IS WHAT WE’RE SEEING TERRORISM, OR TERRIBLE INTERFERENCE IN OUR DEMOCRACY?
I doubt if there’s ever been a general election that was as unnecessary (and so cynically called) as this one….and yet, at the same time, one that has turned out to be so important. Ostensibly launched to give the Prime Minister a strong negotiating hand with Brussels, it has become a vote about whether Britain has lost the plot when it comes to protecting the citizenry – be that via welfare, or control of our borders.
But as almost always happens in Western elections now, the choice available is so mediocre (and complicated by baggage) every citizen with a functioning brain is presented with an impossible dilemma.
On the one hand, vote Labour because the Leader is passionate, genuine, and up for reversing every nonsense that the Conservatives are up to. On the other hand, vote Conservative because otherwise the Brexit negotiation with the EU will probably not give us control of our borders. Er, yes. There is that.
On the one hand, vote Conservative because, despite all his bonhommie and rhetoric, Corbyn is an unreconstructed IS leftie surrounded by fluffy incompetents. On the other hand, vote Labour because if we don’t get the Tories out this time, the road to a full-on corporate State will be wide open. Well quite. That’s another way of looking at it.
Vote Tory because times are tight and they’ll be better at running the economy. Or vote Labour because with near-zero bond rates, we might as well borrow to invest in the infrastructure while we can. Vote Tory because Corbyn will be soft on human rights lawyers fighting to stop bombers being deported. Vote Labour because Theresa May cut police numbers when she was Home Secretary, and made a complete cod’s backside of monitoring Islamist nutters.
Above all, this election has turned into one about safety from foreign threats, be they from Brussels fascism or Islamic Nazism. And if this election has reiterated one thing above all, it is that we have first class emergency services underappreciated by politicians….and fourth-rate security services overrated by those same politicians.
But who exactly are the security services working for?
Like the City and its bankers, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are above the law. In theory they are answerable to Westminster (and dependent upon the legislature for their budgets) but the theory is really a chimera. At least half the time, MPs themselves are under surveillance, and should any legislator turn sniffy about bankrolling the spooks’ latest jaunt, it is an easy job to blackmail them. When GCHQ’s massively upweighted snooping capability was floated in 2008, Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told Commons MPs that it was a “two billion Pound test operation”. In fact, it was a £13.2 billion national project for which all the monies had been approved, although oddly enough no MP anywhere seemed to recall approving it. It had, however, been made clear to Smith that she had no option but to lie to the House.
Some readers may recall that, the night of the Manchester atrocity, I had an odd run-in with a troll swarm determined to tell me the shot I’d published was a fake. This was untrue, and the lead troll – a hack working for Trump’s son in law in the US – scurried off like a jack-rabbit once I asked him to explain what his game had been in calling the photo “just a police exercise carried out two years ago”.
I was further concerned by the odd unwillingness of the Manchester Police to confirm an attack for over two hours. Forty-eight hours later, the Manchester Evening News ran a piece interviewing fire brigade paramedics who had been refused entry to the scene, without reason. Slimeball Mayor Burnham has announced “there will be an inquiry” as to why this was: the holding of breath on that one is not recommended. What has since been confirmed to me is that Burnham personally approved the decision.
Since then, Jon Pilger and others have pieced together a picture (not denied by Downing Street) of how MI5 “recruited” the Abedni family some years ago as double agents working in Libya, but failed to spot that they’d been turned. May was Home Secretary at the time and must have known about the operation. Jeremy Corbyn, to his credit, has from the off stated that he will forthwith cancel any further arms or intelligence dealings with the Saudis. I wish him luck with that one.
This is the second British election in a row interrupted by “terrorist” acts, because the murder of Jo Cox MP by disgruntled Thomas Mair during the EU Referendum a year ago was also conveniently classed as a terrorist act by British security officers. The hysterical (and cynically political) reaction of Labour’s Remain team the following day was to lump blame for the act upon “racist” UKIP in general and Nigel Farage in particular. But the media orchestration of that ridiculous line always struck me as disturbing.
I have lingering doubts about the case. It’s clear that Mair did the deed, but very unclear that he was a terrorist. It was alleged that he had tried to see Cox at her surgery, and been rebuffed. He had flirted with groups like the English Alliance, but they are not classed as terrorists. He refused to plead, chose to defend himself, then offered no defence. Odd behaviour. He was sentenced to life imprisonment as in “whole life” – ie, he will die in prison….and remain silent.
True, he did shout, “Death to traitors, Britain First” as he killed Cox, but that makes the act political, not terrorist. Tommy Robinson of the British Freedom Party makes videos regularly urging people to “get these Muslim scumbags off our streets”, but he is not classed as a terrorist – even though, I assume, the far-Right views he holds do terrorise some Islamics.
The “terrorist” definition did, however, allow police, judiciary and security personnel to conduct the trial in a higher than normal degree of secrecy….while no defence and no defence witnesses ensured no awkward questions. Like, for instance, Mair being hacked off because he had been asked about leaving his council house, and Jo Cox being unwilling to help reassure him.
What I can tell you is this: after Cox’s murder, the Leave lead in the referendum shrank from a comfortable 54-46 to a very close 51-49. Her death came very close to keeping us in the European Union: and be in no doubt, the UK security services are massively in favour of Britain staying in the EUNATO club.
But there is another motive here too that had nothing to do with Brexit, and everything to do with Syria. For Ms Cox was strongly opposed to the bombing of Syria, and close to several organisations in the country who questioned the demonisation of Bashar Assad, the Alawhite leader and President. Further, she was already building a reputation for banging the drum on parliamentary committees about a more ethical approach to trade, with specific reference to middle east arms sales.
The late Robin Cook held similar views. Bush’s State department swiftly decided he was unsound. His death remains suspicious. So too does the “suicide” of senior civil servant David Kelly in relation to WOMD in Iraq – a fiction he publicly (and correctly) denounced as “rubbish”.
The point I am making here is a very simple one: there are security forces in our country way beyond the control of the political class. They are allied with geopolitical interests that are not always in Britain’s best interests. They slavishly support US neoconservative foreign policy, dabble in EU expansionism, prattle mantras about Assad and Putin that are palpable nonsense, and seem more interested in “running” Islamists than keeping them at bay or kicking them out.
They do not seem to have any trouble getting their narratives published in national media. And via GCHQ, they have cemented a diabolical relationship with all the main ISPs.
While jolly gung-ho, they are discovered time and time again to be useless at pulling off either deception tactics or the prevention of terrorism. Either that, or their game-plan is to create fear as a means of maintaining what the creature Macron has already called “a war against terrorism that will continue for decades to come”.
It might be late for me to be pointing this out, but as it reaches the closing stages, what started out life as the Brexit election is looking more and more like a trial of strength between the rights of the citizen, and the devious jackboot of the State.
The Slog 