The Scotland-UK Coalition of Unionist Propagandists (SUKCUP)

The campaign by the Scotland-UK Coalition of Unionist Propagandists (SUKCUP) to discredit the Scottish Government for its compassionate release of Mohmed Al-Megrahi continues apace.

First we had The Herald telling us that the whisky industry would collapse as a result.

Then we had Glen Campbell's BBC Scotland coverage of the release exposed as partisan and rabidly anti-SNP.

Imagine the surprise.

Continuing the pattern, last week The Scotsman ran with this piece on Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill. Apparently, his criticism of Labour hypocrisy on the matter was somehow deemed to be taunting the families of the Lockerbie dead. The Sun would be proud.

Then just yesterday, and plumbing new depths in so-called Scottish journalism, The Scotsman reported that ‘Megrahi outlives six other criminals released on compassionate grounds.’

Think about what this last one means.

Somewhere in The Scotsman offices there is a journalist with a computer spreadsheet listing all the prisoners released on compassionate grounds from Scottish prisons, alongside the number of days since they were released. Each time one of them dies, Al-Megrahi moves up the list and this journalist punches the air and shouts ‘Yes!’, exchanging ecstatic thumbs-up with his boss in the corner.

The SUKCUP minions are now praying he lives as long as possible, if only to prove the Scottish government was incompetent in its decision to release him. Preferably not long enough to clear his name, but maybe just till the referendum, when his on-going ability to breathe will no doubt be useful as an argument against independence.

This continuing campaign on Al-Megrahi got me wondering. Given all these dire predictions about what would happen to us as a result of the release, just how has the decision affected Scotland?

First, and contrary to widespread expectations, it would appear not to have led to US carpet-bombing of Scotland with B52s after all.

Nor, apart from the FoxNews whack-job minority, has it led to much animosity towards Scotland in the US. In fact Susan Boyle seems to be doing just fine.

Nor indeed has it led to a US boycott of Scottish goods. Luckily, no one knows the oil is ours. (Just think how much we would have lost if it were. Whew.) Similarly, our salmon is still in huge demand, and Scotch whisky sales have not plummeted. Considering that the majority of export whisky sales are to non-US markets – with France our biggest customer and China our fastest growing market – this should come as no surprise.

Not that business should have anything to do with such matters. Those worried about the whisky industry should be more concerned about London-based multinationals closing their Scottish whisky plants. The whole Diageo saga - and many others like it - might have been averted had Scotland been independent and able to offer concrete tax benefits for corporations to remain in Scotland. But I digress.

The point is this: not one of the their predictions has come to pass, and yet it continues.

So what is going on?

If it wasn’t clear before it should be now: the distress the SUKCUP flunkies felt most about Al-Megrahi’s release was not that the Scottish Government made a bad call and released a convicted bomber, nor that it didn’t do as the White House demanded and let him rot, not even that it forced UK Labour’s Scottish branch into mental contortions as it condemned what its London masters secretly desired in order to close Tony Blair's dodgy deal in the desert.

As we knew all along, the true source of their discomfort was the fact that the decision was left to Scotland at all.

Once you understand this thinking it all makes sense. You realise that had the decision gone the other way, we would now be getting regular updates on the health of a dying man in Greenock Prison, the Scottish Government would have been portrayed as callous Presbyterians lacking in compassion, but simultaneously labelled as weak for having caved into US pressure to keep him locked up.

That’s the problem with the Scottish Unionist media: they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. Servitude and obsequious grovelling to London, combined with knee-jerk opposition to everything the Scottish Government does solves every problem.

What these gits don’t get is that fewer and fewer people are listening. If the answer to everything is simply ‘it's the nationalist government of Scotland wot did it,’ people anticipate what you’re going to say before you open your mouth, compensate in advance and work it out for themselves.

It's not working any more.



Coming soon: the Federal UK Coalition of Unionist Patriots.

What the Irish Result Means for Scotland & England

With the YES vote in Ireland and European Union integration back to full steam ahead, we are quite possibly living through the last days of UK sovereignty. Interestingly enough though, during these momentous times many UK nationalists can still be heard to argue that even though the UK should be independent from the EU, that Scotland should not from the UK.

The irony of this should not be lost on Scots.

England’s Future in the EU
The UK nationalist argument is that on the one hand Scottish nationalism is narrow-minded, parochial and a recent construction of the SNP, but that UK nationalism is ancient and noble and somehow the way things ought to be, despite it being entirely a creation of the years since 1707. The key to understanding this thinking is that most anti-EU UK nationalist arguments are in fact borrowed from Tory ideas of Englishness, and that almost all the UK’s anti-EU groups are also English. Englishmen are in effect trying to intellectualise what is in reality a visceral aversion to their absorption of English national identity into the EU international soup.




What will the Lisbon Treaty mean for the UK as it stands? If you want an idea of what will happen if Project EU is completed, look no further than Scotland’s history within the UK. The parallels with the UK's coming absorption into the EU collective are striking.

For some time before Union happened for Scotland, there was a loose form of union in place (regal Union in 1603). This generated much conflict with England, and serious doubts from both nations about whether to take it further. Then Scotland suffered from a financial disaster that almost bankrupted the country - the fallout of the failed Darien Expeditions in the late 1690s.

Sound familiar?

Eventually, after much heated debate and venting of spleens, England offered to compensate Scotland in return for incorporating union. The Scottish common people were utterly against it. Then a massive English campaign of pamphlets and propaganda was launched to get it over the line.

Sound familiar?

Daniel Defoe was an English agent in Scotland at the time and a key player. England spent big to bribe Scotland's political elites and, in the end, most of those who were against it changed their minds. Scotland was sold out and the Scottish parliament voted itself out of existence.

Full incorporating Union was then finally enacted, without a referendum, and against the wishes of the Scottish people. How do we know this was the case? The result was rioting in the streets of several Scottish cities.

Scotland’s sovereignty was lost but her national identity persisted stubbornly throughout the Union, during which time her political elites and much of her population threw their weight behind the British Imperial project which, as many Englishmen will admit, was heavily influenced by the Scots. In the 300 years since, Scotland was transformed beyond recognition as hundreds of thousands of Scots scattered themselves across the Empire as soldiers, governors, settlers and merchants. She entered the Union with a fifth of England’s population, and is threatening to leave with barely a tenth.

