Limited Company, or Insiders Out

Leadership hopeful LIZ KENDALL

Generous donor LORD DAVID SAINSBURY

WITH all the talk we've been hearing about "infiltrators" and outside influence in the Labour Party, I'm grateful to a friend up in Leicestershire, Peter Flack, for posting this piece of information up on Facebook.

It concerns a group called Progress, of which I've heard but not yet seen - unlike say, Labour Left Briefing, or Socialist Appeal, they don't seem to have dedicated supporters out selling their paper at union meetings or demonstrations, but can afford to send a free newsletter out to Labour Party members. Of fairly recent origin, they no longer call themselves "New Labour" but confidently describe themselves as Labour's "new mainstream" on their website.
  http://www.progressonline.org.uk/

Peter, who's of similar vintage to myself in the labour movement, though we've travelled different paths, says: 
Here we go. The donors to Progress. the real infiltrators in the Labour Party. As you can see they are all ordinary working people with a civic conscience. LOL

Paul Stanton‎The Labour Party Forum

The financing of the Progress Tendency.

I see from the Progress website that:

Progress is chaired by John Woodcock MP. Our vice-chairs are Jenny Chapman MP, Stephen Doughty MP, Julie Elliott MP, Tristram Hunt MP, Dan Jarvis MP, Liz Kendall MP, Seema Malhotra MP, Alison McGovern MP, Toby Perkins MP, Lucy Powell MP, Steve Reed MP and Jonathan Reynolds MP. Progress’ honorary president is Stephen Twigg MP.

According to Wikipedia, "Progress was founded in 1995 by Paul Richards, Liam Byrne and Derek Draper, the former aide to Peter Mandelson, as an organisation to maintain a dialogue with Labour's new leadership under Tony Blair. It has organised many events and conferences, and hosted several important speeches by senior party figures. Its annual conference has become a staple of the political calendar with many cabinet ministers and other leading politicians attending.

"Lord David Sainsbury has provided substantial funding for Progress, contributing £2 million of the £3 million of donations and sponsorship to Progress from 2001 to 2011.  In 2014 Progress was fined £6,000 by the Electoral Commission for accepting donations of £390,000 from Lord Sainsbury while he was not on a UK electoral register, between December 2011 and April 2013.
In May 2014 Progress dropped using the "New Labour" label, introduced by Tony Blair, for the Labour party."

About Lord Sainsbury himself, Wikipedia tells us:

"David Sainsbury joined the Labour Party in the 1960s, but was one of the 100 signatories of the 'Limehouse Declaration' in an advertisement in The Guardian on 5 February 1981; he went on to be a member of the Social Democratic Party formed by the authors of the Declaration. After the 1983 election Sainsbury prompted the party to give more priority to recruiting members and finding a firm financial base; he was by far the biggest donor to the party, and a trustee, giving about £750,000 between 1981 and 1987. Sainsbury's donations were typically earmarked to specific projects rather than general day-to-day operations.

"Along with David Owen, Sainsbury opposed merging the SDP with the Liberal Party after the 1987 election, and provided office space for Owen to help him re-establish a separate political party, the "continuing" SDP, which was created in 1988.That party was wound up in 1990, and Sainsbury changed allegiance back to the Labour Party, rejoining them in 1996. A year later, he entered the House of Lords as a Labour peer, being created Baron Sainsbury of Turville, of Turville in the County of Buckinghamshire on 3 October 1997.

"Between 1996, the year he rejoined Labour, and 2006, when he stood down as a government minister, Sainsbury donated £16 million to the Labour Party, usually in batches of £1 million or £2 million each year. He donated a further £2 million on 7 September 2007, stating that he was impressed by Gordon Brown's leadership and believed "that Labour is the only party which is committed to delivering both social justice and economic prosperity". He gave another £500,000 on 15 December 2008, making a total of £18.5 million.

"It was reported in April 2006 that Sainsbury, "faced a possible probe into an alleged breach of the ministerial code after admitting he had failed to disclose a £2 million loan he had made to the Labour Party – despite publicly stating that he had." He subsequently apologised for "unintentionally" misleading the public, blaming a mix-up between the £2 million loan and a £2 million donation he had made earlier.

