20th May 2013
Civil partnerships were introduced in 2004 exclusively for same sex couples. They cannot be created religiously but otherwise legally are virtually identical to a hetersexual marriage, civil or church made. The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill wishes to extend the definition of marriage, if they want it, to gays as well as straights. A majority of the public are in favour of it but a significant number of people such as the church community and some MPs, especially Conservatives, are not. The church therefore are specifically excluded from the proposal. As you will appreciate though for the rest it is a heaven sent opportunity for the Gang. All you have to do is create a device which could frustrate the measure and then let those so minded use it for that purpose whilst fooling even themselves perhaps it is not really their intention at all. The clever wheeze the Gang member specialist has come up with, in my view, is that for equality, civil partnerships shoud be available to all couples not just gays. That is entirely reasonable of course but the sting in the tail is that, if the provision goes into the bill, it is an extremely complicated detail to cover the entire community. In practice it could delay the whole law until after the next election. And at that point who knows what may happen.
In relation to the swivel-eyed loons affair I heard a journalist on the World at One today say that normally 40% of what a politician says to you you do not publish, even if sometimes it would make a very good story. One reason of course is that it would breach the trust of your confidant and they would never tell you anything interesting again.
Last Saturday I was writing about the Gang trying to upset relations between Russia and America. Something I forget to mention was that the day before unnamed US officials had informed the New York Times Russia has supplied sophisticated anti-ship missiles to Syria. That caused Mr Lavrov to say in a televised statement that any weapons sent to Syria are as a result of legal contracts which do not violate any international agreements.
In the Budget the Government announced a scheme to assist all buyers of new build homes so that they only have to find a 5% deposit, and take out a 75% mortgage, for purchase. The 20% shortfall will be made up by an interest free government loan which will increase if the value of the proprty goes up. Service charges for the loan apply after six years and it must be repaid when your home is sold. Should the value of the property fall significantly however the taxpyer will ultimately have to pick up the cost. For that reason therefore over the weekend, just before he moves on, Sir Mervyn King said he was worried about the risk being taken on by us all, to the tune of billions of pounds. The Government have responded that the arrangement is only temporary. It will end in 2017 with a maximum investment of about £3.5 billion.
A story here, in my view, of how difficult it is when you are an individual who is resisting the wishes of a nasty gang of people. They get cross with you simply because you are not compliant. I myself do not think life should be conducted like that.
I am a creature of habit. I always use the same area of the supermarket car park on my weekly shop. On Saturday there was a car coming out of that part just as I turning in. Although I was just too late to see I am pretty sure it will have come from the one vacant space in front of me as I drove up, amongst all the other occupied ones. I used it. As I started walking away I was approached by a middle aged lady from the other direction in a knee length lace dress. She had her car keys in her hand and said she was having trouble getting into her car. She was very particular in saying she was parked next to me. I politely declined and suggested she call the AA. I thought she might then get a bit agitated I was not prepared to help her but in fact she immediately accepted my reponse and walked off. In normal circumstances I would never dream of refusing help to a stranger in genuine need. However I do not live in normal circumstances. I would not have mentioned it here except the following morning I was out in my garden close to the outside road. First a motorist stopped to ask directions from a walking man. The man very considerately gave full details. As they departed he wished the motorist good luck. Then almost immediately afterwards a mixed group of young people walked down the lane in good mannered high spirits. They were having a really good time. Those two Sunday events, I suggest, were arranged to make me feel as low as possible. My punishment for not towing the line. Then as a final rider I mention that early Friday evening I was driving home alone after meeting with one of my sons. There was a young couple ostentatiously snogging in a car as I passed it in the lane. All very difficult.
There was a Panorama broadcast about the 1989 Hillsborough disaster this evening using TV footage never shown before. There is no doubt in my mind that the deaths were a tragic accident brought about by inadequate public safety provision and design beforehand, and public service incompetence once events started unfolding. However what it does show more than anything else, in my view, is the inherent complacent led culture of closing ranks and diverting blame which must have been so entrenched at the very top of our society at the time in, for example, the police and NHS. I am sure there cannot have been an organised conspiracy of cover up as such. More like, I would have thought, members of individual masonic lodges just realised it was their job to do what they could to protect their kind.
It seems our powers that be noticed the interest aroused by the North American astronaut’s recent guitar playing in space. I understand he has generated one million Twitter followers. In 2015 it has finally been decided we will have our first UK government sponsored member, Major Tim Peake, in the International Space Station for which we will pay £16 million. That coincides with our decision to significantly increase our financial contribution to the European Space Agency, leading to it opening it’s first technical base in this country. Mr Peake was on Newsnight this evening and was very well briefed on the inspirational element of his mission. He really wants to raise our spirits through his example.
