How China has consistently lied

Seven years ago,when China was awarded the Olympic Games, its government was aware of the misgivings of many nations about the morality of awarding the Games to a nation whose human rights record has been so consistently appalling. It made promises to the International Olympic Committee and to the world that the Games would be a means to expedite human rights reforms and would open China to the world through greater press freedoms.

What has happened in those intervening seven years has proved that those promises were nothing but a sham. China still executes approximately 6000 people a year for a range of nearly 70 crimes including fraudulent VAT receipts. It has summarily arrested human rights protesters and subjected them to torture and long terms of imprisonment. It has demolished homes to make way for Olympic stadia and arrested those who have protested about their subsequent homelessness. It continues to harvest the organs of executed prisoners without permission from relatives and sells them in the medical market place.

China's promises of wider personal freedom have proved a joke. The country has the worlds most powerful internet firewall which blocks off thousands of sites which carry political messages the Chinese government does not want its people to hear.



Amnesty International has, quite rightly, condemned not just China's government but the International Olympic Committee for, having accepted China's promises as genuine, then not followed up on them to ensure they were being acted on. The IOC has done very little to turn the screw on China, presumably because the cost of going through the whole ritual of finding another venue would be both politically and economically damaging.

Instead of being a liberating force, the Olympic Games has proved to be a pretext for China clamping down even harder on dissidents to avoid adverse publicity before the Games begin. This is simply not acceptable.

Today it has been announced that the promise to journalists of unfettered internet access during the Games has been broken. Instead of the freedoms some naively expected China has heightened its checks and curbs on any sites which may provide negative vibes about the country. Foreign journalists who have in the past been even mildly critical of the regime have been kicked out of the country.



One other promise made by the Chinese government at the time was that in those seven years they would green up the environment so athletes would have a happy and healthy competition. One look at the pall of smog that hung over Beijing this week told all you needed to know about the truth of yet another promise.

The unhealthy acrid smog, however, is just a visible symbol of the poisonous gloom which hangs over the entire Olympic movement as , yet again, superficial promises are taken at face value for the sake of prestige, and another unpleasant authoritarian regime is set to gain much international kudos from a world event while unacceptable, inhuman behaviour goes on behind the scenes.

Tweedledum replaced by Tweedledee...God, surely not!!

What readers my blog has will be bored to death with my obsession with the failings of the current British government but, sadly, too much is happening for me to neglect the issue. On Thursday last, in the constituency of Glasgow East, the Scottish National Party overturned a Labour majority of nearly 14,000 to take the seat by a mere 365 votes.

No matter about the narrowness of the majority - the fact that the SNP won the seat at all is a result of seismic proportions. This was the third safest Labour seat in Scotland and required a 22.5% swing in order to take the seat.

Now OK it was a by election. OK the mood of the Scottish populace is very pro its own government at the moment. But even taking those into account, this was a body blow for Gordon Brown and the British Labour government which would be hard to under-estimate.

The faces of the Labour people in the election hall said most of it. The faces and comments of the Labour politicians acting as pundits in the BBC studio said the rest. No matter what proclamations of loyalty are made, it is clear that Gordon Brown is a dead man walking. That I have long taken as read. My horror now focuses on the claim that many influential cabinet ministers want to see Brown replaced by Jack Straw, the Justice Minister.



Jack Straw?? Jesus, they have to be joking. When I was working for Gisela Stuart's campaign in 1997, just prior to Blair's first election victory, Jack Straw was the 'celebrity' sent to the Edgbaston Constituency to boost morale. To a man (and woman) once it was announced that Straw had arrived, everyone fled upstairs so we didn't have to meet him. Straw is the ultimate grey man. He makes John Major look dynamic.

If the Labour Party is to have a relaunch then surely it has to be one of the young Turks like Milliband or Douglas Alexander. Not only is Straw tied to the past, not only is he the ultimate grey, boring conciliator on the surface, he is also a disloyal, opportunistic rat beneath. He knifed Tony Blair when the going got tough for the ex PM and now he is sitting on the sidelines comfortably watching his supporters knife the current Prime Minister, but without getting his own hands dirty.

Straw would be the final proof that Labour members of parliament concede that they have already lost the next general election. Straw would not bring back fresh hope to Labour's cause and the only clue to why anyone might support his candidacy has to be a nepotistic hope of a short term promotion before the Labour ship sinks beneath the waves.

It is a terrible tragedy for socialism that the new Labour flagship ever set sail for it is now cruelly revealed as a busted flush, a cadaver with no real soul. It is worse still for the country that when Labour sinks beneath the waves whenever Gordon Gutless - or whoever his successor is - calls a general election, the alternative is the cherubic , bland and utterly irrelevant David Cameron.



Straw or Brown....Brown or Cameron....Straw or Cameron....Tweedledum or Tweedledee...whatever the ultimate choice Britain - oh and that hasn't got long to go either when the opportunistic Alex Salmond finally wins his Scottish referendum - is headed for disaster.

