The Rest Is Silence

Indie :

When Charlene Downes disappeared from her Blackpool home in the winter of 2003, her mother, Karen, put her faith in the police to find the 14-year-old.

Six years later, there is still no trace of the girl, who is now presumed murdered. Yet despite a lengthy investigation and a Crown Court trial, no one has been convicted of killing the teenager. And, because of a litany of mistakes by detectives investigating the case, it is now unlikely anyone ever will be.

Yesterday, the police watchdog, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) ruled that covert surveillance evidence gathered against the two main suspects in the case was flawed. This means that the evidence can never be submitted in court.

The IPCC said that Lancashire Constabulary's investigation was "handled poorly and unprofessionally" and that the evidence contained a "catalogue of errors which undermined the court case". Seven detectives will be disciplined.

Karen Downes has given up all hope of justice for her daughter. "Whoever killed Charlene must be laughing their heads off," she said. "I feel really let down that the police put us through this trauma when they must have known there were problems with the evidence. To me this just means they will never catch who killed my daughter. They've got no evidence at all now, have they?"

The IPCC report relates to the May 2007 trial of Iyad Albattikhi, who was charged with murdering Charlene, and Mohammed Raveshi, who was charged with helping Mr Albattikhi dispose of the body.

During the trial, the jury was played taped conversations in which Mr Albattikhi, who ran a takeaway restaurant in the seaside town, joked that he killed the girl, that she was "chopped up" and her body had "gone in the kebabs". In another excerpt, he said: "I killed her, I killed a girl ... I was just angry." His co-accused was heard on the tapes saying: "There is nothing left of her. She was here, she died, there really is nothing."

The jury failed to reach a verdict. A retrial was set for April 2008. However, while preparing for the second trial, senior police officers raised issues with the surveillance evidence, much of which had been obtained by a police informant, David Cassidy, who had worn a wire-tap device when speaking to Mr Albattikhi and Mr Raveshi.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was notified, as was the IPCC. The second trial was abandoned when the CPS offered no evidence against the men. Mr Albattikhi and Mr Raveshi, who say they have never met Charlene, were released.

Yesterday, after an 18-month investigation, the IPCC revealed that the flaws in the evidence included the fact that much of the recorded tape and video evidence was not properly transcribed, that the officers working on the investigation were "inexperienced and untrained" and that the informant, Mr Cassidy, was not properly briefed and so therefore asked the suspects leading questions.

One officer will face a disciplinary hearing, one has received a written warning and five will be given words of advice. Two other detectives retired before the investigation was completed and so cannot now be dealt with by the IPCC. A 10th, who has also retired but is still employed in a civilian capacity, will have his position considered.

Naseem Malik, the IPCC commissioner for the North-west, said: "Six years since the disappearance of Charlene, her parents are no nearer to knowing what happened to their daughter. I cannot imagine how distressing this must be for them. The failings in Lancashire Constabulary's investigation can only have compounded that distress. Lessons must be learned ... to ensure such failures cannot happen again."

The disappearance of Charlene, who would be aged 20 now, exposed a dark side to Blackpool's holiday resort image. During the trial, the court heard that Charlene was one of a number of girls who frequented local takeaways and performed sex acts on male employees in exchange for food and cigarettes.

The tragedy has also taken its toll on the Downes family. A week after the trial collapsed, Karen Downes was arrested for stabbing her husband, Robert, during an argument. He did not press charges, saying he understood his wife lashed out because of grief and distress.

Last month, Charlene's older sister Emma, 24, went on trial for racially assaulting Iyad Albattikhi's brother, Tariq, at a nightclub. The charge was dropped when she admitted a lesser charge of common assault, accepting she slapped the man once. She was stopped from doing so a second time when he grabbed her hand and told her: "It's got nothing to do with me."

Karen Downes is still angry. She has criticised the police for not doing enough to find her daughter, saying that Charlene's working-class upbringing meant that her disappearance was not taken seriously.

"I often wonder," her mother says, "if she had been from a posh family and was having piano lessons, would they have tried harder to find her?"

Even yesterday's announcement that the police officers whose conduct during the investigation effectively scuppered any hope of a prosecution will be disciplined has not sated her anger.

She told The Independent: "I have only just come to terms with the fact that Charlene is dead. It's very hard to accept, but I know deep down that she must be dead because she would have been back by now if she wasn't.

"I've been told I'll get an apology from the police but I don't want them to say sorry. An apology is not going to find my daughter. The fact that some police officers will be punished is no consolation. I want to know what the police plan to do now. But I know the answer: nothing. There is nothing they can do. Unless they find her body and it has DNA or some sort of forensic evidence, there is no way they will be able to convict anyone now."

God rest her soul. Other posts on the Charlene Downes murder here.

A Small Postette

at Biased-BBC.

From Whence Hails Huhne ?

Everyone knows about Lib Dem Lembit Opik’s Estonian heritage, featuring astronomer and meteor guru Ernst Opik - not to mention great-uncle Oskar sieg-heiling through WW2 as a senior member of the puppet Estonian government set up when the Germans arrived.

