Tolerating the Intolerable

The smirk on his face tells all one needs to know.  Abu Qatada, a notorious hate preacher and terrorist suspect, has been released on bail.  This follows a successful appeal against deportation to Jordan, where he stands accused of various terrorism offences. 

I’m sure you’ve heard the script before – he will not get a fair trial, say the liberal old judges sitting on the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, proving once again that an ass is far too intelligent an animal to be compared to the law.    It’s not justice denied, it’s not justice delayed; it’s justice mocked.  More than that: we as a nation are mocked, a refuge for every murderous fanatic who knows how to manipulate the system.

Apparently David Cameron, our benighted Prime Minister, shares the nation’s ‘frustration’ at this latest development.  Nick Clegg, his Deputy, says that the government is still “absolutely determined” to deport Qatada. 

Now, here’s a question for you: what does Cameron’s ‘frustration’ and Clegg’s ‘determination’ amount to?  Oh, I know, the answer is just too, too simple.  They amount to precisely nothing, because nothing is what we shall get.  Oh, sorry, that’s not true: we shall get years and years of Abu Qatada. 

I personally would send Qatada off on the next plane to Amman.  No, I don’t care about the asinine judges and I don’t care about the European Convention of Human Rights, adopted wholesale into our own legal system without consideration or reflection by Tony Blair and his toy town government.  I don’t care if the evidence to be used against Qatada in Jordon is based on confessions obtained by torture, the chief objection of the judges.  I don’t even care if he is tortured himself; I just want rid of him; I do not want this appalling man to breathe English air.  I really do not care if he breathes any air at all. 

This is too, too awful of me, don’t you agree?  Taking a more than usually pompous tone in the Telegraph yesterday, Dan Hodges writes that the calls for the immediate deportation of Qatada will rightly receive short shrift –“Once we start simply ignoring the laws of the land, Abu Qatada has won.  Nor do we want politicians muscling aside our independent judiciary.”

Frustrated Dave and Determined Nick most assuredly won’t do that, or anything else, for that matter.  Once the law of the land starts to offer shelter and protection to the enemies of the land then it is worse than useless.  Fine, I’m happy to let Qatada have the victory, just so long as he smirks about it in Jordan.  What I want is a politician less ‘frustrated’ and less ‘determined’; I want a politician with the character of Alexander, one who acts, not talks, one who has the courage to cut through the Gordian Knot and to hell with the consequences.

In essence what I want is to see the loathsome Abu Qatada smirk on the other side of his face.  As it is he is likely to spend years amongst us, all at huge public expense, smiling away at the stupidity of our judges, our law, our politicians and our country, a country that can tolerate the intolerable.  

The Lights of a Perverted Faith

Do you have a definition of abject cowardice?  I do, one that I recently acquired.  A coward is a man who walks on to a school bus, full of children, and shoots a fourteen-year-old girl twice at close range, in the leg and more critically in the head.  The girl in question was guilty of a dire crime: she believes that education is a fundamental right for all.  This was enough to mark her as a target for assassination by the Pakistani Taliban. 

I was a bit out of the loop so far as news was concerned when I was in Tunisia.  But the one item that gripped my attention in early October was a report I saw on the BBC World Service concerning the attempted murder of Malala Yousafazi by a Taliban hitman, principally because she was an active campaigner for schooling for girls which, by their perverted lights, was ‘un-Islamic.’ 

Malala – her name means ‘grief stricken’ – has been active in her cause since the age of eleven.  It was then she began to write a blog for BBC Urdu, detailing what life was like after the Taliban took control of her native Swat Valley in Pakistan.  Her principal fear was over the future of her education – “I was afraid of going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from schools.” 

The Taliban, it has to be said, was allowed to consolidate its position in Swat in an act of retreat and appeasement by the Pakistani government, which hoped thereby to stop the spread of the cancer.  For several months, before they were finally ousted by the army in the summer of 2009, these religious fanatics established their own republic of Islamic virtue, the stuff of nightmares by any reasonable standard.  Men were forced to grow beards and women to wear burqas.  Those who did not comply faced lashing or beheading.  The brutish regime also closed schools, the majority of them for girls. 

After the Taliban’s removal Malala appeared on national television to talk about girls’ education.  Her courage in speaking against the Taliban was enough for the Pakistani government to select her as a fitting recipient of the country’s first National Peace Award for Youth.  But it also singled her out in another way.  At the beginning of this year she was placed on a Taliban hit list. 

That would terrify anyone, particularly a teenager; it would certainly have terrified me.  But Malala would not be silenced by fear. “Sometimes I imagine I’m going along and the Taliban stop me”, she said on television, “I take my sandal and hit them in the face and say, ‘What you are doing is wrong.  Education is our right, don’t take it away from us.’  There is this quality in me – I’m ready for all situations.  So even if (God let this not happen) they kill me, I’ll first say to them, ‘What you are doing is wrong.’”

Her shooting caused widespread outrage, in Pakistan and across much of the world.  How could it not?  How could it not given the callousness of the action, given her youth and given the cause for which she was prepared to risk her life?  Even countries with the most dubious record on human rights recognise the importance of universal education.  I’m almost tempted to say that girls’ schooling is no more of a ‘right’ than breathing; it’s a reflex. 

It’s impossible to breath under the Taliban.  These disciples of Iblis have blown up Sufi shrines, worshipers at mosques, and men and women in markets.  Bombs have been planted to ensure maximum loss of life.  Then there is murder incorporated, the assassination of specific individuals.  Public officials and journalists have been targeted but so, too, have religious scholars belonging to Muslim sects the movement has condemned as heretical. 

Malala was singled out because her campaign for educational rights was an ‘obscenity’, so said Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Taliban spokesman.  Greater poverty of spirit, greater ignorance, I find almost impossible to imagine.  These are people who kill in the name of God knowing nothing of God.  Is there any greater heresy, I have to ask?  There is obscenity alright, the obscenity of the Ehsanullah Ehsan and his debased kind. 

Of all the dark forces in the world the Taliban is among the darkest, deep in evil and ignorance.  To paraphrase some words of Sir Winston Churchill’s, if the movement succeeds all that we have known and cared for will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted faith.

The Monster in our Midst

We all have our favourite monsters from childhood.  One of mine was Captain Hook from J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan.  It was a tingly delight to see him brought to life by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Hook.  My, look, see that big iron hook in place of his missing hand; that was the stuff of nightmares.  Wake up!  Monsters don’t exist; they are all in the imagination.

Oh, no, they are not, I retort in my best pantomime style.  Childhood fears give way to adult realities.  Monsters do exist.  They are here, living among us.  There are few more monstrous than Abu Hamza al-Masri.  Like the fictitious Hook, Hamza has a hook.  But the Captain, for all his wickedness, has a certain charm; Hamza has none.  He is nothing but a nightmare, unrelieved in any way.

He is in our midst at the moment.  He has been for years, presently in prison, fighting deportation to the United States on terrorism charges.  He only has one hand and one eye, though where the missing appendages went is a matter of some dispute.  He says that they were lost in Afghanistan, the result of an encounter with a landmine.  Others say that the injuries were sustained while he was practicing bomb making. 

A supporter of Osama bin-Laden, Hamza was formally an imam at the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, which under his care became a setting for bile and hate, the message of a lesser God.  It was there on the first anniversary of 9/11 that he co-organised a conference praising the hijackers.  It was from there that he called for the creation of a caliphate and the destruction of democracy.  He was just another vampire, prepared to suck the life from the very system that guaranteed his freedom and his right to speak. 