21st May 2013
Thank heavens our parliamentary representatives have sorted something out on gay marriage. In the end the Labour and Conservative front benches came to an agreement that there should now be a formal consultation on the idea of hetersexual civil partnership so that progress on the bill is not held up. It is hoped that liason will be completed in time for insertion into the final legislation. Not that difficult really when sensible people start working together. I heard on Yesterday in Parliament on Today this morning that the actual mechanics were that the original government proposal was voted on and passed; then the Opposition review clarification motion was voted on and passed; then the Conservative backbench ammendment was voted on and lost.
I see Mr Cameron is trying to rebuild some fences with the mainstream of his Party. A BBC webpage this morning reports that he has sent an email to Tory activists telling them they stand for duty, decency and civic pride. He says he is proud of them and proud to lead his party. Let’s hope it turns the tide.
The page also quotes Lord Ashcroft as perceptively saying, in my view, that Conservative members need to decide whether they want the Party to be a vehicle for their own views or are prepared to grin and bear policies designed to broaden it’s appeal.
Interestingly, following my note the day before yesterday on opinion polls, the page reports two have just been published. Survation say that support for the Tories is currently 22% as against Ukip at 20%. YouGov however put the respective figures at 31% and 14%. They can’t both be right.
I don’t think the workings of tornadoes are fully understood. However from looking at the Channel 4 News website I see they connect a thunderstorm in the air to the ground. A thunderstorm is warm moist air which when it becomes fully saturated drops it’s water in heavy rain. The essential thing about a tornado I think is that the air in the atmosphere becomes fast moving and unstable sometimes involving colder air approaching from a different area. On the ground the wind could be flowing at 30 mph in a southerly direction, a mile up it could be 60 mph south-westerly and six mile up it could be westerly at 120 mph. It is that power, and change in direction, which creates the vortex effect that, when a vertical column becomes formed, can stretch all the way to the ground.
The Channel 4 piece was written after a batch of tornadoes under a storm occured in Alabama in April 2011 leaving at least 220 dead. It seems as though the death toll yesterday afternoon in a suburb of Oklahoma City, caused by a single twister lasting 45 minutes and up to a mile wide in places, might well be similar. A BBC webpage this morning says the last bad American tornado before 2011 was in 1953 causing 116 deaths.
Our fight back against the Gang will be a slow, methodical process. It will not happen overnight. However we are on our way I believe. An example around this morning is that after the IPCC published it’s first report in 2011 of Essex police’s involvement prior to the murder of Maria Stubbings in Chelmsford in 2008, it found it should be withdrawn after significant inaccuracies were found. The second go is now out and again criticises the police for not protecting Maria properly before she was strangled by her partner with a dog lead in her home. He had previously been jailed for killing a partner in Germany. Maria’s family quite naturally would like a public inquiry to look into what went wrong. Apparently in Essex over 80 domestic abuse incidents are reported to the police every day.
A BBC webpage this morning highlights that, surprisingly to me, corporation tax issues in the States are as big as they are here. Although the Senate committee has been critiscising large companies since at least September of last year the entity in the frame today is Apple for keeping $102 billion of it’s $145 billion cash stockpile in a complex web of offshore holdings. The Democratic chairman of the committee, Carl Levin, and a Republican member, John McCain, say that is unacceptable. In Apple’s defence though it does seem they paid $6 billion US tax last year based on their company rate of 35%. The delicious irony of course is that half of the American political establishment don’t appear to think it fair that any individuals should pay any tax at all.
Friday’s FT reports that Qatar has spent anything betweem $1-3 billion in supporting the Syrian rebels. Apparantly it makes a standard payment of $50,000 to any defector who leaves the Syrian regime. If it ends up on the winning side I suppose it will want some return for that investment.
The paper also says that apparantly some Pentagon officials came into quite some harsh criticism, from both Democrat and Republican members of a congressional committee, for saying that the war on terror against the likes of Islamist militants in the Middle East and north Africa could last 10-20 years. I would think that has got more to do with justifying a need for your job than anything else. There is also a train of thought that such American international forays of force are not legal even taking into account the passing of The Patriot Act in 2001 after 9/11. Many of it’s sections expired in March 2006.
I do feel the Gang are scraping the bottom of the barrel in America at the moment to try and get some high emotion going. The three stories doing the rounds are allegedly bias investigations by the Internal Revenue Service into conservative political groups; the supposed playing down by the Democratic Administration of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi last September ahead of the Presidential election; and the Department of Justice’s subpoena of Associated Press phone records in pursuit of leaks of government information. President Obama has now sacked the head of the IRS. For the rest it will just have to be thrashed out in public as calmly as possible.
On the tax question the editorial in Friday’s FT says that is really the judges’ fault. With reference to my note of 15th May 2013 there was a Supreme Court judgement in 2010 blurring the distinction between social and political activity meaning a vast inflow of funds into such organisations. The IRS was just trying to catch up with all that even though it’s federal budget had been cut. The worry is that Republican opponents will sense blood and use the destabilisation to mount another attack on Mr Obama’s healthcare legislation.