But Chris Huhne is a bit of a mystery man out of nowhere. Nothing about his parents on wikipedia or any other bio that I’ve seen. Most politicians are only too pleased to tell you about how they got all their values from great-aunt Gertie. Where's the hinterland ? (Lib dem leader and fellow Westminster old boy Nick Clegg has an interesting background too).

Huhne is a pretty unusual surname in the UK – according to the National Trust names site (which shows the geographical distribution of UK surnames) there were fewer than 100 Huhnes on the 1998 electoral register. The FreeBMD genealogy site (which isn't a complete record) shows only two male Huhnes born in the UK between 1837 and 1983 - Paul Harry Huhne in St Pancras in 1903 and Peter I Huhne (with an umlaut) to Harry P and Mrs Huhne (nee Hancock) in Hendon in June 1926. There aren't even very many in Germany - Huhne does have a bit of a Teutonic ring to it.

Whence do his forebears spring ? Or did he just leap into existence fully-formed ?

(Update - maybe the Huhnes are related to the Hoons - perhaps this one)

Update 2 - everything.com :

Christopher Murray Paul Huhne was born on the 2nd July 1954, although strangely enough, Huhne appears to be somewhat circumspect about his family origins. As far as can be ascertained he was born Paul-Huhne, which was certainly the surname he was known under at Westminster School, and the one under which he appeared when his demyship at Magdalene was announced in The Times in 1971. Understandably for someone who was later active in the Labour Party, he then seems to have dropped the double barrelled 'Paul-Huhne' in favour of plain 'Huhne'.

His father Peter Ivor Paul-Huhne was a businessman who, although originally a Conservative, became interested in Liberal politics as a consequence of the invasion of Suez in 1956, and married a Margaret Ann Murray of Toronto, and was himself the only son of Mr H Paul-Huhne who ran the British Electrical Resistance Company for many years and also married a Canadian from Toronto. His mother was an actress known under the name of Ann Murray, the high point of whose career appeared to be an appearance as the 'motorist' in the UK made Psychomania (1973). Chris Huhne himself once claimed that she played Clark Kent's mother in one of the Superman movies, but this claim appears to be nothing more than a figment of Huhne's imagination.

Robert Kirby 1948-2009

I mentioned a while back Harry Robinson's work with Nick Drake and Sandy Denny, but most of Nick Drake's string arrangements were done by Robert Kirby, a fellow Cambridge student when they met.

Times obituary :

At this stage, Kirby’s ambitions in music extended no further than becoming a music teacher at a public school: “doing the choir, a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan,” as he put it many years later to Drake’s biographer, Patrick Humphries. Five Leaves Left was well enough received by the critics but sold abysmally. Yet despite the poor sales, the cheque for his work was sufficiently substantial to persuade Kirby to leave Cambridge and embark upon a full-time career as an arranger. One of his favourite stories concerned a parting shot to one of his disapproving tutors at Cambridge, who told him that his work sounded like a television commercial. “Gosh, as good as that,” was Kirby’s well-aimed response...

Finding it increasingly hard to make a decent living as an arranger, he took up a career in marketing.

I liked the recorders and strings he did for Vashti Bunyan, on whom I blogged here.

Baby-Mamas

I can remember definitely one, possibly two girls at Bromsgrove High School having babies (and leaving).

US blogger Sandra Rose on the US high school where 115 out of 800 girls are pregnant. Lordy. Their Prom must be really something.

The school is the Paul Robeson High School. I don't think the great man would be impressed.

I suppose this Robeson song would be most appropriate for the story. But lets have this, which my mother - a great Robeson fan like so many in 1930s South Wales - often sang to her little ones.



(via Booker Rising)

Friday Night Is Boogaloo Night

No, no, no - Pedro Gutierrez aka Pete Terrace aka the King of the Boogaloo (also featured here and here).

Pete could play in a more jazzy Latin style too. This is pretty cool.

What's Been Happening, Then ?

Three biggish things struck me over the last fortnight.

The BBC and their - not exactly an about-turn, but certainly a halt - on global warming :

What happened to global warming?

By Paul Hudson
Climate correspondent, BBC News


This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

That doesn't mean the BBC (or I) have abandoned the principle that chucking large amounts of CO2 into the air is not a wise thing to do without knowing the possible consequences. But once again the existing climate change models seem to have failed - as so often before. Doubtless they will be tweaked until once more they match the latest data, but this is, in the words of the late Sir Fred Hoyle :

“Bloody bad science,” growled Alexandrov. “Correlations obtained after experiments done is bloody bad. Only prediction in science.”

“I don't follow.”

“What Alexis means is that only predictions really count in science,” explained Weichart. “That's the way Kingsley downed me an hour or two ago. It's no good doing a lot of experiments first and then discovering a lot of correlations afterwards, not unless the correlations can be used for making new predictions. Otherwise it's like betting on a race after it's been run.”

On a related issue, it seems we're not going to run out of fossil energy quite yet - a good thing too, given our nuclear shambles and our green dreamworld.

Energy crisis is postponed as new gas rescues the world

Engineers have performed their magic once again. The world is not going to run short of energy as soon as feared. America is not going to bleed its wealth importing fuel. Russia's grip on Europe's gas will weaken. Improvident Britain may avoid paralysing blackouts by mid-decade after all.

