

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MPs and Whistleblowers

I'm delighted to see Tony Wright's Public Accounts Committee recognising what many of us knew all along: a "culture that encourages proper whistleblowing... is the best safeguard against leaking". The BBC has an outline of the findings here.

The challenge is shifting that culture. Unfortunately, Britain still has an instinct for secrecy. The  introduction of whistleblower legislation and the Freedom of Information Act have made surprisingly little difference to this deeply ingrained taste for keeping the public in the dark. I sincerely hope that the PAC's proposal that civil servants are given a route of disclosure through parliament will make a difference. But I have my doubts.

The two major cases in which I have been directly implicated as a journalist (Katharine Gun and Derek Pasquill) raised deeply important public interest issues. Both individuals appeared before Tony Wright's committee. In each case, it is difficult to see how they could have raised their concerns through the usual whistleblowing procedures. Gun, a translator at GCHQ, had received a memo from the US National Security Agency requesting British help in spying on the United Nations Security Council in the run-up to the war in Iraq. As her entire organisation was implicated in this decision, to whom would she have communicated her concerns. Her point was that everyone in GCHQ should have been shocked by the NSA proposal to spy on the UN. Everyone should have blown the whistle, but only she did. Her very reaction  to the memo was an implicit indictment of her colleagues' failure to act.

In Derek Pasquill's case, again his concerns were with the very culture of the organisation employiong him., in this case the Foriegn Office. He was shocked that his colleagues were pursuing a policy of appeasement of radical Islam. The documents he leaked demonstarted that the UK government planned to open up back channels to the Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and revealed a preparedness to allow extremist Islamist idelogues into Britain to avoid potential social unrest if they were banned. Again, it is difficult to see how Pasquill could have been expected to go through the usual whistleblowing procedures when he was questioning a policy that came from the top.

In some cases, whistleblowers simply have to leak.

(As a result of his actions Derek Pasquill lost his job, a decision which he is presently appealing. This is a costly process. The organisations which benefitted from his disclosures, The Observer, The New Statesman and the think-tank Policy Exchange have so far failed to contribute to his fighting fund, but as I am sure they will do the right thing. Anyone else wishing to help Derek get back to work at the Foreign Office please contact me at martin.bright@btinternet.com).

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