In his article in the edition Philip Stephens suggests the wishes of Conservative eurosceptic MPs, who he thinks are now in the majority (115 out of 315 Tory MPs voted to express regret that no EU referendum provision appeared in last week’s Queen’s Speech), are so extreme there is no way EU leaders could agree. Their next tactic he thinks will be to try to get Mr Cameron to commit himself to the specific demands they require in order to stay in the union.
On Saturday I wrote about Theresa May’s letter to the College of Policing. After reading yesterday’s FT I think she also said there that people should definitely be publicly named once they have been charged. It seems there was some press upset last week when Warwickshire Police intitially refused to name a man charged with burglary. When they did, confirmation was made he was a member of their staff. Following on from my note of 14th May 2013 about policemen being leant on by their superiors the article says that a poor flow of information from the police is now very noticeable to journalists. On the wider picture it says the cross-party submission of proposals for a Privy Council press regulation system have been put back to late summer. Perhaps the politicians hope that things will have quietened down a bit by then.
An article in today’s FT says three drone aircraft and 8000 police officers will be deployed for the G8 summit next month. The PSNI seem confident that terrorists will not be able to get through to the golf complex venue itself but in the Republican dissidents’ back yard, such as north and west Belfast, they do expect trouble. Like Boston, mobile phones can be used to detonate bombs and appareantly Eire is bringing in legislation so that it can shut down those networks if it wants. We however it seems do not think that necessary in the north.
From the page before that I see the retail value of Scottish, presumably farmed, salmon to it’s economy is £1 billion per annum, not an inconsiderable sum.
The paper also reports that yesterday the Syrian regime, with the help of Hizbollah fighters, re-took Qusair from opposition forces. The city was of strategic importance to the rebels as it allowed them to supply Homs from Lebanon.
Lord Saatchi’s wife died from cancer about two years ago. He was on Today this morning after he asked a question in the Lords yesterday. He wanted to see if it would be possible to identify those patients who die as a result of cancer treatment, by destroying the body’s immune system for example, rather than the cancer itself. He estimates that 10% of our 150,000 yearly cancer deaths are due to complications but obviously it would be better if we had accurate data.
I have written several times about plants being killed or trees being pushed over in my garden, most recently last week. Although it has taken me 19 years I think I have worked out who is doing it. If I am right he is a meek mannered man, a Gang helper I suspect, who wishes he were hard and strong like his friends but isn’t. However he can make up for that by killing living things with weedkiller. He has made it plain in the past he doesn’t like me. I mention him in my book. The way it works I think is that his gang friends let him know when I am not here so he can come and do his silly acts to his heart’s content. And because I do not know for sure there is nothing I can do about it.
The reason why I have concluded that is due to something which happened about ten days ago. For many months I had been having problems with someone, of all things, digging holes in my garden. It started off with the rotted flowering cherry stump in the lawn the tree of which I cut down a few years ago. As degeneration progressed I filled up the emerging hole with earth so the grass would grow. However every time I did that the stuff would come out. At first I thought it was the fox but it happened so often it seemed highly unlikely. If there was anything there he was interested in he would have found it long ago. And then recently a hole started appearing in the terrace side flower bed about four yards from where I sit in the lounge looking out of the patio window. That also appeared again when I filled it in. The second occurrence convinced me it was all Gang work. So when I filled the tree stump hole in last, I put some wire mesh over the top and secured that in the lawn using two old L-shaped shelf brackets. I hit those into the ground using my coal hammer. It has worked. However last weekend I went to use that hammer for something else and it has been taken from my shed. The inference was plain, I was meant to think it was the same person who was digging the holes. However I do not jump to conclusions like that. It all seemed a little too obvious. I suspect it was hoped I would take retaliatory action against the individual concerned as I know where he lives. Indeed the situation was just like that described in the dairy note I wrote on 11th October 2007 reproduced in the chapter 3 appendix in my book, about my visit to Kent Police headquarters. In this instance it was assumed I always realised who was doing the things in my garden when I didn’t. Anyway I worked it out eventually.
When I look at it now, that was quite a momentous note. It talks about seeing things through to the end. I have not mentioned it but shortly after the Boston bombings in April 2013 I wrote three emails. I believe they have made a difference. Indeed in many ways I think it was the last piece in the jigsaw. If the world cannot now sort out it’s problems on it’s own it never will. I need to move forward in my private life. It will not be easy but I am determined to get there.
In 2005/6 Sir David Nicholson was head of Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust when Stafford Hospital was performing badly. From there he went on to become chief executive of the NHS. Today Sir David has said he has decided to retire from his £211,000 per year post next March.