The World Gas Conference in Buenos Aires last week was one of those events that shatter assumptions. Advances in technology for extracting gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than almost anybody expected.

Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said proven natural gas reserves around the world have risen to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, enough for 60 years' supply – and rising fast. "There has been a revolution in the gas fields of North America. Reserve estimates are rising sharply as technology unlocks unconventional resources," he said.

This is almost unknown to the public, despite the efforts of Nick Grealy at "No Hot Air" who has been arguing for some time that Britain's shale reserves could replace declining North Sea output.

The advances involve shattering rocks deep underground, freeing the gases they contain. We might even see a self-sufficient United States once more.

Last but by no means least, the Government are actually rattled enough about the decline of their white working class vote (and the rise of the BNP vote) to try and do something about it.

Wrapping himself in the Union Flag doesn't seem to have worked for Gordon. We have moved into a new phase of the Canute-like struggle against demographic reality and human nature.

A £12m programme to connect with resentful white working-class communities in 130 wards across England and undercut rightwing extremism was launched today by the communities secretary, John Denham.

He insisted it was not the role of the state to combat the BNP. But he said the Connecting Communities programme would address legitimate fears and concerns that if neglected could prove fertile territory for extremism.

The first 27 areas named in the scheme included parts of Bromley and Barking and Dagenham, in London, parts of Birmingham, Stoke and Nottingham, as well as Milton Keynes, north Somerset and Poole, in Dorset. They were identified under criteria including cohesion, crime and deprivation, perceived unfairness in the allocation of resources and feedback from local people.

The funding will be used to give local people the space to air grievances and ensure that the way housing, education, healthcare, jobs and training are allocated do not cause resentment...

He said the communities involved were the least likely to have prospered when the economy was booming and were the most vulnerable to the recession. "It's not surprising that they may question whether they are being fairly treated and to worry that others are, unfairly, doing better. Not entirely surprising that feeling unfairly treated can lead to resentment or worse."

Denham said it was necessary to make clear that the government was committed to making sure that every community in every corner of the country knew it was on their side. "No favours. No privileges. No special interest groups. Just fairness," he promised.

Trouble is, when you say to a community that you're 'on their side', who are the other side ? If you're on everyone's side then you're not on anyone's side.

I'll be interested to see what the Connecting Communities initiative actually does with the money.

"The funding will be used to give local people the space to air grievances" - and then you'll call them racists. How much space can you get for £12 million ? And as for it not being the role of the state to combat the BNP, look at the initial list of recipients - Blackburn, Barking (4 areas), Stoke, Broxbourne etc. It'll be interesting to compare them with local council election results.

When immigrant communities riot, or let off bombs of Tube trains, the concern of the Government, not necessarily having much clue about what's going on at street level, is to find 'community leaders' or minority organisations to throw money at. Throw enough money and a feisty firebrand can be tamed, although at an organisational level that didn't work too well with the Muslim Council of Britain.

But there are only one set of people who declare themselves to be the voice of white Britons. I don't see any of our £12m heading in that direction. Instead, according to the usually well-briefed 24Dash site "individuals will be encouraged to act as community champions or tenants and have a bigger say in local issues. This will help build up the confidence and self-esteem of residents so that they feel that they can regain control over their estates, their lives and their futures."

The rest of the money will be thrown at the usual suspects :

"There will be investment in councillors and other leaders and frontline staff to support their confidence and skills in addressing these problems and help them shape the strategy for their area."

The 24Dash report looks like a straight paste of a Government handout and is interesting for that reason. The message is that there isn't actually a problem other than a load of dreadful myths that need to be refuted. This one will run and run, with much dark humour to be mined therefrom. It isn't really funny, though.

Not Dead, Just Sleeping

Apologies for the non-existent posts of the last fortnight - a bust computer and a lifestyle change have both played their part. I'm taking a few (two or three inshallah) months out of work to do other things - mostly house and garden stuff, but hopefully some walking and visiting too.

When I gave up being an employee some years back to go freelance I'd intended to take a break then - having been working full-time for some 30-odd years. But someone offered me some work straight away and I thought I'd better take it - then someone else offered more when the first job finished and so on. I've been fortunate - never actually had to send my CV out to anyone or search for work - which I will be doing come December. My latest project finished last month and it seems a good time to take the long-postponed break.

You'd think I'd be blogging more, not less - but it doesn't seem to work like that. After a day bashing a computer or nailing down business requirements blogging time feels like earned time - after the kids have finished homework. It feels a little odd after all these years getting up in the morning and not having some eight hours of task to perform for a third party - be it boss or (latterly) client. Instead I choose my own tasks - admittedly from a monstrous list. An old house and a large garden offer plenty to do. Fences, paths, drive, convert old kitchen into study, paint the external walls, repoint the inglenook and install a woodburner - and Susan would like a walled garden if I have the time.

