I don't think Cameron is a malicious charlatan like Tony Blair, nor as avaricious - he doesn't need the money. But there is something of the Blair about him - good looking young politician delivers touchy feely lines of dubious sincerity. One of his concluding lines summed it up for me:

"I see a country where the poorest children go to the best schools."

Now don't just admire how fine that sounds, read it again:

"I see a country where the poorest children go to the best schools".

Do you think David Cameron does see that, really? Do you see that? And if the poorest children go to the best schools, who will go to the worst schools? What does it actually mean in practice? " I think we should give a few token plebs scholarships to Eton"? "I wish we had someone from a council estate in the Bullingdon Club"? Or that the state schools in deprived inner city areas really will become the very best schools in the country? Does anybody in their right mind consider that to be possible? Or is this just rhetoric designed to neutralise Cameron's cossetted origins?

There was a rather nastier point of using pretended concern for the poor earlier in Cameron's speech, when he banged on about the poor single mother who works to better herself, and who because of benefit withdrawal effectively is taxed at 96% on every pound she earns over £150 per week. A crafted standing ovation greeted a ringing declaration that the Conservatives would end the scandal of marginal 96% tax rates for the poorest in our society. But of course the Conservatives would do that, not by lowering the single mother's tax rate, and not by keeping giving her benefit when she works. They would do it by reducing the benefit she can get if she does not work, thus "incentivising" her to search for a non-existent job supported by non-existent cheap childcare for her children. The Conservatives' attack on "Welfare Dependency" is motivated by their perpetual nastiness, which Cameron merely disguises a bit better. It is an attack on the poor disguised as social concern.

We are in for a Khaki election, with the parties competing to be the most committed to the ruinous war in Afghanistan. I have to say I do not object to Richard Dannatt joining the Tories. I always argue that we need politicians who have experience outside politics. There have been distinguished military men who have been good in Parliament - like Denis Healey and Paddy Ashdown. But they had the decency to get themselves elected first.

Yes, the true hypocrisy of the Dannatt affair has been missed by pretty well all commentators. The Tories opposed New Labour's self-serving House of Lords reform, on the apparently principled point that the House of Lords should be reformed to a democratically elected Upper Chamber. Now they announce that Dannatt will be working with the prospective Tory government - from the Lords.

Plainly the Tories have no more interest in democracy than New Labour, and their true intention is just to turn the Lords from Tony's Cronies to Dave's Cronies.

Makes you sick, doesn't it.

So determined are the British mainstream media, and all three main English political parties, to maintain patriotic support for the War in Afghanistan, that there has been almost no reporting here of conclusive evidence that the Afghan elections were entirely fraudulent. There are huge discrepancies between the turnout as monitored by UN observers, and as declared by the Afghan "Independent" Electoral Commission. For example:

In Helmand province in the south, where Taliban fighters remain very active, for example, the U.N. estimated that just 38,000 votes were cast while Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission reported 122,376 votes for the top three candidates, including 112,873 for Karzai. In neighboring Kandahar, the U.N. estimated turnout at below 100,000 voters -- compared to the commission's official count of 242,782 votes, 221,436 of them for Karzai.

The interesting thing is that the UN itself has been complicit in covering this up, and the true figures have only been released by a whistleblower, Peter Galbraith, who has naturally been sacked. His motives are immaterial - it was wrong of the UN to suppress this information. For sheer bloody minded cynicism, the response from Edmond Mulet, assistant UN secretary general, takes the biscuit. He stated that the UN was mandated to support the Afghan election, not to monitor it.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ihcxyvLQTtUCreNe2jbrDczmO9aQD9B6JLT81

A smoother but still more cynical confirmation that the UN is going along with fraud came from the Head of the UN's Afghan mission, Kai Eide, who stated that:

"If one is serious about state-building in Afghanistan, one must allow these nascent institutions to work and to grow. This means allowing them to make their own mistakes."

This resonates strongly with me because it mirrors exactly the arguments I had with UN officials in Uzbekistan who refused to acknowledge the appalling human rights abuses in the country. In particular, UNICEF point blank would not report the massive use of forced labour of young children in the cotton fields, preferring instead to quote reports from Uzbek government institutions denying this.

Sadly, the majority of international diplomats, Eide and Mulet included, are high living careerists, fleas riding on the back of power, with no principles and with no empathy for the plight of people whose lifestyle does not include an unlimited supply of free champagne.

There are times when I feel a total disconnect from the mainstream media. Political commentators appear almost universally to have concluded that George Osborne's speech yesterday was a success, that he has "Grown up" or "Come of age". Am I alone in thinking that Osborne sounded like a petulant public school prefect? I spent the entire speech thinking "arrogant little shit", and I would be astonished if quite a few other people did not hink so too.

The incessant repetition of "We are all in this together" struck me as amateur in both concept and delivery. It also brought the thought that multi-millionaires like Messrs Cameron and Osborne are rather less "in it" than ordinary people. If that were not true, of course, he would not have needed to insist so hard on the opposite. The fact that the rich may have to wait up to five years for exemption from inheritance tax seemed to me less than a huge sacrifice on their part: in contrast to public sector workers, who are expected to take a pay freeze, and working people who are expected to retire later - both to finance the massive subsidies paid to bankers. The Conservatives are no better than New Labour in seeking to hide their determination to let bankers' obscene salaries and bonuses continue, hidden behind a smokescreen of hypocritical rhetoric.

You may be surprised to learn that personally I believe that the public sector should be kept to below 40% of GDP, which is to say that it should be cut by over 25%. That makes me more radically anti-state than the Tories. There is a huge amount of waste in public expenditure, especially in local government.

My solutions are more radical. The local government system suffers from a disconnect between provision and finance. It is admministered locally but financed centrally. Your council tax only accounts for a tiny percentage of the council's expenditure, so the ability to relate performance and provision to cost is lost on the taxpayer/voter. At least 80% (100% in wealthy areas) of all local services, including education, should be funded through wholly variable local income tax. National income tax would be correspondingly reduced and council tax abolished. Up to 20% central government subsidy might be paid to poorer regions.

If voters were paying 15% of their income in tax to the local authority, they would take much more interest in local government, and wonder why they were paying for over-inflated and almost completely useless social services departments, and why the deputy manager of the leisure centre was on £85,000 pa. I can think of no single change which would lead to a more radical reduction of government expenditure.

The other major change would be smaller, leaner public services which simply go on with delivering the service direct, with minimal administration. This is the opposite of what the Tories would do. In particular, we need to cut out the whole complex administration of "internal markets" within the public services, where vast arrays of accountants and managers spend their wasted lives processing paper payments from the government to the government.

Let me tell you a true story which is an analogy for the whole rotten system. As Ambassador in Tashkent, I had staff from a variety of government departments - FCO, MOD, DFID, BTI, Home Office etc. In addition to which, some staff sometimes did some work for other than their own department. This led to complex inter-departmental charging, including this:

I was presented with a floor plan of the Embassy building, with floor area calculated of each office, corridor and meeting room. I then had to calculate what percentage of time each room or corridor was used by each member of staff, and what percentage of time each member of staff worked for which government department. So, for example, after doing all the calculations, I might conclude that my own office was used 42% of the time on FCO business, 13% of the time on BTI business, 11% on DFID, etc etc, whereas my secretary's office was used ....

