"The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. "
I don’t understand, so talk me through this one.
a) Tommy Sheridan visits clubs and fesses up to the SSP when the press find out
b) SSP advise him to ‘lay low and say nuthin’
c) TS decides to brazen it out in the libel court
d) SSP comrades know they’ll be called as witnesses, and as I understand they have no choice about turning up. Their only choice is whether to lie and commit perjury or tell the truth. They (mostly) tell the truth.
e) but TS rhetoric wins the day, and he brilliantly persuades the jury. Result!
f) and immediately afterwards he publicly calls the truthful SSP members ’scabs’ and announces that he intends to ‘destroy them’
Now at this point our SSP comrades, like Colin Fox, are socialists in good standing, who gave TS sensible advice that he ignored. TS, hitherto a socialist in good standing, asserts that their unwillingness to risk jail for his family-man reputation renders them ’scabs’ to be ‘destroyed’ by unspecified means.
OK. At this point, who are the good guys and who the bad guys? The people with the correct analysis or the guy who wants to destroy them because they wouldn’t put their testes in a vice for him? Not for socialism, not for a principle, but to perpetuate a false image of a Great Leader?
Now I’m not too sure about going to the police with affidavits and secret tape recordings. But one socialist has insulted and threatened to destroy other socialists - on completely insufficient and self-interested grounds. Don’t they have a right to self-defence - in the last resort, to destroy the man who’s trying to destroy them?
(this piece of course assumes that d) is correct. My whole analysis rests on the assumption that the SSP exec had no choice about testifying in court.
Is this correct ? I don’t know Scots law. Martin ?
If it’s not correct and they were under no obligation to testify, then my analysis falls to bits - because the exec should then, from an SSP perspective, have lain low and said nuthin - leaving TS in his own juice rather than adding their own.)
"I've never been accused of a crime of dishonesty in my life."The News of the World, the Murdoch press and the Sun have tried to destroy me and my marriage. But you know what - I'm not frightened of them. I've fought them all my life and I will continue to fight them.
"I'm not frightened of Lothian and Borders Police.
"I'm not frightened of saying they should be ashamed of themselves for the way they've treated my family."
Sheridan then bowed his head, paused, and looked up at the jury.
He went on: "I'm frightened of you. I'm frightened of you because you can do something that the News of the World will never be able to do.
"You could separate me from my wife, you could make me break my promise to my daughter that I'd spend Christmas with her.
"Given what you've heard - and never mind the emotion, because you're not here to judge emotion - I ask you to believe you've heard more than enough reasonable doubt to convince you that I'm innocent of the charges that remain."
At this point, about 100 supporters packed into the public gallery applauded.
"it is a public tragedy that Sheridan has managed to get himself into this position at a time when the people he has claimed to speak for and represent need a tribune of his political gifts more than they have ever done before...
I hope he takes the chance to use his considerable talent and intelligence to help those who come into contact with him. There may be any number of rudderless young men who could benefit from having a mentor like Tommy Sheridan."
I ask if his children are in private or state schools. (He has four, two by his ex-wife and former Style Council singer Dee C. Lee, one following a short-lived relationship, and a four-year-old daughter with his girlfriend, Sammi, 34, "very sweet gel, puts up with quite a lot from me".) "They’re all in private school. No, one’s in state school," he corrects himself. "If you’ve got the money, I don’t see how you’ve got a choice, really. I don’t want my kids mixing with crack and guns. I’m not saying it’s all like that, but there’s an element of that."
At least one person was killed and two were injured yesterday in two explosions in central Stockholm that caused panic among Christmas shoppers.A Swedish news agency said it had received an email warning, ahead of the explosions, in which a threat made against Sweden and its population was linked to the country's military presence in Afghanistan. The TT agency said the warning, which comprised sound files in Swedish and Arabic, was also sent to Sweden's security police (SAPO) and was received 10 minutes before the blasts. It also referred to caricatures of the prophet Mohammed by Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who became the subject of death threats and at least one assassination plot after cartoons appeared in a Danish newspaper.If it is true that the deceased nail-carrier is an Islamist who appears to have gone off prematurely (always a hazard for a shy young man in liberated Sweden), and that the car bomb was the traditional petrol and gas canister type which failed so dismally to take out any 'dancing slags' in London just before the Glasgow Airport attacks, then the Swedes can at least take confidence from their incompetence - and go back to reading Stieg Larsson and worrying about the 'far-right'.The first explosion at around 5pm local time, near the busy shopping street of Drottinggatan in the centre of the Swedish capital, was in a car containing gas canisters. The dead man was found at the site of the second blast about 300 metres away. Sweden's Aftonbladet newspaper reported that the man was carrying pipe bombs, as well as a backpack full of nails, although this was not confirmed by the authorities. "The car exploded with a series of minor explosions and there was also some kind of explosion close to where we found the dead man," Ulf Johansson, a police spokesman, told the BBC. "We need more investigation and of course we need more witnesses to give us the information of what actually has happened."