Anyway, I'm feeling virtuous (and sweaty) enough for a post or two. Current task is putting a damp proof course in the oldest (no foundation, timber-framing) part of the house. Some genius before us had plastered straight up over the (damp) supporting bricks to the timber frame of an internal wall - then hidden it behind skirting. The plaster has acted like a wick and the timber is damp enough to need cutting out in places. A builder friend took a look yesterday and a two-pronged strategy agreed. Where the supporting bricks are crumbly and damp enough they'll be removed and replaced with new brick, new concrete bed and a proper plastic DPC - but you can only do this to one or two at a time, as the bricks hold the timber up which holds the wall up ! Elsewhere a DPC will be injected into the mortar - won't last forever but better than nothing. Injection DPCs used to be a professional job but the latest products are silicone pastes which can be injected with a low-pressure gun.

All good fun. I've just laid a small concrete bed and there's time for a post while it dries and before I head for Screwfix to pick up some DPC plastic.

High Speed Music

Don't come any faster than this - watch Paul Warren on fiddle - or shorter either. But no one-chord wonders here :

What An Unfortunate Name ...

It sounds more like the sort of practice that Harriet Harman would deplore being advertised on the Web.


(Best of order in the comments, please)

Guardian Morality

This blog, eighteen months back :

Oh Lordy - "Disability Hate Crime". I suppose the idea is that although the current criminal justice system is totally unable to enforce existing laws on anti-social behaviour - witness the tragic fates of Christine Lakinski and the Pilkington family - they hope to add the disabled to the list of "protected species" aka designated victim groups.

The Guardian :

Although much of the abuse centred on the taunts about the children's disabilities, police failed to recognise it as a hate crime rather than simple antisocial behaviour, which would have made it a far higher priority.

The inquest heard that at the time of Pilkington's death, Leicestershire police had not implemented the Home Office guidance on hate crimes issued two years earlier.

Hinckley and Bosworth council's community officers visited Pilkington but never learned until after she was dead that anyone in the family was disabled.

And if poor Francecca Pilkington hadn't had a disability ? If she'd been harassed 'because she was there' ? Then she could go hang as far as the Guardian, the local authority and the police were concerned.

(via Dalrymple : "the seriousness of an offense committed in Britain now depends upon who the victim is. If a person is not of an identifiably protected group, he or she is not entitled to police intervention against abusive stone- and bottle-throwing youths. He is not entitled to protection at all. The Guardian’s article appears to accept that such behavior, so long as it targets a member of an unprotected group, is merely undesirable—“anti-social” rather than obviously criminal")


UPDATE - Aaarghh !

"Pilkington case may be a Lawrence moment for disability hate crime"

You Have Been Warned

Some people on 'the Left' gave up on democracy a long time ago - both Cherie Blair and Helena Kennedy are on record as saying that they saw the law as a more effective method of bringing about radical social change than dull old vote-grubbing - and when you look at the helplessness of the law-abiding and the empowerment of the criminal today, who's to say they were wrong ?

(incidentally, if anyone out there has mp3s of Ms Kennedy's recent 4 part R4 'Jeopardising Justice' series, please get in touch - I didn't record them and should have done)

Still, that dull old campaigning stuff played its part, and Labour have been in power for 12 years, arriving with massive goodwill and expectation, soon to leave with the hatred of many and the bitterness of their own supporters.

Laurie Penny has been to the Labour conference :

On Tuesday I walked along the seafront with Hilary Wainwright (another public school leftie) and John McDonnell whilst those two seasoned old campaigners- veterans of 1968, feminists and formerly die-hard Labour activists - mused that the future of the left lay in direct action.

John McDonnell is a fan of the IRA ("it's about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle") and has called for the lifting of the UK ban on the LTTE, more usually known as the Tamil Tigers.

It remains to be seen what manner of 'direct action' Mr McDonnell has in mind. Can't say we've not been told, though.

Cognitive Dissonance Alert ...

Liberal Conspiracy on Andrew Marr's (IMHO disgraceful - I agree with Nadine Dorries) 'are you a loony or what' questioning of El Gordo, 28th September 2009 :

... right-wing bloggers kept questioning Gordon Brown’s sanity and calling him ‘bonkers’, demented and other names for partisan reasons. They justified this on the basis that some others within the Labour party had apparently also started these rumours. But no evidence is offered.

Then some national journalists referenced ‘internet rumours’ to repeat that smear, which was then used by the same bloggers to declare that they were justifed in their smears because it had reached national press and so it must be true. And so the BBC’s Andrew Marr bought into that feedback loop and asked a classic variation of: ’so when did you stop beating your wife’.

.... this incident illustrates that most right-wing bloggers come from the same stock. The ‘bonkers’ meme has been viciously repeated by right-wingers to undermine the PM. There is no evidence to it. The PM could be attacked in other ways – through his policies for example – but these people are only interested in character assassination. And yet only a few months ago they screamed hysterically about how the left was beholden to vicious rumours and chartacter assassination. Now they’re saying nothing other than cheering Marr on.

Damn right-wing bloggers, eh ?

I think they must have got the idea from that vicious right-wing Liberal Conspiracy site, 10th September 2009 ?

We have no way of substantiating this rumor, but let’s for a moment run with the assumption that Brown is taking anti-depressants.

My response? Good. Great. If the Prime Minister of Britain is suffering from depression or some other mental health condition, which given the stresses of his current position seems highly likely, then I’m glad he’s getting treatment for it. I’m glad he’s man enough to admit that he might need help.