I then would have to multiply the percentage for each government department for each room, lobby and corridor by the square footage of that room, lobby or corridor. Then you would add up for every government department the square footages for each room, unitl you had totals of how many square feet of overall Embassy space were attributable to each government department. The running costs of the Embassy could then be calculated - depreciation, lighting, heating, maintenace, equipment, guarding, cleaning, gardening etc - and divided among the different departments. Then numerous interanal payment transfers would be processed and made.

The point being, of course, that all the payments were simply from the British government to the British government, but the taxpayer had the privilege of paying much more to run the Embassy to cover the staff who did the internal accounting. That is just one of the internal market procedures in one small Embassy. Imagine the madnesses of internal accounting in the NHS. The much vaunted increases in NHS spending have gone entirely to finance this kind of bureaucracy. Internal markets take huge resources for extra paperwork, full stop.

The Private Finance Initiative is similarly crazy; a device by which the running costs of public institutions are hamstrung to make massive payments on capital to private investors. What we desperately need to do is get back to the notion that public services should be provided by the State, with the least possible administrative tail. The Tories - and New Labour, in fact - both propose on the contrary to increase internal market procedures and contracting out.

All of George Osborne's vaunted savings proposals yesterday would not add up to 10% of the saving from simply scrapping Trident. Ending imperial pretentions is a must for any sensible plan to tackle the deficit.

The Tories have adopted one plan I advocated in Norwich - tax breaks for start-up firms. One of the reasons for the failure of British entrepeneurship is our insistence on taxing firms even as they struggle to first establish themselves. George Osborne has only proposed a two year break on employment taxes - I propose a much more radical five year exemption from all taxes - but at least he has noticed the right problem.

All state personal payments should be means tested. It is time to slaughter the sacred cows of the welfare system. Lloyd George's old age pension saved us from the horrors of the workhouse system and brought a sense of entitlement and dignity to working people, but after precisely a hundred years it is time to move on. Peculiarly, if all state benefits are means tested, it will remove the stigma. Many pensioners, including some close to me, take the basic pension but refuse to apply for income support. If all state payments were made through a single income tax assessment procedure, the stigma problem could be tackled. So would the nonsense of the Duke of Westminster's entitlement to a state pension and child benefit, and the billions spent in recycling money to and from the middle class via the state.

There would still need to be a cut-off age at which the State no longer expects people to work -though retirment should be voluntary, not compulsory for those still able and wanting to work. Here the Tories are insensitive. It is a national disgrace that the difference in average life expectancy between districts in the affluent South of England, and inner city areas in our older industrial cities, can be as much as twenty years. In parts of Glasgow men struggle to live to retirement. There is also the law of unintended consequences here - any increase in retirement age will bring an immediate and major increase in those claiming incapacity benefit, the Tories' favourite bugbear. The solution is to make it easier for people to continue to work voluntarily, and means test all payments. But the entitlement to retiire at 65 should remain until the benefits of increasing good health have reached all workers, not just Tory voters.

I hope that offers some food for thought. I also hope that it does something to remove the continuing misimpression that I am left wing....

Tom Harris MP being the fool in question. He thinks that the people who concocted the lies about Iraqi WMD, thus launching a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, are the best choice to be in parliament:

I would have thought it in our country's interest to have an MP - of whatever political persuasion - with a background in covert intelligence work.

Tom's article is based on a huge number of preconceptions. The truth is, that the wonderful James Bond opus has fundamentally affected the perception of MI6 in the British people, including the politicians. But James Bond is fiction. It bears no resemblance at all to the real MI6.

In particular Tom Harris has swallowed the idea that MI6 officers put themselves in particular danger in the course of their work, That is simply untrue. Watson's attempted contrast in "The View From The Residence" between comfortable diplomats and brave MI6 officers is offensive. He may be interested to know that consistently since World War II more FCO than MI6 staff have been killed or injured on active service.

MI6 officers only work abroad with diplomatic immunity. Their "Cover" is almost always as Embassy staff. The following single true story tells more truth about MI6 than Tom Harris will ever experience. Names have been changed.

I was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw, in charge of the Political and Economic Sections. One day I was having lunch with a well known Polish restaurateur, Wlodek. Wlodek ran Warsaw's most exclusive restaurant and catered for many government functions. He was also a well known social figure in his own right, and a great purveyor of political gossip.

Over lunch Wlodek told me a story about the then Polish Prime Minister. I was able to tell him that I had been present on the occasion he described and the story was untrue.

There was another First Secretary in the Embassy, we will call him Bill, with a theoretical job description very similar to mine - only he was really an MI6 officer. A couple of days later I was having lunch in another restaurant with another contact (now you know why I am so fat). Ensconced in a corner together were Bill and Wlodek.

A couple of days further on I received a copy of an intelligence report issued by MI6. It described the source as "Regular and reliable, with good access". It contained the same story Wlodek had told me.

I minuted on it - "Bill - you got this from Wlodek. He told me the same thing. It's not true. I was there." and sent it back to him. I got told off for the cardinal sin of writing the name of the source on the report.

A couple more days, and I met Wlodek again.
"Wlodek, why did you tell Bill that story", I asked, "I told you it wasn't true".
"Ah yes," Wlodek laughed, "But Bill paid me ten thousand dollars for it".

Which is what MI6 mostly do. They buy information. By definition, of course, people who sell you intelligence are apt to be unreliable. Much of the key "intelligence" on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction was bought from an Iraqi Colonel. If you hand over briefcases of used dollars to Iraqi Colonels in Egyptian hotel rooms, they will give you lots of information on WMD. Absolutely as much as you want. Just keep the dollars flowing.

Forget the entertaining Ian Fleming. Read Graham Greene, who saw much further into the human soul. Our Man in Havana is much closer to truth than James Bond.

There is also the question of the huge sums of taxpayers' cash doled out. I had to account in detail you would not believe for ever penny of FCO cash spent. Every British Ambassador spends two full working days a month carrying out accounts and receipts and stocks checks.

But I frequently in my career had to sign for large sums in cash (MI6 officers do not sign for it themselves) which I then handed over to my MI6 colleagues. You can't ask a paid traitor for a receipt, so this money was, literally, unaccountable. The largest cash sum I ever handed over was US$120,000. Did I ever suspect MI6 officers might be stealing some of this untraceable money? Yes, bluntly I did, in one case in particular. There are absolutely no safeguards.

Not all information is paid for. Informers can have other motives. Interestingly one effect of the invasion of Iraq has been that far fewer informants are willing to cooperate with British intelligence because they see the UK as a force for good in the world. But "Human Intelligence", or HUMINT, always has to be carefully assessed for the motive of the teller and his credible access to the information. Very often, it is wrong.

HUMINT reports arrive around Whitehall with red cardboard covers and SIGINT - communications intercepts from GCHQ - in blue jackets. I recall Tristan Garel-Jones, when a FCO minister, asking his Private Secretary in a meeting about Cyprus "Now remind me again, which colour is reliable and which colour is speculative?" Broadly, he was not wrong. GCHQ information is viewed generally in Whitehall to be better quality than MI6 information, and I certainly found this true in my 20 years of dealing with intelligence.

All this is broad bush. MI6 are sometimes involved in Sigint operations. They sometimes produce good human intelligence. But they failed disastrously their two most important tests - over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and over the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands. Both failures led to war.

The other source of MI6 HUMINT is foreign liaison. This is where MI6 stand accused of accepting large quantities of dubious intelligence and turning a blind eye to the fact that it was obtained by torture.