"Well, good grief! The BBC News just ran an interview with Charlie Gilmour, made on the day, before they knew who he was, or what he'd done, and it's pretty clear he's either functionally retarded, or was drunk or stoned at the time."
"Last night, Gilmour issued a statement through his father's PR firm."
"Charlie was on acid when he ripped the flag at the Cenotaph. He boasted about being on drugs on his Facebook afterwards but later took down the posts about acid."
A friend wrote on Gilmour’s Facebook page: “That is you climbing the flag, yes?”
Gilmour replied: “No. Not me. Someone else.
“Whoever it was was obviously on acid and didn’t know what the f*** he was doing and how much of a massive f***ing backlash there would be…”
The pal wrote, “My mistake” – to which Gilmour replied: “My big f***ing mistake.”
"Charlie Gilmour has admitted being close to the car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall when it was ambushed by paint-throwing demonstrators in Regent Street. At 8.10pm, less than an hour after the attack on the Royal limousine, he was filmed by the BBC outside Topshop in Oxford Street, half-hiding a woman’s lace-up boot under his coat."
"Another picture showed him apparently trying to light a fire by the doors of the Supreme court on Parliament Square. "
"Privately-educated Charlie Gilmour, whose Pink Floyd guitarist stepfather is worth £80million, said: 'I would like to express my deepest apologies for the terrible insult to the thousands of people who died bravely for our country that my actions represented. I feel nothing but shame. My intention was not to attack or defile the Cenotaph. Running along with a crowd of people who had just been violently repelled by the police, I got caught up in the spirit of the moment. I did not realise that it was the Cenotaph and if I had, I certainly would not have done what I did. I feel additionally mortified that my moment of idiocy has distracted so much from the message yesterday's protest was trying to send out. Those who are commemorated by the Cenotaph died to protect the very freedoms that allow the people of Britain the right to protest and I feel deeply ashamed to have, although unintentionally and unknowingly, insulted the memory of them.'"
¶6. (U) Erdogan indexed his political survival to getting a negotiation date from the EU. He achieved that goal. The Wall Street Journal and other Western and Turkish media have opined that the EU owes Turkey a fair negotiating process leading to accession, with the Journal even putting the onus on the EU by asserting that while Turkey is ready the question is whether Europeans are ready for Turkey.
¶7. (C) But there's always a Monday morning and the debate on the ground here is not so neat. With euphoria at getting a date having faded in 48 hours, Erdogan's political survival and the difficulty of the tasks before him have become
substantially clearer. Nationalists on right and left have resumed accusations that Erdogan sold out Turkish national interests (Cyprus) and Turkish traditions. Core institutions of the Turkish state, which remain at best wary of AKP, have once again begun to probe for weaknesses and to feed insinuations into the press in parallel with the nationalists' assertions. In the face of this Euro-aversion,
neither Erdogan nor his government has taken even minimal steps to prepare the bureaucracy or public opinion to begin tackling the fundamental -- some Turks would say insidious -- legal, social, intellectual and spiritual changes that must
occur to turn harmonization on paper into true reform. The road ahead will surely be hard.
¶8. (U) High-profile naysayers like main opposition CHP chairman Baykal, former Ambassador Gunduz Aktan, and political scientist Hasan Unal continue to castigate Erdogan. But theirs is a routine whine. More significant for us is that many of our contacts cloak their lack of self-confidence at Turkey's ability to join in expressions of skepticism that the EU will let Turkey in. And there is parallel widespread skepticism that the EU will be around in attractive form in ten years.