But there are limits to tolerance.  In 2004 he was arrested for various offences under the Terrorism Act.  He was eventually found guilty of soliciting the murder of non-Muslims and incitement to racial hatred.  In sentencing him to seven years imprisonment, Mister Justice Hughes said that he had helped to “create an atmosphere in which to kill has become regarded by some as not only a legitimate course but a moral and religious duty in pursuit of perceived justice.”  

The judge went on to say;

No one can say what damage your words may have caused.  No one can say how often or widely your preaching was repeated. You are entitled to your views and in this country you are entitled to express them — up to the point where you incite murder or incite racial hatred.  You commended suicide bombing, you encouraged them to kill in the cause you set out for them. 

For years Hamza represented a clear and present danger, effectively ignored by successive governments, more attuned to ‘human rights’ than to human safety, the safety of the people of this country.  No action was taken despite mounting evidence of his involvement in international terrorism. 

We want rid of him.  The sooner he goes the better.  The sooner he is extradited to the United States, where he is wanted on various terrorist offences, the better.  Nothing could be simpler. 

Alas, when it comes to European law, ‘simple’ is a word that should never be used.  We in England come under the purview of the European Court of Human Rights, which really should be called the Terrorist Court of Last Resort.  People like Hamza know how to play the system.  He and his lawyers – it’s a really big earner - have been playing it for years, launching appeal after appeal with Strasbourg. 

In Hamlet the Prince muses on the law’s delays.  Shakespeare did not know the half of it.  The law’s delays?  Extradition has now been delayed for five years, the judges previously blocking his removal to the States just in case of… in case of what exactly?  Was the fear that he might not get a fair trial, that he might be tortured, that – God forbid – he might be executed?  No, none of this; the concern was that the poor creature might not live in the manner to which he had become accustomed; that the American prison system might just be a tad ‘too harsh.’ 

But at last came the dawn of reason.  In April of this year the judges ruled that he, along with other alleged terrorists, could be deported to the States because their facilities are better than our facilities.  Hamza – thank goodness- would have access to all of the things that make life worthwhile, like television, a telephone, and arts and crafts. 

That’s alright then; off you go Captain Hook.  So, why is he still with us?  Why?  Because – wait for it – another appeal, an appeal beyond the final appeal, has been lodged.  His lawyers have now applied for the case to be heard before the European Court’s Grand Chamber, twenty-four hours before the deadline for his removal had passed.  This consists of a panel of five judges, not due to assemble now for at least two months.  If they conclude that there is a case it may take another year before they reach a decision.  Yes, it is a joke, but I for one am not laughing.  

Hamza, of Egyptian birth, has cost this country millions, in welfare payments, in state housing, in health and prison bills, in trials and in appeals.  Up until April the legal bill alone amounted to £1.5million, that’s about $2.4million.  There are other costs, too, that he has brought to us, costs associated with his wretched family. 

The hook-handed, one-eyed imam was in the habit of preaching against the moral laxity and the ‘decadence’ of the West.  He would know all about moral laxity and decadence, not from looking at Western society.  No, it comes a lot closer to home; it comes to his home.  In 2009 three of his sons were imprisoned for fraud involving stolen cars.  The following year another son was jailed for violent disorder and yet another for armed robbery.  Now, Imran Mostafa, (yes, yes, still another son; will the line go on to the crack of doom?), keeping the family tradition, has been convicted for his part in an armed raid on a jewellery store. 

Amongst other things Hamza wanted the introduction of Sharia law in this country, with the strictest of interpretations, I imagine.  One handed bandits might then also have become a tradition in his family, like father, like sons.  But we, in our decadence, do not descend to barbarism.  We just allow barbarians to live among us. 

Don't Cry For Me Ecuador

But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.'
'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'

We all went a bit mad here last week. Suffering from post-Olympics depression, we had to have a new show, and we did. It’s called Julian of Leaks, or Don’t Cry for Me Ecuador. It features in a starring role Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, a man who makes Narcissus look like a rather retiring and positively self-effacing sort of chap.

Anyway, there he was, Mister WikiLeaks, addressing a rag-tag army, Evita-style, from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London’s Knightsbridge district, where he has been holed up for the past two month, poor man. Well, anyone forced to throw themselves on Ecuadorian hospitality surely deserves to be pitied.

He was ‘forced’ to take ‘political asylum’ there because of a ‘witch hunt’ being carried out against him; because he fears that some massive international conspiracy is at work, set to spirit him away to the United States.

There is only one thing wrong with this scenario: Washington has not asked for his extradition. Sweden has, something he neglected to mention to the swooning multitudes across the street. He is wanted not because he is “making a stand for justice”, as he put it, but to answer charges of rape and sexual assault. He spent a good bit of the past two years fighting extradition in the British courts. It was only when his case failed that he jumped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Why Ecuador? I really don’t know. I suppose the reason might be that this banana republic – are there bananas? – is a bastion of truth, justice, human rights and panama hats. Or it might be that Rafael Correa, its leftist president, is almost as childish a narcissist as Assange himself, a little man who wants to cut a figure on a bigger stage, preaching from the balcony of his ridiculous little fiefdom.

I have a question for you. When is rape not rape? Representative Todd Akin knows. He knows all about legitimate and illegitimate rape. Yes, shocking, shocking for all shades of progressive opinion, for whom rape is rape is rape, for whom no means no means no. Unless, of course, the alleged rapist happens to be a hero of the nursery left, as Rod Liddle wrote in a Spectator blog; unless the alleged rapist happens to be Saint Julian of Leaks.

George Galloway is Britain’s leading left-wing ayatollah, a political crazy man by most normal standards. As the leader of Respect, a party without respect, he leapt to the defence of the Divine Julian. It wasn’t rape at all, he said. He simply had sex with a woman while she was asleep, not bothering to bother with a condom. It was merely a case of “bad sexual etiquette.” In other words, there is no need to ask before an insertion. Respect indeed. All I can say is that any woman who might care to spend the night as a guest in Chez Galloway best keep awake, just to avoid the risk of ‘bad sexual etiquette.’

Galloway has since tweeted that “it’s about WikiLeaks, stupid.” Stupid I may be, but so far as I can see it’s nothing of the kind. It’s about a man full of self-serving and abstract notions of truth and justice while believing himself to be above all such petty considerations as law and due legal process.

Actually, it seems obvious that Assange, for all his protestations, is more afraid of Swedish than American retribution. Oh, but you see, it’s easy to beguile the stupid crowd with talk of injustice and witch hunts, with nebulous conspiracies of all sorts, though there are perfectly sound reasons why he should also face charges in the United States, theft being high among them.

America is an easy target. It would not do at all to talk of the “dark forces” at work in Sweden, the “Saudi Arabia of feminism”, a “nest of revolutionary feminism”, pronouncements the leaky one has made in the past. Sweden, you see, is the sort of place that clearly has rather old fashioned notions of what constitutes good sexual etiquette.

Assange is fleeing from Swedish justice. Quite right, too. Sweden is notorious for its lack of democratic accountability, its biased system of law and its atrocious abuse of human rights. Then there is Correa’s Ecuador, the victim of another campaign of spite and misinformation. It’s simply not true that the country has no culture of human rights and freedom, not true that dissidents are jailed on trumped up charges, not true that journalists are arrested and TV stations shut down for daring to criticise El Presidente. Assange really would be at home there.

The show goes on, unfortunately, one of the more deadening West End productions. Personally I rather hope that the police spirit the star away while he is still asleep, sending him on his way to Sweden. After all, it’s not really extradition if he’s sleeping, merely a case of bad political etiquette.

