Say it ain’t so, Joe
Joe Haines’ 2003 Glimmers of Twilight (London: Politicos, 2003) got a fair bit of attention when it appeared, most of the comments noting either former Harold Wilson press officer Haines’ allegation that Marcia Falkender claimed to have had an affair with Wilson in the 1950s, or the claim (supported by Bernard Donoughue in his Downing Street Diary) that Wilson’s doctor, Joseph Stone, thought that Falkender’s impact on Wilson was so bad and so serious that he offered to kill her. But none of the reviewers that I can find referred to the section in which Haines says on page 140 that a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee told him that ‘he and the FCO believed she [Marcia] was an Israeli spy, but didn’t, or couldn’t, offer any evidence.’
Haines speculates that perhaps this was the source of the money which kept Lady Falkender in the style (several houses and servants) to which she had become accustomed during the 1970s.
….this is now
Robert Moss, one of the creators of the Thatcher-led revolution of the 1980s, ally of Brian Crozier, propagandist on behalf of Pinochet’s Chile, international hunter of subversion, and author of The Death of Democracy and The Spike, spreading disinformation about the British and American Left, is now a leading figure in the American world of dreams, dream interpretation, dream therapy, shamen etc.
Check out </www.mossdreams.com/> or the many clips of Moss qua dream expert on <youtube.com> and wonder anew at the strangeness of the world.
PPPiffle
In a piece in The Evening Standard of 13 March Chris Blackhurst reminded Londoners that the Metronet PPP deal, which was supposed to rebuild part of the London Underground, and has now collapsed into administration leaving the taxpayer holding a bill of £2 billion? £4 billion? (estimates vary), cost the British state (i.e. the taxpayers) £500 million in lawyers’ and consultants’ fees. £500 million and we end up with a contact which lets the private companies walk away? In America this is known as ‘tax farming’.
Spookaroonie
In a mailing from intelforum.org, the following inquiry was posted in March by Jean Maria Arrigo:
‘Inquiry: Covert weapons experiments in post-war South America I would like to speak privately with anyone else who has direct or indirect knowledge of covert weapons experiments in post-war South America. These experiments may involve radiation, psychoactive drugs, psychic training, interrogation methods, or nonlethal weapons. Subjects may include indigenous peoples, street children, and peasants.
As a social psychologist with experience in operations, I seek to support moral voices among intelligence professionals, without compromise of their patriotism. I have established an Intelligence Ethics Collection at Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, with oral histories and other materials, some restricted for decades.’
Experiments on ‘indigenous peoples, street children, and peasants’? And this from a social psychologist ‘with experience in operations’, looking for dirt on behalf of ‘moral voices among intelligence professionals’?
Something is afoot here.
Messin’ with the moneylenders
More than three months ago (as you read this in June, or later) the Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer resigned after being revealed as the user of expensive prostitutes. Spitzer had been leading the civil authorities’ attack on the US banking system for the subprime events, what the Americans call ‘predatory lending’. His downfall and that role, of course, are just one of those coincidences. On February 14, the day after he was arrested, The Washington Post published an article by Spitzer titled, ‘Predatory Lenders’ Partners in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers.’
Spitzer wrote:
‘In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC [Office of the Controller of the Currency] invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act pre-empting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks.’(1)
Greg Palast noted that Spitzer was arrested on the same day that the Federal Reserve bailed out part of the Carlyle Group, Carlyle Capital, with a loan of $200 billion. Palast asks:
‘Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Naw, that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” – made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.’(2)
The initial law enforcement interest in Spitzer, or the formal pretext perhaps, was a tip to the FBI from what the Americans call a Republican ‘political operative’, Roger Stone.(3) The system then put Spitzer under surveillance worthy of a major terrorist threat and duly caught him with his pants down.
Kow-towing to the moneylenders
Every once in a while Polly Toynbee (apparently Britain’s most influential columnist) hits a bullseye. She did in her column in The Guardian on 11 March when she wrote: ‘History will wonder at Labour’s ……..fixation on finance, which accounts for only 7.9% of GDP.’ The context: 7.9% of GDP is slightly more than tourism and about half of manufacturing.
Here’s Brown in 2004, giving the annual address as the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the City.
‘Let me thank you first for the scale of the contribution you make to the British economy – the £50 billion of income, 4 per cent of national output, and the 1 million jobs that arise. And let me thank you also for the resilience, the innovative flair and the courage to change with which you have responded to not just the world economic downturn but to the greatest economic challenge of our times – the challenge of global competition.’
All this praise for a sector which then (apparently) produced 4% of GDP? And is that ‘innovative flair’ all those dodgy financial instruments which are self-destructing at the moment? Has a politician ever been more spectacularly hoist on his own petard?