¶9. (C) The mood in AKP is no brighter, with one of FonMin Gul's MFA advisors having described to UK polcounselor how bruised Turkey feels at the EU's inconsistency during the final negotiations leading to Dec. 17 (EU diplomats in Ankara have given us the other side of the story). Gul was noticeably harder-line than Erdogan in public comments in the lead-up to the Summit, and was harder-line in pre-Summit negotiations in Brussels, according to UK polcounselor.
...
¶10. (C) AKP's lack of cohesion as a party and lack of openness as a government is reflected in the range of murky, muddled motives for wanting to join the EU we have encountered among those AKPers who say they favor pursuing membership...or at least the process. Some see the process as the way to marginalize the Turkish military and what remains of the arid "secularism" of Kemalism. We have also run into the rarely openly-spoken, but widespread belief among adherents of the Turk-Islam synthesis that Turkey's role is to spread Islam in Europe, "to take back Andalusia and avenge the defeat at the siege of Vienna in 1683" as one participant in a recent meeting at AKP's main think tank put it. This thinking parallels the logic behind the approach of FonMin Gul ally and chief foreign policy advisor in the Prime Ministry Ahmet Davutoglu, whose muddy opinion piece in the Dec. 13 International Herald Tribune is in essence a call for one-way multi-cultural tolerance, i.e., on the part of the EU.
¶11. (C) Those from the more overtly religious side of AKP whinge that the EU is a Christian club. While some assert that it is only through Turkish membership and spread of Turkish values that the world can avoid the clash of civilizations they allege the West is fomenting, others express concern that harmonization and membership will water down Islam and associated traditions in Turkey.
....
¶12. (C) AKP also faces the nuts-and-bolts issue of how to prepare for harmonization. In choosing a chief negotiator Erdogan will need to decide whether the risks that the man he taps will successfully steal his political limelight outweigh
the political challenge his choice will face since it will be the Turkish chief negotiator's responsibility to sell the EU position to a recalcitrant Turkish cabinet. It is because the chief negotiator is likely to be ground down between EU
demands and a prickly domestic environment that some observers speculate Erdogan might give the job to his chief internal rival Gul.
¶13. (C) At the same time the government must reportedly hire a couple thousand people skilled in English or other major EU languages and up to the bureaucratic demands of interfacing with the Eurocrats who descend on ministries as harmonization starts. If the government continues to hire on the basis of
"one of us", i.e., from the Sunni brotherhood and lodge milieu that has been serving as the pool for AKP's civil service hiring, lack of competence will be a problem. If the government hires on the base of competence, its new hires
will be frustrated by the incompetence of AKP's previous hires at all levels.
....
¶17. (C) Inside the party, Erdogan's hunger for power reveals itself in a sharp authoritarian style and deep distrust of others: as a former spiritual advisor to Erdogan and his wife Emine put it, "Tayyip Bey believes in God...but doesn't trust
him." In surrounding himself with an iron ring of sycophantic (but contemptuous) advisors, Erdogan has isolated himself from a flow of reliable information, which partially explains his failure to understand the context -- or real facts -- of the U.S. operations in Tel Afar, Fallujah, and elsewhere and his susceptibility to Islamist theories...
Erdogan's other foreign policy advisors (Cuneyd Zapsu, Egemen Bagis, Omer Celik, along with Mucahit Arslan and chef de cabinet Hikmet Bulduk) are despised as inadequate, out of touch and corrupt by all our AKP contacts from ministers to
MPs and party intellectuals.
...
¶21. (S) Third is corruption. AKP swept to power by promising to root out corruption. However, in increasing numbers AKPers from ministers on down, and people close to the party, are telling us of conflicts of interest or serious corruption
in the party at the national, provincial and local level and among close family members of ministers. We have heard from two contacts that Erdogan has eight accounts in Swiss banks; his explanations that his wealth comes from the wedding
presents guests gave his son and that a Turkish businessman is paying the educational expenses of all four Erdogan children in the U.S. purely altruistically are lame.
¶22. (S) Among the many figures mentioned to us as prominently involved in corruption are Minister of Interior Aksu, Minister of Foreign Trade Tuzmen, and AKP Istanbul provincial chairman Muezzinoglu. As we understand it from a contact in the intel directorate of Turkish National Police, a continuing investigation into Muezzinoglu's extortion racket and other activities has already produced evidence incriminating Erdogan. In our contacts across Anatolia we
have detected no willingness yet at the grassroots level to look closely at Erdogan or the party in this regard, but the trend is a time bomb.
