New Britain: A Saudi Satellite Slave State
Strange that politicians love to talk tough when the going is good, but become incapable, gibbering idiots as soon as there is any sign of trouble.
Is it because they are spineless cowards by their nature or are they just so slippery that they cannot stick to anything to prevent them from slithering from the moral high ground to the gutter to the sewer?
If their brave talk is to be believed, we shall soon have every real and imagined criminal rotting their lives away in Titan Prisons and every real or, more probably, very unreal and imagined terrorist on a CIA extraordinary rendition flight to Guantanamo Bay, as New Britain and wheezy old America rid the world of anyone who does not share their grotesquely intertwined views and The War on Terror is won to universal cheers of “Hurrah!” and only small and local explosions, causing minor collateral damage to non-believers.
Unless, of course, somebody with a lot of money tells the government of New Britain to jump, in which case, our brave leaders will shout in unison: “Yes, your Lord Highness-ship, and how high may we entertain Your Most Excellent Majesty by jumping today, Your Wonderful-ship?”
When Saudi Arabia decided it did not like the idea of any tin-pot New British government looking too closely into bribery and corruption surrounding a massive arms deal, there was no attempt whatsoever to employ brinkmanship, but immediate, utter, humiliating and grovelling capitulation.
Just like Gordon Brown and Darling of the Treasury abasing themselves before the barked orders of the rich in the non-dom tax evasion scandal, Tony Blair ran with brown trousers and bicycle-clips to anyone in authority, telling them they had to be nice to his masters: the rich and the truly powerful.
The mother of Parliaments had become a common prostitute to service the lusts of the rich.
The Guardian describes how low the former nation of New Britain had sunk as it declared itself a banana republic to be bought and sold like a harlot:
The British government was powerless to resist the Saudi threats that forced it to close down the BAE corruption investigation, its lawyers insisted in the high court yesterday.
[...]
Philip Sales, QC for the crown, said the government could not “magic away” the threats from the Saudi ruling clan.
But the judge said: “Every time a hostage is taken or a ransom demanded, the answer by the government is: ‘We do not yield to threats’.”
The high court has heard unchallenged allegations that it was Prince Bandar, the alleged beneficiary of £1bn in secret payments from the arms giant BAE, who threatened to cut off intelligence on terrorists if the investigation into him and his family was not stopped.
[...]
Moses said: “What you are saying is that the law is powerless to protect our own sovereignty - the law cannot be deployed as a weapon to protect the sovereignty of this country.”
The judge said: “Your answer is, yes, it is powerless. No lawyer or court can protect one of the essential features of sovereignty, which is control over one’s own domestic criminal law system.”
Asked if that meant nothing could be done to resist this kind of threat “from a powerful foreign state”, Sales replied: “Correct - we cannot compel Saudi Arabia to adopt a different stance.”
So, if you are a criminal or a terrorist or the dictator of a foreign power and you want to test the mettle, the iron resolve of a New British prime minster, just shout “Boo!” and watch them collapse into a heap of uncontrollable tears and slimy entanglements of snot, like a toddler who has had their dummy taken away.
Oh, Brave New Britain!
Blair To Brown: Spin To Spinelessness
The art of spin is, by its nature, underhand, artificial, duplicitous and deceiving.
It was what ordinary people, less skilled in the black arts of politics, would call lying.
During the First Coming of Tony Blair (zealots across the world are awaiting his Second Coming as Emperor of Europe later this year) spin was all the rage. Real news was blotted out by fairytales; concoctions of pipe-dreams and wishful thinking were paraded as reality; newspeak became the political lingua franca.
Under Gordon Brown, of course, all that changed. Creating as much distance as possible from the new pariah Blair became essential. All well and good.
The downside of this, however, is that we can all now see that the new emperor has no clothes.
We thought that Tony Blair’s oleagenous toadying to the rich and famous would be consigned to history and not be the shape of things to come. Looks like we almost got conned again.
As Paul Routledge says in The Mirror:
If you want to change this government’s mind, don’t be poor, don’t be old and don’t work in the public services.
No. Be wealthy, have influential friends in high places and the power to blackmail weak politicians.
Chancellor Alistair Darling spurns the claims of pensioners and people on benefit, and insists that low-paid government employees accept real cuts in living standards.
But he’s caved in to the rich and powerful. He backed down on plans to tax traders who sell their business. Cost to the taxpayer? £200million a year.
And now he’s backtracking on proposals to soak the super-rich who live here but don’t pay taxes, the so-called “non-domiciles”. Cost? Many hundreds of millions.
The Telegraph is no more charitable to Darling of the Treasury:
HM Revenue and Customs has written to tax lawyers withdrawing some of the most contentious aspects of the non-dom plan.
Mr Darling’s retreat follows last month’s climbdown on plans to raise capital gains tax and threatens to make his first Budget next month a public humiliation.
The Chancellor still plans to charge long-standing non-doms a £30,000 annual levy, but other measures are significantly watered down.
These include no longer asking for detailed information about offshore trusts, not taxing works of art brought into the UK for public display and not taxing money brought into the UK to pay the £30,000 levy.
According to Forbes:
‘This clarification is a victory for common sense,’ said John Cridland, CBI deputy director-general.
‘The proposals were clearly cobbled together in a hurry … we need the government to be more careful in future about sending out a message that Britain is no longer interested in attracting talent and ideas to our shores, or that those people already here, who contribute over 23 bln stg to the UK economy each year, are no longer welcome,’ he added.
From the day that Mrs Thatcher told Rupert Murdoch that Tony Blair was “a safe pair of hands” and therefore allowed him to be elected, to the tea-party with Mrs Thatcher when Gordon Brown had only just moved into 10 Downing Street, the signs that New Labour is just the old Nasty Party in disguise have been there for all to see.