22nd May 2013
I only mention it briefly in chapter 10 of my book but I did go through a stage of several weeks in the autumn of 2009 when I wrote note upon note trying to work out why I simply had not been shot dead by a Gang hitman to stop my troublesome ways. I think my final conclusion that it is because the Gang is a hidden sect, remains valid but going a bit further, I imagine if it were a single man’s decision he might well have taken a chance on it. I have always written about a Gang Master, for instance when I remarked about about stolen masterpieces on 17th October 2012 and polished diamonds on 19th February 2013. For convenience and simplicity I shall continue to do that. However I think the reality must be that it is a top committee. Not though like the ‘Ndrangheta, as I wrote on Saturday, based on family ties but on talent in progressing your chosen life’s course. You start low and as you prove yourself you climb higher and higher up the tree. If you are lucky, and in the right place at the right time, you find yourself at the top table.
The front page of last Saturday’s FT reports that Brussels wishes to extend it’s EU bonus cap to come in next year, to all bank employees earning more than 500,000 euros a year. The maximum bonus will be double salary with shareholder approval. The piece says that London bankers are aghast at the proposal. I expect they will use every argument against it they can feasibly think of except that they would like to see their own indididual remuneration as large as possible.
When I wrote my note yesterday about the Oklahoma tornado, reports were saying at least 90 had died. The final figure this morning is 24. That looks a bit strange to me. Very much as though the intial reaction by some was that they fully expected it to be apocalyptic. You can see that people are now a bit defensive about the mistake. The State medical examiner has said some bodies may have been counted twice in the confusion and the governor suggests the number of 24 might still creep up if some bodies were taken direct to funeral parlours.
I heard comment on Today this morning that most of the 10 children who died attended schools without tornado protection basements. That it seems to me ties in with the gun control debate. It is a matter of risk. You cannot stop tornadoes or people firing guns when they have them but you can take precautions to netralise the effect of tornadoes or to stop guns falling into the wrong hands.
One of those silly Gang stories, in my view, about this morning reminds me of the MP who parked badly in Banbury last autumn. My diary note about that is dated 11th September 2012. This time, from the photograph on the BBC website, it appears the mayor of Bury St Edmunds drove his car along a pavement and then turned left into the doorway of a Tesco Express in the town, breaking the door. A Tesco spokesman, who it seems has a bit of knowledge about these things, wished the driver a speedy recovery.
At some point in the recent past Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command decided they had enough evidence to charge a man with the murder of four soldiers, on their horses at the time, in the 1982 IRA bombing in Hyde Park. He was arrested at Gatwick airport on Sunday after flying in on a flight from the Irish Republic where he lives. Obviously he would not have done that if he had been told the police were waiting for him. I do wonder therefore if the operation was carried out without notifying security staff at the airport. I related what happened to me when I was in the baggage hall at Gatwick on 6th April 2013, in my note written the same day.
I saw it said on Channel 4 News last night that David Cameron, in No 10 Downing Street, was beginning to show the strain of recent events. When you get tittle tattle like that broadcast on national television you might well feel it is time to fight back. Perhaps it is partly why the government announced this morning that, as has been asked of them for a long time and in line with the policy of several other countries, we have decided to offer a tempoary home to some Afghan interpreters. They must have worked on the front line alongside British troops for at least a year before they can live here with their famililies for an initial period of five years. That will keep them out of the way of revengeful hotheads in their own country. It has been Lib Dem policy and for me is definitely the right thing to do. My guess is that Mr Cameron has finally decided to ignore those around him saying, for whatever reason, that it would not be a wise move.
Then the Prime Minister was also on Today this morning following passing last night of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill through the House of Commons. I thought he expressed it in an extremely appropriate way when he said it will mean young teenage gay men will no longer have to feel ashamed of how they feel. In future they will be supported by the force of law.
Today Ed Milliband, at a Google event, has been critiscising Google’s tax affairs. The early Business News on the programme was also talking about the Apple chief executive’s appearance at the America Senate committee hearing yesterday looking at their tax position. He decided to give as good as he got. He said Apple likes to keep things simple not complex. They do wish to comply with the spirit of the law but the US tax system makes it all so riducuously complicated. Whether he was thinking that is why Apple’s head office is in low tax Ireland and why they have at least one company which is not tax resident anywhere, I am not sure. However you would hope sensible legislators and big companies will be able to sort something out.
With the technology now available to us I think it would be fair to say that today’s global living should be about the collection of impartial data and then its dissemination so we can follow our lives as we feel best. An aspect of that which the broadcast featured was the current count of wildlife in the UK. In the State of Nature report 25 organisations have pooled resources to ascertain that 60% of our animal and plant specicies have declined in the last 50 years, some to such a degree that 10% can be termed endangered. You may argue that is just evolution. Some may think we should try to reverse the trend. The important thing to me though is we have the information on which to make up our minds.
The transmission gave me an update on the position in Qusair, the town which controls the highway between Homs and Damascus. Contrary to what I wrote yesterday it seems it has not fallen to the Syrian government. And it is quite a worrying situation. Apparently the town still contains 15,000 civilians and if it falls most of those will want to find refugee camps somewhere. Additionally, because of the involvement of Hizbollah in the attack, the Free Syrian Army says that if they lose it they will take their fight into Lebanon itself.