In July 2006, he became the first government minister to be questioned by police in the "Cash for Peerages" inquiry.  On 10 November 2006, he resigned as Science Minister, stating that he wanted to focus on business and charity work. He categorically denied that his resignation had anything to do with the "Cash for Peerages" affair, stating that he was "not directly involved in whether peerages were offered for cash", although this was contradicted by subsequent press reports attributed to "Labour insiders" which suggested that his resignation was indeed a direct consequence of the affair.

From July 1998 to November 2006, he held the post of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry, as the Minister for Science and Innovation in the House of Lords, a government position for which he accepted no salary.

He was the Blair government's third-longest-serving minister after Tony Blair himself, and Gordon Brown. Because of his importance to the Labour Party as a donor, contemporary press reports described him as "unsackable." He has argued that there are "far too many reshuffles", and that there were considerable benefits to his remaining in post for so long.

David Sainsbury has also been associated with the Institute for Public Policy Research and Progress. Between 2001 to 2011 he provided £2 million of funding for Progress. In 2009, he created the Institute for Government with £15 million of funding through the Gatsby Charitable Foundation to help government and opposition politicians to prepare for political transitions and government.

" Sainsbury donated £390,000 to Progress and the Movement for Change between December 2011 and April 2013, while he was not on a UK electoral register, which is contrary to electoral law, leading to Progress and the Movement for Change being fined by the Electoral Commission."

(Wikipedia, my emphasis).

Unusually, for the labour movement, Progress is registered as a limited company, which means though it may be run by members, there is a tighter legal definition of who is a member.  But with its big names and big money it must have expected little limit on its influence.

Environmentalists noting Sainsbury's views on nuclear power and GM crops have been among those concerned that he might have too much influence.

By 2003 Lord Sainsbury had given over £11 million to the Labour Party. Mark Seddon, a member of Labour's National Executive Committee, told the BBC, 'In any other country I think a government minister donating such vast amounts of money and effectively buying a political party would be seen for what it is, a form of corruption of the political process.' Seddon said it was causing Labour to lose members amid criticism from the grassroots that the party was now 'in the pockets of the powerful and the rich'.

When he was made Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury resigned as Chairman of the Sainsbury's supermarket chain and put into a blind trust major investments in two plant genetics-related investment companies (Diatech Ltd and Innotech Investments Ltd). Innotech has a substantial stake in a firm called Paradigm Genetics involved in a joint GM-related venture with Monsanto. Between 1996 and 1999 Diatech was granted three patents for GM products that are said to have the potential to make millions of pounds in royalties.

 .......

For some, the choice of an unelected biotech investor and food industrialist to be Science Minister, based within the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), was more than emblematic of the UK's corporate-science culture. While Lord Sainsbury is officially supposed to leave the room whenever GMOs are discussed at government meetings, even if this occurs, critically related areas like the strategic direction and the funding of the bio-sciences and of biotech related institutes fall directly within Sainsbury's area of responsibility and influence. As The Times (Apr 17, 2002) has noted, 'Suspicious minds looked at the 300 per cent increase in the government grant to the Sainsbury Laboratory and pondered whether this might be linked to the fact that Lord Sainsbury of Turville is the Science Minister.'
Sainsbury's biotech business interconnections with areas of his official responsibility are numerous. For instance, when Lord Sainsbury travelled to America as Science Minister in 1999, to research a report into biotechnology, he was accompanied by members of the BioIndustry Association, a lobby group for companies involved in GM food (the DTI helped pay their costs). His company, Diatech is an Associate Member of the BioIndustry Association.
Eight days before he became Science Minister he loaned Diatech money to buy a £2 million office in Westminster. Diatech has registered a patent for a genetic sequence taken from the tobacco mosaic virus for use in genetically modified plants. This was developed at the Sainsbury Laboratory by Mike Wilson who is a consultant to Diatech.

http://powerbase.info/index.php/David_Sainsbury

As for Progress , here is Wikipedia again:

"In 2012 Progress was at the centre of the debate over the direction of the Labour Party under Ed Miliband, after a widely circulated anonymous report called for Labour’s national executive to "determine the organisational nature of Progress, and whether or not this form of organisation is acceptable inside the Labour Party." Criticism of Progress had concentrated on the generous funding that Progress had secured from external donors, and on positioning, regarded as being on the right of the Labour Party. Following circulation of the report the GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny led calls at the 2012 Labour conference for Progress to be "effectively… (outlawed)…as part of the Labour Party."