Her people helped found and populate many of the nations that grew out of the Empire. Conversely, most of her land at home is today under foreign ownership. That is the nature of junior partnership in an empire.

What does this mean for England? Her population stands today at 51.7 million, barely more than a tenth of the population of Europe. With this in mind, the question on the lips of many Englishmen is this: once we have lost our sovereignty, will our island location be enough to preserve what’s left of England’s national identity in a teaming sea of 499 million Europeans, or is our population destined for dilution and depletion as the English are scattered throughout Europe, and European migrants pour in?


Scotland and the EU
In Scotland, many Scots may be sorely tempted to say, “see how you like your own medicine”, but for us the baton change from Westminster to Brussels would be fairly straightforward. It will be something for which 300 years of union with England has prepared us. In reality, we are already part of the EU labour market, while receiving none of the benefits of direct membership. But will full membership of the EU be the best arrangement for an ‘independent’ Scotland?

Will it be a case of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’?

Personally, after independence I would prefer a transition period of about twenty years to get our house in order and enter Europe on our own terms - if ever, instead of joining as an oil-rich-but-penniless escapee from the financial basket case that is Britain today. Norway’s associate membership via the EEA and EFTA has allowed it to opt into European programs on its own terms, and – through its massive oil revenues – to build a $400billion sovereign fund, giving it one of the hardest currencies in the world (as the UK Govt predicted 35 years ago would happen in Scotland after independence) instead of propping up the Euro.

This is probably the best path for Scotland.

Unfortunately, from where we stand I don’t think EEA membership is something that can be sold to a cautious Scottish public, in whose collective mind the act of breaking away from London will be difficult enough, and for whom the idea of Brussels acts as a safety net. In other words, if we want to get Scottish independence over the line, the SNP policy of independence-in-Europe is the most likely way it will succeed.

Independence-in-Europe has long been SNP policy, and although I’ve recently had my reservations, I now realise that these will only play into the hands of those who wish to keep Scotland in the UK. Make no mistake: for those Scots unsure of independence, cold feet about the EU will not lead them to choose the alternative model of EEA/EFTA-style of Norwegian nationhood.

It will keep us locked in this godforsaken Union.

Europe may have its problems but, as the expenses scandal has clearly shown, these issues are dwarfed by the systemic venality of Westminster and Whitehall. And the suggestion of Tony Blair as EU president should be seen for what it is: a distraction. Removing the corrupting influence of London’s tentacles from Scotland should remain our top priority and can only be a Good Thing.

If the last few weeks of Irish referendum coverage have taught us anything, it’s that most EU scaremongering in the UK has been by disaffected English Tories and the English Tory media, watching as the last vestiges of their national identity – dressed up as the UK – disappear.

That same UK sovereignty has allowed the British parliament to control Scotland since 1707 and, not to put too fine a point on it, the game is up.

So it’s important for Scots not to be taken in by English Tory protests at the loss of UK nationality to the EU. As part of the UK, Scots have no nationality to lose. We already lost that three hundred years ago, and now it's time to take it back.

Norway offers us the model, but even direct membership of the EU is more than what we've got now, which is nothing.

Nine Ways to Stop Scotland Breaking Free

As Scotland’s minister for the Constitution, Mike Russell’s job is to deliver a successful independence referendum in late 2010. This will not be easy. In the second part of this series, we look at what he will be up against, and what tactics PM-to-be David Cameron might use to hold together what’s left of the remnant of Empire we call the UK of GB & NI.


Over the next two years, the fate of Scotland will be decided in the following three polls:


A. The next British General Election on or before June 3rd, 2010.

B. The planned referendum on Scottish independence, planned for late 2010, and

C. The next Scottish parliamentary elections on May 5th 2011 - if indeed there is still a devolved Scottish parliament by that date: if the above referendum goes ahead and is successful, there won’t be any more elections for a devolved Scottish parliament. The electoral cycle for a newly independent free and democratic Scotland will have begun.


Getting a referendum bill through the Scottish Parliament will be no easy matter. It will be met by the full arsenal of British Unionist resistance: the combined opposition of the British Unionist parties in Edinburgh (Labour, Tory and LibDem), the relentless pro-Union bias of the foreign-owned Scottish media, the death throws of the out-going Labour administration in London, the continued surreptitious spoiling tactics of Britain’s faceless minions in Whitehall, and the full might of the next Tory government at Westminster with its massive English majority.

But now that Labour is facing annihilation at the next British election, surely the task facing Scottish nationalists becomes simpler? Won’t there be a Scottish backlash against the Tories, once they take power at Westminster?

You would think so, but we can’t write off Labour yet. Their plan is to hang on long enough to fire off their last deadly Parthian shot: proportional representation in UK elections. With the prospect of at least a dozen years in power, the Tories will oppose it, but Gordon Brown (or his unelected Labour successor) will push it through as the only thing standing between his party and utter oblivion.

How will this affect Scotland? The referendum is the key, but with an impotent Tory administration in Westminster (as a result of a new PR system), there might not be the backlash against the Union that the SNP is counting on in the coming referendum.

The signs are indeed ominous, and Scottish nationalists might be getting a strong sense of déjà vu. Haven’t we been here before? For those too young to remember, current events bear more than a passing resemblance to 1979, with the SNP calling for the dissolution of the British parliament, Scotland being dragged down by the UK’s increasingly precarious finances, the IMF breathing down the British Government's neck, the Labour Party on the ropes, the Tories waiting in the wings of Westminster, and a referendum on Scottish nationalism in the pipeline.

When the '79 referendum was finally held, Scotland voted YES in a contrived question that would have granted an almost meaningless form of devolution, only to be told the answer was NO on a trumped-up technicality.

It was Europe that eventually forced London to concede real devolution to Scotland via another referendum in 1997 after – despite Tony Blair’s claims of spontaneous generosity – a secret group of Scottish nationalists had pointed out to Council of Europe diplomats that Brussels was in no position to dictate forms of democracy to Eastern Europe when those self-same forms were being denied within Scotland. London was promptly told to get its house in order. Quickly.