But the biggest source of UK intelligence is the United States. Most reports issued by MI6 are CIA reports, as most reports issued by GCHQ are NSA reports. An alpha-numeric code is the only thing that shows the difference. It was the CIA's adoption of torture that caused Jack Straw's change of policy to accept it.

The fallibility of HUMINT has been very well understood in Whitehall for generations. The reports are fed in by MI6 but then go through a number of sceptical filters, in the FCO, MOD and Cabinet Office and other government departments if relevant, formalised in the Joint Intelligence Committee and its sub-committees. With New Labour enforcing true belief in the War on Terror, the scepticism filters have been opened wide. That was the scandal of the Iraqi WMD dossier. The appalling quality of the bought and torture intelligence being fed in was just par for the course from MI6.

A final observation. I had no MI6 officers with me in Tashkent because MI6 said the operating environment was too dangerous. Meantime I was visiting alone and unarmed all through the Ferghana Valley and Tien Shan.

There, Tom Harris MP. That is the view from the Residence. Evidently it is a damn sight clearer than the view from the New Labour benches of the House of Commons.

Where do I find the campaign to stop Blair?

A massive task of mobilisation lies ahead to prevent the elevation of Tony Blair to President of the European Union. The issue has potential to unite the vast majority of the British people. Imagine the Countryside Alliance and Stop The War demonstartions combined. It is essential that people accept a "Big tent" campaign that unites around the single objective of preventing Blair's appointment by amking clear to Brussels that it is completely unacceptable to the European Union.

I had always been a supporter of EU membership, but even the possibility of Blair's appointment crystallises for me the arrogance of Brussels and the increasing distance between EU institutions and people. Should the EU become headed by a war criminal, I shall defintely conclude it is time to leave.

No post today because I have been too busy with a whirlwind of family and friends. By chance, everyone seemed to have something they wanted to celebrate with me today. Now I am off to bed early, smiling and exhausted.

Precisely 38 minutes after I posted a blog entry pointing to definite proof of Jack Straw's complicity in torture, one Helen Wright added this comment, which I thought deserved a wider audience:

I thought you were removed for buying sex from vulnerable young women in foreign countries?

Apparently you enjoy sex with a kilt on and like to smack womens arses while singing Scottish songs.

You are a man of questionable morals and brough shame on our country. Crawl back under your rock, you slimeball

.

I am shocked. You mean there's another way to have sex?

I repeat it as a poignant reminder of the glory days of the Downing St smear machine, when they concocted enough lies about me to fill a Trident submarine. As New Labour goes down unloved into oblivion, it is interesting to see the legs still kicking in reflex.

The extremely important post from which she was seeking to detract your attention is here. Please, please read it - as experience shows that getting sex in the heading quintuples my traffic, her puerile smear will then have backfired spectacularly.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/10/either_craig_mu.html

Jack Straw took the policy decision that the UK would receive intelligence obtained under torture by the CIA and other liaison intelligence services. He has been denying it ever since, and described my evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Human Rights Committee as "entirely untrue".

In the White House and at the Pentagon, such respect had evaporated completely. As Cofer Black, former head of counter-terrorism at the CIA was later to tell a congressional committee: "All you need to know: there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves came off."

There must have been some realisation of this new fact of life at the highest levels of the British government. Craig Murray, who was later removed from his post as ambassador to Uzbekistan after denouncing the use of intelligence extracted under torture, recently told parliament's joint committee on human rights (JCHR) he had been informed by a senior Foreign Office official that a decision that such intelligence should not be questioned was taken by Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, following discussions with senior intelligence officials. Straw describes this claim as "entirely untrue". But when Michael Wood, the FO's senior legal advisor, was asked his opinion, he is known to have concluded it was not an offence in international law to receive or possess information extracted under torture, although it would not be admissible as evidence in court.

Now either Jack Straw or I must be lying to Parliament. There is no other explanaton. One of us is an extrenely devious man who has poisoned public life with falsehoods on the subject of the British government's attitude to torture and the validity of much of the "war on terror" narrative as a result. Which one is the liar?

There is a document which will establish the truth of this. It is classified Top Secret and stored in the Permanent Under Secretary's Department in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I judge that the time is now right to try and get hold of it through the Freedom of Information Act. I have little doubt that the FCO will refuse the request, but I believe that, with parliamentary and police investgations underway into this policy, I can now demonstrate enough of a public interest case for the Information Commissioner to release the document on appeal.

This is my email to the FCO. I think the reasons given for release of the document are pretty cogent. The request was dated 20 September and addressed to Peter Ricketts, Permanent Under Secretary, FCO:

Peter

I wish formally to request from you under the Freedom of Information Act the minutes of the metting of 7 or 8 March 2003 between Linda Duffield, Michael Wood, Matthew Kydd and I on the subject of the receipt of intelligence obtained under torture. In particular I wish to receive the top copy which includes a manuscript note of the views of Jack Straw. I believe you were in the loop on this discussion at the time in your then position of Director International Security.

There is a strong public interest in the release of this minute. This meeting formed the core of the evidence which I gave recently to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. The credibility of my evidence is a key issue in the very important report on UK complicity in torture produced by that committee. The release of this minute will go far in establishing the truth or otherwise of my account, which is a matter of major public interest and on which I have given evidence in person before not just the parliamentary joint committee, but also important committees of the European Parlaiment and the Council of Europe. As you will acknowledge, the UK's attitude towards the receipt of intelligence from torture abroad is a matter of keen parliamentary, academic, media and public debate of late.

There is an undeniable public interest in the truth of the government's policy on this major issue being known.

You had a personal role in the establishment and implementation of our policy of obtaining intelligence from torture, first as FCO Director of International Security and secondly as Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Therefore I do not doubt you will immediately be minded to obstruct this FOI request. Let me anticipate your arguments:

This meeting is no longer secret. With the agreement of Treasury Solicitors, I published on my website and in Murder in Samarkand, the letter from Sir Michael Wood of 13 March 2003 which refers to the meeting and sets out his view that to receive intelligence from torture is not a breach of the UN Convention Against Torture. This letter is discussed at length in the recent report and the minutes of evidence of the Parliamentary Joint Committee. The existence of the meeting and the government's line at the meeting is therefore well established. Publication of the minute will only add the personal involvement of the then Secretary of State. To continue to hide that would be only in the interests of avoiding political embarassment, which is not a legitimate reason under the Freedom of Information Act.

An account of the meeting was published in my book Murder in Samarkand. This account of the meeting was cleared with the FCO and takes into account the input of others at the meeting as given to me by the FCO as part of the clearance process. The table produced by the FCO, giving my account of the meeting alongside the FCO's comments and request for changes, is an unclassified document and has been published by me on the internet for three years now. So there is no additional damage to relations with the US or Uzbekistan from releasing the minute of a meeting the content of which has already been acknowledged by the FCO in public.

The Obama administration has taken a different line on these issues to its predecessor, has acknowledged that excesses occured in CIA handling of the question of torture and intelligence, and has released key top secret documents on the issue. For the UK to do the same cannot credibly be argued to damage UK/Us relations.

Yours ever,

Craig Murray

If, as Jack Straw says, my story is "Entirely untrue", then it should be a simple matter to release this document and prove it.

There is a possible downside - I am worried that this request may lead to the destruction of the document, or at least of the top copy with the manuscript note amplifying Jack Straw's views.