In response, a Labour Party statement said, "We are a party that is reaching out to people, gaining new supporters and offering real change for the country in these tough times. The Labour Party is a broad church and we are not in the business of excluding people." 

These fine words must have been echoing through the mind of Harriet Harman in recent weeks, even if they seem to have been forgotten by some Labour MPs!

See also:


http://www.leftfutures.org/2012/02/call-for-labour-inquiry-into-the-organisation-activities-of-party-within-a-party-progress/

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/03/labour-party-within-progress

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/why-are-right-endorsing-liz-kendall.html

Dirty Money fuels 'Social Cleansing'

 (photo Martin Francis, Wembley Matters),
http://wembleymatters.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/housing-groups-call-urgent-meeting-with.html

A DELEGATE to my local trades council was reporting last week how families in his part of the London Borough of Brent were being told they should move to another part of the country if they wanted housing.

Up the road in the neighbouring Tory-run Borough of Barnet, tenants and residents of the West Hendon neighborhood are confronting a privatised regeneration that will leave many with neither security nor the ability to afford to stay.

Across London in Labour-run Newham the E15 Mothers occupied an empty estate to highlight the council's policy, under which they were told to move to the Midlands or further afield.  

I first heard the expression "social cleansing" used when Tory Westminster council was removing people from the run-down Artillery Mansions block of flats across Victoria Street from City Hall.
To be precise, I saw it on an improvised banner protesting what the council was doing, slung from the building's upper-storey windows.  I'd just come back from Bosnia so the protesters' allusion to ethnic cleansing needed no explaining.

Dame Shirley Porter's policy of clearing streets and council homes of working class people, in the name of "building stable communities" became associated with gerrymandering, and better known as the "Homes for Votes" scandal, leading to the Tesco heiress moving to the Israeli seaside resort of Herzliya, and eventually having to pay a £12.3 million fine.

But the broader policy of privatising and selling council housing to Yuppie buyers had been pioneered by Tory Wandsworth council without much problem (except for less affluent people on the housing list who saw entire estates taken out of their reach). Taxi drivers told of fares asking for Battersea destinations across the bridge as "South Chelsea".

The battle for urban space that has become too fashionable or convenient for the centre (the Cities of London and Westminster) and so is priced out of reach for working people, has been a recurrent feature of the capital. The problem was intensified under Thatchernomics, when industry, even in parts of London, was left to rust, while the City finance sector and the property market for a time boomed. The pressure on housing, and on transport, with everyone having to come into the centre to work, has continued. Even today, though Mayor Boris Johnson blames homelessness and rough sleeping in the capital on "immigrants", most of the people migrating into London for work are coming from other parts of Britain.

London's prosperity does not extend to other parts of the country, nor down to everyone in London.  But during the previous period of growth the Duke of Westminster, whose family had donated land to the city for housing working-class people, had to fight a legal battle to prevent Westminster council selling off the estate behind the Tate Gallery, because the council claimed there was no such thing anymore as a "working class".  I don't know which new social thinkers the Tories has been reading.      
Nowadays the battle to resist social cleansing has become more widespread. The government's policy of capping benefits does not help, since nobody is doing anything about rent capping. In Hoxton, once far from being a fashionable area, the New Era estate tenants were faced with a 'developer' threatening to double rents and evict those who could not afford them.  The long neglected Battersea power station site is finally being developed for housing, but not at prices most Londoners can afford. On a smaller scale, flats being built as part of the Willesden Green library redevelopment are being advertised in Singapore, apparently. Whether anyone in sunny Singapore really fancies moving to Willesden we don't know, but as with Battersea, they are being sold the flats as an investment.