Mark Bridger has been in the witness box at Mold Crown Court today. The reporter on PM this afternoon says that when Mr Bridger took the oath he choked up as he promised to tell the truth. I understand his evidence is that when he put April into his vehicle she was limp and therefore presumably dead.
For me the killing in South London this afternoon has created a deep sense of shock in our establishment, no doubt because it was completely unexpected. When I was listening to PM this afternoon a Scotland Yard statement was expected before 6pm. It is now after 9pm and it still hasn’t happened. I heard on Channel 4 News that extra police officers had been drafted in from Essex, Sussex and Thames Valley forces, again no doubt because it isn’t known what to expect. I do feel for the head of MI5 in post for only a few weeks. My advice would be to remember what Mr Learmonth said, as I recorded on 23rd March 2013. You need to hold your nerve. An act of terror, as all and sundry are categorising it, means you are supposed to panic. Do not do so. You will find everything will be fine.
I do not wish to say any more than that. I want my note made yeterday to be a turning point for me. I am entitled to a private life as much as anyone else. I might be making some people extremely angry. But it is not my fault. In common sense terms there is nothing I can do about it.
At a Brussels EU summit today it seems as though real progress was made towards pan-continent uniform tax rules for companies wherever they operate. The system being set up is an automatic information exchange between national tax authorities.
23rd May 2013
I have been on a training course today for my application to take on a volunteering role in the criminal justice system. There were 11 of us. The professional man there of about my age was, in my opinion, a high level Gang helper or Gang member. There is no way I feel that anyone else in the room could reasonably have suspected that. His manner and demeanour were just as we experience every day. He was fully briefed I believe about my private life. The reason I knew was because of the questions and statements he directed at me and what he said to others, the latter designed to introduce niggling elements of doubt in people’s minds. From my occasional staring at him, not noticed by anyone else, he knew I knew. Because he is not an evil man in any way he did find that uncomfortable. When he spoke about criminals to the room he instinctively made a joke about his statements, I imagine to make himself feel better. He is a mason I feel and I doubt if his particular lodge will be involved in overt criminal activity at all. Neither will anything have necessarily ever have been said to him about the larger picture of Gang activity generally. However people are not daft. We work things out for ourselves. He had been asked to speak to me in a certain way. He knew that was for bad reasons and he went along with it. He should be ashamed of himself.
Mr Obama is a complicated, kind man. It is obvious he is principled, as the gun control debate shows. Yet perhaps above all he is a politician. There is no point in trying to do something which is not possible. I may be wrong but I suspect he thinks the shutting of Guantanamo Bay is now within his grasp; and possibly much more besides. That could be lifting his spirit to address subjects he has no obligation to talk about and to reach out for other goals which not that long ago he thought were impossible.
The President has made a wide ranging security speech at the National Defense University in Washington. He refers to America’s global fight being at a crossroads, suggesting I feel that in future questions of morality should have equal prominence to those of effective military tactics. He justifies past drone stikes by referring to a war but says they have only ever been used in exceptional circumstances when civilian casualties, with near certainty, would not be involved. In the cases where innocents have died he simple says their deaths will haunt him for as long as he lives. You cannot get more honest that that. As you watch him though you know those thoughts have never stopped him from doing what he believes is right. Ongoing policy for deploying drone strikes will now be public.
A pointer to Gang involvement yesterday I feel is that as far as I am aware Lee Rigby could not have been identified as a serving soldier by sight alone. He was just a person I think wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt. Another is that nothing was left to chance that a murder would result. Lee was first of all run over by a car to immobilise him before the two men got out and, I suspect, beheaded him. A great wish of one of the murderers was to be filmed afterwards and to have his comments recorded. Then some members of the English Defence League were walking around Woolwich last night trying to cause as much trouble as possible. But, Mr Gang Master, things have changed a lot since the riots you were able to orchestrate in London in August 2011. This time your proxies’ crime of hate has not worked.
Mr Cameron was on good form I felt when he spoke in Downing Street this morning. He said the atrocity would pull us together, make us stronger. He named the lady who walked up to one of the attackers afterwards to try to calm him down. He said the best way to defeat terrorism is to go about our normal lives.
24th May 2013
Three after shocks have occured today in my view after the murder in Woolwich on Wednesday, all involving planes and roads which the Gang obsess about. This morning a British Airways plane on it’s way to Oslo had to return to Heathrow Airport for an emergency landing when black smoke started coming out of one of it’s engines. No one was hurt but the airport was shut for several hours. It seems there were simultaneous problems in both engines involving one of the covers coming off so it probably could have been a lot worse. Then a potentially more serious situation I would have thought occured when it appears two men tried to get into the cockpit of a Pakistan International Airways plane as it was on it’s landing approach to Manchester Airport. The plane was diverted to a safe area of Stansted Airport where the men were arrested. If they had managed their task you fear to think what might have happened. Quite correctly I feel the incident is being treated as a police matter. Then at 7pm this evening a BBC webpage reports that the M6 is shut near Birmingham due to the presence of a suspicious vehicle. I am cofident the road will be reopened later.