It was the supreme irony of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. Having lobbied for full EU membership for the emerging democratic states of Eastern Europe (to counter attempts by the French-German axis to create a ‘United States of Europe’) her actions led to Scottish nationalists then using her success to seek the same levels of democracy, levels she had been so instrumental in preventing in Scotland.

So what can we expect this time around? Another loaded question in a fixed-up referendum? Twenty more wasted years? What tactics will the combined might of the British establishment use this time to hang on to Scotland for the few remaining years it needs to extract the last of her oil?

To answer this question, and to anticipate the desperate Unionist rearguard action about to be unleashed on Scotland, I’ve decided to put myself in David Cameron’s shoes - assuming he wins the next election. What follows is a step-by-step battle plan, ready to roll for the newly elected Prime Minister of this morally and financially bankrupt British state:

1. Announce English votes for English laws. This should head off English demands for devolution and act as a good band-aid for the inherent unfairness of England not having her own parliament.

2. Make ‘Respect for Scotland’ the Tory mantra north of the border. Buy off the Scottish elites and nationalist-leaning Scottish entrepreneurs with knighthoods and peerages. Move some of the nuclear subs from Scotland to ports in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Re-form the Scottish regiments. Divide et impere.

3. Strict Scottish media management. Control the flow of all non-internet information. Pull the plug on award-winning Newsnight Scotland. Encourage pseudo-intellectual Scottish writers to attack the idea of Alex Salmond’s ‘arc of prosperity’ while ignoring the stunning success story of Norway (1), the closest match to Scotland, and the complete meltdown that is UK Inc. Continue to support blanket pro-Union media coverage via the BBC and the Scottish press. Spoon-feed ‘lobby journalists’ with inside stories, ostracising any journalist – English or Scots – with nationalist leanings. Increase funding to BBC Scotland for pro-Union news and current affairs programming. This could never happen in England, but with Scotland’s well-established, anti-SNP, rabidly pro-Union press and media, it would be business as usual, with a new piper calling the tune.

4. Derail economic arguments for full Scottish independence. Avoid granting full fiscal autonomy, allowing instead the Calman Commission recommendations on Scottish government borrowing. Then go further and announce a fair share of all taxes raised on oil revenues will now be paid directly to Scotland, proportional to its current ratio of the UK population: 8.5%. (2) The nationalist Scottish Government will appear greedy as it condemns the niggardliness of the windfall while spending it on hospitals, roads and schools. The Scottish people will probably settle for this as an acceptable result, allowing the British Government keep the rest for IMF repayments, more London infrastructure, the Olympics and the replacement of Trident.

5. Form an unholy alliance with Labour in Scotland to get access to its up-and-running electoral fraud machine. They too will be playing an end game for their survival as a party, just as you will be for the British state. They will hope to stage a comeback from their old Scottish heartland, and will be willing to try almost anything. Imaginary Scottish Labour supporters voting for the Union in a referendum are better than real ones.

6. Once all this is in place, announce a British-run referendum on Scottish independence to take place before the Scottish Government one, with the pretext that you want to make sure it is run fairly, being such an important issue.

7. Make the referendum question loaded, something along the lines of: ‘Should Scotland break all ties and separate from the rest of Great Britain, or remain within the United Kingdom?’ YES – break all ties; NO – remain in the United Kingdom. The psychology of this is that most referendums tend to vote ‘No’, regardless of the issue, when it is contrived as a vote for the status quo. (3)

8. Hold the referendum on a work day or, even better, a holiday weekend so that the aged and unemployed – those currently dependent on British government handouts – will be over-represented, and more independent professional people will be too busy to vote, or away on holiday. (4)

9. Once the NO vote occurs – as it surely will if all these steps are taken – declare the matter of Scottish independence closed for a generation, at least until well past peak oil, when an asset-stripped Scotland can finally be cut loose.


In this way, despite the unprecedented levels of autonomy granted to Scotland, you, David Cameron, will still be able to claim that you are Prime Minister of a UK that includes the land and seas of Scotland. The UK will then retain its relative importance within Europe, its geopolitical importance in the world, and its seats on the UN Security Council, G8, and NATO, allowing you to continue with the myth that Britain is still a world power.(5)

This will also give your government continued access to 91.5% of Scotland’s oil revenues, essential if bankrupt Britain is to have any chance at all of paying off the unprecedented levels of debt accrued on the watch of your predecessor, the unelected Scottish Unionist Prime Minister, James Gordon Brown.





UPDATE
Brown signals end to ‘first past the post’ voting at Westminster



References

(1) “On the government's estimates, the [2009 Norwegian Government] surplus will more than halve as a share of GDP from 18.9% to 7.4%. That would still be a remarkably good outcome in comparison with the budgetary problems being faced in other European countries, although it is also dependent to some extent on the revised macroeconomic assumptions underlying the forecast.”
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13709932

(2) The current proportion of the UK population living in Scotland is 8.5%, taking Scotland’s latest population as 5,144,200, and the UK as 60,943,912.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/uk.html
http://www.scotland.org/about/fact-file/population/

(3) This has been the case in Australia, where the option for change has always been tied to the YES choice in any referendum. In this way only 8 out of 44 referendums have been carried since Federation in 1901.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Australia

(4) Labour tried this in Glasgow East in 2008 and still lost. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7522153.stm

(5) Jack Straw revealed the true value of Scotland to the UK during BBC Question Time, September 28 2006: “A broken-up United Kingdom would not be in the interests of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, but especially not England. Our voting power in the European Union would diminish. We'd slip down in the world league GDP tables. Our case for staying in the G8 would diminish and there could easily be an assault on our permanent seat in the UN Security Council.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/5388078.stm

Nine Ways to Steal an Election

In a former post, we looked at some of the many loopholes in the UK’s democratic system. Turning this around, let us now look at the many ways the British electoral system may be successfully exploited by a party sufficiently determined to seize power - or hold it at any cost.