Well, we've all played Monopoly. But whereas that's just a game, the pundits and politicians on television talk as though the supply and demand for land, and the price of homes, is some kind of objective process, the values are real, and we have to move out to the Green belt, or treat old and run-down estates as "brown belt" for redevelopment -and more expensive- housing.  Oh, and at least two thirds of the council homes which were supposedly sold to tenants are now in the hands of private landlords renting for profit.

And now another aspect of all this has come into view.

This is taken from yesterday's 'Independent':

Billions of pounds of corruptly gained money has been laundered by criminals and foreign officials buying upmarket London properties through anonymous offshore front companies – making the city arguably the world capital of money laundering.

Some 36,342 properties in London have been bought through hidden companies in offshore havens and while a majority of those will have been kept secret for legitimate privacy purposes, vast numbers are thought to have been bought anonymously to hide stolen money.

The flow of corrupt cash has driven up average prices with a “widespread ripple effect down the property price chain and beyond London”, according to property experts cited in the most comprehensive study ever carried out into the long-suspected money laundering route through central London real estate, by the respected anti-corruption organisation Transparency International.

Some sources claim it has skewed developers towards building high-priced flats and houses rather than ones ordinary people can afford. While corruption and tax evasion are likely to be the biggest sources of the illicit money, drug dealing, people trafficking and sanctions busting are also common, police say.

TI’s research, which includes previously unreleased internal figures from the Metropolitan Police Proceeds of Corruption Unit, found that 75 per cent of properties owned by people under criminal investigation for corruption are held through secret offshore companies.

London has become a global magnet for corrupt funds, TI said, due to the high prices of property – enabling millions of pounds to be laundered at a time – and Britain’s notoriously lax rules on the disclosure of property ownership.

Any anonymous company in a secret location, such as the British Virgin Islands, can buy and sell houses in the UK with no disclosure of who the actual purchaser is. Meanwhile, TI said, estate agents only have to carry out anti-money-laundering checks on the person selling the property, leaving the buyers bringing their money into the country facing little, if any scrutiny.

Anti-corruption activists including Boris Nemtsov, the Russian opposition figure murdered in Moscow last Friday, have repeatedly expressed frustration that the UK does so little to stem the flow of money stolen from their countries.

Boris Nemtsov was outspoken about the UK's efforts to clamp down on money laundering Boris Nemtsov was outspoken about the UK's efforts to clamp down on money laundering (Getty)

Robert Barrington, executive director of TI, said: “This has a devastating effect on the countries from which the money has been stolen and it’s hard to see how welcoming the world’s corrupt elite is beneficial to communities in the UK.”

Over £180m of UK property has been investigated by police in the past decade, but this is likely to be only a small proportion of the actual amount, the report says. UN figures suggest only 1 per cent of money laundering flows are   detected.

Detective Chief Inspector Jon Benton, director of operations at the Proceeds of Corruption Unit, said: “Properties that are purchased with illicit money, which is often stolen from some of the poorest people in the world, are nearly always layered through offshore structures.

“In nearly all the grand corruption cases we investigate, we find – what we suspect is – proceeds of corruption being used to purchase high-value properties.”

Preferred option: the British Virgin Islands Preferred option: the British Virgin Islands

Companies set up in the Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories such as Jersey, British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar are the preferred option for concealment of corrupt property purchases.

More than a third of company-owned London houses are held by effectively anonymous firms in the British Virgin Islands. Jersey companies own 14 per cent and the Isle of Man and Guernsey 8.5 per cent and 8 per cent.

Mr Benton said: “The lack of access to beneficial ownership information about offshore companies that hold property in the UK is a major barrier for our investigations.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-property-boom-built-on-dirty-money-10083527.html

What was it Mrs.Thatcher said about not letting criminals profit from their crimes?

Perhaps if David Cameron wants a monument to the 'Iron Lady' it could be a Statue of Dirty Liberty inscribed "Bring Me Your Crooks and Corrupt Dictators, and especially the Money".

Hendon story:
http://www.londontenants.org/Pages/projectsderrick.htm

How much independence can you have with TTIP?

LOTS of discussion as the date draws near for Scots to vote on independence. We hear Alec Salmond of the Scottish National Party trounced Labour's former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling in debate, the latter of course heading up the 'No' campaign.