Holy Willie's Prayer

MacKaskill, the Law's Ass

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man ever convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, one of the worst acts of mass murder in British history, died earlier this month at his home in Tripoli.  He died a free man.  He died three years after Kenny MacAskill, the wholly ridiculous Scottish Justice Secretary, announced to the world that he was to be released on 'compassionate' grounds, having only three months to live.

It was a decision taken, I understand, on the 'best medical advice' available at the time.  This goes to prove one thing: the Libyan medical service is clearly ten times better than that of Scotland, a point made by Douglas Murray in the latest issue of magazine Prospect.  So, if you are unfortunate enough to take ill on your travels just hope that you end up in North Africa rather than North Britain!

Who could possibly forget MacAskill's mawkish and lachrymose words when he announced his intention to release Megrahi? Apparently he does not believe in God but that did nothing to stop him descending into a symphony of metaphysical hogwash;

Mr Al Megrahi now faces a sentence imposed by a higher power. It is one that no court, in any jurisdiction, in any land, could revoke or overrule. It is terminal, final and irrevocable. He is going to die. 

Yes, said God, you are all going to die, but I’ll show you Mr MacAskill – the end is not yet!  It was three years of embarrassment for Alex Salmond's Scottish National Party administration until Megrahi finally did the decent thing and shuffled off this mortal coil.  There is a legacy here that has made the Scots’ legal system look more than usually ridiculous, though the SNP has suffered no adverse electoral consequences.  

MacAskill and Salmond, after the decision was taken to release a man responsible for the deaths of no fewer than 270 people, the majority of them American, went on to lecture the world on humanity and compassion, seemingly the 'defining characteristic' of the Scottish people.  Personally I can only take cant in very small doses, though the Scots seem to swallow it in abundance, along with whisky.  

There is something else.  The release was granted on condition that al-Megrahi drop a pending appeal, though why the two should have been married, knowing nothing of Scots law, I don’t quite understand.  Is it perhaps that there was a greater danger here, that the thinness of the evidence on which Megrahi was convicted would have held up the Scottish system of justice to even greater ridicule? 

I think it will take years for all the issues here to come to light, indeed if they ever do. They may very well be submerged forever in a newly independent Scotland, secure in its self-righteous and hypocritical 'humanity.' When the news of Megrahi's death was released Salmond said that the first thing we should remember is the victims of Lockerbie. The victims here include the American families who lost their relatives, portrayed at the time when Scotland was wallowing in its unique sense of ‘humanity’ as unreflective and vengeful.  Yes, vengeful, simply because they wanted justice; they spoke for the dead when nobody else would, certainly not those hypocritical humanists MacAskill and Salmond.

I know Americans are found of Scotland; I know many Americans, including some close personal friends of mine, are of Scots-Irish ancestry, but this should not blind people to the fact that Lockerbie victims were victims twice - first of Megrahi and the Libyan security service, and second of the government of Alex Salmond.  Now he remembers the dead whereas previously he has used them for petty nationalist ends.  

Like Douglas Murray, I sincerely hope that Americans will not forget this.  If you want an insight into the conceited, self-regard of people like MacAskill and Salmond and their ‘unique values’ I would suggest that you could do no better than turn to the poetry of Robert Burns.  I'm thinking specifically of a few lines from Holy Willie's Prayer;

Lord, bless Your chosen in this place,
For here You have a chosen race!
But God confound their stubborn face
And blast their name,
Who bring Your elders to disgrace
And open shame!

Life on Airstrip One

Democracy and civil liberty are constructs built on one essential foundation – a society that is culturally homogenous. That is to say, there has to be a set of core civic values, things that we can share in our individuality, things that define who we are as a people and as a nation. A respect for the rights and privacy of the citizen come high here.

Alas, such respect is being challenged by the very people we elect to uphold it, demonstrated by the recent proposal to monitor the emails and phone calls of all private citizens, something I touched on in Big Brother might just watch you. We have a government of appeasers, an attitude of mind born of fear - the fear of the minority; fear of what they might think; fear of what they might do. We have a government that would make criminals of us all rather than name the criminals.

The sad truth is our social fabric has all but been destroyed by the lie of multiculturalism, a lie sold by successive administrations. Multiculturalism, of course, is the corollary of mass immigration. The Tiber may not have foamed – yet – with much blood, but Enoch Powell was right when he said that we must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to have permitted an influx of migrants on an unprecedented scale, a movement of peoples not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire.

My thoughts here have been spurred by a recent article in the Telegraph by Ed West (The case for liberalism in one country). In this he makes reference to John Stuart Mill’s Representative Government, a classic of nineteenth century liberalism. I read this some years ago, though I have forgotten most of its content. But there is one key passage that is now fixed forever in my mind;

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling…each fears more injury to itself from other nationalities, than from the common arbiter, the State. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than their jealousy of government.

Just imagine the likes of Nick Clegg or any of the sad ghosts of contemporary liberalism saying that! It’s something Powell might have made use of, though, alongside Virgil.

Diversity has become the shibboleth that has united the whole political class ever since the time Powell was sacked from the Tory shadow cabinet for showing more honesty than is wise in politics. Thereafter a numbing silence settled on the whole question of mass immigration, a consensus that was no consensus.

I wrote above that we have a government of appeasers, fearful of the minority. People were rightly shocked by the recent mass surveillance proposals but, as West emphasises, what was absent from the debate was the extent to which the snooper state is the direct consequence of mass immigration. The sad truth is that, with the rise of Islamic radicalism, the snooping is never going to go away.

Although the political class in general is responsible for the damage done to this country, the government of Tony Blair carries a particularly heavy burden of blame. I think it will take decades to assess the true legacy of the whole cancerous New Labour project, more treasonable than is possible to conceive, short of a Quisling occupation.

Unrestricted immigration went hand in hand with the war on terror and the appeasement of religious minorities. Il-conceived wars abroad, supposedly designed to fight terror, brought terror to our doorstep. We are far more at risk now from jihadists in London then we ever were in Kabul or Baghdad. The anti-terror legislation introduced by the last government did more damage to our national freedoms than the Taliban or al-Qaeda ever could. All this and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, a direct challenge to freedom of speech, legislation that has seen people prosecuted for expressing a point of view.

West makes one core observation;

The British end of the war on terror, and the appalling loss of British lives in Afghanistan, is a product of mass immigration, but such is the way that the sacred cow of diversity must be protected that people would rather accept any course than one that confronted this fact.

When wealthy, globe-trotting liberals espouse the cause of universalism they often describe it in terms of air travel and airports, a world of vibrant, diverse, cross-cultural pollination. Which is great, for the few wealthy enough to use business class. For the rest of us society has become exactly like an airport – endless security checks, CCTV, government snooping, armed police and all-powerful officials who will arrest you for an inappropriate remark. For our own safety, of course.

Yes, life in an airport, that just about sums up the truth of modern England. Perhaps that ancient name should go. Orwell was right; this really is Airstrip One.

McGuiness’ Albatross

In June of last year I wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph reader’s blog site, one headed Machine Gunn McGuiness – it’s time for some answers. It was written in the wake of the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972, when a number of people were shot dead by the British Army in Londonderry.

The Parachute Regiment was held to blame for that tragedy, but the responsibility was also thrown obliquely on Martin McGuiness, the public face of Sein Fein/IRA, a man for whom I have nothing but the deepest contempt. I concluded my piece with the following remarks;

There are, however, some more immediate questions to be answered by a man now in government in Northern Ireland; there are questions to be answered by Martin McGuiness, Deputy First Minister. The dead of Londonderry had to have their day and David Cameron was right to make the statement he did in Parliament. But that day has passed. Now I hope the Tory back-bench will ask some pointed questions when Saville is subject to more detailed scrutiny. Was it, perhaps, the custom, I have to ask, to walk around with sub-machine guns in Northern Ireland? Was McGuiness giving it some air or intending to practice for a knee capping or a dozen? It really is time for some toughness here, time to make Machine Gun McGuiness smirk on the other side of his face.

