We, European citizens of all origins and of all political persuasions, wish to express our total opposition to the nomination of Tony Blair to the Presidency of the European Council.
Government plans to give the home secretary powers to remove juries from some inquests are "astonishing", an influential group of MPs says.
A little-noticed clause in the Counter Terrorism Bill would also enable the home secretary to change the coroner if deemed to be in the national interest.
We’ve just had word that a young man in Iran aged only 15 at the time of his offence will be executed in the next 72 hours unless urgent action is taken.
Behnam Zare’ has been convicted of a murder committed when he was 15 years old. He’s now 18 and is being held in Adelabad prison, in the south-western city of Shiraz. The order to carry out his execution has now been sent to the prison.
Amnesty is urging people to take action to help save Behnam at www.amnesty.org.uk/deathpenalty
The murder reportedly took place on 21 April 2005, when Behnam Zare’ swung a knife during an argument with a man named Mehrdad, wounding him in the neck. Mehrdad later died in hospital. Behnam Zare’ was detained on 13 November 2005; Fars Criminal Court sentenced him to qesas (retribution) on charges of premeditated murder.
Behnam Zare’ is one of at least 71 child offenders currently on death row in Iran. The country continues to execute child offenders – people under the age of 18 at the time of their offence – despite the practice being strictly prohibited under international law. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has twice urged Iran to stop executions of child offenders, yet since 1990 Iran has executed at least 24 such offenders. You can find out more about the issue at the excellent campaigning website www.stopchildexecutions.com and link to our blog on this case (and other issues like the USA’s use of waterboarding) here.
This is a genuinely urgent case where our actions can make a real difference. Hope you can help.
I was aware, in December, of press inquiries from a newspaper concerning visits by my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting to Babar Ahmed, but at no stage before last Saturday was I aware of any information that the press inquiries concerned any covert recording or anything like that.
The guidance is intended to illustrate the information local authorities could include such as details on how to access local provision like English language classes, waste and recycling services and employment services; practical information on rights and responsibilities including national laws and rules around paying taxes alongside background on social norms such not littering, not spitting and queuing in shops.
Taking money from Isaac Kaye defaces Peter Hain's only remaining conviction. When Hain became a Labour cabinet member and was obliged to ditch everything he once believed, he was allowed to keep just one political memento: his admirable record of opposition to the apartheid government. When he moved from South Africa to Britain he became this country's leading opponent of apartheid. The regime first tried to kill him, then tried to fit him up for a bank robbery. He was a brave and remarkable campaigner. But in 2007 he trampled his medals into the mud to get the money he needed.
This is the story of our political system, of most of the world's political systems. You enter politics with the highest ideals and end up grovelling to multi-millionaires.
Will you and the equivocators who surround you like a cocoon never go on the record about anything?
Even the stuff you claim to believe in?
Silly me.
When Paul Staines was first threatening bloggers with libel actions last year over the republication of a 1986 report from The Guardian, not much was made of a second report from the following year:
...Between 6pm and 8pm tomorrow some 150 selected members of the Young Conservatives will be guests at the South African Embassy for a drinks party. According to the invitation, the host is the Counsellor at the Embassy, a Mr. C. Raubenheimer, and the shindig is to mark the departure of a Mr. P. Goossen...The invitation list was drawn up with the help of David Hoyle, chairman of the Conservative Student Foreign Affairs Group, who devotes a lot of his time arranging support for the Nicaraguan contras.
The paper names several of those who were invited:
...Andrew Rosendale, chairman of the Young Conservatives in London; Paul Delaire Staines, who once…[cut!] (1)
A couple of names here are spelt wrongly: "David Hoyle" is of course "David Hoile", who in 2001 managed to get the Guardian to retract a claim that he had once worn a "Hang Mandela" sticker – only for a photograph to emerge shortly after (Hoile is now a lobbyist on behalf of the Sudanese regime). "Andrew Rosendale", meanwhile is "Andrew Rosindell", at the time Chairman of the Greater London Young Conservatives and now a very right-wing MP in Essex. The GYLC had for a long time been supportive of South Africa: in August 1985 (just days before the notorious "state of emergency" was declared) it sent a delegation to the country (to meet "moderate" groups that claimed to be independent of the regime) (2), while the following November the vice-chair of the organisation, Adrian Lee, appeared in Tatler sitting under an "I (Heart) South Africa" banner (3).