Combining the findings from a number of recent investigations into electoral fraud in Britain (1,2,3,4,5), it is absolutely clear that - despite the current government's lip-service to electoral reform - all of the following means of electoral fraud remain relatively easy to execute across the whole of mainland UK (6):

1. Nominating people as postal voters without their knowledge, for the fraudulent use of their vote by a third party. The first voters know of this is when they turn up at the polling station and find they have already voted. (7)

2. Family voting by the householder on behalf of everyone in the house. The householder is in total control of the household voter registration, both in terms of who is registered and who is not. If he or she doesn’t approve of how someone will vote, they can delete them from the household register, or vote on their behalf by post, knowing their date of birth. (8)

3. Registering bogus voters on a household’s voter list. The householder can make up as many names/birthdays/identities/signatures as he/she wants. (9,10) This is particularly effective if a party persuades the householder to vote for it by post as a block. According to the Council of Europe inspection team, this is “very difficult to detect”. (11)

4. Registering to vote in multiple electorates. Many people do this legally, for example students who live away from home. But since there is no central electoral register, there is no limit to how many constituencies in which a person can register. Using postal voting, it is “childishly easy” in a General Election to send off multiple postal votes in plenty of time for all the constituencies where you are registered. (12)


Although illegal, routine collection and handling of postal votes by party activists (‘If you fill it in now, I'll post it for you.’), enables each of the following three related forms of electoral fraud:

5. Intimidating or bribing socially vulnerable voters to vote for the party that is collecting the postal vote, or to leave it blank for the party activist to complete later. This is devastatingly effective if the household is a student dorm or an old folks’ home, giving the activist enormous voting power. (13,14)

6. Altering completed postal votes. It’s as easy as crossing out one choice and replacing it with another. There are very lax rules about this. The party activist doesn't even have to match the pen colour.(15)

7. Destroying postal votes for the opposing parties. (16)


In addition, the UK Department of Justice (17) wants to bring in e-voting and e-counting, both of which are wide open to the same kinds of abuse to which all forms of remote voting are vulnerable: impersonation, bribery and intimidation.(18,19,20). If the Opposition objects to their use, this also creates a clear conflict of interest for the IT suppliers of the systems, and a strong commercial incentive to extend the incumbent Government’s tenure by:

8. Programming or changing results for electronic counts of postal votes. This is relatively easy to achieve, especially when observers are kept away from the computers doing the counting.(21) The Open Rights Group findings make it clear that for the systems so far deployed there is absolutely no way to verify the results produced. (22)

9. Hacking, programming or changing results of e-voting (online voting) totals. Again, there is absolutely no way to verify the results produced, particularly when the e-voting computer servers are locked away in data centres remote from the scrutiny of observers in the counting rooms. (23,24)


Thus, if e-voting and e-counting are deployed for the next General Election (as they were for Scotland’s elections of 2007), there will be in place nine separate ways for committing serious electoral fraud across the length of Britain.

Interestingly, of all the recommendations in the various reports, the UK government chose only to focus on the checking of personal identifiers on returned postal ballots, which is now mandatory.(25) Unfortunately, the potential fraud is not with who is voting by post, but the pressure brought to bear on those who voted, the handling of these votes, the corresponding destruction of postal votes for other candidates, and in whether the voter exists at all. (26) So this does absolutely nothing to eliminate any of the problems inherent in the concept of remote voting. What is more, this reform was in place before the highly dubious Glenrothes by-election result of November 2008 (27), and so had no effect whatsoever.

Whether intentionally distorting the truth by careful choice of words, or astonishingly unaware of the realities of electoral fraud, the report by the Electoral Commission on Glenrothes contained the following gem:

“A full check of all returned postal voting statements is the only way of checking that postal votes are returned by those who applied for them. Full checking will also remove actual and perceived loopholes in the system and can be expected to deter further attempts at malpractice. We therefore commend the Returning Officer and his staff for undertaking 100% verification on the first occasion of the Regulations being in force in Scotland.” (28)

Considering that all the Returning Officer was doing was checking unverifiable names and dates of birth on postal votes against a list of equally unverifiable names and date of birth on the electoral roll, this is utter nonsense.

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Even the author of the latest report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life seems to argue that the only issue at stake here is one of the public's faith in our democracy:

“Electoral fraud is not a trivial matter. It is an affront to the democratic principle of one-person one vote. Left unchecked it will eventually undermine trust and confidence in the democratic process and by implication the electorate’s consent to the outcome of elections.”(29)

But it’s even more serious than that. If ever there was a perfect time for a determined political party with a ruthless political machine to seize and hold the British state by massive electoral fraud, this would surely be it.

With Scottish independence looming and an increasing number of English demanding their own assembly, the danger is that some might see this as the only way of saving Britain, ironic as that may sound.



UPDATE 25-5-09

Since I wrote this, the expenses scandal has broken, and the BNP look like it might be seen by many as the alternative English party in the coming election. If you add immigration levels to the mix of why many think Britain needs saving, the BNP look particularly dangerous - especially if they get their act together on electoral fraud. It will indeed be ironic if they do, considering the EU - born in the wake of fascism - had the chance to clean up Britain's electoral system in 2005. And blew it.

References

(1) The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) report on the May 2005 UK General Election, August 5, 2005, p18:
“The ODIHR is the lead agency in Europe in the field of election observation. It co-ordinates and organizes the deployment of thousands of observers every year to assess whether elections in the [Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe] area are in line with national legislation and international standards. Its unique methodology provides an in-depth insight into all elements of an electoral process.”
http://www.osce.org/odihr-elections/15922.html

(2) UK Electoral Reform Society (ERS), Policy on e-Voting and Counting, April 2008.
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/Electronic%20voting%20POLICY.pdf
From its website : “Since its foundation in 1884, the Electoral Reform Society has worked for the development of democracy not only in the United Kingdom but also abroad, promoting, organising and monitoring elections."