Anti-depressants are used by millions of people in this country, although the stigma attached means that many of us don’t talk about it... It takes courage to go to the doctor and say that you have a problem...

I only wish more politicians would follow his example – after all, it’s not as if mental health difficulties in government are unheard of. Some of the greatest leaders the Western world has ever seen had serious mental health difficulties ... Winston Churchill ... Lincoln was also chronically depressed and anxious...

So is the ‘Prime Mentalist’, as he has become known, a person who has mental health problems? It certainly seems likely . Would that fact, by definition, make him unfit to lead the country? Absolutely not.

Not only have plenty of great statesmen and women had mental health problems, the experience of overcoming those problems and playing to one’s strengths may even be an advantage in politics – as it is for many people who, like myself, battle mental ill health.

I said at the time that this "isn't it great that the Prime Minister is mentally ill ?" approach romped home in the With Friends Like These Stakes.

Labour Conference Opens

"There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom."

(H.P. Lovecraft on the Gardner family in "The Colour Out Of Space. I know I've quoted it before, but it's such a perfect description.)

Senior Police Officer = Senior Social Worker

No matter what happens at street level, where the decisions get taken the sociology grads are totally in control :

Police try to avoid sending anti-social youths to prison because it increases the chances of them reoffending, an inquest into the deaths of a mother and her disabled daughter heard today.

Superintendent Steve Harrod, head of criminal justice at Leicestershire Police, was giving evidence at the hearing into the suicide of Fiona Pilkington, 38, who killed herself and and her disabled daughter two years ago. Ms Pilkington, 38, died after setting fire to her car while she and her daughter Francecca Hardwick, 18, were inside. An 11-year bullying campaign by local youths had made their lives intolerable. Months before, Ms Pilkington had written in her diary that she had given up trying to call the police for help, because they thought she was “overreacting”.

Earlier this week it emerged that Ms Pilkington had called police 33 times to complain about the abuse but none of the gang members, including the main problem family about whom police were informed, were prosecuted.

Mr Harrod was then asked by a juror: “If a youth above the age of criminal responsibility commits a crime, why is the criminalising of juveniles a consideration? If they commit a crime do they not bring the criminalisation upon themselves?”

He replied: “From a police point of view, what we want to do with any criminals is to prevent reoffending. From my personal experience, if a juvenile goes in to detention, they are likely to mix with like-minded people during their time there and they are more likely to reoffend. I think for new police officers this is all part of their training and for older officers there is a transition. But once you recognise that if you go to charge, and then the offenders come out of prison, you see them in the cells again and again.”

The badly burnt bodies of Ms Pilkington and her daughter, known as Frankie to her family, were discovered in October 2007 in the family’s blue Austin Maestro at the side of the A47 near their home. For more than a decade the family had been subjected to daily torment from local youths – some as young as 10 – who routinely shouted abuse and hurled objects at their house. At one point Ms Pilkington’s son Anthony, now 19, was threatened with an iron bar and locked in a shed at knifepoint. Earlier, the inquest was told social services were aware Ms Pilkington had been experiencing “suicidal thoughts”.

I blogged this case two years ago, and the reality turns out to be just as heartbreaking as I thought. Frances Crook and the Prison Reform Trust - and the BBC, of course - are doing a cracking job.

UPDATE - more from the spectacularly useless Steve Harrod :

At the inquest into the pair's deaths yesterday, Superintendent Steve Harrod, head of criminal justice at Leicestershire Police, acknowledged that the criminal justice system was set up to avoid sending juveniles to prison. He said police officers were only allowed to issue warnings to young troublemakers unless their behaviour was judged to be serious.

"I'm not sure if people know but low-level anti-social behaviour is mainly the responsibility of the council"

UPDATE - more torture in the community. If this had happened sixty years ago it would have been front page news. That's two rape/torture convictions in Greater London in the last three weeks that the BBC have failed to report. Is a pattern developing ?

The boys, two aged 17 and the other 16, approached the 14 year old victim and took her to a flat in Bromley on October 24 last year. While there the girl was raped and her hair was set on fire. An investigation was launched by Lewisham police and officers obtained mobile telephone footage of the suspects tormenting the victim with a cigarette lighter. Detective Constable Darren Sonnar said: “This was a particularly harrowing case".

I don't have a clue ...

Who Gerald Warner is. But I like the cut of his jib :

The most loathsome government in Europe, outside of Downing Street, is in deep doo-doo and it is a joy to behold. The ludicrous regime in Spain of José Luis Zapatero has driven the country into bankruptcy. From its inception, as a consequence of a knee-jerk, eve-of-poll hissy fit by the electorate after its conservative predecessor stupidly blamed the Atocha station bombing in Madrid on ETA instead of al-Qaeda, the Zapatero government has been little more than a Spanish Civil War re-enactment society.

Why don't you stop pussy-footing and tell us what you really think ?

Persecuting the Church, trying to force doctors to commit abortion against their consciences, pulling down statues of General Franco and renaming streets in honour of Red murderers... no student union extravagance of gesture politics has been neglected...