There is a new international affairs magazine called International World Report. The first issue has a very interesting focus on Central Asia, The article on the Uighurs is a good introduction to the subject. There is also an interview with me. This is perfectly accurate, but as always when you read back a verbatim transcript you think of things you might have put better or explained further.
http://www.independentworldreport.com/

I don't know if future issues will maintain a Central Asian focus, but in any event the magazine looks like it could be a good source on lesser known foreign policy areas.

If I were a resident of Bracknell, I would not vote in the Tory Open Primary as I think the concept of choosing candidates of your political opponents is silly. Taken as given that I am not a Conservative and disagree with him on many points, I would hope that they choose Iain Dale, who is harmless by Tory standards and can be fun.

One person I would not vote for is the crusading neo-Conservative Rory Stewart. It is particularly annoying that he is constantly referred to as a former diplomat. Stewart was an MI6 officer and not a member of the FCO.

Three years ago I received a message from the FCO asking me not to mention this as, at that time, Stewart was still very active for MI6 in Afghanistan and his life could have been endangered. I agreed, and even removed a reference from my blog. However now that he is safely and lucratively ensconsed at Harvard, I see no reason to conceal the truth. I is necessary to reveal this so that people can correctly evaluate his political pronouncements on Iraq and Afghanistan, and his motives in making them.

In putting himself forward for election, Stewart has forfeited the right to conceal his background from the electorate.

I cringed throughout Gordon Brown's speech yesterday. I retain, despite all, a soft spot for Gordon Brown. I know enough people who know him from Edinburgh, to be convinced that Brown basically means well. He is very wrong, but he means well. That is in sharp contrast to Blair, who is just a very talented charlatan devoid of any core belief other than his own self enrichment.

The Labour conference is attended by people whose standard of living depends upon their party having control of the state apparatus. Blair delivered on their personal craving for power and position, but self-evidently cared about none of the social justice issues which the party's founders really did believe in, and which the conference members like to think they believe in, when they are maudlin drunk. So they followed Tony without loving him, and reserved warmer cheers for Gordon who they sensed was not actually a bad person.

Now, with no Blair to contrast with, Brown's appeal of being well meaning but crap is less obvious. Watching him make a conference speech is like watching Eddie the Eagle plunge down a ski ramp - he is plucky but utterly unsuited. Indeed these are qualities which are fundamental to Grodon's world view, as evidence by the execrable ghost written books he churns out, on themes like Courage and Britishness. It as though he is stuck in the Boy's Own Paper. No wonder he believes he saved the world.

Yesterday's speech was just excruciating to watch. The "Highlight" was a list of New Labour's alleged achievements. He emphasised each by an extraordinary jerky hunch of the shoulders accompanied by a swivel of the head. It looked really weird - like a Gerry Anderson puppet, but without the warmth.

It was almost as weird as the previous day's Mandelson performance. That was the most self-regarding speech I have ever heard, returning again and again to Mandelson himself as the reference point of success. His culminating point - "If I can come back, we can come back" deserves more analysis. What does it mean? "Because this government is so dodgy that a Minister twice sacked for corruption can come back a third time, then people will vote for us"?

Brown has promised us Magdalen homes for pregnant teens and an unspecified further crackdown on yobs. Here again Brown moved into superhero mode. "Whenever and wherever there is anti-social behaviour, we will be there to fight it." That is plainly not true. It lacks any connection with reality. To seek to reduce anti-social behaviour is a good thing. Much more attention needs to be paid to the causes of the loss of family and community cohesion, and less to immediate recourse to the criminal legal system. But the idea that superheroes will descend "whenever and wherever" goes beyond the realm of legitimate rhetorical aspiration into the realm of delusion.

Brown's empty rhetoric on banking bonuses could not conceal the fact that he intends to do nothing practical about them.

There is no real connection between yesterday's speech and the announcement that the Sun will no longer support New Labour, other than being timed to endear Murdoch to the Tories.

New Labour should not be sorry to have lost Murdoch's support. They should be deeply ashamed that they ever had it. At the last election, the Sun made plain that it was only endorsing New Labour because of Iraq and the "War on Terror" agenda.

Should New Labour ever recover electoral support, it will be after a period in opposition in which it must decide whether to try to outflank the Tories from the right and try to ally again with Murdoch, or try to remember something of what it was founded for.

How long will the "New Labour" brand be retained? It is associated with the liberalisation of banking regulaton and the disatrous collapse that followed, and with the horror of Bush foreign policy. If "New Labour" were a car, it would be eligible for Mandelson's scrappage scheme.

One of my passionate convictions is a belief in international law to govern relations between nations and to establish basic rules of humanitarian conduct within nations.

A comment on my last posting asked by what right the Royal Navy was intercepting vessels carrying narcotics on the High Seas. In one sense the answer is straightforward, and contained in Article 108 of the UN Convention on The Law of The Sea:

Article108

Illicit traffic in narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances

1. All States shall cooperate in the suppression of illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances engaged in by ships on the high seas contrary to international conventions.

2. Any State which has reasonable grounds for believing that a ship flying its flag is engaged in illicit traffic in narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances may request the cooperation of other States to suppress such traffic.

That is slightly more complicated than it sounds. It is rather ambiguous about whether you need the permission of the flag state (the state where the ship is registered) before you can board a vessel on the High Seas. The most obvious interpretation might be that para 2 indicates you do need permission, and para 1 indicates the flag state should give it.

In most cases you would try to get permission of the flag state before acting against one of its ships, but that may not be practicable in a fast moving operation. The situation is complicated by the fact that the law presumes flag states to be responsible. Although the some of the worst of the abuse has been ameliorated, that is of course far from the case. Liberia and Panama were the most famous examples where the corrupt government of a petty or failed state
sold the right to register ships to unscrupulous businessmen, who granted the flag to any owner who wished to escape serious regulation of the safety of the vessel and crew, qualification requirements for officers, union recognition, and environmental and other regulation which may be practiced by a "real" flag state. The Liberian shipping register was not based in, and had no connection to Liberia other than the formal payment and larger backhanders for the rights.

For those with a Third World Good, First World Bad view of international relations, it is worth noting that attempts to reform the blatant abuse were frustrated for decades by the G77 in the UN.

I am not aware of any case law on the subject. It seems improbable that any flag state would want to go to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea over an intercept on the High Seas which did net a haul of drugs. But if an innocent vessel - let's say a Venezuelan one - is boarded without permission of Venezuela on the High Seas, the law may be clarified.

The point is an important one; an example is the Proliferation Security Initiative. This was a Bush Blair plan to intercept ships going to North Korea on the High Seas and search them for nuclear components. Interestingly the initial plan adopted in September 2003 was for an international naval patrol by UK, US, Australia and others to intercept ships going to North Korea to prevent passage of "Narcotics and WMD".

Now there is no right at all in international law to stop vessels on the High Seas and search them for WMD components. But there is the duty under UNCLOS to co-operate against narcotics trafficking. Bush and Blair cannot seriously have expected anybody to believe that their scheme was designed to prevent narcotics being smuggled into North Korea. Plainly the inclusion of narcotics was intended to abuse the powers under that head in order to search for something else. In fact, the Proliferation Security Initiative plainly required a Security Council Resolutin, and China made plain that Bush/Blair were not going to get away with that one.