Not only is this man still smirking but he is attempting to smirk his way into the office of president of the Irish Republic in an election to be held towards the end of this month. But everywhere he goes he is followed by his own legacy, a legacy of IRA violence. This is a man who was imprisoned twice in the 1970s for membership of this terrorist organisation, the first time after being caught near a car containing 115kg of explosives and 5000 rounds of ammunition. And as the Saville Inquiry concluded, he was likely armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun on Bloody Sunday and probably used the weapon. He and his kind certainly contributed to the tensions which lead to the shootings.

He says he left the organistation in 1974, but as a recent Times report concluded, few believe this to be true. All the evidence suggests that he went on to become the IRA’s northern commander and the head of its army council. There are atrocities thereafter that he certainly knew of or approved, like the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing

Thankfully he is pursued by his murderous legacy even in the Republic, where people generally might be inclined to be more sympathetic. In Athlone he had an encounter with the son of an Irish soldier, who’s father was killed by the IRA in 1983, demanding to know who was responsible. Another uncomfortable encounter followed with the brother of an Irish policeman, killed in County Meath in 1984, who accused McGuiness of having his "family’s blood on his hands." The sister of Mary Travers, shot dead in Belfast in 1984, called his campaign "an insult to the victims of the IRA."

And so it is, to all the victims of the IRA, north and south of the border, north and south of the island’s religious and political divisions. He offers the usual weasel evasions, saying that he never killed anyone himself but refusing to say if he ordered others to kill. He says that he cannot remember the oath he took on joining the IRA. And if you believe that you will believe anything.

He is a liar, a coward and a killer, of that I have not the least doubt, one who hides behind the worst kind of hypocrisy and dissimulation. The past cannot be discarded, the past of a man like this, which he carries around his neck like a curse, the same curse as the Ancient Mariner.

Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung."

Introducing Doctor Death

Since Osama bin Laden has been dropped into history’s dustbin, we haven’t heard an awful lot about Ayman al-Zawahiri, the new head of al-Qaida, the new Doctor Death. I’m not being wholly ironic in according him that title – he really is a doctor, a graduate of the medical school at Cairo University.

There is not really that much joy in his life; no, that's not right - there is absolutely no joy at all. It was his sixtieth birthday at the weekend though it's highly unlikely there was much in the way of celebration, because birthdays are considered to be a 'secular distraction'. This wouldn't have been any hardship at all for a man who, when he got married, demanded that there be nothing in the way of singing or dancing at the ceremony.

As a student of seventeenth century politics people like al-Zawahiri remind me in some respects of the Puritans, especially in the bleak mid-winter of English history, when they ruled the country as a kind of Islamic republic, no singing, no dancing, no theatre, no Christmas, no 'secular distractions' of any kind, just a heavy and deadening religiosity. Actually, on reflection, some of the puritans were not that bad, certainly not as bad as Sheik al-Qaeda. Oliver Cromwell, to be fair, was rather a jolly sort in contrast.

Does al-Zawahiri have any hobbies, I wonder, things he does when not planning mega-death? Oh, probably not; planning mass murder and martyrdom is such a full-time occupation. Apparently even bin-Laden liked time out now and again, watching off-duty militants play football when the two were together in the Sudan in the early 190s.

Not al-Zawahiri. He, as the Observer reported, preferred to organise a spot of murder and mayhem in his native Egypt, arranging for a series of bombings in the country. As you can imagine this was not at all popular with the recipients, especially after a schoolgirl was killed, causing a major reaction against the militants. Of the murder of this unfortunate girl he later wrote "The unintended death of this innocent child pained us all, but...we had to fight the government, which was against God's Sharia law and supported God's enemies."

You see, when you have God on your side there is no crime that cannot be excused, no murder that can't be justified, even the murder of the innocent. But we are not innocent, you and I and almost everybody else who stumbles this way; no, we are guilty; we are targets, carefully selected by Doctor Death, to be murdered at his convenience. Amongst the senior leadership of al-Qaeda he was a key player in urging the attack on America which lead to the tragedy of 9/11 and the death of some 3000 people; not innocent, not guilty, nothing; just dead.

And so it went on, his fingerprints on one outrage after another. His wretched shadow was to fall across the people of Iraq, where that psychopath Abu Musab al-Zarqwahi carried out a campaign of such vicious intensity that it turned the country en masse against al-Qaida in much the same way as the people of Egypt were alienated by al-Zawahiri's earlier campaign. We sometimes forget that it is Muslims, not infidels, who have been the principle victims of these nauseating fanatics, who kill in the name of God, a greater form of blasphemy I find Impossible to imagine.

Bin Laden has gone but the cancer is now in the shape of the Doctor Death, lurking like his master somewhere in Pakistan. The danger is ever present but there is some comfort in the news that al-Qaeda appears to be fragmenting, with serious infighting at the top. Doctor Death, not being the man his master was, not having an ounce of personal charm or charisma, is unlikely to be able to hold things together.

It's best to be cautious, though. This man, as we know from the attacks on the Twin Towers and other American targets, likes a big show, and a big show is likely to be the only thing to restore the fortunes of an organisation badly shaken by the death of its former leader. Let’s hope that a drone, or the Navy Seals, find him first. That's the one thing I wish in all sincerity for Doctor Death - death.

Feeding the beast

Bin Laden is dead. The news is now round the world. I woke up to it early this morning, discovering it not through the usual media but from an alert in my inbox from Bob Mack, a friend and fellow blogger. I couldn't quite believe it - perhaps it was a mistake, maybe the facts are not conclusive. I immediately messaged Bob;

"Bob, I’m just out of bed, just checking my mail and I saw this. I heard it first from you! Is it really, really true? There’s no doubt, is there? Do they have a body? I’m so glad if it’s true. I was tempted to refer to this creature as a rat on two legs, though, on reflection, I thought that unfair to rats."

Yes, he confirmed, it's true, quoting a news report from the Army Times. I gather it was a consequence of an operation by the elite Navy Seals unit, with groundwork in preparation for months. These brave American servicemen are to be congratulated, should be congratulated by decent people across the world, people for whom Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are an abomination, the work of the Devil, the agents of Iblis. Nothing can ever make up for the attacks on New York and London; nothing can ever bring the many victims of these vile people back to life, but at least some justice has at last been achieved, and some justice is better than no justice. That Bin Laden is off the face of this planet has to be a cause of immediate celebration.

I'm happy; I'm sure just about everyone else who reads this will be happy also, but I think this should be tempered with caution. We should always be aware of the nature of terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda; that they are amorphous, formless, almost like gas; they can operate through multiple locations without any central control. From watching past news reports, from watching Bin Laden's periodic broadcasts from some isolated and indeterminate location, it's fairly obvious that he had lost much of the importance that he once had, that he had become little more, if you like, than an avatar. A head has been cut of the hydra but the beast is not dead; other heads will appear from other places.

I know, it's a sobering thought, not one that perhaps we really want to hear at this point in time, but all the more necessary simply to ensure that we retain a proper sense of balance. Bin Laden is dead; terror is not, we all know that. Al-Qaeda has received an important blow to its morale, but it will soon recover, in possible revenge attacks. This is not the end, it's not the beginning of the end, and, I have to say, it is not even the end of the beginning. I also have to say that it was a gross error to get rid of his body, get rid of the evidence, so quickly. This is the stuff from which myths, and conspiracy theories, are hatched.

