Monday, August 19, 2013

The Last Word

I am bringing this blog to an end, for several reasons. The first is that it has not attracted an audience or stimulated a debate - pity about that (but I did not promote it or advertise it at all - I didn't even tell my friends that I was writing it.)

The other issue is my despair. Our freedoms are not simply under attack - they have been grossly undermined by the actions of the US and UK governments in the last few years. As for the UK police, words fail me!

This week, the Guardian, which I have now given up reading because it makes me so sad, has revealed the 'Prism' program which apparently allows the US government to monitor telephone and internet records of any US citizen communicating with any foreigner.

It has been suggested (and denied) that GCHQ in Britain benefits from this information. But that is clearly untrue - see the Guardian 22.06.13.

It has also come to my attention that a major re-fit at Menwith Hill is under way.

Menwith Hill, in Yorkshire, is an immense American communicatons monitoring station on British soil and I have always suspected that British spooks go to Menwith Hill with their requests for surveillance rather than applying to the Home Secretary or a judge when they need a suspect monitored.

How happy I would be, if I knew that suspicion were wrong.

The British state has been grossly over-powerful, mendacious and ruthless for as many years as I have been alive. Seventy, this year.

In 1959 or 1960 in a school boy's debate at St. Paul's School, at the age of 16 or 17, I put to Lord Hailsham (then in the Cabinet), the accusation that British troops had tortured and killed Kenyans who supported (or were accused of supporting) the Mau Mau independence movement in their country.

He brushed it off.

It has taken 53 years for those Kenyans to get near to justice and to receive compensation for the ghastly injuries (including castration) inflicted by soldiers from the British army. Compensation was agreed last week.

Hypocrisy is the British disease. Hypocrisy, venality and lock-tugging subservience to a class system and a country which makes us 'subjects' instead of citizens, serfs and slaves instead of individuals with hope.

I am very frightened for my grand-children.