One has to be extremely cautious when writing about this subject. While detractors claim that these kind of links amounted to support for the apartheid regime, the "libertarians" of the 1980s Tory right – and their American "Young Republican" counterparts – make an important distinction: they were, they insist, simply anti-ANC. Apartheid was abhorrent (and decried as "racial socialism"), but it only continued because of the Communist-backed and terrorist ANC. If South Africa were to enjoy greater support from the west, then apartheid would wither, so those wanting positive change in the region should support Chief Buthelezi and Inkhata in South Africa, Jonas Savimbi and UNITA in Angola, and the MNR in Mozambique – thus we see here Paul Staines posing with a pro-UNITA t-shirt next to a UNITA representative. Right-libertarians accused of having supported apartheid tend to threaten to sue; the left-wing blogger Charlie Pottins was at the receiving end of one such threat back in 2006.
Staines has entered into a bit of self-criticism over the anti-Mandela posturing of the era, writing in the libertarian Free Life magazine in 2000:
I never wore a "Hang Mandela" badge but I hung out with people who did. Why? What did we gain from doing so? Did we make ourselves more popular by calling for the death of a man who was fighting injustice by the only means available to him?
However, Staines doesn’t go so far as to wonder whether the right-libertarian movement as a whole may have been hoodwinked by a regime which knew that hard-right racialist arguments would no longer win South Africa support, just like some left-wing groups were manipulated by the Soviets. In 1995, the former South African spy Craig Williamson was quoted as saying that
We couldn’t convince Americans that apartheid was right. The only chance of manipulating things to survive just a little bit longer was to paint the ANC as a product of the international department of the Soviet Communist Party. (4)
The apartheid regime developed various "front" organisations, which were supposedly independent but were the secret beneficiaries of government funds. One of these was the National Student Federation (NSF), which developed close links with Republican students in the USA. This is explored in a book by Russ Bellant, who notes the role of one now-notorious American figure:
In 1983…Jack Abramoff went to South Africa as a chairman of the College Republican National Committee to begin an ongoing relationship with the extreme right National Student Federation (NSF). The NSF noted this as a "grand alliance of conservative students…an alliance that would represent the swing to the right amongst the youth in America and Western Europe." After an exchange of trips between College Republicans and South African student rightists, the College Republican National Council passed a resolution condemning "deliberate planted propaganda by the KGB," and "Soviet proxy forces" in Southern Africa, without mentioning apartheid or racism. (5)
In the UK, the NSF cultivated the libertarian Federation of Conservative Students. Searchlight profiled the FCS in 1985, and noted that
...at this year’s conference, there were two delegates from a new student organisation in South Africa, the NSF, and Mr Peter Gossen, a visitor from the South African Embassy (venue of several luncheons for FCS members last year). (6)
It should be noted that the NSF’s head, Russel Crystal, denies there was any link with the security services – or at least, if there was one, he had not been aware of it. Buthelezi himself was also part of the strategy: in 2006 James Sanders published a fascinating book entitled Apartheid’s Friends, which details the secret support given to Buthelezi through "Operation Marion":
The name of the operation reflected its deeper function: ‘marion’ was a shortened form of the English and Afrikaans word ‘marionette’: a ‘puppet moved by strings’. (7)
Abramoff also headed the International Freedom Foundation, which had a branch in the UK directed by a libertarian named Marc Gordon (now based in South Africa). South Africa was named as the source of its funding in Private Eye as early as 1987 (8), and later it was shown that the money had been channelled via the USA through Jack Abramoff and Russel Crystal (9). A 2000 report in Searchlight notes that
According to the former South African spy Craig Williamson, the IFF grew out of a meeting in 1985 at Jamba, the headquaters of UNITA, attended by right-wing Americans, Nicaraguan Contras, Afghanistan Mujahideen and South African Securiyy police. (10)
The British IFF also financed the Mozambique Solidarity Campaign, which, according to a 1989 report in the New Internationalist, shared offices with the International Society for Human Rights (11). The British ISHR was run at various times by Adrian Lee and by Paul Staines.