Another comment on the same thread alluded to the Israeli ramming of an aid/campaigning ship en route to Gaza, and suggested there is no such thig as international law.

Well, the Israeli action was plainly illegal in any number of ways. A naval attack on a peaceful civilian ship not in time of war, a denial of innocent passage or freedom of the High Seas (depending exactly where it took place) and a subsequent failure of the duty to render assistance to a vessel in distress. It is not that there is no international law; the problem is enforcing it.

From 1945 for the next 50 years, international law made tremendous strides in establishing basic rights and norms and regulating relations between states. International judicial institutions made hundreds of landmark judgements, which were indeed in the vast majority of cases complied with. The US had a history of holding out against such developments and then, a couple of decades after everyone else, signing up (as with the Convention on the Law of the Sea).

Then came the Bush/Blair disaster. With Russia in near catatonic economic shock and China just starting to emerge, Bush/Blair argued that the might of a single military superpower equalled right, and that the moral convictions of divinely inspired leaderhip overrode international law. The illegal invasion of Iraq, the use of torture, the abjuring of the Geneva Conventions, were just part of the Bush/Blair attack on the whole concept of being bound by law. It was a Neitzschean view of the US President as Hero.

With the UK and half of Europe following the money, the pier of the largest bulwark of support for the concept of international law was fatally corroded.

One key aspect of the development of international law prior to this was a growing acceptance of the notion that at some point international law obtains a universality, whether or not states have signed up to the specific instrument. This is separate to the question of the number of ratifications needed to bring the Treaty into force, though that is a necessary prior step. Put another way, notions encapsulated in treaties pass into customary international law.

This is, in fact, common sense. Nuremburg confirmed the principle - it would not have been taken as a defence for the Nazi leaders to say that they did not subscribe to the same system of morality as the rest of the world.

Which brings me to Israel. The fact that Israel is one of the handful of countries not to have ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, does not make it any less illegal for Israel to ram civilian vessels. Equally - and contrary to the point made by another commenter on an earlier entry - Israeli nuclear weapons are not legal, just because Israel has not ratified the nuclear non-proliferation treaties. Israel has no more right than Nazi Germany to choose to be an aggressive rogue state, and cannot simply claim to be above the framework of international law.

It is, of course, perfectly possible for behaviour to be legal yet still reprehensible. It is worth noting that it is perfectly legal for Iran to develop medium range missiles. But to test fire them now is an obvious provocation from a regime that is fanatical and deeply irresponsible.

The annoying thing about Ahmadinejad's speech at the UN was that there were whole swathes of it with which I was entirely in agreement. At least he did not get into holocaust denial on this occasion: if he could have further refrained from the couple of sentences which were indeed anti-semitic, he would have made the walkout appear unjustified and puerile, But the man is plainly deranged. (I expect that Roman Polanski, whose mother died in Auschwitz, would be surprised at the claim that the Holocuast was an invention.)

While Iran is entitled to develop its missiles, to develop nuclear warheads is illegal. I have maintained all along that Iran is indeed seeking to do this, and the admittance of its secret nstallation is pretty hard to construe as part of peaceful nuclear power development.

Incidentally, this is what a secret nuclear installation looks like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbjgDERSuiI&feature=player_embedded

I can think of no justification at all for taking any measures against Iran over its nuclear programme, that we do not take against Israel for its major illegal nuclear arsenal.

The signs are good for the developing US/Russian rapprochement on Iran, and I regard that as a good thing. It moves us further from a scenario in which the US may be involved in a military attack on Iran, and leaves Gordon Brown out of line in the ferocity of his anti-Iranian rhetoric. I expect that New Labour feel they could use a war before the general election, but I don't think they will get one.

Thanks to Tony for the link.

I congratulate the Royal Navy on their seizure of 5.5 tones of cocaine off the South American coast. In the long term this drug should be legalised, taxed and regulated. But until then, the organised crime caused by prohibition should be combated, and the Royal Navy did a good job.

What an astonishing contrast to Afghanistan, where the massive coalition forces in the country turn an effective blind eye to the industrial scale production of heroin all around them. Between 85 and 90% of heroin production is controlled by the warlords and gangsters of the hideously corrupt and undemocratic Karzai regime, whose rule our soldiers die to enforce.

Just a few random facts to help people remember the great tradition of New Labour in supporting ordinary working people:

Tony Blair is chraging between £100,000 and £200,000 per speech - while for just an extra £180, attendees can have their photograph taken with him.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6850868.ece

Baroness Scotland paid her husekeeper just £6 per hour.
The visa in the housekeeper's passport had already expired (irrespective of whether it was genuine or not) before Baroness Scotland claimed to have seen it.

A friend in the FCO has told me that the French proposal for a cap on bankers' bonuses, against which Gordon Brown fought furiously in the EU, G8 and G20, suggested a limit of 8 million euro per banker per year. Brown said this was too restrictive. Brown will announce to great fanfare in Brighton instead a system where bonuses are delayed and paid part in shares (which saves the bankers 22% in income tax).

These changes are meaningless as the bankers are rather well placed to borrow against their delayed bonuses and shares, and can just up them to defray the cost of doing so...

As I have previously stated, I can affirm that the FCO and MI6 knew that al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber.

I strongly recommend that you read this devastating article by the great lawyer Gareth Peirce, in the London Review of Books. Virtually every paragraph provides information which in itself demolishes the conviction. The totality of the information Peirce gives is a quite stunning picture of not accidental but deliberate miscarriage of justice.

Here is an excerpt:

Thurman had made the Libyan connection, and its plausibility relied on the accuracy of his statement that the fragment of circuit board proved that it would have been possible for the unaccompanied bag to fly from Malta without the seemingly inevitable mid-air explosion. And thus it was that a witness from Switzerland, Edwin Bollier, the manufacturer of the MEBO circuit board, was called on to provide evidence that such boards had been sold exclusively to Libya. Bollier was described by al-Megrahi's barrister in his closing speech as an 'illegitimate arms dealer with morals to match'. The evidence he was clearly intended to provide had begun to unravel even before the trial began. Sales elsewhere in the world were discovered, Thurman did not appear at the trial, and the judges commented that Bollier's evidence was 'inconsistent' and 'self-contradictory'. Other witnesses, they found, had 'openly lied to the court'. Despite all this al-Megrahi was convicted.

Bollier had been one of the most potentially dubious of many dubious witnesses for the prosecution. But Dr Köchler, the UN's observer throughout the trial, recorded that Bollier had been 'brusquely interrupted' by the presiding judge when he attempted to raise the issue of the possible manipulation of the timer fragments. Could the MEBO board, or a part of one, have been planted in such a way that it could be conveniently 'discovered'? After the trial, new evidence that would have been at the centre of al-Megrahi's now abandoned appeal made this suggestion more credible: a Swiss electronics engineer called Ulrich Lumpert, formerly employed by Bollier's firm, stated in an affidavit to Köchler that in 1989 he stole a 'non-operational' timing board from MEBO and handed it to 'a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case'. Bollier himself told Köchler that he was offered $4 million if he would connect the timer to Libya.

There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes's findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled 'cloth (charred)' by him, but then overwritten as 'debris' even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been 'found' by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive.