If precedent is followed, Zapatero will soon issue the unemployed with government petrol to burn down churches. Of course, the really fun bit – if the historical parallel is fully adhered to – would be the emergence of another Franco and his dismantling of the whole shambles.

Hmm. Unlikely in a nation where they seem to have dropped off somewhere in the early 90s. Churchill wrote of Barcelona's cafes in 1935 as full of "eager-facd, black-coated young men purring together with glistening eyes about Spanish politics". Alas, young men are just what the current Spanish state is short of.

Allahu Achtung Bar

I saw this story reported somewhere late last night and assumed it was a joke. Apparently not.

Investigators have discovered a "Jihadi village" of white German al-Qaeda insurgents, including Muslim converts, in Pakistan's tribal areas close to the Afghan border. The village, in Taliban-controlled Waziristan, is run by the notorious al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which plots raids on Nato forces in Afghanistan.

A recruitment video presents life in the village as a desirable lifestyle choice with schools, hospitals, pharmacies and day care centres, all at a safe distance from the front. In the video, the presenter, "Abu Adam", the public face of the group in Germany, points his finger and asks: "Doesn't it appeal to you? We warmly invite you to join us!"

According to German foreign ministry officials a growing number of German families, many of North African descent, have taken up the offer and travelled to Waziristan where supporters say converts make up some of the insurgents' most dedicated fighters.

And they picked up a few more on their way there :

Pakistan has jailed six Germans, including a four-year-old girl, on suspicion of trying to join an extremist group, after arresting them on the Iranian border in May, according to the weekly Der Spiegel. They reportedly include the brother-in-law of Munir Shuka, spokesman for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a militant group with ties to Al-Qaeda that is often cited as a top security concern by governments in ex-Soviet Central Asia. Also held are a German converted to Islam and his wife of Eritrean origin along with their four-year-old daughter, according to Der Spiegel in a report to appear Monday. The six were said to have claimed to be Turkish and to have lost their papers, and it was not until August, when Pakistani intelligence took over the case, that their identity was revealed.

I'm sure we're all relieved that the four year old is no longer a danger.

Oh, and a few Swedes :

According to Sveriges Television (SVT), it was Ghezali, along with two other Swedes and several other foreigners, who was arrested by police in Pakistan on suspicions the group had ties with the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. “We confiscated a laptop and $10,000 they had with them,” said a spokesperson for the Pakistani military, according to the Expressen newspaper. The arrests took place at a checkpoint in Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab province, when the group was reportedly on its way to southern Waziristan.

I must say I'd never heard of Bekkay Harrach, aka Abu Talha al-Almani (the German), but he's apparently the hot new kid on the Al Quaeda block - and he's bringing a whole new style to the tired old jihadist video - you know, the formulaic flag, readings by black-clad chaps, beheadings stuff that is so 2004.

The latest video by Harrach is most striking because its themes and packaging are targeted almost exclusively for a Western audience. Speaking softly in fluent German, without the usual militant or religious props featured in past al Qaeda messages, he stares directly into the camera and only occasionally looks down to turn over the pages of his speech. He never wags his finger or raises his voice. The video carries no subtitling in Arabic.

He's the jihadist we can all relate to - with a real emo look that's bound to appeal to the vitally important suicidal fifteen-year-old demographic.

He's got a neat line in dry humour, too :

"He reminded viewers of the attacks in Madrid and London and, addressing the German chancellor, asked "Lady Merkel, what is the logical outcome earned by British Conservatives and the Spaniards for their support for the Iraq war? Why is Germany involved in the war on Afghanistan? The Afghan people did nothing to the German people and the Mujahideen have not done anything to the German people... God commands us in the Qur'an - Al-Anfal, verse sixty - that we must do what we can to force our enemy to surrender," he stated. "But if the enemy can find a peaceful solution... the Holy Qur'an commands us to forgive." According to his statement, Germany's only option to avoid an attack is to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan.

If Germany does so, he said, al Qaeda will withdraw from Germany. "This is a promise from al Qaeda. This is the tolerant Islam that the West knows well and praises so much."

I don't know. Right-wing Germans were attacking Jews in one way or the other for a fair chunk of the early part of last century. Thirty years on one or two left-wing Germans were doing the same. Thirty years after that ...

A German convert to Islam pleaded innocent on Monday when he and Al Qaeda’s 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were put on trial for plotting a bloody 2002 suicide bombing of a Tunisian synagogue. “Every time innocents die, that touches me deeply,” insisted Christian Ganczarski when he appeared in a Parisian anti-terrorism court to face a charge that he and Sheikh Mohammed planned the attack which left 21 dead.

Hmm. You can never tell with stuff on the Web, but this says different.

Cognitive Dissonance Alert ...

Lynne Featherhead MP at the Lib Dem Conference :

And there has been so much damage done to the image of Muslims with the reporting of news from overseas and here, where so-called Islamic terrorists often feature - but when those fighting the terrorists, or the victims of terrorism, are also Muslim - this often goes unmentioned.

The drip-drip effect of linking the word 'Muslim' and the word 'terrorism' - but not linking "victim" and "Muslim" in the same way - is pernicious.

And at the same time we have seen a rising tide of attacks on Jewish people too.

Er ... do you want to tell her, or shall I ?