I say "of course", though Labour's founder James Keir Hardie was in favour of Home Rule, and is being claimed by 'Yes' campaigners, even those in the SNP itself. Whereas Darling in the 'Better Together' campaign is together with the Tories whom Keir Hardie despised, as he would the war and privatisation policies of New Labour in government, of which Darling was a part.

Whatever his attitude to Scottish independence might have been, what Keir Hardie stood for, whether in his Ayrshire coalfield beginnings, campaigning in West Ham South, or entering the House of Commons with his cloth cap, was the political independence of the working class, which was why his Independent Labour Party was formed.

Friends of mine are divided on which way to vote on independence. From a working class point of view I can see arguments for and against. Having been able to boast there are fewer Tory MPs in Scotland than pandas in the Edinburgh zoo (and its no question which the public loves and prefers to see, it aint Tories!) , Scottish people smart at having to remain subject to a Tory government at Westminster elected by southern English votes. They want to defend their health services and education, and wish their country's oil wealth could have been put to better use than boosting the City of London speculators.

Far from being mere nationalists, some are internationalist; enough to want to see Scotland free to pursue its own foreign policy, establishing new friendships, while ceasing to be used as a nuclear submarine base or source of regiments for imperialist ventures around the world.

On the other hand, it is hard to see Alec Salmond and his party going that far, when he has been at pains to pledge Scotland's continued contribution to NATO and stress that the Queen, and not he or any other prime minister, would remain head of "our" armed forces.

Meanwhile, Scotland's departure would leave us weakened in England and Wales, removing more than forty Labour MPs from facing the Tories at Westminster. Not all those Scottish MPs are like Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, some of them are socialists.

All the same, I can't begrudge my Scottish comrades, who have already experienced having Scottish Socialist MSPs, the chance to give this government a kick up the jaxy and break for freedom, while they wait for us to catch up.

Looking at some of those urging a 'No' vote would be enough to persuade me to vote 'Yes'.  Who wants to stay "together" with Cameron and Boris, or Darling and Gordon?  Do Scots have to listen to no longer Gorgeous Georgie paying a return to Dundee to denounce what he called "Reds in Kilts", or to the Orange Order banging its big drums in Edinburgh on September 13 demanding a 'No' vote?
(According to blogging ex-diplomat and 'Yes' supporter Craig Murray the BBC has decided not to cover this in case it gives the 'No' campaign a bad image. Too late, Beeb, we'll do our best to spread it.)

 Something that's been interesting me since the Grangemouth dispute last year is whether an independent Scottish government elected on a mood of confidence in a better future could sit back while a private company headquartered in Switzerland threatened to close Scotland's only oil refinery and much of Scottish industry?  The SNP could not stand up to this, and the Labour Party leadership preferred to bite the hand that feeds by joining the Tory attack on my trade union.

The SNP has also backed away from re-regulating public transport, let alone restoring public ownership, and this month Sir Brian Souter boss of Stagecoach  coughed up another £1 million to party funds.  On the other hand, the Better Together campaign received a £500,000 donation from businessman Ian Taylor, chief executive of the oil trading firm Vitol, to help secure a "no" vote in the referendum.

This starts to sound almost like the 1707 Act of Union, which a Scottish historian dubbed the "job" of the century, but now as then, there's more to this than private interests, the public are not as easily bought as MPs or  parties, and a vote for independence  does not necessarily mean  a vote for Alex Salmond's party. Like the referendum in 1997 which led to reopening a Scottish parliament, it could open up all sorts of new possibilities.

"But", asks a doubter, "in what sense can either Scotland or the rest of Great Britain ever be said to be independent when we are all controlled by the banks, the EU, and the IMF etc.? " Good question. To which, without going into whether it makes any difference whether we're talking about banks on Wall Street, in the City of London, or Edinburgh, I can only say these things are relative; and that we may as well find out.

One set of initials I've not seen mentioned in this debate, nor almost any other, is TTIP, standing for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The United States and European Union have been negotiating this since July 2013, and talks could be concluded by next year.