John Newsinger, a regular in these columns, has a very good essay on Brown in issue 30 of Variant, ‘Gordon Brown: from reformism to neo-liberalism’.(4) What Newsinger does not do – I presume because the information is simply not available; I certainly don’t have it – is explain why Brown shifted between 1988 and 1995 from being some kind of social democrat to being the neo-con, free marketeer we see today. We know some of Brown’s journey in that period – to Bilderberg with John Smith, tutorials on the magic of the market from academics at Harvard, courtesy of Ed Balls – but we do not seem have an account from Brown of why he made this journey. It may simply be that the Clinton Democrats persuaded him that there was no alternative if he wanted to get elected; but it would be interesting to know. For all that Brown has been in politics for over thirty years we still know very little about his beliefs (if he has any).
Friends in high places
The text of a very interesting complaint sent in December 2007 to Peter Ramsden, Secretary to the Committee on Standards in Public Life about the influence of the Israeli lobby in the UK, is on-line.(5) Most usefully, it includes details of the Conservative as well as Labour Friends of Israel.
The authors comment:
‘In the meantime your Committee is aware how the lobby group, Friends of Israel, has embedded itself in the British political establishment and at the very heart of government. Its stated purpose is to promote Israel’s interests in our Parliament and sway British policy. MPs are surely not at liberty to act in the interest of a foreign military power at the expense of our own national interests, or to let foreign influence cloud their judgement. Such conduct is at odds with the second of the Seven Principles of Public Life, namely Integrity – “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.” ’
Towards the end of the letter the authors note:
‘It is especially disconcerting to discover that at least two members of your Committee, which is pledged to uphold the Principles of Public Life, are Friends of Israel – namely Baroness Shephard, president of Conservative Friends of Israel and Alun Michael MP, a member of Labour Friends of Israel.’
Education, education, education
If you know any teachers, you know that the NuLab education-raising-standards story is a fraud, that there has not been the continuous ‘raising of standards’ claimed by the government. What there has been is a stream of stories reporting that standards have risen. This is not the same thing. It’s a kind of Stalinism: have you met you quota, comrade? And, of course, everyone had. In England – things are different in Scotland and Wales – most schools are meeting their quotas by faking their figures, assisted by the examination boards which are now competing to make exams easier to pass and fiddle. The politicians asked for improving figures, so the education system has delivered them.
This produces odd side effects. Take ‘secondary standstill’, which was ‘a problem’ for a while some years ago. As the primary schools fiddled their children’s attainment levels, they would arrive at secondary schools apparently at – say – level 5. According to government theories, they should then continue up the ‘spine’ of the national curriculum to the next levels. But this wasn’t happening. Children were not making the expected progress in their first two years in some secondary schools. In reality, they were merely catching up to the faked attainment levels they arrived with. But this couldn’t be faced. Hence the ‘problem’ of ‘standstill’.
And I wonder: do the politicians know this is happening? I skimmed through a library copy of the diaries of former Education Secretary David Blunkett and there is a moment when one of his sons passes a school exam, and Blunkett comments something like this: considering how little work my son had done, for a moment I wondered about the quality of the exam. (I have lost the note on this and cannot be bothered to reskim 600 pages for the exact words.) And he leaves it there. As far as I could see – and I was skimming this – he makes no further reference to this subversive thought. (But nor did he remove it from the text during its editing.)
In The Guardian that paper’s new education correspondent, Jenni Russell, commented that:
‘every education secretary and minister has been distinguished by an almost wilful determination to ignore the mass of research which does not suit their agenda.’(6)
Russell describes encounters with two recent education ministers in which, after Russell put the content of critical reports by the government’s own researchers to them, they replied, ‘Oh, my people tell me there’s nothing new in that’ and ‘My people say it’s rehashed.’
Shades of ‘Yes Minister’? Ministers as prisoners of their civil servants? Perhaps. But as politicians, what could these ministers do if they knew what was going on? They cannot announce that the previous decade of their government’s policies had been a fraud. In adversarial politics, policy changes are presented by opponents as weakness and failure; and if a political fraud has been concealed, the cover-up has to be maintained for as long as the party concerned remains in office. It doesn’t take big smarts for ministers to work out that it’s simply better not to know.
Down under
The New Zealand anti-US bases campaign and its spook-watching community, Murray Horton and his partners in thought crime, are now on-line at <www.converge.org.nz/abc/>. As I have commented before, it is interesting to see that the anti-American, anti-spook New Zealand Left is also running the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Who on the British Left would take part in a Campaign Against Foreign Control of Britain?
Notes
- <www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031208J.shtml>
- In an e-mailout from <gregpalast.com> on 14 March.
- <www.miamiherald.com/459/story/465701.html>
- <www.variant.randomstate.org/30texts/GB.html> Variant is distributed free in hard copy through arts outlets (galleries, arts centres etc.) and is available on-line at <www.variant.org.uk>
- <www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/12/20/p21963>
- ‘The NUT has cried wolf too often, but this time it’s right’, The Guardian 26 March 2008