Tony Blair tried to disguise it, but Gordon Brown is just blatantly shoving it in people’s faces.
If you are not rich New Labour is not interested.
New Labour: Selling Britain Into Corporate Slavery
So, Gordon Brown has been accused of selling the children of Britain into slavery by reducing their education to nothing more than training them to have no ambition or abilities beyond abasing themselves before exploitative companies.
The only lessons children will learn in Brave New Britain are how to oil the corporate money-machines and how to become the cloned and expendable labour force of global business.
When business says jump to Gordon Brown and his jittery lackeys, the only answer they can come up with is: “How high, your Sirships?” When Darling of the Treasury was stupid enough to think that he had the power to introduce legislation to tax business, he was promptly thrown back into his toy-box by Digby Jones and the money-men.
The government of UK Plc is owned, lock, stock and barrel by business. When MPs and ministers are not begging for backhanders from business for performing dodgy backroom deals, they are simply ordered around like minor servants by the chairmen of multinationals.
Of course, this all started for New Labour under the Emperor of Servility, Tony Blair.
At least under Mrs Thatcher’s religion for the non-thinking, Greed Is Go(o)d, there had been some chance that the money which sloshes around the arms trade might find its way into the pockets of those near and dear, if not otherwise unemployable loved ones:
“What Bandar [Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar] could not secure, in the face of the Israeli lobby in Washington, was a massive contract that would transform the entire military profile of the Kingdom [Saudi Arabia]. Reagan encouraged him to go to the British, and Mrs Thatcher was able to pull off one of the largest arms deals of all time, although it was shrouded in secrecy. Even America’s leaky top table would not disclose the true value of what became known as the Al Yamama defence deal. Included in it were seventy-two Tornado fighter aircraft, endless airbase infrastructure, and much more; the eventual value was somewhere between $30 and $50 billion. It was described to me subsequently by a top Foreign Office mandarin as the most corrupt British contract in modern history.
“A few months earlier, in July 1985, unknown to us, Bandar had jetted off to Austria, interrupting a rare Thatcher holiday in Salzburg to initial the deal. When it came to secrecy about the contract and the fabulous backhanders that flowed from it, the Saudis met their match in Britain. No one was ever prosecuted, but numerous well-placed people and their relatives profited from assorted back-pocketry. All we could be sure of in Washington at the time was that there was an odour, some of it no doubt fuelled by envy, but most of it coming from the chat amongst politicians and officials about who had benefited from the usual Saudi practices. Endless pro-Israeli Congressmen would try to point us this way or that, but we were never able to identify the actual value of the deal, or of the associated bribes, or the proximity of the recipients to key British politicians in power at the time”.
Shooting History: A Personal Journey
Jon Snow
Still, Tony Blair taught the iron discipline of rapid reaction: when somebody with money tells you what to do, you do it without question and fast as lightning.
Which is why no levels of grovelling subservience with regard to quashing the SFO investigation into the Al Yamama Saudi arms deal with BAE Systems would raise one twitchy eyebrow of surprise in anyone.
The Guardian has this on the current judicial review:
The British government appears to have “rolled over” in response to Saudi pressure to drop an investigation into alleged bribery in arms deals, a senior judge said today.
Two high court judges are reviewing the decision of Robert Wardle, the director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), to drop the investigation into allegations of bribery and corruption in contracts between BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia.
Dinah Rose QC, for the pressure groups Corner House Research and the Campaign Against Arms Trade, today told the court Tony Blair applied “irresistible pressure” on the SFO and the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to end the investigation while he was prime minister.
“There were repeated efforts by the UK ambassador to Saudi Arabia and personal overtures from Tony Blair. Irresistible pressure forced them to drop the prosecution,” Rose said.
The prime minister “stepped over the boundary between what is a permissible exercise and impermissible attempts to influence or dictate a decision on the investigation by expressing his view,” she said. “This is the clearest case of intervention that goes too far.”
According to The Daily Mail, Tony Blair is even more complicit in promoting and fostering terrorism than had already been thought:
“Although some companies have sought to excuse bribery on the basis that jobs would be lost if bribes were not paid, the flip side of the coin is the extent to which companies lose business either because they are unwilling to pay bribes or because they are out-bribed by competitors,” he said.
Corruption also had profound implications for national security, as acknowledged by the leaders of all G8 countries, including Mr Blair when he was Prime Minister. They recognised that “corrupt practices contribute to the spread of organised crime and terrorism, undermine public trust in government and destabilise economies”.
The Foreign Office recognised that weak or failing states were frequently safe havens for terrorists.
Corruption among ruling elites in the Middle East had been cited as a factor motivating the leadership of terrorist organisations such as al Qaida, one of whose stated aims was the elimination of corrupt regimes.
Mr Hildyard said Saudi Arabia had assured the United Nations that it would comply with its duty of co-operation in anti-terrorist matters. Its willingness to co-operate with the UK was so strong that it had signed a “memorandum of understanding” to facilitate such contact.
Yet, said Ms Rose, the Saudi government had issued threats aimed at stopping the BAE inquiry and the Director of the SFO had unlawfully submitted to those threats.
So, what does this say about New Britain?
That it is a failed banana republic which will comply willingly with the wishes or orders of any dictatorship or chairman of business, as long as somebody is making squillions of money out of the deal.
It also says that New Britain is no longer a democracy, but merely a political harlot; a nation in the form of a low prostitute which will sell its people and principles to, not even necessarily the highest bidder, but anyone who flashes the cash, but possibly with no intention of paying the bills.
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