CST recorded 609 antisemitic incidents (pdf link) in the first six months of 2009. This is more than the 5441 incidents recorded by CST during the whole of 2008. CST has never before recorded more than 600 antisemitic incidents in a calendar year. The previous annual high was 598 antisemitic incidents recorded in 2006. The 609 antisemitic incidents reported to CST in the first half of 2009 is more than double the 276 antisemitic incidents reported to CST in the first six months of 2008. The main reason for this record number of incidents was the unprecedented number of antisemitic incidents recorded in January and February, during and after the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The number of incidents recorded did not return to normal pre-Gaza levels until April, some three months after the fighting in Gaza ended.

CST recorded 286 antisemitic incidents in January 2009, by far the highest number
ever recorded in a single month since CST began recording antisemitic incidents in 1984. In January 2008 CST recorded 43 antisemitic incidents. The previous high recorded by CST in a calendar month was 105 in October 2000, the month that the second Palestinian Intifada began.

Must be all those hideous right-wingers, what ? To be fair to Ms Featherstone, I imagine she knows perfectly well where the anti-semitic attacks are coming from. Just another one of those truths that dare not speak its name.


More contradiction :

And then there's religion. In recent years, sadly the spectre of religious discrimination has arisen again. A party born of revulsion at the treatment of Catholics and Non-conformists stands four square behind all those who seek to practice their faith.

Well, yes. As long as they don't practice it too seriously, that is.

Not that long ago it was against the law to be openly gay. Now it is against the law to refuse to register a civil partnership.

And registrars like Lilian Ladele are sacked for practicing their faith and refusing to register civil partnerships - a decision thoroughly approved of by Lynne Featherstone, standing four-square behind Ms Ladele's practice of her faith - with a P45 in one hand and a pitchfork in the other.

"There is no hierarchy between strands of equality"

But you've just proved that there is. Gay trumps Christian - even black Christian. Time to give the old Victimhood Poker pack a shuffle and tweak some of the values for British cultural sensibilities.

To be fair, she's no more full of hot air than her leader. I was on a running machine for pretty much the whole of Clegg's speech. It was a great speech to run to. Normally time crawls by on a running machine - you feel you need to get the miles or calories in, but it seems to take forever to get there. Not so yesterday - the time flew by. Never have so many platitudes been rolled out per unforgiving minute.

"We offer discipline for a purpose. Not just austerity, but progressive austerity"

Even Tony Blair, whose spirit seemed to be have been hovering somewhere in the background when the speech was written, would have had a job delivering that with a straight face.

"I want to say something to teachers, doctors, nurses, police officers, social workers, in fact to everyone who works in our public services. Britain depends on people like you and the services you provide"

Yes, but we depend even more on there being a few people selling things that other people want to buy - and being taxed to pay for the public services. As sterling loses its value our exports should rise - but are we still making anything ?

The whole thing was motherhood and apple pie and could (in the main) have come from any one of the three main party leaders. Pretty much all the sticky issues (where's our energy going to come from ? A 'zero-carbon future', apparently) were glossed over and some of the biggest (like immigration) didn't get a mention at all. The stuff about public sector pensions ('Let me reassure you: my particular focus will always be on the gold-plated pensions enjoyed by senior civil servants, quangocrats ...') was downright dishonest - as if there are enough MPs and senior civil servants to take the whole funding hit which will almost certainly be necessary.

Some ideas were OK. I'd go further than a £10,000 zero-tax band and say that the threshold should be set at the annual salary of someone doing a 40-hour working week for the minimum wage. But some of their other ideas ("abolish safe seats") sounded pretty odd. And if the speech had a theme, it was 'we're nice guys. Trust us' - which Blair and Cameron have already trademarked.

There was one bit in Ms Featherstone's speech which resonated.

The battle lines are drawn at our childrens' feet.

In pessimistic moments I fear that may be all too literally true.

"a vacuum wrapped in a nullity inside an abyss"

I've tended to think of Putin's Russia as a gangster state, but one where the gangsters know where to draw the line - that line being Russian national interest - or at least said interest as perceived by Vladimir Putin. Others, like Mark Steyn, consider the place to be the basket case of basket-cases - "Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa.".

This (via the excellent FT Alphaville blog) certainly seems to lend weight to the Steyn view ("Russia is facing simultaneously a massive ongoing drain of wealth out of the system") - the travails of one William Browder, a few years ago the largest single foreign investor in Russia via his still-extant (but now London-based) Hermitage Fund.

“Certain Russian officials and private citizens entered into a conspiracy to reregister to themselves three investment companies owned by the Hermitage Fund,” the filing says, with the goal to “apply for and receive fraudulent tax refunds of over $230 million from the Russian Treasury, and finally, to funnel these proceeds through bank accounts in Russia and the United States.”

The filing outlines a familiar story of brazen corruption in Russia. Even Russia’s president speaks often on the topic. Last Sunday, for instance, Mr. Medvedev told a television interviewer that foreigners perceive corruption in Russia to be “without limits.”