The British libertarian right’s links with southern Africa in the 1980s is a story that has never been told in full, and indeed I’ve had to self-censor some interesting details for legal reasons.
****
(1) Edward Vulliamy, "People Diary", in The Guardian, 24 September 1987.
(2) Stephen Cook, "Young Conservatives for South Africa", in The Guardian, 10 August 1985.
(3) Camilla Desmoulins, "Tory! Tory! Tory!", in Tatler, 280 (10), November 1985, pp. 166-167. I’ve seen a copy to check this, by the way.
(4) Quoted in James Sanders, Apartheid’s Friends: The Rise and Fall of South Africa’s Secret Services, John Murray: London, 2006, p. 189.
(5) Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, South End Press: Boston, 1991, p. 82.
(6) "How the Libertarian Right Hijacked FCS", in Searchlight, May 1985, pp. 10-11.
(7) Sanders, Apartheid’s Friends, p. 266.
(8) See Private Eye (674) 16 Oct 1987 p. 9.
(9) Ken Silverstein, "The Making of a Lobbyist: Jack Abramoff’s start in South Africa", in Harper’s Magazine, blog 17 April 2006.
(10) Nick Lowles and Steve Silver, "Sound as a Pound?", in Searchlight (306), December 2000, pp.4-8. The Jamba conference was co-organised by Abramoff and Jack Wheeler, whom I blogged here.
(11) Paul Fauvet and Derrick Knight, "What is Renamo?", in The New Internationalist (192), February 1989. It should be noted that the very negative spin put on the ISHR in this article was disputed by its UK General Secretary, Robert Chambers, in a subsequent issue. As far as I can see the ISHR, while conservative, is quite respectable.
In a move that will challenge the secrecy surrounding MPs’ allowances, Ben Wallace has released detailed information about how he spends more than £152,000 of taxpayers’ money.
Tony Blair has been holding discussions with some of his oldest allies on how he could mount a campaign later this year to become full-time president of the EU council, the prestigious new job characterised as "president of Europe".
Blair, currently the Middle East envoy for the US, Russia, EU and the UN, has told friends he has made no final decision, but is increasingly willing to put himself forward for the job if it comes with real powers to intervene in defence and trade affairs.
Some Blair allies also say that he now recognises that as envoy in the Middle East he is not going to be allowed to become the key player in furthering Israeli-Palestinian talks this year, and will be reduced to a role of supporting political development in Palestine and boosting its economy.
Reporters from the Mail to whom I spoke independently agreed that they had bribed not only police officers but also civil servants. For example, they targeted officials who had access to the massive database of the social security system, which registers the personal details of every British citizen with a national insurance number and every foreign national with a right to work in Britain - some 72 million private citizens. One reporter who has now left the paper recalled: 'We used to use the social security computer as if it was an extension of the Daily Mail library. You phone your contact, have a chat, say you're looking for such-and-such a guy, this age, rough location - is there any chance? Keep chatting. He says, "Oh, we've got five people of that name." You say, "Well, givegive me all five." You get home addresses, phone numbers, maybe workplace too. They get you information off the database, and you reward them with a dirty great meal or an envelope.'
At one point, according to one Mail source, a reporter in the newsroom was bribing a Ministry of Defence police office who could access several databases, including Scotland Yard's. Mail reporters separately claim that they also had regular access to what is arguably the most sensitive of all confidential information, the health records of some of their targets. As one Mail veteran put it to me: 'If the Mail' go for you, they get every phone number you have dialled, every schoolmate, everything on your credit card, every call to your phone and to your mobile. Everything.' Even if it is against the law.
...acted unlawfully by failing to provide some prisoners with access to courses to show they were safe for release, appeal judges have ruled.