The annual conference of trades union councils held in Cardiff on June 14-15 adopted a resolution  from Ealing trades council warning that this agreement could enable big US and multinational companies which have already penetrated the National Health Service to complete their takeover.

"If the EU and the US agree to TTIP without excluding the NHS from its provisions, the result could mean the end of the NHS as a public service. Corporations could permanently have the legal right to run health services with or without approval of the British Government. The marketisation of the NHS under the Health and Social Care Act means that the NHS will no longer be categorised as a ‘public service’ and would therefore be included in the provisions of the TTIP wich restrict or prevent national governments from determining how industries are run. TTIP can override not only health and safety, but pay arrangements, union agreements and other basic standards. The markets take legal priority".

There were assurances afterwards that the NHS would be protected ("Safe in Our Hands"?) but the negotiations have been conducted largely in secrecy, and David Cameron sacked the minister who was supposed to be safeguardung the service.

The magazine New Internationalist reported earlier this year that the TTIP and its equivalent in the Pacific would "swing the power balance away from states in favour of big business". Giving '10 Reasons to be worried about the trojan treaties',  Hazel Healy instanced US firms wanting to remove EU food-labelling laws and restrictions; US tobacco giant Philip Morris suing governments which tried to combat smoking; US investors wanting to take away workers' right to organise in unions; and moves affecting both health services and the environment. As a sign of things to come, under the North Atlantic Free Trade Area (NAFTA) agreement a US company was suing Canada for $250 million because Quebec province banned fracking.   
http://newint.org/features/2014/05/01/trojan-treaties/

The development charity War on Want has also warned that TTIP could endanger decades of campaigning  and legislation on issues from food safety and hygiene to banking laws and labour rights. War on Want executive director John Hilary has written a  book about it.

What is noticeable is that while trade unionists have raised concerns about this secret treaty  and campaigners have sought to make us aware of the dangers, we hear little on the media or from political parties, including those bold patriots in UKIP. It seems Farage's fighters want to defend our freedom from "Brussels Bureaucrats" and Polish plumbers, but would not dream of saying a word against big corporations.

Would an independent Scotland defend its independence against big business, or will whatever we vote for be ignored, and whatever is passed by parliaments in Westminster or Holyrood be torn to shreds by big companies and their lawyers,  under the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership? We might as well find out now. And demand that governments we elect should not be bound by agreements we have not seen or had a say in.  

How the Bank of England helped Hitler loot Czech gold

REFUGEES from Czechoslovakia, like this Jewish couple detained at Croydon airport on March 31, 1939, were not warmly welcomed.
But Nazis were welcome to help themselves to Czech wealth, thanks to Bank of England.

 

SEVERAL newspapers this week carried the story this week of how the Bank of England assisted Nazi Germany to lay its hands on the Czechoslovak gold deposit, sent abroad for safe keeping. This was a valuable asset to the Nazis wageing war.
  
Though this story is not new, it is confirmed now in the Bank's own official report, released for the first time.  As Adam Lebor writes in the Daily Telegraph, (Jyly 31) "The documents reveal a shocking story: just six months before Britain went to war with Nazi Germany, the Bank of England willingly handed over 5.6 million pounds worth of gold to Hitler - and it belonged to another country.

"The official history of the bank, written in 1950 but posted online for the first time on Tuesday, reveals how we betrayed Czechoslovakia - not just with the infamous Munich agreement of September 1938, which allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland, but also in London, where Montagu Norman, the eccentric but ruthless governor of the Bank of England agreed to surrender gold owned by the National Bank of Czechoslovakia.

"The Czechoslovak gold was held in London in a sub-account in the name of the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel-based bank for central banks. When the Nazis marched into Prague in March 1939 they immediately sent armed soldiers to the offices of the National Bank.

"The Czech directors were ordered, on pain of death, to send two transfer requests. The first instructed the BIS to transfer 23.1 metric tonnes of gold from the Czechoslovak BIS account, held at the Bank of England, to the Reichsbank BIS account, also held at Threadneedle Street.

"The second order instructed the Bank of England to transfer almost 27 metric tonnes of gold held in the National Bank of Czechoslovakia’s own name to the BIS’s gold account at the Bank of England.