25th May 2013
There have been a couple of letters now in the FT Magazine, including last weekend, following a article a few weeks ago written by a son about his Austrian Nazi father who he argued did his best to be a good man. The readers make the point that in many ways Austrian persecution of the Jews during the war was just as bad as that of the Germans. They feel Austrian leaders should recognise the reality rather than encourage their population to look upon themselves as having been a victim nation.
At the end of last week’s Magazine Gillian Tett writes about labour laws in New York State. Apparently even today it is quite legal for farms in the rural north to make mostly Latinos work extemely long hours without recognition of any human rights at all. Some have worked continuously for ten years without one day off. A daughter of Robert F Kennedy has campaigned against that set up for a long time but still it goes on. Not a very good advert for American values I would have thought.
A friend of the older, blooded hands Woolwich murderer Michael Adebolajo, who converted to Islam with him in 2004, was on Newsnight last night. He said that Michael for some reason went on a trip to Kenya last year when he was picked up by Kenyan soldiers and physically and sexually abused by them. He said that seemed to have a profoundly destabilising effect on him. Then when he got back MI5 started pestering him to give them information. He said it got so bad he would not answer his door when he thought it was them knocking. Hardly surprising then, in my view, that the police decided they would like to speak to him about his information. That they did by arresting him on BBC premises immediately after the interview had been recorded. I hope they will be able to get to the bottom of it all.
If the Pakistani airline incident yesterday was a Gang plot the retribution for it not succeeding seems to have come through this morning. A school bus travelling in Gujrat Pakistan has exploded unexpectedly killing 16 children and injuring 7. Theories about the cause differ.
For no explicable reason a 24 year old lady keeper at a wild life park in Cumbria walked into a tiger enclosure yesterday. She was attacked by the animal or animals and taken to hospital where she died.
Amongst the Woolwich happenings I forgot to highlight that after his Brussels trip last week David Cameron made a point of personally visiting Francois Hollande in Paris. That no doubt will have been to talk about our mutual support for the Syrian rebels and also I think to show Britain’s solidarity with France generally on such issues. I see this morming as well that France has begun withdrawing it’s 4,000 troops from Mali.
I wrote about my electricity bill in chapter 10 of my book. I suspect our utility companies are pretty much controlled by the Gang and think the way government hope to break that hold for electricity is for us to have digital smart meters in our homes. Then those who are interested can easily check they are being charged correct amounts. The aim is that 30 million households should have the meters by 2020. First however the electronic kits given to us must be secure and work properly. A BBC webpage reports this morning there could be a potention problem in that connection. The roll out of the scheme has been put back by a year whilst design of the meters is looked at again.
I had my second and last day of training yesterday. I have changed my view on my male colleague. It is a bit more subtle than I thought, I suspect. This time, right at the start of the day, he asked a question to engender fear into the room I feel about how safe we would be in the activities being envisaged. The programme coordinator very reasonably made the point I thought that she would not expect timid people to volunteer for our role which does carry a small element of risk to our personal safety. I also spoke as strongly as I thought publicly acceptable to him. For the rest of the day he acted perfectly normally displaying the doubts and uncertainties we all have. Why his initial comment was made I can only speculate but it may have been no more than thought suggestion from the Gang. However, should he have had bad feeling towards our group, I am pretty sure if there had been a shocked reaction first thing he would have kept on at the theme again and again. When we were having our sandwiches at lunchtime in the room someone else raised the Woolwich killing. I put forward the view that Lee had been beheaded but that the authorities did not feel it appropriate to make the information public. I noticed that he left the room, possibly shocked himself by the strength of his own emotions, immediately after I said it.
26th May 2013
I had wondered if the police last Wednesday had deliberately not shot to kill or if it was luck neither Mr Adebolajo nor Mr Adebowale were killed. I am pleased to find out from a BBC webpage this morning that it was the former. They were both shot in the legs. The same source told me there was a drive past of solidarity by bikers yesterday, some ex-military, at the site of Lee’s death. When I was going out yesterday I went past a gatherering of about 100 bikers, all in their black leather uniforms, at their usual spot outside a cafe about five miles from where I live. In relation to my note of 1st May 2013 about the apparent ‘Ndrangheta feud I do think we should try and draw them into our society more than we do.
The charity Faith Matters has reported that since Wednesday’s killing they have received 162 calls, with more to be processed, to their helpline reporting anti-Muslim incidents. Their normal rate is six a day. The Gang are not daft. They know how to gets some of us extremely worked up so we start doing silly things.
I see from a BBC webpage this morning that Andrew Parker the new MI5 chief will be giving an intitial report next week to the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee on the Woolwich murder. I feel it extremely important in a democracy that that is the way things should work. I am probably prejudice but I do think MI5 are far too secretive an organisation. Who knows how things may have turned out if they had not gone around pursuing Mr Adebolajo without telling anyone else what they were doing.