There are also serious questions that have to be addressed about the deeply misconceived 'war on terror', questions about our involvement in wars in the Muslim world, places where we have no business, where we achieve nothing; places like Afghanistan and now Libya, where the war on terror has degenerated into terror. The deeper our engagement, the more collateral damage, the greater the hydra becomes, sucking, like a vampire, on resentment, anger and hate. This is something that is not easily defeated, not even by the most careful intelligence and the bravest of soldiers. Yes, Al-Qaeda is a vile organisation but by one ill-conceived action after another we have been feeding the beast, not killing it.

Ass...ange

We face a rising tide of stupidity and subversion; for the two invariably flow together. The Times reported on Saturday that anarchist groups - the people who dominated and guided the recent student demonstrations in England - are planning further exhibitions, including one against the royal wedding. It must not be assumed for a moment that these people are any more significant than they were in the past, but the Internet, the medium of instant communication, the arena of flash mobs, has given them a power that they had never hitherto possessed: the power of concentration and rapid mobilisation.

So, there they are: an army of weirdoes, geeks and hackers, people who smash a Macdonald’s window at one moment and attempt to sabotage the web sites of banks and credit card companies at the next. These organisations have become targets because the digital anarchists, the Jacobins of the net, do not like their boycott of Wikileaks. Hardly surprising this: delinquents are bound to support one of the most delinquent enterprises spawned by the net. They are bound to support that Julian Assange fellow, that alleged sexual predator, in his monumental irresponsibility. He is just like them; they are just like him.

I suppose there is a counter-position here. This one-sided betrayal of the process of diplomacy, which, of it’s very nature, has to be conducted in confidence, in the frankness induced by confidence, has hugely increased my admiration for the United States of America and the way it caries out its business. The leaks have shown American diplomats to be statesmanlike and controlled, in contrast with the hysteria of some of those with whom they do business. It's such a disappointment to the Guardian-reading crowd.

Wikileaks is a joke, a pathetic anti-American conspiracy which turned out to be, well, pathetic, a purveyor of gossip and international small-talk. Assange is little better than a schoolboy saboteur, an ass with ass’s ears, for those with the wit to see the man in his Bottom-like form. But his anarchist, conspiracy monger and UFO-spotting admirers are blind, unable, or unwilling, to see that his revelations also carry dangers.

I think, on further reflection, that they may very well welcome these dangers, a chance for a spot of practical sabotage. His site has identified targets across the world considered vital to American security. A number of these are in my country, which means that the terrorist threat is all the greater, the threat to innocent people who happen to work in, for example, centres for the manufacture of smallpox vaccines.

I simply do not comprehend those who offer encouragement to this sort of thing, these kinds of leaks, one-sided and deeply undemocratic, by a secretive web organisation accountable to no one but itself, whose own activities are far from transparent, beyond the posturing of Assange, its laughable and self-promoting front man. It’s all part of the conspiracy that we face from the geeks of the world, who only need the internet to rampage behind Bottom.


My Oberon! what visions I have seen!
Methought I was enamoured of an ass.

London burning

London burns and so do your shabby dreams
behold you future executioners!

This, believe it or not, - and believe it you must - is a recent comment posted on an article I wrote earlier this year, welcoming the advent of David Cameron as Prime Minister (But to be young was very heaven). I dislike censorship and I will publish all reasonable comments, even when I deeply disagree with them, just so long as they are not rants or propaganda, and just so long as they are not naked personal attacks on me or another blogger.

I suppose this ungrammatical contribution comes under the heading of a rant, and therefore my decision not to publish could be justified in such terms. However, there is another reason here. Generally speaking I like to debate with all those who offer comments, where debate is necessary. How on earth is one to enter into any constructive exchange with an individual quite as stupid as this? It goes beyond stupidity, though: his words betray a seething resentment and a deep sense of personal inadequacy, a combination, I suppose, of orc and morlock, a subterranean kind of creature. I’m not going to mention who the blogger is but I have visited the site in question and the ungrammatical ignorance there reaches depths you might find difficult to imagine. No, you may not, because you are probably too well aware that standards of literacy in this country have been in decline for some time past.

But I am grateful to this oik, let me just call him Fire Bug, Bug for short, whom I take to be typical of the ‘students’ who attacked the car of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall recently, shouting ‘Tory Scum’ in the process. When it comes to scum the Bugs of this world have the most intimate kind of knowledge.

My ‘shabby dreams’, the dreams of a future executioner ( a role I might relish!), what are they, I wonder? Oh, yes, a world where low class types like Bug know their place, which in the great scheme of things is doubtless cleaning some public lavatory in Scunthorpe. We could, I suppose, bring back the workhouse, a brilliant Victorian innovation, a real alternative to university for Bug.

His words, posted after the student demonstration against the increase in tuition fees, indicate he was ‘out’ last Thursday, ensuring that London was burning, ensuring that the cenotaph was attacked, that police horses were attacked, a chance for a spot of mindless mayhem. Really, that’s what it’s all about, mindless mayhem, not fees, not higher education, just chaos for the sake of chaos, destruction for the sake of destruction.

One of Bug’s companions that day was a certain Charlie Gilmour, son of the Pink Floyd guitarist and, I’m ashamed to say, a history student at Girton College, Cambridge, who swung on the flag at the Cenotaph. Fees are not an issue for him because his father is rich enough (perhaps Girton’s admissions policy should come under closer scrutiny?) No, it was just an adrenalin rush, trouble for the sake of trouble. He’s since issued a grovelling (all the press reports emphasise that word) apology, saying he did not know what the Cenotaph was. This comes, remember, from a history student at the best university in England (perhaps the content of Girton’s courses should come under closer scrutiny?) Unfortunately he can’t be sent down, as he deserves to be sent down, because his flag swinging act took place outwith the university term. “We don’t need no education”, Gilmour senior and his band sang self-refutingly. Pass the message on to Gilmour junior: you should get no education.

I absolutely support the increase in fees, the only way to ensure that we retain a world-class tertiary education sector in these financially straightened times. The thing is, apart from desecrating the cenotaph and attacking the royal car, most of mob who poured on to the streets of London have not got the first clue what they are protesting about, including Cenotaph Gilmour.

I read a comment in the press from someone who picked up one of the protestors’ leaflets. Apparently it does not even mention the issues at stake, just a lot of wishy-washy nonsense about an attack on ‘working class kids’. It might be best if these ‘working class kids’ turned their thoughts to more realistic ends, rather than clogging up the higher education sector with low class courses in fourth rate ‘universities’.

The issue, if you are at all interested, is really quite simple, though clearly too complex for most of the revolting students. What exactly is it they want? Unfairness, that’s what, a transfer of tax revenues to subsidise them at the cost of the general community. The system we have at the moment is simply unsustainable. The last government with its usual hocus pocus politics expanded the number entering higher education without expanding resources. The gap between what students pay and what their teaching actually costs has grown at an alarming rate. Government can no longer make up the shortfall, so higher fees offer the best way of bridging the chasm. In other words, those who actually benefit from university education should be made to pay for this education – in common with a great many students across the planet – rather than the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, or those ‘working class kids’ who have no interest at all in university.

We really have lost our way when higher education is seen as a right, not a privilege best suited to the best qualified, a right for the semi-literate Bugs of this world. I’m going to let Somerset Maugham have the last word here;

I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious. They are scum.