...
Two Big Questions
-----------------
¶24. (C) Turkey's EU bid has brought forth reams of pronouncements and articles -- Mustafa Akyol's Gulenist-tinged "Thanksgiving for Turkey" in Dec. 27 Weekly
Standard is one of the latest -- attempting to portray Islam in Turkey as distinctively moderate and tolerant with a strong mystical (Sufi) underpinning. Certainly, one can see in Turkey's theology faculties some attempts to wrestle with
the problems of critical thinking, free will, and precedent (ictihad), attempts which, compared to what goes on in theology faculties in the Arab world, may appear relatively progressive.
¶25. (C) However, the broad, rubber-meets-the-road reality is that Islam in Turkey is caught in a vise of (1) 100 years of "secular" pressure to hide itself from public view, (2) pressure and competition from brotherhoods and lodges to
follow their narrow, occult "true way", and (3) the faction-and positivism-ridden aridity of the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet). As a result, Islam as it is lived in Turkey is stultified, riddled with hypocrisy, ignorant and intolerant of other religions' presence in Turkey, and unable to eject those who would politicize it in a radical, anti-Western way. Imams are for the most part poorly educated and all too ready to insinuate anti-Western,
anti-Christian or anti-Jewish sentiments into their sermons.
Exceptionally few Muslims in Turkey have the courage to challenge conventional Sunni thinking about jihad or, e.g., verses in the Repentance shura of the Koran which have for so long been used to justify violence against "infidels".
¶26. (C) The problem is compounded by the willingness of politicians such as Gul to play elusively with politicized Islam. Until Turkey ensures that the humanist strain in Islam prevails here, Islam in Turkey will remain a troubled, defensive force, hypocritical to an extreme degree and unwilling to adapt to the challenges of open society.
¶27. (C) A second question is the relation of Turkey and its citizens to history -- the history of this land and citizens' individual history. Subject to rigid taboos, denial, fears, and mandatory gross distortions, the study of history and practice of historiography in the Republic of Turkey remind one of an old Soviet academic joke: the faculty party chief assembles his party cadres and, warning against various ideological threats, proclaims, "The future is certain. It's only that damned past that keeps changing."
¶28. (C) Until Turkey can reconcile itself to its past, including the troubling aspects of its Ottoman past, in free and open debate, how will Turkey reconcile itself to the
concept and practice of reconciliation in the EU? How will it have the self confidence to take decisions and formulate policies responsive to U.S. interests? Some in AKP are joining what is still only a handful of others to take tentative, but nonetheless inspiring, steps in this regard. However, the road ahead will require a massive overhaul of education, the introduction and acceptance of rule of law, and a fundamental redefinition of the relation between citizen and state. In the words of the great (Alevi) Anatolian bard Asik Veysel, this is a "long and delicate road."
"We don't care what charges you arrest Assange on, just don't cable the details to Hillary Clinton..."
Recorder John Hardy QC told Ali his offence was at the top end of the scale, despite the fact his ineptitude had thankfully meant it was doomed to failure.
He said: 'On that day, for whatever reason, you became embroiled in a planned and calculated attack which was part of a campaign of violence and intimidation by the local drug lords in Crawley against the licensees of this pub.'
"If you want a good night out and your staying quit far from the town centre, you can go and visit The Imperial (at the broadfield shops) It is a good place to chat and drink away together with the good old broadfield people. As many people know broadfield is quit voilent, but visiting The Imperial does not get you involved, because most of the trouble-makers are under age and are not allowed in the pub (so they just stand on the street having noting else to do, but causing trouble) The people working in the Imperial and visiting the pub always look after everyone in the pub. They accept you for who you are and where your from."
"the imperial has a bad reputation but it is a lovely place in the summer, where people from all ethnic backgrounds get together. "
"We all know Grendon's the prison of the future; loving and understanding and getting to know the prisoners is now official policy, not only of the Home Office but of the Prison Officers' Association as well. If you say you don't approve of it, down it'll go in your record; and when you come up for consideration for promotion, you'll find you've been unaccountably passed by."
"They said I was a product of my environment and upbringing. That made me feel it wasn't my fault, so the last person that I looked at was me and that's the first place I needed to look."