3) Open Rights Group (ORG): report into the May 2007 English and Scottish elections, June 2007, p63: “The Open Rights Group is a fast-growing NGO focused on raising awareness of issues such as privacy, identity, data protection, access to knowledge and copyright reform.”
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/e-voting-main/

(4) Council of Europe (CoE), Venice Commission report, ‘Application to initiate a monitoring procedure to investigate electoral fraud in the United Kingdom,’ January 9, 2008. http://www.assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2008/electoral_fraud_UK_E.pdf
From the CoE website : “The European Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as the Venice Commission, is the Council of Europe's advisory body on constitutional matters."

(5) Committee for Standards in Public Life (CSPL), 12th Report, April 2008.
http://www.public-standards.gov.uk/Library/OurWork/AnnualReport2007.pdf
From website: “The Committee on Standards in Public Life is an independent public body which advises government on ethical standards across the whole of public life in the UK.”
This is the first report by the new chairman Sir Christopher Kelly. His predecessor, Sir Alistair Graham, was sacked by Tony Blair in April 2007 after criticism of his government’s attitude to standards of integrity in public life as having ‘a low-priority’.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1545488/Anti-sleaze-watchdog-in-attack-on-Blair.html

(6) As a result of the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act of 2002, the UK Government closed some of these loopholes, but only for Northern Ireland: individual voter registration replaced household voter registration, and the requirement for photographic proof of identity in the polling station was brought in. UK Electoral Commission: ‘Electoral Fraud Act 2002: an assessment of its first year in operation,’ December 2003. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/election/electoralcommission1203sum.pdf
As a result of the tighter identity checking, the number of voters fell by 10% as the bogus identities dropped off the electoral roll. CoE report, note 68, p10

(7) CoE report, note 21, p5

(8) Open Rights Group, ‘Observer Handbook (ORG Handbook): May 2007 Elections’, April 20, 2007, p2
“Unsupervised voting includes postal voting and Internet voting. Such remote methods can be done in unsupervised areas such as home or work where others can influence or steal votes. The secrecy of the ballot cannot be maintained and there is the potential for ‘family voting’ whereby the head of the family casts the entire family’s votes on their behalf.”
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/org_observer_handbook.pdf

(9) CoE report, note 85, p12-13: “The main underlying weakness of the electoral system in the Great Britain is the current household registration system without personal identifiers. This system makes it extremely easy to add bogus characters to the voters’ lists. All a head of household has to do is to add a number of names on the yearly canvas form. The Registration Officers have only limited power to check these names and the absence of personal identifiers makes any checking of these names an all but impossible task. Therefore, as long as the names on the registration form are not overly frivolous, and the number of bogus entries is not unrealistically large in comparison to the residency in question, all names will be de facto accepted on face value and added to the voters’ list."

(10) CSPL, p10: “In the Committee’s view, the safeguards introduced by the Government in the 2006 to combat electoral fraud are easily bypassed because of the fundamental weaknesses in the current system of electoral registration. In most cases the information supplied on completed electoral registration forms is taken at face value, and few checks are carried out at polling stations to verify a voter’s identity."

(11) CoE report, note 89, p13

(12) CoE report, note 91, p13: “The fact that a person is legally allowed to be registered on the voters’ lists in more than one locality offers another opening for electoral fraud. Although its is illegal to vote more than once in the same national election, the onus on not doing so is completely on the voter itself. While it would be physically difficult to vote in person in multiple polling stations in different localities, the postal vote arrangements make it childishly simple to do so, and equally difficult to detect.’ "

(13) ODIHR report, p8: “Postal voting presents challenges with regard to the secrecy of the vote, and the possibility of undue pressure on voters at the time of marking the ballot. This may be of particular concern with regard to perceived as being most vulnerable.”
See also CoE report, note 100, p14

(14) CoE report, note 32, p6: “Multi occupancy households, such as student dormitories and caring homes for the elderly, are also considered to be single households for the purpose of voter registration."

(15) CoE report, note 98, p14

(16) Times Report on Labour advising it student canvassers to destroy opposition votes in Leeds: ‘Get the votes and we can win, but don't get caught with them,’ TimesOnline, 29 April 2007. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1719968.ece
The Council of Europe report, p5, note26, also states that when the police found the two Labour candidates in the Birmingham warehouse with the thousands of completed postal voting packs they were either altering or destroying votes for other candidates.

(17) The Department of Constitutional Affairs became the Department of Justice on May 9, 2007 after assuming some of the duties of the Home Office.

(18) ERS report, p3: “When votes are cast outside a polling station the secrecy of the ballot cannot be assured and there can be no guarantee that the elector did not suffer intimidation or was offered a bribe while voting."

(19) ORG Handbook, p2

(20) ERS report, p4: “Being a form of remote voting, it compromises the secrecy of the ballot, significantly increasing the risks of voter intimidation, bribery and impersonation. The Society therefore opposes the introduction of internet, text and telephone voting at present."

(21) ORG Report, p13: “In most locations computer screens were positioned too far away from barriers to be observable or were turned away from view so they couldn’t be observed."

(22) ORG Report, p3: “ORG is concerned that the lack of reliable audit trails, the actions of some vendors that left no audit trail and a general reluctance to perform manual counts to confirm the results of e-counting mean that there is no meaningful way to verify that voters’ intentions had been accurately counted."

(23) ORG report, p1: “E-voting is a ‘black box system’, where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud.”
p20: “No matter what access was provided, fundamentally the servers are opaque to the human eye. No observer would be able to examine what the server was doing, what data it was sending and receiving or whether problems were occurring, without detailed technical access to the software and its operating system, yet it would be inappropriate and is clearly against guidelines for observers to handle anything to do with the running of the election. Hence ORG must conclude that the servers and their operations were—and will remain in future elections—unobservable."

(24) ERS report, p4: “The use of internet, text message and telephone voting seriously compromises the security of an election, both because: It is vulnerable to hackers and other attacks on the electoral system by those who might want to influence the outcome by interfering with the equipment or software"

(25) Among other things, the UK Electoral Administration Act 2006 allowed independent observers at UK elections for the first time, in line with most democracies. It also brought in identity-checks on all postal votes, checking date of birth and signature against those provided (but not verified for authenticity) at the time of voter registration. There is nothing to guarantee that any of these identities are real.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/pdf/ukpga_20060022_en.pdf

(26) CoE report, note 84, p12: “It does not take an experienced election observer, or election fraudster, to see that the combination of the household registration system without personal identifiers and the postal vote on demand arrangements make the election system in Great Britain very vulnerable to electoral fraud. The 2006 changes to the electoral law only partially addressed this vulnerability."