..... "The Czechoslovak bank officials believed that as the orders had obviously been carried out under duress neither would be allowed to go through.

"But they had not reckoned on the bureaucrats running the BIS and the determination of Montagu Norman to see that procedures were followed, even as his country prepared for war with Nazi Germany. His decision caused uproar, both in the press and in Parliament".

Indeed, the financial journalist Paul Einzig had got hold of the Czech gold story and contacted George Strauss, the Labour MP for North Lambeth, who asked Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on May 15, 1939: "Is it true, sir, that the national treasure of Czechoslovakia is being given to Germany?".

Chamberlain - a major shareholder in ICI, which had links with IG Farben in Germany and was a corporate member of the Anglo-German Fellowship -denied it.  Chamberlain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, denied knowing anything about it. But the row had just started.

As Adam Lebor writes:
"George Strauss, a Labour MP, spoke for many when he thundered in Parliament: 'The Bank for International Settlements is the bank which sanctions the most notorious outrage of this generation - the rape of Czechoslovakia.’

"Winston Churchill demanded to know how the government could ask its citizens to enlist in the military when it was ‘so butter-fingered that pounds 6 million worth of gold can be transferred to the Nazi government’.

"It was a good question. Thanks to Norman and the BIS, Nazi Germany had just looted 23.1 tonnes of gold without a shot being fired. The second transfer order, for the gold held in the National Bank of Czechoslovakia’s own name, did not go through. Sir John Simon, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had instructed banks to block all Czechoslovak assets."

Others have explained that the gold did not have to be shipped from London. The Bank of England authorised its partner in the Bank of International Settlement (BIS) in Basle to deduct $40 million from the Bank of England's holding there, and then replaced it from the Czech National Bank holding in London. 


 The BIS was set up under the Young Plan, which provided for US loans to Germany to help it meet World War I reparations. The German banker Hjalmar Schacht publically denounced the Young Plan, and took charge of  big business fundraising for the Nazi party, but according to Adam Lebor:

"The BIS was founded in 1930, in effect by Montagu Norman and his close friend Hjalmar Schacht, the former president of the Reichsbank, known as the father of the Nazi economic miracle. Schacht even referred to the BIS as ‘my’ bank. The BIS is a unique hybrid: a commercial bank protected by international treaty. Its assets can never be seized, even in times of war. It pays no taxes on profits."

"The Bank of England’s historian argued that to refuse the transfer order would have been a breach of Britain’s treaty obligations with regard to the BIS. In fact there was a powerful counter-argument that the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia had rendered any such obligations null and void as the country no longer existed".
(Indeed Hitler had declared triumphantly "Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist").

"A key sentence in the Bank of England documents is found on page 1,295. It reads: ‘‘The general attitude of the Bank of England directors of the BIS during the war was governed by their anxiety to keep the BIS to play its part in the solution of post-war problems’’.

"And here the secret history of the BIS and its strong relationship with the Bank of England becomes ever more murky. During the war the BIS proclaimed that it was neutral, a view supported by the Bank of England. In fact the BIS was so entwined with the Nazi economy that it helped keep the Third Reich in business. It carried out foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank; it accepted looted Nazi gold; it recognised the puppet regimes installed in occupied countries, which, together with the Third Reich, soon controlled the majority of the bank’s shares.

"Indeed, the BIS was so useful for the Nazis that Emil Puhl, the vice-president of the Reichsbank and BIS director, referred to the BIS as the Reichsbank’s only 'foreign branch’. The BIS’s reach and connections were vital for Germany. So much so, that all through the war, the Reichsbank continued paying interest on the monies lent by the BIS. This interest was used by the BIS to pay dividends to shareholders - which included the Bank of England.

"Thus, through the BIS, the Reichsbank was funding the British war economy. After the war, five BIS directors were tried for war crimes, including Schacht. ‘They don’t hang bankers,’ Schacht supposedly said, and he was right - he was acquitted."

Indeed, by the 1960s, Schacht was back in business, turning up in countries like Iraq and Indonesia after CIA-backed coups had led to massacres of commumists and trade unionists, making these places safe and profitable for Western big business. 