What's impressive is that the crooks didn't rob Hermitage (although they were driven out of Russia), but stole tax that Hermitage had already paid to the Russian Treasury. Ripping off unwary foreign investors is a tradition in many countries (I used to bank with the biggest bank in the world - then it bought an aptly named American bank called Crocker) - but in Russia, state functionaries and private capitalists combine to rip off the state. Here's Crowder's open letter :

Simply put, Russia is not a “state” as we understand it. Government institutions have been taken over as conduits for private interests, some of them criminal. Property rights no longer exist, people who are supposed to enforce the law are breaking it, innocent people are victimised and courts have turned into political tools.

Rather than a normally functioning bureaucracy, Russia’s clans fight over control of government positions and the power to use state resources to expropriate assets...

First, the Russian police raided our offices and took all our corporate documents. These were used fraudulently to re-register our investment holding companies into the names of convicted felons. The same documents were used to fabricate backdated contracts the criminals then “enforced” in Russian courts, which obligingly awarded them $974m in fake damages – helped by a guilty plea from lawyers falsely claiming to represent us. The criminals used these fake losses to claim a fraudulent refund of $230m of taxes we had paid in 2006, which was paid out to them in just two days. This despite us reporting the unfolding fraud to Russia’s top law enforcement officials 21 days before the tax money was stolen.

Foreign investors get ripped off all the time in many countries. What makes this story unique is the state officials working together to steal $230m from the Russian state itself. The sharks have started to feed on their own blood.

What makes it even more worrying is that the Russian government took no action to recover the money when we reported the crime. Rather than going after the rogue officials and criminals, the government turned the full weight of the law enforcement apparatus against us for reporting it. They arrested our lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, who uncovered the tax rebate fraud. He has since been kept in pre-trial detention on cases I believe were fabricated. Six other lawyers who filed criminal complaints or helped discover the fraud were harassed and fled Russia for safety.

Steyn :

What would you do if you were Putin? What have you got to keep your rotting corpse of a country as some kind of player? You’ve got nuclear know-how — which a lot of ayatollahs and dictators are interested in ... That’s the danger for America — that most of what Russia has to trade is likely to be damaging to US interests.

Crowder :

Some may argue the rule of law in Russia should not concern outsiders, but if corrupt officials can steal such a large amount of money from the state with no questions asked, it is not a very big leap for a similar group of corrupt officials to sell some loose Russian military hardware to terrorists, or even help rogue states to acquire nuclear technology. Moreover, when government officials act not in the interest of the state but for themselves, the normal tools of diplomacy simply do not work. It becomes impossible to trust international commitments, be it in the area of arms control or nuclear security. Perhaps there was a line in the past that Russians would not cross, but with the spectacular recent decline in the rule of law, anything is possible in Russia now.

It all makes the mysterious "hijacked" Russian timber ship episode look even more sinister. Is Russia, in Steyn's words, "a vacuum wrapped in a nullity inside an abyss" ?



UPDATE - not that state functionaries colluding to rob the State is exclusive to Russia :

Two tax office workers invented more than 1,400 fictitious children and hijacked hundreds of identities in a £1.2m payments scam, it has emerged. Civil servant John Brian Agdomar and an accomplice, Olanekan Omatayo Ogunmekan, were jailed after being caught using information in the national tax credit computer system to arrange extra payments diverted to a complex network of bank accounts. Agdomar used his job at the Department for Work and Pensions as a cover to access genuine customer records to obtain personal information, allowing the pair to arrange for genuine claims for tax credits to be increased by way of a bogus 'change in personal circumstances'. Records were amended with additional fake children in order to increase the payments but the extra money was siphoned off. In some cases personal records were amended with fictitious disabled twins or triplets to inflate the tax credits as much as possible.

Agdomar is thought to have illegally accessed more than 2,500 customer accounts. Between them the pair fabricated more than 1,400 fictitious children, hijacked hundreds of identities and illegally claimed more than £1.2m in tax credits until they were caught by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) investigators. Agdomar, 42, from Hackney, east London and Ogunmekan, 35, from Bethnal Green, London, were arrested by HMRC in 2008.

The UK is importing millions of people from countries with high levels of corruption. No attempt at integration with the host culture is required (and it would now be difficult in a place like Bethnal Green, where there aren't any hosts left to integrate with) . All things being equal, it would be surprising if levels of corruption in the UK did not rise. It's a subject I've touched on before and doubtless will again. But we've a way to go before we manage Russian-style sleaze. Give us time.

A Few Homing Rooks At Sunset

Africa, Africa : Booker Rising on independence leader Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and freedom of speech (or lack of) in Uganda.


"this degrading practice, which our traditions and our faith detest" - Gay Lib doesn't seem to be catching on in Senegal.


"All the defendants are devout Muslims and Akram went to the same mosque as the victim" - I'm pretty sure Islam didn't require that Akeel Shah stab Adnan Patel to death - because Patel quite rightly objected to Shah's gang selling dope to his little brother. Clint D'Mello, 24, from Leyton, and his friends Moneeb Khalid, 21, of Seventh Avenue, Manor Park, and Mohsin Akram, 19, of Brady Mead, Beckton, were cleared of murder but convicted of violent disorder, while Akeel Shah, 24, from Leytonstone, was convicted of murder. Shah was ordered to serve a minimum of 15 years.