Even if one knew nothing of the devastating findings of the public inquiry in the early 1990s into the false science that convicted the Maguire Seven or of the succession of thunderous judgments in the Court of Appeal in case after case in which RARDE scientists had provided the basis for wrongful convictions, Hayes's key evidence in this case on the key fragment should be viewed as disgraceful. There is a basic necessity for evidential preservation in any criminal case: every inspection must be logged, chronology recorded, detail noted. But at every point in relation to this vital fragment that information was either missing or had been altered, although Hayes had made meticulous notes in respect of every single one of the hundreds of other exhibits he inspected in the Lockerbie investigation.

The entire article really should be read by anybody with any interest in British or US politics.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/peir01_.html

Thanks to David Rose.

I am watching BBC Question Time, for the first time for many months. I am genuinely astonished at the right wing bias of the panel. That the two "non-party" panel members are Digby Jones and Fraser Nelson shows the determination of the BBC to cover the full spectrum of political opinion from very right to very very right.

That they could not find a single panel member who supports the release of al-Megrahi, or who was prepared to mention that he might well not be the Lockerbie bomber, rendered the whole first fifteen minutes of "debate" otiose

As previously mentioned, I was once invited to be a panelist on Question Time but was cancelled by the BBC at short notice. .The BBC more recently caused a storm by inviting the BNP on to Question Time. I have stood against the BNP in two parliamentary elections - one in Norwich, and one in the very heart of the BNP heartland in Blackburn. Combining both parliamentary elections, as a mere individual I gained just two votes less than the BNP.

Yet, according to the BBC, I am officially banned from politics programmes on the BBC because I have no evidence of popular support for my views, while according to the BBC, the BNP have to be invited because of the extent of the popular support for their views.

The truth is that there is no concept of too right wing at the BBC, while there is a concept of too radical. The one no go area is a questioning of the narrative of the War on Terror.

Fascists are within the pale; sceptics are not.

Everybody in London with any connection to the media knows that Baroness Scotland's ex housekeeper, Loloahi Tapui- Zivancevic, is loudly denying that Baroness Scotland checked her immigration documentation, and cancassing selling this story.

So why are both the BBC and Sky reporting Ms Tapui- Zivancevic's arrest without mentioning the fact that she is calling the Baroness a liar.

A friend of mine in MI6 told me earlier this year that for the first time, the Israeli nuclear arsenal is now bigger than the British nuclear arsenal.

Plainly that is of no concern to Gordon Brown, because while he exhibited righteous indignation today at Iran's attempts to acquire a nuclear weapon, Israel's large and expanding nuclear arsenal was not mentioned at all. The potential to make a bomb in a few years should bring sanctions; the possession of an illegal arsenal of 162 warheads (in February - probably 165 by now) should not even rate a mention. New Labour have of course been providing heavy water and nuclear components to Israel, with a false paper trail through Norway.

I am very pleased that Brown has put the UK's nuclear weapons into disarmament talks and has endorsed the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. But with Israel not a party to any of the treaties, and with Brown and Obama refusing to admit even that the World's fourth largest nuclear arsenal exists, I can only presume they believe that nobody should possess nuclear weapons - except Israel,

At 2am I watched a repeat of Nick Clegg's conference speech in full on the Parliament Channel. The Liberals and the Lib Dems always had a knack of producing leaders who were liked and respected. Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe, David Steel, Paddy Ashdown and Charlie Kennedy were all among the first rank of effective and charismatic parliamentarians of their day (I am not here discussing the merits of their policy positions or extra-parliamentary activities).

But in Menzies Campbell and Nick Clegg the Lib Dems have produced two total duds. Both have the same leaden delivery and both are self evident preeners with an opinion of themselves which far outstrips their talent. I am not sure I have ever seen any conference speech by any leader of any party as devoid of charisma as Nick Clegg's was yesterday.

You can't replace charisma, but there are some things which can compensate for its absence. Heartfelt sincerity is the most important of these. That was particularly lacking, too. The only bit of Clegg's speech that came across as compellingly believable was when he declared that he wanted to be Prime Minister.

I am sure he does. I want to bat at No 3 for England.

But why? There were two areas where the insincerity was so evident that it made my flesh creep. And they were areas where the Lib Dems should be making the running - on Afghanistan and Trident.

On Afghanistan, Clegg started his speech with an attempt to invoke the glib patriotism of The Sun, with a heartfelt tribute to our boys and girls fighting over there. Except they were, of course being let down by the government. They needed more helicopters and equipment to kill Afghans more effectively, (he left out the last phrase).

We should do the job properly or not at all, Clegg declared in a truly pathetic attempt to appease neo-imperialists and anti-imperialists both at the same time. It was a sickeningly cynical bit of politics from someone who was masquerading as a Liberal.

Clegg spent the entire conference attempting to appeal to Thatcherites by proposing cuts in public spending, including in public service pay and pensions. But on the obvious and largest waste of public money he offered only a completely meaningless formula. There should be "No like for like replacement of Trident", he intoned with a constipated look on his face that was meant to indicate statesmanship. The remarkably small conference audience duly applauded.

"No like for like replacement of Trident". How can people who are supposed to be thinking Liberals applaud such a transparently meaningless phrase? What a pathetic ducking of the issue. It could mean that the UK retains and pays for a submarine based offshoot of the US nuclear deterrent, but configured differently. It could encompass Brown's three submarine proposal. It could mean - and this seems to me the most likely meaning - that we should keep and pay for an offshoot of the US based nuclear deterrent but it should not be submarine based. But as with the support for the occupation of Afghanistan, there was no underlying rationale; just a burning desire to try to appeal to all shades of opinion at once.

I shan't bother to try to deconstruct Clegg's "Progressive austerity", which might be the worst political slogan ever conceived. His abandonment of the Lib Dem commitment to abolish univeristy tuition fees is shameful. To pretend that what happens in Scotland is impossible for England is foolish. To prioritise a pointless nuclear deterrent and an imperial war over social progress and mobility is not, in any sense, liberal.

The problem with an increase in the tax threshold to £10,000 is that, while it does lift the low paid out of income tax, it provides precisely the same cash tax cut to everybody earning £10,000 or over. Someone on £10,000 a year will get exactly the same cash boost as the banker on £5 million a year. Both will get a bigger cash boost than someone on £8,000 a year. How is that progressive?

At the last general election the Lib Dems under the excellent Charlie Kennedy offered a viable, radical alternative. At the coming election they will offer Clegg's carefully crafted attempts not to offend Tory England. As the party has grown, and as the allowances of public money for MPs' and MEPs' staff have created a parisitic army of the paid ambitious, the Lib Dems have become merely slaves to the worship of power. I can think of no reason to vote for a party led by Nick Clegg.

Baroness Scotland has an extremely high opinion of herself, and an extremely low opinion of anybody who might question her. She laughed in the House of Lords at Eric Lubbock, when he was making a perfectly correct point about the burdens placed by the government on the immigration service exceeding the capacity of the staff to deliver.

Lord Avebury: ...That seems to be of fundamental importance in deciding whether the Immigration and Nationality directorate is capable of coping with any new burdens that are placed on it, let alone the ones that are specified in these regulations. The Minister may snigger, but this is not a laughing matter.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I am not sniggering. The noble Lord is not right. We have tried extremely hard to deal seriously with this matter. I was merely shaking my head in disbelief

In the same Lords debate on 23 April 2004 Baroness Scotland went on to pooh-pooh the idea that proposed requirements on small employers to check and to keep copies of employees' immigration status and documents, were difficult or excessive.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal ... The employer has then simply to take a copy of the application form or other document proving exemption. That would provide them with their statutory defence and authorise them to employ the person

She was not at that moment referring to the precise category of immigrant in which her housekeeper fell, but she was to pilot legislation through the Lords which did cover her housekeeper, and to defend the obligations it placed on employers.