A government that has lost the plot

To my deep distress, it has been apparent since the latter days of the Blair premiership that here we have a Labour government stumbling to defeat at the next election. I had some faint hopes at the start of the Brown premiership but these were dashed pretty early on.

This government is nigh on hopeless. The bills it passes are all cosmetic soundbites and either irrelevant or ineffective. Its ministers are clearly ill equipped for the size of the task. We hear now that Harriet Harman is gearing herself to be Brown's successor when, as seems likely the way things are going, he is forced out. If there is anything which would make me hope Brown stays in post its the possibility of being replaced by the inept Harman.

And when it comes to substantive issues of the nation's future, the government is lost and enfeebled. Look at the situation with knife crime. Seventeen young people stabbed to death in London alone since the turn of the year. We are clearly in the grip of a gang culture in parts of our inner cities which requires to be excised, root and branch. People involved in knife crime should be heavily punished. Potential immigrants awaiting citizenship and asylum seekers involved in crimes of violence should be booted out of the country with absolutely no compunction.

Instead what is Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith's answer? We are going to take knife criminals around A and E wards so they can see the damage their actions have caused. All together now..say 'Aaaaaaaaaaahhhh - bless!' As if the little monsters will give a shit. This is yet another daft idea like Blair's idea of towing thugs to cash machines, invented by a government long on soundbites and short on genuine policy.



Britain has been sliding into this mess for years and now we are seeing the consequences of a mix of social policy disasters. The family unit has virtually disintegrated in many parts of the country and we have a breed of kids with no conscience , no morality and no role models. We have a failed immigration policy, a so called 'multi culturalism' which has produced ghettos of deprived, disadvantaged and resentful teenagers whose law is drugs, guns, knives and violence.

Somehow, somewhere Britain has to get to grips with this instead of pussy-footing around with taking these poor deprived souls to A and E wards. We need a government with real ideas and real balls.

It ain't this one!

'News of the World' getting a spanking

Sorry to the readers I do have that I haven't contributed anything for a month - other issues having taken precedence, not to mention nothing much happening that I haven't referred to before. I hope to make amends for that.

One issue that has interested me - and not just for prurient reasons - is the Max Mosley privacy case. Although the case is not yet over, I believe this might be a watershed in the way society views what happens between consenting adults and may change the perception of British newspapers about what constitutes 'the public interest'. If it does -and the 'News of the World' is hit with heavy damages in this case, I shall be crowing from the rooftops for I hate the dirty, sneaky way the gutter press in Britain interferes in the private lives of individuals, makes a healthy profit from sales to the prurient, and then claims some moral high ground.



It is always good to see a gutter rag apparently misjudging the social mood completely. When they paid a dominatrix to secretly film corporal punishment sessions involving the head of Formula One racing, Max Mosley, they must have assumed that their self righteous claims of 'squalid goings on', 'perversions' etc would resonate with the general public and protect them from any consequences.

Instead of hiding his head in shame, as I'm sure the 'N.O.T.W' expected. Max Mosley has stridently defended his right to private sexual tastes with consenting women, asserted (very successfully so far) that his public role is not such that he is expected to set some 'moral example' in accordance with conventional social mores and has rejected the unsubstantiated claims of Nazi role-playing - a particularly delicate issue for him, being the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain's pre-war fascist leader.

It has been interesting to read the views of other newspapers on the case, most taking the evidence against Mosley very lightly indeed, making a joke of the spanking and whipping, and almost saying 'What's all the fuss about..this is 2008 for God's sake!'

I sincerely hope this mood is reflected in the opinion of the judges. A man whose public career is not affected one whit by his taste for being whipped on the bare buttocks by women, has been publicly shamed and humiliated by a gutter rag that I wouldn't wipe my backside with..so I hope Mosley wins and the N.O.T.W. really gets a hammering on the costs of this case. Even if they do it won't be enough to bankrupt them, which is, in my opinion, a great pity.



Ironic that one of the few newspapers which seems to have huffed and puffed its self righteous way in support of the NOTW is Britain's right wing flog 'em and hang 'em 'Daily Mail' which was founded as an anti semitic newspaper and whose former publisher, Lord Rothermere, enthusiastically supported Sir Oswald Mosley and his fascist blackshirts in their authoritarian mansifesto for Britain. Oh well, leopards and spots and all that!

It is interesting that the mood of the public seems to have been primarily on Mosley's side. I'm not sure this would have been the case twenty or thirty years ago, particularly with the working class readership of the 'NOTW', for 'perversions' like spanking and whipping were seen, if at all, as the preserve of the dissolute rich. Now I reckon people of all backgrounds, even if they haven't seen 'Secretary', indulge in a little spanking behind closed bedroom curtains and it has become an acceptable sexual practice to many. And, maybe more importantly, people are becoming more cynical about what lies behind a newspaper's self righteous justifications.

I sincerely hope the judges reflect what I perceive to be the public mood here, because this really could set a bench mark for the rights of people to enjoy their own sexual tastes in private and for the newspapers to have to accept a new code of what is in 'the public interest'.