(27) David Maddox, ‘SNP raises doubts on Glenrothes as inquiry launched into by-election,’ The Scotsman, February 4, 2009.
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/SNP-raises-doubts-on-Glenrothes.4943446.jp

(28) Electoral Commission Report on the Glenrothes By-Election, p13.
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/news-and-media/news-releases/electoral-commission-media-centre/news-releases-reviews-and-research/glenrothes-election-report-published

(29) CPSL, p10

MI5 in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland was on a path to peace and prosperity until someone recently had other ideas. This post seeks to discover who is behind the current bloodshed and to determine their strategy. It asks the question ‘why now?’ and argues that the British government itself might be pulling the strings.

It was with great sadness that I read of the first security force members to be killed in Ulster since 1997. At this terrible time, my thoughts are with the grieving families and friends of the men who died. I remember when a close family member was killed there in the 1970s, and how it shattered the lives of everyone who knew him – his mother, wife, young children, brothers and sisters.

We can only hope the war-weary people of the Province keep cool heads and avoid escalating this to another pointless cycle of tit-for-tat revenge.

I say I was saddened to hear about the deaths, but I was certainly not surprised. Let me tell you why.

If Northern Ireland can stay on the path to peace, it would surely be only a matter of time before a peaceful Ulster begins to build more substantial ties with Dublin. Whether because the loyalists look over the border and see a more prosperous Ireland, or because the IRA’s American donors dried up after September 11 (1), paramilitaries from both sides have taken concrete steps to retreat from the brink. Nearly two years ago, Protestant groups declared that they were renouncing violence(2), and the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) reported six months ago that “[the Provisional IRA’s] Army Council by deliberate choice is no longer operational or functional.”(3) The IMC’s next report in November 2008 went so far as to say that the “people [in Northern Ireland] are generally confident that there will not be a return to the former troubles.” (4)

The Provisional IRA knows that peace on both sides of the border is a necessary precondition for unification to occur. Given time, they would seem to be happy to wait till the two regions drift together in peaceful coexistence and prosperity. They are in no doubt whatsoever that if the killing times return the troops would be back on the streets, and Ulster’s ties to London would be re-established for another thirty years, by virtue of the troop presence alone.

The tone of British press has been predictably superficial: that the murders are the acts of “cornered animal” paramilitaries whose thuggish existence is threatened by a successful peace process.(5)

Threatened by peace after twelve years of peace? Something doesn’t add up. What on earth is driving these fringe republicans back to violence?

Things have been underway for some time. First, in a spectacularly provocative move, it was quietly arranged that MI5 would take back the counter-terrorism activities of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the bipartisan police force that succeeded the RUC as a result of Good Friday Agreement of 1998. MI5 is deeply despised by the nationalist population, and stands accused by Sinn Fein of collusion with loyalist death-squads.(6) With no official announcement, the handover occurred on October 10, 2007. Word got out that it was happening and the wisdom of the move was seriously questioned in the weeks before the handover – not only by nationalist politicians, but by the local NI Police Ombudsman and the Policing Board.(7)

As Margaret Gilmore, Senior Research Fellow at the British security think-tank Royal United Services Institute reported a year ago:

“The PSNI has been responsible for national security in the province. But on 10 October 2007, the police relinquished that responsibility, passing it instead [back] to MI5. The handover took place without any official document… That apparently innocuous yet historic document has never been published and even getting anyone to talk about the shift is extremely difficult.”(8)

She goes on to highlight a stark difference in the way MI5 would operate to its predecessors:

“MI5 is also uncompromising on the thorny issue of how much of its work will focus on republican dissidents and how much on loyalists. Security sources admit MI5 officers in Northern Ireland will focus almost exclusively on republican dissident groups that they deem a threat to national security, while they believe loyalist dissidents are more a law and order/serious crime problem, and thus should be dealt with by the police.”(9)

So MI5 took back surveillance activities of terrorist activities from the police force created by the Good Friday Agreement, but only to monitor dissident republican groups? Understandably, this caused a huge outcry of resentment among the nationalist population. Who would be protecting them? In the four and a half years up to the October 2007 handover, the civilian murder rate by loyalist paramilitary groups was almost twice that by dissident republican groups.(10) Loyalist groups still retain their arms caches to this day.(11)

Not long after the decision to redeploy MI5 was taken, the fires were stoked still further: two months later, MI5 Director General Jonathan Evans cut the ribbon on the Service’s new £20million office in Ulster, easily its biggest regional office outside its Thames House facility in London. The size of the facility caught many in Northern Ireland off guard and caused yet more alarm among local politicians.(12)

Its purpose was not immediately apparent. By February 2008, it was revealed: far more than a regional surveillance office, it would be a second headquarters for MI5, capable of relocating 400 staff in the event of a terrorist attack in London. As Jamie Doward wrote in the Observer at the time: “The opening of the base is in danger of widening rifts in Northern Ireland. (13)

Dolores Kelly of the Northern Ireland Policing board summarised the danger the new centre presented:

“We worked hard for two years to get agreement around two ground-breaking accountability mechanisms which made possible a new beginning in policing – the Policing Board and the Police Ombudsman. MI5 operates outside the control of these mechanisms and as far as the ordinary public and voters are concerned it is a law unto itself. Whose national security they are going to protect? Certainly all through our dirty war, they were curiously blind to the threat coming from the loyalist community. The British Government declared more than a decade ago that it had “no selfish or strategic interest in Northern Ireland”, but clearly this is no longer the case given the massive spy centre they have built at Holywood.”(14)

The new facility is therefore a clear signal that Britain is renewing its strategic interest in the Province, and nationalist politicians can no longer make the case to the fringe elements of the republican paramilitaries that the peace process will lead to a united Ireland.