Plainly Baroness Scotland would not have been fined £5,000 if she had not done something wrong. Plainly she was aware in general of the legal obligations on employees to keep copies of employees' immigration status documents, and plainly she did not do this.

Any sin of omission can be described as "Accidental", like failing to pay your income tax. But coming from the high-handed sneerer who pushed the very legislation through the Lords, of course she should resign.

I do not believe her story that she did check the documents but did not keep copies. The basic document to check is the visa, which states very clearly the position on entitlement to work. Is she claiming she saw but did not copy forged documents? What precisely is she claiming?

There is of course the wider question of our hypocrisy on immigration. Major British cities are heavily dependent on illegal immigrants. Every middle class Londoner has been served by an illegal immigrant in a cafe, restaurant or pub, been inside offices cleaned by illegal immigrants and often had work done in their house by illegal immigrants. I personally have several friends who are illegal immigrants, and several more who are fictional students at fake language schools.

If you look at remittances from workers in the UK back to their families in poor countries, these cash flows would be impossible on the basis of the "official" ethnic community in the UK. Ghana, for example, receives personal remittances which are greater than the country's exports; the UK is the biggest source. I would put just the Ghanaian illegal immigrant community in the UK at well over 100,000.

The total number of illegal immigrants in the UK is almost certainly well over a million.

Boris Johnson has been the only prominent politician I can recall who has been brave enough to face the facts and call for an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Most of the political class simply prefer to pretend the problem does not exist. The illegal immigrants are not going to go home and you can't deport over a million people without becoming still more of a police state. The economy couldn't cope if you did, as British people won't do many of the jobs involved - like being the sniggering bitch's housekeeper.

It is indeed anomalous that illegal immigrants can very easily get National Insurance numbers. But it is also a good thing. It is much better for them to be working and contributing.

Baroness Scotland has been revealed as a hypocrite of remarkable proportions. But until their is a serious effort to address the status of our massive illegal immigrant workforce, we continue to be dependent on an entire class of non-people.

Gordon Brown is making the headlines this morning with an offer to cut the Trident II deterrent from four to three submarines. While something of an improvement on New Labour's previous stance of unthinking macho pro-nuclear posturing, it still goes nowhere near addressing the fundamental futility of Trident.

Who is it meant to deter? In all the analysis on the attempts of Iran and North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons, I don't recall any serious commentator from any political perspective even mentioning the British nuclear deterrent as a factor in the equation.

I am no fan of Putin, but neither can I now conceive a nuclear standoff with Russia or with China, as the ideological divide has effectively collapsed.

New Labour's original proposal forTrident II was a huge increase in killing power over the current Trident. We need more detail on the number of not just submarines but also the number of independently targetable warheads and their size, but it remains probable that Brown's proposed three nuclear submarines of Trident II will still represent an increase, not a decrease, in the already massive destructive power of the four nuclear submarines of Trident I.

But I fail to understand why we are discussing at all the huge expenditure on this extraordinary monument to human evil, when we are going to have to pay for it entirely from borrowing on top of already over-massive government debt.

The government have already announced they are planning to slash secondary school teachers. Incredibly they are planning to introduce yet more internal market "reform" into the National Health Service, as a means of saving money, in face of overwhelming evidence that this approach hugely increases spending on accounting and administration without delivering service improvements or savings.

Trident missiles; immoral, useless and ruinously unaffordable. But Gordon Brown isn't going to increase their killing power by as much as he had originally planned to increase it. So that's alright then.

Brown's hand has been forced, of course, by Obama's consistent and generally laudable initiatives. We await the meat of his proposed nuclear weapon reductions. But the cancellation of the Bush plans for a new interceptor missile system in Eastern Europe should be applauded - with caveats.

It was always a pathetic fiction that the system was intended to defend against non-existent intercontinental ballistic missiles from Iran carrying non-existent Iranian nuclear warheads. The Russians were quite right to suspect that the defences were primarily against Russian missiles. It is a fascinating thing that the most passionate advocates of Mutual Assured Destruction spend a great deal of their time, and billions of taxpayers' money, on trying to take the mutual out of it.

Under Putin, Russia has moved in a highly unpleasant authoritarian and nationalist direction. Russian schools once again elide the Stalin-Hitler pact. The Great Patriotic War only started in 1941, while Stalin's appalling crimes are minimised and his image burnished. The murder of independent journalists continues apace, almost unreported in the West. Opposition political parties cannot campaign, and the space for independent media has almost completely vanished.

But the Bush administration's standoff with Putin was not connected to Russia's internal authoritarianism. Dictatorship did not worry Bush in the least in the US/Uzbek alliance, for example. The US/Russia standoff was a retreat into the Cold War postures and hard sphere of influence politics. It was a return to they system that was so profitable for the arms industry and military complex throughout the Cold War. US attitudes, summed up by forcing the missile defence scheme onto Russia's borders, helped create the Russian paranoia which boosted Putin's nationalist support.

A warming of US/Russian relations will be no bad thing, and may open the way to more sensible ways of interacting with Iran. But there are other aspects to this which are more worrying.

The Obama administration has been at pains to emphasise that the missile defence scheme is being reconfigured, not being abandoned. The Russians had earlier made an offer to the Americans to share their radar system monitoring Iranian airspace from Baku. This would have involved stationing of US forces in Azerbaijan.

According to one of my FCO sources, the US have now indicated to the Russians that they wish to revisit this Russian proposal. There is more to this than joint cooperation over Iran. Russia had effectively rolled back US influence in the ex-Soviet space of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Gazprom had tied up the gas of the Central Asian states, and the US was evicted from its airbase in Uzbekistan and had received marching orders to withdraw from Kirghizstan. Its major remaining ally, Georgia, was militarily humiliated by Russia, driving home a hard lesson in the realities of power in the region.

The Obama administration has been carefully and slowly clawing back ground, in particular seeking to rebuild its supply access to Afghanistan through Central Asia. A transit agreement with President Karimov of Uzbekistan in March this year was a key step. A US military presence in Baku would be a major part of the jigsaw.

But the regime of President Aliyev of Azerbaijan, whose father was once Putin's KGB boss, is almost as brutal as that of President Karimov. For the US to seek to back up its Afghan policy by forging alliances wth such regimes, will dismay many of Obama's supporters.

This comes as any last vestige of moral justification for the occupation of Afghanistan disappears in the light of a massively fraudulent election and increasing public understanding of the huge corruption, warlordism and misogynism of the Karzai government, floated on a sea of heroin production.

The "return" of General Dostum, the vicious Uzbek warlord, drug baron and mass killer who heads the Northern Alliance, is a symbol of the moral bankruptcy of Obama on Afghanistan. Dostum had officially been exiled to Turkey by Karzai for murdering a number of political rivals. In fact he spent very little time in Turkey but was running his fiefdom from a home near Mazar e Sharif and supervising his heroin trade. But he was officially brought back from Turkey by Karzai for the election, with US approval, and duly delivered votes of over 100% for Karzai in many Uzbek areas of Afghanistan.

Now the Pentagon is proposing to initiate weapons supply on a massive scale to Dostum's private army, to fight the Taliban. They believe this would have more chance of success than building the hopeless Afghan army (of which Dostum remains nominal Chief of Staff).

