March 2009 Archives

Listen carefully and you can hear the cloven hooves of lawyers galloping towards Binyam Mohamed - the Ethiopian claiming to have been tortured by the US authorities.

I am not condoning torture but there are quite a few unanswered questions in all of this irrespective of whether the claims are correct or not. Mohamed arrived here from Ethiopia in 1994 and left for Pakistan in 2001 on a false British passport - his picture stuck on someone else's' document - and went on to Afghanistan, where he attended a training camp, before being eventually picked up in Pakistan on a false passport.

He claims to have been tortured in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan before ending up at Guantanamo Bay so if you were a betting man, where would your money be on where Mohamed, or his lawyers, will be making their mega-money claims? The countries that facilitated the torture? The countries that carried out the tortures, led by the USA? Or just go for the big one, the USA who held him and flew him around the world to be tortured?

Don't be silly - it will be odds on it will in here in Britain, suing the British Government, with lashings of legal aid paid for by us as we end up paying royally for both sides. The lawyers will have their snouts in the trough for as long as they possibly can and then the judiciary will come up with their own Alice in Wonderland interpretation of the Human Rights Act.

I am not even sure why Mohamed became our case in the first place as he is not a British citizen and left us on a bent passport so would not have been able to legally return in any case.

Calls for an inquiry into claims the Government knew that torturing was going on might have some political capital in embarrassing the powers that be for a day or so but that is about all. This lot have skins to make a rhinoceros look delicate and a ruthless ability to lie without batting an eyelid.

If they agree to an inquiry then they will dictate the terms and we will probably end up with a quick whitewash job along the lines of the charade into the death of Dr David Kelly - anyone who believed that lot of old cobblers probably breeds by cell division.

If they want to lose the inquiry of course then the alternative would be another Saville Inquiry which is in its 11th year having knocked up a cost of £400million or so. The Bloody Sunday inquiry has become a lawyers' mutual fund pension plan, all paid for by the tax payers. Such an inquiry of course would mean that Foreign Secretary David Miliband would have grown up and left school by the time it was over so would be out of the firing line.

With a court case and an inquiry on the breeze the air is thick with fees which is why you can hear the lawyers hovering ready for the feeding frenzy. Justice might hold the scales but is the lawyers in charge of the till.

I never understand these labels scattered among the supermarket aisles like currants in a bun comparing the price in the supermarket you are in with Asda, Sainsbury, Tesco or whatever.

You must have seen them, the "Tesco's price 56p - our price 56p!!" ones or whatever. Now what I don't understand is if there are a couple of labels in an aisle saying they are the same price as the supermarket down the road, does that mean that everything else is more expensive? That seems to be the logic.

If they are so keen on telling us they are the same price then surely they would have brass bands and dancing girls out to tell us everything else was cheaper.They don't so presumably they aren't.

Is it just me or does anyone else get annoyed with this obsession TV now has of never allowing programmes to end without some wittering announcer jumping in with a banal comment and stunningly unexciting information of what treat is on next.

As soon as the credits roll the picture is squeezed to the size of a postage stamp or squashed to become illegible so if you wanted to see who played a particular character or who the director was or whatever - tough.

It is worst after a film or play with a dramatic, sad or thoughtful ended when as soon as the final scene fades on death and destruction or the tragedy of the human condition some cheery soul wearing hob nails jumps in to prattle on and destroy the moment.

I am sure if having some berk banging on about nothing in particular at the end of every film was seen as having artistic or dramatic merit then the likes of Danny Boyle would be using it. As they are not then perhaps TV might like a rethink. expense of the middle man.

As one who always thought PFI schemes were a con where the taxpayer - me and you - lost out heavily in a system which seemed to be designed to line the pockets of consultants, bankers, carpet baggers from the City and bent senior civil servants I cannot quite understand the logic of the taxpayer - that's me and you again - bailing out belly-up schemes.

The whole idea was that these rag bag consortiums of convenience raised all the finance and took all the risk to build schools, hospitals and the like while the taxpayer paid heavily through the nose for the next 30 years. It was a system which by some miracle of accounting chicanery was cheaper than the taxpayer building these things for themselves and, by a happy coincidence, also kept billions in public expenditure off the Government books.

Now the Government is looking at ways to finance these failing schemes so can any explain the logic of putting up the cash for someone to build, for example, a hospital, and then we spend 30 years paying for something we provided the money for in the first place.

I know honest and Government cannot be used in the same sentence unless it is a joke but just for once would it not be more honest if there is a case to be made that these things still have to be built and public money is paying for them that we build them ourselves and cut out the considerable expense of the middle

Anyone one else under the impression we are going to see yet another Government con when it comes to Royal Mail?

The taxpayers, that is you and me, take on the £9 billion black hole of the Royal Mail pension scheme - which is a scheme much better than the one enjoyed by the vast majority who are paying for it through their PAYE contributions - while the Government raises cash by flogging off part of Royal Mail to some foreign outfit or a bunch of hedge fund, private equity cowboys.

I might be wrong but I suspect the bit being flogged off will not include delivering Christmas cards in the Highlands of Scotland or circulars to hill farms in Wales.

In a few years time, if Britain has not been repossessed by then, the Government will point to how well the cherry picking private bit is doing against the public bit, which is the bit actually providing the service, and the stage will be set for full privatisation as the only hope for a modern postal service (i.e. limited to easily accessible addresses in reasonably well populated areas).