Mobs and cops

As the carriage made its way along the highway the royal couple within were subject to repeated insults. Ugly faces pushed through the windows, spitting on the prince and tearing the dress of his wife. The mood within was one of fear, shock that there was so much violence and brutishness in the world, shown at its worst in the nation’s capital. Here the obscenities and the abuse issued freely. It was only with difficulty that the escort kept the foul mob at bay.

No, it’s not what you are thinking. This is not London and the people in question are not the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. They are Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette returning from Varennes in the summer of 1791, the furthest point they reached in trying to escape from the excesses of the French Revolution. But when I saw the look of fear on the Duchess’s face as the royal car was attacked last Thursday by those brutish ‘students’ it occurred to me that this must have been the same expression that appeared on the face of the divine Marie Antoinette all those years ago.



Who would have believed that our capital could have been desecrated in this fashion; who would have believed that a loathsome mob could have attacked the future King of England and his wife; who could believe that a British citizen could have swung on the flag on the cenotaph, the nation’s most sacred symbol, like an ape, or another urinate on the statue of Sir Winston Churchill, the nation’s greatest wartime leader? We must have gone back in time and imported the sans-culottes of 1791, stinking, animal-like, corrupting the air with their rotten halitosis. They’re still at work, this Varennes mob, on the Guardian comments website, posting remarks like “fuck Churchill” and describing the attack on Charles and Camilla as “hilarious.”

I have a busy life. I try to keep up with the news, though it’s not always possible. So, I have a question about quite an important item that I’ve clearly missed. Can anyone tell me, please, when the Metropolitan Police were replaced by the Keystone Cops? To lose control in one riot may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose control in both looks like carelessness. No, Lady Bracknell is far too mild: it looks like utter incompetence, like comic stupidity, if only the possible consequences were not so serious.

Sir Paul Stephenson, Keystone Cop-in-chief, sorry, make that Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, says that the protection officers, some of whom were armed, showed “enormous restraint and good judgement.” We now know that one of the beasts leaned through an open window and stabbed the sixty-three year old Duchess with a stick.

What if it had been a knife? How did these officers know that it was only a stick? What, exactly, are the circumstances in which they would draw arms if not this? Are they so afraid of the political fall-out that they are effectively numbed into inaction? Just imagine what would happen if an American President had been attacked in this fashion. The individual in question would have been shot dead even before he managed to poke his stick, of that I have not the least doubt. With a clot like Stephenson in charge of royal security, of the security of visiting heads of state, personal incompetence has turned into national embarrassment.

Every bullet which leaves the barrel of a police pistol now is my bullet. If one calls this murder, then I have murdered: I ordered all this. I back it up. I assume the responsibility, and I am not afraid to do so.

You may recognise this quote; if not these are the words of Herman Goering, a statement issued shortly after he became Prussian Minster of the Interior in 1933. I suppose the Stephenson version would be that every bullet that does not leave the barrel of a police pistol is a sign of his ‘remarkable restraint.’ I hope we are better prepared to deal with rabid mobs, ‘students’ or whoever they are, in the difficult times ahead. With a man like this in charge I’m not at all confident.

In Memory of Jean McConville

I’m generally quite a controlled person. I do get angry but I prefer not to let emotions get the better of my judgement. I prefer to look at things in a detached manner, especially items on the news which have little direct bearing on my life. But sometimes my guard slips. It did at the weekend after I read a story by Amanda Forman in The Observer. It concerns a nobody; it concerns a woman who was turned into a nobody: it concerns Jean McConville.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of her. I hadn’t until I opened the paper. She’s dead now; she’s been dead for years, her remains long incarcerated in a hidden grave. She was a victim, the victim of an IRA murder squad, who kidnapped her in front of seven of her children from their home in West Belfast in the winter of 1972. Their father was already dead and they were never to see their mother again. Sent to orphanages, they were told a malicious lie – that she had deserted them.

Jean McConville was a victim long before those IRA thugs took her. A Protestant by birth, she married one Arthur McConville, a Catholic, converting in the process. But this just made her a double outcast, rejected by the Unionist Community and suspected by the Nationalist. She and her husband both suffered repeated sectarian persecution. Forced to move from place to place, they finally ended up in the Falls Road. After her husband’s death from cancer in 1971, Jean’s position, already bad, became intolerable. When her neighbours reported that she had been seen aiding a wounded British soldier she was taken away by an armed gang, never to be seen alive again.

We now know that she was tortured prior to being murdered; that she was beaten with such force that her bones broke and her hands were mutilated. After she was shot in the back of the head, death in the well-practiced Moscow style, she was taken over the border and buried on Shelling Beach in County Louth. For the next thirty years, as Forman says, the IRA denied that they had anything to do with her disappearance.

The murder was only the beginning of the crimes against Jean McConville. It was almost as if she had never existed, that she did not matter, that her disappearance did not matter. The then Royal Ulster Constabulary did not even trouble themselves to record the complaint of her abduction. More than that, they refused to accept that she was even missing, insisting on the basis of an anonymous tip-off (no real need to guess from whom) that she had absconded with a British soldier.

That would have been that but for the fact that a silent witness turned up. In 2003 the earth gave up its secret when a storm washed away part of the Shelling Beach car park, finally exposing her body. The IRA now admitted responsibility for the crime, justifying the act on the basis that she had been an ‘informant.’

It was only now, after years of shocking negligence, that the authorities began to take the matter seriously. Robert Carswell, the Lord Chief Justice, ruled that, in the circumstances, the government should break its neither confirm or deny policy on such intelligence matters, to reveal if there had been any secret dealings with Jean McConville. There were none. In 2006 Baroness Nuala O’Loan, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, ruled that she had never been an agent at any time, that she was “an innocent woman who had been abducted and murdered.”

The police have apologised for their negligence. The IRA, an organisation I hold in the deepest contempt, has also offered a hypocritical, self-serving ‘apology’, saying that it “regrets the suffering” caused to Jean’s family. Remember, most of them were small children, including six year old twin brothers, when their mother was taken as they screamed and cried.

Jean McConville is just one among the legion of the lost, totally unimportant then and too insignificant now to derail the so-called peace process, which has seen terrorists enter government in Northern Ireland. But justice, unlike law, never sleeps; justice bleeds from open wounds. We now know who exactly was responsible for ordering Jean’s abduction and murder. He is Gerry Adams, president of Sein Fein, accused by former confederates, the same man who is about to enter the politics of the Republic, who is standing for the Dail for County Louth, the same place where Jean was hidden all those years ago. I fully share Foreman’s disquiet;

Ireland is a member of the International Criminal Court whose charter clearly states that the definition of a war crime includes the murder of civilians in “an armed conflict not of an international character”. Thus a man who is alleged to be a war criminal, who is alleged to have broken the law in one of the worst crimes in Irish and Northern Irish history, is poised to become a governor and make that country’s laws.

There are so many things done for the sake of expediency, but this can be pushed too far, even for peace. To reach any accommodation with a wretch such as Adams, to vote for a wretch such as Adams, to breath the same air as a wretch such as Adams would be too much for any normal human being, anyone who entertains even the most elementary concepts of moral rectitude and justice. Jean McConville, friendless and isolated, murdered for no good reasons, an uneducated woman without connections, a victim of the worst kind of prejudice, is his abiding legacy. Like Foreman I will not forget. This blog is dedicated to her memory.

Benedict Arnold in cyber space

I’m a snoop; I read other people’s letters; I even read letters intended for the sovereign in person, top secret, highly revealing documents that could cause tremendous discomfiture and embarrassment if published...or they could have caused these things if they had been published in the seventeenth century, the time when they were written!