The change of policy had the desired result. Surveillance indicated an immediate surge in activity among dissident republican groups who actively began to recruit.(15) Several police officers were wounded in fifteen attacks in seventeen months.(16) Republican political leaders struggled desperately to calm the situation.

Meanwhile, the Catholic nationalist populations' simmering sense of betrayal was maintained and nurtured by MI5’s continuous surveillance of republican communities, while offering not one iota of protection from loyalist paramilitary groups. MI5 have been operating completely beyond the reach of any Northern Ireland government oversight(17), their very presence a violation of the Good Friday Agreement and everything it sought to achieve.

Two months ago, intelligence showed the government campaign of sustained covert nationalist provocation might finally bear fruit. An announcement was made by Evans that trouble was expected, and that the threat from dissident Irish Republican groups had “significantly increased in recent months”.(18)

To ensure the threat was consummated, the tension was ratcheted up one more notch. The masterstroke was on March 6th when, apparently to counter the imminent threat, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) were deployed, a composite unit drawing men from the SAS and other special forces regiments. This group had a fearsome reputation in Northern Ireland and would also report to MI5 command directly. Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister, was forthright in his condemnation of their deployment:

"The history of the North has shown that many of these forces have been as much a danger to the community as any other group.” (19)

The rest, as they say, is history. Two days later, sappers Mark Quinsey and Cengiz Azimkar were killed at Massareene army base after stepping out to pay for a pizza delivery. The same weekend, PSNI officer Stephen Carrol was killed on night patrol in Craigavon.

This is the security background to the recent murders, the blame for which must be laid squarely at the feet of the British Government. By its actions over the past 17 months, Whitehall has sent a clear message to the dissident republican paramilitaries that the Provisional IRA has been foolish to negotiate with the UK, that the peace process will not lead to a united Ireland, and that Britain is reasserting its strategic interest in the Province. The recent murders were the end result of careful planning by key people in the UK government, elected or otherwise, who by sustained incendiary measures have repeatedly poured fuel on the dying embers of Irish republican violence to incite fringe groups to attack the security services. Regardless of whether outside observers find these actions sufficiently provocative, the point is surely that the dissident paramilitaries of Northern Ireland evidently did.

And so it begins again.

Orwellian doublespeak seems to be the rhetorical device of choice. Protestant leaders have stated that “the attack vindicated the police decision to call on the army intelligence specialists” (20); while the Sunday Herald described the predictable knee-jerk reaction of the authorities:

“Police estimate there are around 300 dissident republicans intent on wrecking the Northern Irish peace process. They claim to have identified many of them and say they are moving to put them behind bars,”(21)

and the Daily Mail is openly canvassing its readers about whether the troops should be sent back to Northern Ireland to restore peace.(22)

So why now? And who is behind this? The candidates who stand to gain the most are:

1. Hardline Ulster Unionists who believe that the peace process will lead to the reunification of Ireland.

2. An unpopular British government with low standing in the polls, needing to be seen acting with resolve in a crisis.

3. MI5 bosses facing budget reductions if Irish operations are wound down completely. As a percentage of its total budget, Irish republican counterterrorism is already down from 23% three years ago to just 17% a year ago.(23)

4. Elements of the British establishment who feel - like Jack Straw - that Britain’s seat on the UN Security Council would be jeapardised if its territory were in any way diminished.

Mr. Straw unwisely let the last cat out of the bag in 2006 when asked about Scotland. His answer was clear and unambiguous:

“A broken-up United Kingdom would not be in the interests of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, but especially not England. Our voting power in the European Union would diminish. We'd slip down in the world league GDP tables. Our case for staying in the G8 would diminish and there could easily be an assault on our permanent seat in the UN Security Council.”(24)

So here we have a coincidence of interest between the party in power, its unelected leader, those who wish to maintain Britain’s structural integrity and global standing, the British security services, and the hardline element of the local loyalist population.

The strategy has clearly been to provoke dissident republican paramilitaries into violence, the goal being to recreate and sustain a level of bloodshed sufficient to justify a return of the troops to the streets in a de facto occupation.

A further goal, and I’m possibly crediting whoever is behind this with more foresight than they deserve, is to remobilise the feral ranks of Scottish Unionism, increasing the tension steadily until 2010 when a resurgent body of Unionist flag-waving bigots can sway the looming referendum on independence London’s way.

Think about it: if Scotland becomes independent, England and Wales plus Northern Ireland would be a strange beast indeed. The Province’s main cultural links lie with Ireland to the south and via Ulster’s historical, religious, linguistic and cultural connections to Scotland farther north. Of the other three nations of the United Kingdom, England would be the country farthest from Ulster, and with the least in common. Perhaps Ulster might even end up being jointly administered in friendship by an independent Scotland and Ireland together, to assuage Ulstermen’s fiery pride.

Whatever happens, the point is this: if London loses Scotland, so too probably Ulster. But if the Troubles can be rekindled, Ulster would be held by the presence of British troops alone, while Scotland – the real prize in this great game with the leverage she gives to England’s world power status – might be held by a sense of ethic and religious solidarity with her beleaguered neighbour. Scotland would still be British soil, held by the “acceptable level of violence” across the North Channel in Ulster.(25)

Two birds with one stone.

Whatever the reason, the resumption of violence in Northern Ireland has become Britain’s strategy to retain the Province. Especially now that Tony Blair, so crucial in steering the Good Friday agreement through, is out of the way. Rogue forces within the British government are now free to unravel what he helped achieve. (26)

His successor Gordon Brown has himself been directly and heavily involved with current Northern Ireland policy. The Times reports:

“He taken an increased interest in the past year, with several visits to Northern Ireland. When the peace process hit trouble over policing towards the end of last year Mr Brown spent much of one week deeply involved.”(27)

But surely Britain could never afford another major troop deployment to Ulster? Isn’t the UK almost bankrupt?

Apparently so, but street patrols in Northern Ireland do not require the vast supporting infrastructure of a remote foreign war. Most of the expense would be fuel for vehicles, surveillance, and in soldiers’ wages, which are due whether the soldiers are sitting on their backsides in their barracks or patrolling the streets of Belfast. Nor would the conflict need heavy artillery or advanced weapon systems. What passes as inadequate equipment in the Middle East will do perfectly well for Northern Ireland. British troops returning from Iraq will be available just in time.