Last Thursday evening I watched Newsnight which started with Kirsty Wark speaking to Mark Urban. I heard Mark say that by concidence he had been speaking to a source within MI5 the day before, I think he meant before Wednesday’s attack, who told him the thing our home security service has been worried about for a long time is the lone wolf attack, just as happened twenty four hours later. On Friday morning I went onto BBC iPlayer to check my recollection but the programme was not available. I have looked again, and watched the recording, this morning and Mark says nothing about lone wolves. I suspect that piece has been edited out.
The law of unintended consequences applies to the Gang, a masive global organisation, as much as to anyone else in my view. It could be argued I feel that the three pronged Gang destabilisation of David Cameron, using Europe, gay marriage, and Ukip had been going pretty well. That all changed in an instant last week however with Woolwich. Suddenly we all looked to him to be our calm leader to chart a course through a difficult situation, something he does very well I believe. All those other issues were immediately discarded to the unimportant tray. Our media had other things to think about. I could imagine that has made quite a few UK based very senior Gang lodge members pretty upset that all their hard work was thrown away at a stroke. I would thoroughly agree with them. Perhaps they should send a memo to head office.
The day after the Boston bombings there was a bit of an upheaval in the financial and commodities markets as I noted in my diary on 16th April 2013. The day after the Woolwich killing, as reported in the early Business News section of Today last Thursday, the Japanese stockmarket was extremely volatile. At one point during the day the Nikkei had been up 350 points. At the time of broadcast it was down 650. It ended the day down 1143 points or 7.3% The Footsie 100 that day was down 143 points at 2%. A clear indication there in my view that financial confidence is strongly correlated to Gang activity.
From the early news briefing on Radio 4 this morning I know that on 26th May 1981 the entire Italian cabinet resigned over allegations that a large number of MPs were active members of the Freemasons.
Soon after that I heard an edition of Four Thought on motivation in the workplace. Apparantly Google have done some research on it collating masses of data from such things as job performance reviews, surveys and the like. The finding was that the attribute people value more than any other in a manager is that of a good coach. In my language that equates to drawing out of people the good qualities they recognise within themselves but which they also realise they are not able to develop without the help of another. No one should be on their own in a box.
From the Newspaper Review I understand the Sunday Telegraph has an article written by the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles. He asks that public officials such as senior police and judges, shound impartially implement the law and not be unduly influenced by political correctness. Judges especially in my view should be calm and individually minded in all their decisions. I recall that Mr Pickles sat in on some Cobra meetings last week. That also reminds me that Frank Gardner said last week that Cobra just stands for the locations where those meetings take place, the Cabinet Office briefing rooms.
A lovely story from America this morning that thousands of runners who were not able to complete last month’s Boston Marathon have now done so. It was organised by a group of committed volunteers calling themselves OneRun with the slogan we’ll get our finish.
To remind me as much as anyone else Hezbollah are a Shia grouping. Yesterday it’s leader gave a fiery speech about his decision to openly send fighters into Syria to help that regime. He promised his supporters they would win. It was direct retaliation for that I would say which caused two rockets to be fired into Beirut this morning from an unreported location, wounding at least three people. A Sunni former Lebanese Prime Minister has said what Hezbollah are trying to do in Syria is political and military suicide. It would be nice to think there is a possibility of bringing in Hezbollah to the peace negotiation process somehow.
I watched the very brave news conference given by Lee Rigby’s family on Channel 4 News on Friday evening. His wife spoke eloquently. She is an example to us all. Lee’s step father read a text out that his mother received, I think on Tuesday evening. It showed to have come from Lee’s phone, called her a million to one Mum and wished her a warm good night. I do not believe Lee sent it. Please do not think the Gang are nice people.
If I am right about that it also means Lee was individually targeted. I sincerely hope the police can get to the bottom of it in their investigations.
I needed my passport for Thursday of last week to prove my identity in my volunteering role. I got everything ready in my garden office on the Wednesday afternoon and put it in my attache case. When I came over to the house I carried the case in the laundry basket with the clothes I had ironed earlier, left that in the dining room and put the case by the back door ready to pick up on my way out. However when I got up I realised I had forgotten something and took the case back to my office. When there I realised the passport was missing. I only had about ten minutes before I left but I knew it could just be in a couple of places. With no luck I took my birth certificate instead which proved quite sufficient. When I got back I had a more thorough look but still could not find it. I decided I would contact the police the next morning to report it’s loss. However, dear reader, I expect you know where this is going. A few hours later I was walking through the dining room and noticed the passport lying loose in the laundry basket. The only trouble with that though is when in the basket the passport was safely secured inside the case. It could not have fallen out from there into the basket.