Dostum used to tie dissidents within his own ranks to tank tracks to be driven in front of his men as an example. He had hundreds of alleged Taliban supporters killed by crowding them into sealed containers in the desert sun. He is believed to have killed some 3,000 "Taliban" prisoners, and controls the drug trade through Uzbekistan to the Baltic and Europe.

Obama's foreign policy is undoubtedly an improvement on his predecessor and in the area of missiles and nuclear weaponry deserves to be labelled progressive. But the moral poison of the Afghan War is fatal to his efforts.

Sorry about that false dawn - seems I was sicker than I thought. Three days ago I decided I was well enough to go out for a walk, and after just four hundred yards I collapsed in the street, which was dead embarassing. First everything went orange then my legs wouldn't hold me anymore. I was helped home by a young couple from Kosovo.

Unfortunately, I think the damage to my lungs caused by the extraordinary near fatal episode detailed in Murder in Samarkand, most likely an attempt to kill me, has left me less able to cope with routine stuff like flu. But I think I really have recovered now - I feel fine. I have lost just over a stone, which is probably no bad thing.

Nadira and Cameron are fine, neither show any signs of catching anything.

That was a nasty flu. No idea if it was a swine flu or not, but I finally have recovered a little energy today. I feel like I've been punched in the face, but I can manage the stairs again.

Talking of flu, this is an interesting story which could be a great mine for conspiracy theorists:

Craig Murray, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, stumbles across the fact that the British government is routinely receiving intelligence from torture, through the CIA. He knows that the CIA is flying people in to Uzbekistan to be tortured. He directly documents a number of false flag bombings and other devices designed to exaggerate the al-Qaida threat in Central Asia.

He dutifully reports all this back to his superiors in London. He is recalled, told that this is UK policy and he should shut up. Continuing his investigations in Tashkent, he is suddenly faced with eighteen serious disciplinary allegations. They include criminal allegations like selling visas for sex, and an accusation that he is an alcohlic.

He is told the allegations will be heard in secret and he is not allowed to tell anyone, not even to prepare a defence. He has a nervous breakdown. Downing St leaks details of the more lurid allegations to the tabloids but this backfires. Murray is known in media circles and his human rights work is respected. The accusations meet with widespread media derision, and Murray is acquitted on all counts.

Returning to Tashkent in triumph, he collapses after two days with multiple pulmonary emboli (blood clots in both lungs). He nearly dies and is in a coma for five days. There is never an explanation of the cause of so many blood clots, and doctors are suspicious. Unexpectedly he recovers, but is given six months to three years to live due to resulting pulmonary hypertension. He is dismissed as Ambassador when one of his telegrams on torture and intelligence is leaked to the Financial Times - who nonetheless do not publish the most damning bits.

Murray proves to have the extremely rare ability to regrow the arteries in his lungs, and starts to recover. He tries to make public the British government's complicity in torture, releasing documents on the internet and publishing Murder in Samarkand, which tells the above story.

Murray stands against Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Blackburn in the 2005 General Election. The BBC make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Murray. Esther Oxford, the Assistant Director and cinematographer on the documentary, lives with Murray for four weeks to film it. After the election Oxford and her camera are even admitted to the operating theatre for Murray's heart surgery.

Murray becomes good friends with Oxford and presenter John Sweeney. But when the documentary is made, The Ambassador's Last Stand concentrates heavily on Murray's personal eccentricities and thus discounts his allegations of British government complicity in torture. The Murrays and Oxfords remain friends, however. Murray meets Esther's father, the virologist Professor John Oxford, and Murray's wife Nadira dances at Esther's wedding.

Murray gives evidence to the European Parliament on UK complicity in torture. Returning on the Eurostar, he sits with a Tory MEP, a descendant of T E Lawrence. The MEP shows Murray on the train Lawrence's original map of proposed boundaries for the Middle East.

In researching the possible dangers from avian flu, Prof Oxford exhumes a victim of the Spanish flu of 1919, who was buried in a lead coffin. The corpse is not just anybody - it is Sir Mark Sykes. Sykes is the diplomat who negotiated the infamous Sykes-Picot map, dividing the Middle East on colonial lines between British and French puppet regimes. This is done contrary to the hopes of Lawrence for a strong Arab nation, and behind the back of Woodrow Wilson. Sykes dies on the way home from the negotiations.

Six months after Sykes is exhumed, a global flu pandemic is first identified in Mexico.

All of the above is true.

The first half of the story, as contained in Murder in Samarkand, is the tale of a genuine government conspiracy to use torture, falsify intelligence and smear an innocent man to cover it up.

In the second half I conflate my tenuous connection with John Oxford, an interesting meeting on a train and the Sykes/Lawrence link, plus the timing of Sykes' exhumation and the outbreak of swine flu. I really don't believe those are any more than mild coincidences. But I can see inspiration for a novel in there if they were beefed up a bit.

Been laid up in bed for the last few days with a very nasty flu.

In another example of the mad obsession with seeking a delusory security no matter what the impact on liberty, the government is bringing in a screening scheme which means that, at the government's own estimate, 11.4 million people who come into contact with children will need to obtain a certificate to show that they have no relevant criminal record. This will cost them £64 each.

Statistically the chance of any given child being harmed by someone other than a family member is extremely small - and almost certainly no larger than it ever was. This is an extraordinary, even ludicrous, apotheosis of the idea that the state should attempt to pre-empt all evil.

If we can pull back from the manipulation of fear and the exaggeration of risk, the madness of the scheme is evident. Not only Scoutleaders, choirmasters and football coaches will need to be certified, but so will parents who give a lift to other people's children to school, and authors who enter schools to chat about their books (including me). If you give a lift to school to a neighbour's children a few times without beiing certified, you will get a criminal record and a £5,000 fine.

Relatives, of course, are exempt - which as they are statistically by a huge degree the most likely people to harm the kids, only further points up the nonsense.

I hesitated to write that, lest the government has the wheeze of bringing in a certificate you need to be an uncle.

The scheme represents a monstrous new bureaucracy and yet a further radical extension of government databases on ordinary people. It will not stop child abuse at all. To take as one example the recent high profile case of Vanessa George, Plymouth nursery teacher accused of child sex abuse. Ms George could have easily obtained a certificate as she had no prior convictions.

Of the 0.00001% of those coming into voluntary and helpful contact with children, who have a secret motive to harm them, most will be volunteering because that is their only opportunity of access. The man who wants to be a scout assistant because he wants access to molest children is not likely to have other access and therefore not likely to have a record which the check will show up - if he's daft enough to apply in his own name.

There are already other mechanisms which help stop convicted sex offenders committing crime again. They are not perfect, but you will never stop all evil. The determined criminal will get hold of certificates through aliases or forgery if they really wish, or just snatch kids from playgrounds.

This scheme makes as much sense as would a requirement to produce a certificate saying that you are not a bank robber, before you are permitted to enter a bank. A society that can support this scheme has been firghtened out of its senses. The government seeks to treat everyone as a sex offender unless they can prove otherwise. It is crazy. The effect will be to stigmatise normal relationships with children, to point suspicion at anybody who chooses to interact with other people's children, and to reduce participation in scouts, guides, sports and many other voluntary activities.

Sooner or later an "Agency" run by some of the government's business friends will be coining money from running the scheme. It's an ill wind...