And, of course, an army’s wage bill isn’t so hard to meet when you’re printing money by the truckload, as the British government plans to do.

The British strategy is already paying dividends. A weekend poll showed that after his visit to Northern Ireland, Gordon Brown and the Labour Party have begun to climb in the polls.(28)

And this week the Belfast Telegraph reports that, after two years of cutbacks, MI5 has at last been successful in getting its budget increase approved:

“MI5 is preparing to boost spending on intelligence activities in Northern Ireland in an effort to track down a hardcore of Republican extremists committed to violence. The Security Minister, Lord West of Spithead, said the security services' budget for the province would be reassessed.”(29)

More staff have already been dispatched to the new facility.(30) Perhaps the increased budget and personnel will allow MI5 to monitor the loyalist paramilitary groups now too. They have some catching up to do. After ignoring them for so long, they will have no idea of their activities, or when or where they will strike.

Expect a great deal of violence from both sides before this fire is put out. You can be certain that whoever is behind it will do whatever it takes to keep it smouldering.

How to Stop This?

It is quite clear that the British government has done its level best to provoke this violence. It is therefore a matter of the utmost urgency that Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox demand answers from Defence Secretary John Hutton on the following:

1. Do you have any idea what MI5 has been doing in Northern Ireland for the past 17 months?

2. What and when did MI5 hear about these IRA dissident groups’ plans?

3. What security measures were taken in response?

4. What knowledge, if any, does MI5 have of the activities of Ulster's paramilitary groups?

5. What, if any, security resources have been allocated to monitor future activities of Ulster paramilitary groups?

References

(1) Kaya Burgess, “9/11 attacks ‘helped to secure peace in Northern Ireland’,” TimesOnline, October 18, 2008. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article4965700.ece

(2) Mary Jordan, “N. Ireland Protestant Group Vows to Renounce Violence”, Washington Post, May 4, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/03/AR2007050302321.html

(3) From the Nineteenth Report from the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) of Northern Ireland. IMC Report#19, © Crown Copyright 2008, Sep 3, 2008, p8 http://www.independentmonitoringcommission.org/documents/uploads/ACF1599.pdf

(4) The Twentieth Report from the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) of Northern Ireland also recommended that it was time for the complete devolution of policing and justice. IMC Report #20, © Crown Copyright 2008, p32 http://www.independentmonitoringcommission.org/documents/uploads/Twentieth%20Report.pdf

(5) “Northern Ireland terrorists are like a 'cornered animal'”, claims Sir Hugh Orde,” TimesOnline (no author), March 15, 2009 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5912123.ece

(6) Jerry Adams, “No room for MI5 in the North”, November 9, 2006, http://cryptome.info/mi5-out-ni.htm

(7) Margaret Gilmore, ‘MI5 in Northern Ireland,’ Monitor, March, 2008, p7 https://www.rusi.org

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid., p8. My emphasis.

(10) Between March 1, 2003 and August 31, 2007, there were 13 verified loyalist murders of civilians, versus 5 verified republican murders. None of those killed were members of the security forces. IMC Report #20, Op. Cit., © Crown Copyright 2008, p18

(11) Dan Keenan & Gerry Moriarty, “Time running out for UDA and UVF to decommission”, Irish Times, March 16, 2009 https://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0205/1233787117494.html

(12) Gilmore, Op. Cit., p6

(13) Jamie Doward, “MI5 plan to use Belfast bunker in emergency,” Observer, February 24, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/feb/24/uksecurity.northernireland

(14) Gilmore, Op. Cit., p8

(15) IMC Report #20, Op. Cit., © Crown Copyright 2008, Nov 10, 2008, p5

(16) John F. Burns, ‘Irish Assault Raises Specter of Brutal Day,’ New York Times, March 8, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/europe/09ulster.html?_r=1

(17) The MI5 website says that “The Prime Minister is responsible for the UK intelligence machinery as a whole,” but that “The Home Secretary is regularly briefed by the Director General, who is directly accountable to him.” MI5 is not accountable in any way to the local security structure put in place following the Good Friday Agreement.

(18) Joseph Daily, “Dissident IRA Threat on the Rise: Most people think it's all over in Northern Ireland. Unfortunately it is not,” WorldNetDaily, January 13, 2009. https://www.wnd.com/2009/01/86031/

(19) David Sharrock, “Row breaks out over return of Army to fight splinter IRA terrorists,” TimesOnLine, March 6, 2009. Sharrick reports: “The regiment’s expertise lies in intelligence gathering and surveillance. Special forces, including the SAS, were withdrawn from Northern Ireland after the paramilitary ceasefires in 1997.”

(20) John F. Burns, New York Times. Ibid.

(21) Chris Watt, “Petrol bombs on Ulster’s streets as police arrest five,” Sunday Herald, March 17, 2009.

(22) MailOnLine Debate: Should the Government send more troops to Northern Ireland?

(23) Gilmore, Op. Cit., p6

(24) Jack Straw, BBC Question Time, September 28 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/5388078.stm

(25) A term first used in December 1971 by Reginald Maudling, then British Home Secretary. https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/othelem/glossary.htm

(26) One of the few things Tony Blair can be said to have helped achieve. As the Downing Street Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell noted, “the heroes of this story are Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and the party leaders in Northern Ireland”.” From Max Hastings’ review of “Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland,” TimesOnLine, March 23, 2008.

(27) Michael Evans, Philip Webster and David Sharrock, “Northern Ireland shootings: MI5's response,” TimesOnLine, March 11, 2009.

(28) Reuters UK, “Brown cuts opposition opinion poll lead,” March 18, 2009. https://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKTRE52G35D20090317

(29) David McKittrick, “Police 'making progress' in hunt for gunmen who killed soldiers,” Belfast Telegraph, March 10, 2009. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/police-making-progress-in-hunt-for-gunmen-who-killed-soldiers-28469992.html

(30) Evans, Webster and Sharrock, Op. Cit.