Now there is WikiLeaks; now there is publication of confidential information online for all to see. And what do we have? In a lot of cases pretty much the small change of international diplomacy, the sort of things that people say in confidence and never expect to see repeated, at least not in their lifetimes. The action we see in history, the things that happen, really are the tip of an iceberg or, better said, they are the few seeds germinating from the thousands thrown.

It seems to me that a lot of the Wiki stuff is of such a nature, seeds that would never have germinated, lots of inconsequential gossip. I note the Iranians even believe that the whole thing is a fiction, designed to put additional pressure on them. Perhaps it is; perhaps it’s an indication of what might happen, a warning of how much ill-feeling there is against them across the region? I’m just anticipating the inevitable conspiracy theory!

The whole thing is an embarrassment for the State Department, a look at diplomacy in the raw; but is it anything more? Yes, it probably is; for it makes the confidence, frankness and the trust within which diplomacy must be conducted all the more difficult. I have no hesitation in saying that this is a form of sabotage, a threat not only to the interests of the United States but to its friends and allies also.

I think the hacker, Julian Assange, his collaborators and associates, are stupid, or malicious, or both; if they are Americans they are clearly traitors. I certainly hope that they are caught and pursued to the full extent of US law for theft and for espionage.

There are wider lessons here, though, in dealing with future attempts at cyber terrorism - I offer no apology for the use of that expression – which I hope are learned quickly. It’s really difficult to believe that there could have been a security leak on this magnitude, documents that should really have been left to future historians to interpret, the snoopers of a different age.

The tale of Peter the Painter

Jack the Ripper is one of the black legends of London’s East End. But let me bring another to your attention, one you may not have heard of. It's the story of a man simply known as Peter the Painter. Peter entered the stage of our history exactly one hundred years ago, and then exited it again, almost as completely and as mysteriously as Jack the Ripper.

Let me take you back to a different time, a different England, one so unconcerned by the prospects of terrorism that it was even possible to bring firearms and bomb-making equipment across the border without raising undue concern. It’s London in the early years of the twentieth century, a city full of exiles from the Russian Empire, coming in the wake of the abortive revolution of 1905. These exiles, Latvians and Lithuanians among them, were dedicated revolutionaries, many of them Bolsheviks, who took refuge among the Jewish community of Whitechapel.

Where there are Bolsheviks there are also Bolshevik methods, including the doctrine of ‘expropriation’, theft by all normal standards of crime. All is fair in the ends of revolution, all capitalists were fair game, even if the ‘capitalists’ in question were petty shopkeepers. And if anyone got in the way, even the horny handed sons of toil, then that was just too bad. After a gang of these desperados killed a fifteen year old boy and wounded fifteen other people in a botched robbery in 1909 they were lauded in the French left-wing press as “audacious comrades” under attack from “citizens, believers in the State and authority.”

A year later other ‘audacious comrades’ were at work, trying to break in to a run-down jeweller’s shop in the district of Houndsditch from an adjacent property. So loud was the noise that the neighbours called the police. They came, only to be greeted by gunfire, killing one officer outright and wounding a further four, two of them mortally. The gang in question, as Clive Bloom details in the latest issue of the BBC History Magazine (Terror on the Streets of London), were all members of ‘the Flame’, one of Lenin’s criminal front organisations. Its leader, according to legend, was Peter the Painter.

The murderers, who treated the English police as if they were the Okhrana, the notorious Tsarist secret police service, managed to escape, but in the subsequent manhunt they were discovered to be of Latvian origin. Eventually they were found, holed up at 100 Sydney Street, a three-floored tenement near a brewery. Peter the Painter was believed to be there. This time the police came armed. Thus began the Siege of Sydney Street.

The details given by Bloom in his account are really quite startling, almost amusingly so. Police incompetence is nothing new, but it’s the naïveté of the time that it’s most astonishing, a time of greater innocence, a time when criminals, even foreign criminals, were expected to understand the rules, the gamesmanship. Inspector Wensley, head of the Whitechapel force, began proceedings at Sydney Street by sending some officers to knock on the door, seemingly having learned nothing from the Houndsditch incident. When answer came there none they even threw pebbles at the window! These pebbles were greeted by gunfire, wounding one officer. Things now went from understatement to overkill.

Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, was asked to provide military support. He did, and he also provided himself, helpfully armed, to be greeted by onlookers with shouts of “Oo let ‘em in”, an expression of their anger over lax immigration policy. He was also unwise enough to allow himself to be caught on film, later the cause of condescending comment in the foreign press, including the Russian and German, who offered helpful hints on modern policing methods!

The siege lasted for more than five hours, coming to an end in a shoot-out, with the building on fire. In the ruins the bodies of two men were found – Fritz Svaars and Joseph Sokolow. There was no sign of Peter the Painter.

Peter, like Jack the Ripper, was never to be caught. For a long time his presence was so elusive that questions were raised over his very existence. The problem here is that Russian revolutionaries were in the habit of using a huge number of code names and aliases. Lenin and Stalin had dozens before alighting on their final forms. Some of the more obscure figures are therefore almost impossible to trace. But, in the end, Peter was traced, although it took almost a hundred years. Discovered, yes, but in such a way that the mystery deepens even further.

In 2009 British scholars working in the Latvian archives managed to piece together the story of one Peter Piatkow, who also went by the name of Janis Zhaklis, a house painter and dedicated Bolshevik. Even before coming to London he had been involved in robbings and shootings in his native Latvia, then a province of the Russian Empire. As with so many others in the shady revolutionary underground, it’s also possible that he was working as a double-agent for the Okhrana.

But that’s it; there is nothing more. After 1911 Peter the Painter vanishes from history. It still cannot be proved that he was head of the Sydney Street gang or not; it cannot be proved that he was even there. There is just one tiny and intriguing fact, that of an unnamed prisoner in Stalin’s gulags who, as late as the 1950s, told intimate and detailed tales of the activities of the Bolshevik underground in London. Was this Peter the Painter? Alas, we will never know. There are some mysteries that history never reveals.

Necessary evil

In the early months of the Second World War Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was arrested along with many others and forcibly interned under Defence Regulation 18B. These people, it is important to understand, had committed no crime; they had given no indication that they were even prepared to commit a crime. They were simply arrested and imprisoned on the off chance of treason, a clear breach of both habeas corpus and their youman rights more generally. Oh, but people did not talk about youman rights then; people were far more concerned about the greater danger the country faced, far more concerned by the prospect of a Trojan Horse within the national citadel. After the danger receded most of the ‘suspects’ were released. Mosley himself was freed in 1943 in the face of objections from – guess who? - the National Council of Civil Liberties, which now calls itself simply Liberty.

Defence Regulation 18B is long dead. We no longer need it; we are not at war. Oh, but we are, as the latest airline plot shows; as death lists drawn up for British MPs shows, after one MP was stabbed, almost fatally, in his constituency surgery. We are at war, facing an enemy far more ruthless than Mosley and his Black Shirts, an enemy that is prepared to kill innocent and guilty alike. We do not have 18B; what we have is Control Orders, introduced by the last government as part of a platform of counter-terrorism measures.

I’m reluctant to speak up on behalf of anything introduced by Tony Blair, whom I despise as a man and as a politician. I believe in civil liberties, the right of every suspect to face their accusers, one of the corner stones of our constitution, going all the way back to Magna Carta. But I look with ever growing contempt on those ranged against them, those defenders of youman rights, those who seem blind to the particular circumstances in which we live, the political threat which we face. I look at them, the Guardian readers, the hyper liberals and all their fellow travellers. I look at a new broken back coalition, an axis between Tony Benn, a sort of socialist dinosaur, one who believes that the problems of terrorism and the Middle East can be solved by a ‘peace conference’, and David Davis, a Tory of very little intellect, a sad, rejected and resentful man, anxious to undermine the present government at every move. If these people say black I will say white.