Going through that I believe on the Wednesday I was under Gang camera surveillance as normal, in my office, my dining room and my utility room where the back door is. There is a microphone in my bedroom which can detect my breathing when I am asleep. With that information my local Gang director was able to instruct a Gang helper to enter my house at a specific time on Wednesday night and remove the passport from the case. It was not anticipated I would notice before I left. Then when I was out on Thursday my house was entered again and the passport put into the basket with the anticipation I would think it fell out when I carried the basket over. A lot of trouble to go to you might think to try and destabilise me at my first training day. However the Gang have all their organisational procedures, back up and people in place anyway so they might just as well use them. That is very much how it works I am afraid.
You may recall I wrote about obtaining my passport on 21st March 2013. That the item should arise again in these notes shows, in my view, the trammelled, obsessive thought processes of some Gang directors. Those men are not very impressive people at all.
The shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham was on Today early on Thursday asking Jeremy Hunt not to solely focus on the perceived failings of GP’s when looking at the current difficulties in NHS emergency care. He says it is a very complicated subject and should be looked at in the round. Later on Mr Hunt was on the programme himself and pretty much agreed with everything Mr Burnham had said.
John Humprys interviewed Aaron David Miller, a former advisor to US Secretaries of State, on the transmission about all the various intractable problems in the Middle East at the moment sapping everybody’s energy and strength. People are afraid of making things worse. At least at the moment there is an equilibrium of sorts. But Mr Miller, to quote the Rolling Stones as he said, remarked the parties should understand they are not going to get what they want, they must put up with what they need. The irony of having the Rolling Stones called upon to sort out all our problems caused John a bit of a chuckle as you can imagine. At the end Mr Miller simply said he loved the BBC.
On Friday, Today had an early piece on silly Gang goings on, in my view, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. About a week before a known bunch of specialist thieves had been suspected of having stolen jewellery worth 1.4 million euros. On Friday it was a black gold encrusted necklace worth 2 million euros taken from under the noses of over 80 security guards and police. There it is said a bent security guard or hotel staff member must have been responsible.
Just after that was a report from Russia suggesting it is a totally lawless country, through an endemically corrupt state, for those who wish to make their own individual way in life, such as aspiring businessmen. Oever the last three years more than 600,000 criminal cases have been opened in the country against entrepreneurs and 1 in 6 have been prosecuted under various charges. That must have a terribly debilitating effect on progress towards any form of future enterprising culture. There is talk of an amnesty for such people but as you can imagine there is a lot of resistance to the suggestion.
Later there was a discussion on the problem but the early programme section presented me with a quite horrifying report about a nine year old girl who gave evidence by video link within the same building in a sexual abuse case. From her grandmother’s words she obviously came from a good family who told her just to tell the truth. At the court hearing, after initially being very nice to her, she was called a liar three times by the lady proscecuting barrister. The case collapsed because she could take that kind of treatment. Three years on and her grandmother says it has completely changed her personality. She distrusts people and talks down to them. Essentially she has lost all self confidence because she could not stand up to the barrister, with her alleged abuser watching everything. And we convince ourselves we live in a civilised society.
Then later on there was an interview with an unnamed 11 year old young man who had been encouraged to watch online hard core pornography by his friends. He very honestly said he hated it but yet could not turn it off. Fortunately he spoke about it to his mother and I am sure it will now been fine. However before he did that she noticed he had become withdrawn, sullen and angry. The Children’s Commissioner for England later said there is compelling evidence that exposure to such material is damaging our children. Not all children have a kind Mum they can talk to. We need to do something about it.
A Sudanese government official, the chairman of the Darfur Regional Authority was heard on Today this morning saying that the mainly Arab Janaweed militia have returned to the area and started attacking the local population again. So far this year over 500,000 have fled, more than all those displaced over the last two years.
The London Borough of Merton is next door to Morden about which I wrote on 18th March 2013. The former was mentioned on the programme because six Conservative councillors have defected to Ukip. One of them appeared and she was genuinely perfectly comfortable with the fact that her new Party had political influence there, through her and her colleagues, which their voters did not wish for.
Another of those strange coincidences. This time Evan Davis had been asked to visit our air traffic control centre in Hampshire operated by NATS yesterday for interviews to be broadcast next week. With two major airspace incidents however it turned out to be an extremly stressful day for them. With that topicality, at Evan’s request I suspect, a small piece was entered into this morning’s transmission. I am pleased to see it also appears in the website record of the programme.
Last Thursday’s FT says that an online anti-capitalist based protest group, Stop G8, is planning a protest march in London the week before the event. Amongst other organisations being targeted are hedge funds, private banks and private equity firms. They have been in contact with the police about sensible precautions to take. One piece of advice apparently is for their staff not to dress like hedge fund managers on their journey to and from work on that day.
An indication of what a leaderless bunch our security services may have been in the past could perhaps be shown from an article there saying sensitive intelligence files from the 1930s and 40s, such as transcripts of secret recordings of conversations within the Rotyal Family, have only just been released for public view. They had been languishing in forgetton vaults and have only finally been signed off for publication by David Cameron since he became Prime Minister. Their recording I think started in 2008.