Thank goodness for Charles Moore, by far my favourite newspaper and magazine columnist. Writing in the Telegraph on Saturday he points out the simple and sober facts about Control Orders, overlooked by the cotton candy minds of the broken back coalition. More than a thousand people were detained under 18B, not always in the best of conditions, certainly not in anything quite as convivial as house arrest. How many are now subject to house arrest (actually it's only partial house arrest) under control orders? Nine; yes, that’s right, exactly nine. The orders, as Moore says, are sparingly applied. They are intended to restrict the movements of those that the Home Secretary, acting on the advice of the intelligence services, believes to be a genuine threat. The evidence is not subject to a normal legal test because it is simply too sensitive. Nevertheless, it is still evaluated by a High Court judge in considering periodic renewals. “Liberty”, Moore writes, “is indeed a key concept in our society. But it will still be discredited if the public sees it as means of protecting those who hate that society the most, while exposing the rest of us to unnecessary danger.”

Control Orders are likely to go and go soon. The Liberal Democrats in our present Coalition government are against them as well as Davis and his band of muddle-heads. More important MI5, the branch of the intelligence service responsible for domestic security, now says that they are no longer absolutely necessary. Teresa May, the present Home Secretary, has defended them as a ‘necessary evil’; it’s just such a pity there has been so much concentration on the ‘evil’ and not enough on the ‘necessity’. I sincerely hope that if and when they do go we do not come to regret their passing and blame those responsible for their passing in the face of some future outrage. I suppose I can always take abstract comfort from the Observer, which says that the whole system violates our deepest principles. I wonder if the people who believe that sort of thing, including the forces of the broken back coalition, would have been equally bold in speaking up for our ‘deepest principles’ in 1940? Not Liberty, obviously.

Utopia on skulls

At the beginning of last month fifty-eight year old Verena Becker appeared in court in Stuttgart, charged as an accomplice in the murder over thirty years ago of Siegfried Buback, then Germany’s prosecutor-general, in a drive-by shooting. Becker, if you have never heard of her, was once a member of a collection of terrorist fanatics generally known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, after the two principal leaders, though they preferred to call themselves the Rote Armee Fraktion – Red Army Faction – or the RAF.

These people had declared war on what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, Buback being a prime target, an agent of the ‘fascist’ state. The fact that Buback’s driver was also killed probably counted, if it counted for anything at all, as a terrorist version of ‘collateral damage.’

Becker and her crowd were part of a generation now known in Germany as the Achtundzechzigers – the 68ers – the student cohort of 1968, born to put the world to rights, born to compel their parents – the Auschwitz generation- to face the facts of their past, to face the fact that Germany had not been liberated at all in 1945, that the Federal Republic was not a true democracy merely a continuation of the Hitler state.

Knowing nothing about Becker and next to nothing about German urban terrorism I’ve had a quick and enlightening trot through Utopia or Auschwitz; Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust by Hans Kundani, a London-based journalist. It’s quite a tale, a story of political pathology, intellectual delusion and sophistry of the most tortured kind imaginable. For me it simply confirmed something that I had long deduced: that when it comes to the supposed lessons of history nobody is more deluded or capable of self-delusion than those on the political left.

I say left but it in the end it’s impossible to determine where these people, the generation of 68, belong other than in a kind of bedlam. They started off with a radical Marxist agenda but there were always undertones of distinct forms of German nationalism, allowing them to perceive the United States as an occupying power in the West as the Soviets were in the East. They began in criticising Nazism with attitudes, outlooks and practices that were distinctly Nazi. They began to upholding Auschwitz as a symbol of absolute evil only to relativise it, placing it alongside the bombing of German cities and the sufferings of the Palestinian people, before, in some cases, wishing to forget it altogether, or even denying that it happened at all.

Yes, that was another of their favoured causes, Palestine in the wake of the Six Day War, an event that transformed Jews and Israel from history’s victims to history’s perpetrators. In an article published in The New Republic in August 2001 Paul Berman put it thus: “To the West German students Israel became the crypto-Nazi state par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms.”

It certainly did, not in Israel, not in the German State, but in people like Becker, people that Jurgen Habermas, once the doyen of radical thought in Germany, described as ‘left-wing fascists.’ The anti-Semitism was, of course, disguised in the usual dishonest way as ‘anti-Zionism’, a wholly enlightened process that saw a ‘selection’ of Jews by some 68ers following the Entebbe hijacking, that saw a bomb planted in a Berlin synagogue on 9 November 1969, which just happened to be the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Horst Mahler, an RAF activist who supported the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972, is a Nazi. No, that’s not an insult; he is a leading neo-Nazi, currently in prison for using the Hitler salute and Holocaust denial, both of which are crimes in Germany.

It went on, the tortuous delusions went on, specifically in the sporadic murder campaign of the RAF, a substitute for action by the proletarian masses, ever immersed in ‘false consciousness’, who had to be shown how things were done, how things were to be done, how the inconvenient were to be done away with.

Becker’s trial will doubtless draw a curtain on one of the most shameful periods, on one of the most shameful generations, in German history, the real children of Hitler, people who saw murder as a means to an end, utopia on skulls. It seems to me that the capacity of power to corrupt is not nearly as great as that of idealism.

Saville and Jarndyce

Bleak House happens to be one of my favourite novels by Charles Dickens. It centres in part on an interminable legal battle, a case known as Jarndyce v Jarndyce. Nobody quite understands the original causes of the case. All they know is that it's a dispute over a will, a dispute that serves only the interests of the lawyers, people for whom time is money; for the more time they spend wrangling over Jarndyce v Jarndyce the more of the legacy is eaten up in fees and expenses. In the end the case is settled...but only when there is nothing left.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.

So says Charles Dickens in the novel. I'm sure he would be pleased to discover that nothing much changes; that the inquiry of Lord Saville into the events of Bloody Sunday, the shooting by British troops of Irish protestors in Londonderry back in 1972, took twelve years to report at a cost to the tax payer of almost £200million.

Actually, on reflection, even the Lord Chancellor in Jarndyce v Jarndyce may have been shocked by this mad profligacy, this legal joke at public expense. Let's have a look at the figures, shall we? According to a report I read today in the Daily Mail Saville spent £34million on computers alone. That means that every page of his report cost £7000; yes, every page. It actually gets worse. His lordship spent more than £200,000 on furniture and £62,000 on something called 'media monitoring', paying a company to check the press, the television and the radio to see what they were saying about Jarn...sorry the Saville Inquiry.

The dear old judge claimed a mere £20,000 in personal expenses, not bad, I suppose, for twelve years. But, wait a moment: look at his travel expenses. For bills which involved commuting between London and Londonderry he claimed £322,413. It seems to me that it would have been better to buy this man a private jet; it may have been a lot less expensive in the end.

The tedious bill goes up and up and up: the fourteen barristers involved made several millions from the inquiry, with the best rewarded pocketing four million pounds each. Eversheads, one of the legal firms involved, was paid more than £13million for interviewing witnesses. And then there is the £23million that went on offices and halls, as well as £25.8million listed in the accounts as 'operation of systems/maintenance.' Best not to say anything about the £2.5million written off as 'general office expenditure'

In the end the whole bill came to exactly £191.2million, roughly the equivalent of £4 for every man, woman and child in the whole of the United Kingdom, and that is not the end; for legal bills and other expenses are still coming through. It's a joke but sadly the joke's on us.

This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give--who does not often give--the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"