Lebor continues:
"Buried among the typewritten pages of the Bank of England’s history is a name of whom few have ever heard, a man for whom, like Montagu Norman, the primacy of international finance reigned over mere national considerations.

"Thomas McKittrick, an American banker, was president of the BIS. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, McKittrick’s position, the history notes, ‘became difficult’. But McKittrick managed to keep the bank in business, thanks in part to his friend Allen Dulles, the US spymaster based in Berne.

"McKittrick was an asset of Dulles, known as Codename 644, and frequently passed him information that he had garnered from Emil Puhl, who was a frequent visitor to Basel and often met McKittrick.

"Declassified documents in the American intelligence archives reveal an even more disturbing story. Under an intelligence operation known as the ‘Harvard Plan’, McKittrick was in contact with Nazi industrialists, working towards what the US documents, dated February 1945, describe as a ‘‘close cooperation between the Allied and German business world’’.

"Thus while Allied soldiers were fighting through Europe, McKittrick was cutting deals to keep the Germany economy strong. This was happening with what the US documents describe as ‘the full assistance’ of the State Department.

"The Bank of England history also makes disparaging reference to Harry Dexter White, an official in the Treasury Department, who was a close ally of Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary. Morgenthau and White were the BIS’s most powerful enemies and lobbied hard at Bretton Woods in July 1944, where the Allies met to plan the post-war financial system, for the BIS to be closed.

White, the Bank history notes rather sneeringly, had said of the BIS: ‘‘There is an American president doing business with the Germans while our boys are fighting the Germans.’’

"Aided by its powerful friends, such as Montagu Norman, Allen Dulles and much of Wall Street, the BIS survived the attempts by Morgenthau and White to close it down. The bank’s allies used precisely the argument detailed on page 1,295 of the Bank of England’s history: the BIS was needed to plan the post-war European economy".

With his brother John Foster Dulles as US Secretary of State, Allan Dulles as head of the CIA was a powerful figure in US global hegemony and the Cold War. Harking back to the IG Farben connection, pro-Soviet and Czech propaganda pointed to the Dulles' brothers links via Standard Oil, but oddly failed to get on to the Bank of International Settlement.

It is interesting that the Bank of England report was drawn up in 1950 and yet has only just been published. Perhaps 1950 was too close to the Second World War, and too far into the Cold War. Two years before the Communists had seized power in Prague and the Western powers set up NATO. In 1950 the Korean war began, and West German rearmament was beginning.

The next question is why, apart from the bad name which bankers have gained,  the story is suddenly newsworthy. Maybe there's a clue in what Adam Lebor goes on to say.

"From the 1950s to the 1990s the BIS hosted much of the planning and technical preparation for the introduction of the euro. Without the BIS the euro would probably not exist. In 1994, Alexander Lamfalussy, the former BIS manager, set up the European Monetary Institute, now known as the European Central Bank.

"The BIS remains very profitable. It has only about 140 customers (it refuses to say how many) but made a tax-free profit of about 900 million pounds last year. Every other month it hosts the Global Economy Meetings, where 60 of the most powerful central bankers, including Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, meet.

"The BIS also hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which regulates commercial banks, and the new Financial Stability Board, which coordinates national regulatory authorities."

Adam LeBor is the author of ’Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World’, published by PublicAffairs.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/bank-of-england/10213988/Never-mind-the-Czech-gold-the-Nazis-stole....html

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jul/31/bank-of-england-and-nazis-stolen-gold?INTCMP=SRCH

See also:
http://historicalpassages.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Class+of+39 

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Trading_Enemy_Higham.html 

The economic background to appeasement, and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during World War II. 

http://www.8bitmode.com/rogerdog/lobster/lobster20.pdf

Books: 

Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy.

Adam Lebor, Hitler's Secret Bankers

John Weitz , Hitler's Banker

Fox's trail in Haymarket may lead to bigger prey

ARRIVING at Embankment, Unite banners followed by that of Wandsworth prison officers. In several prisons staff held union meetings in defiance of ban on strikes.
Probation officers and Court staff were also on march, along with head teachers and members of the Chartered Society of Physio-Therapists - all those who according to Tories were just "militants itching for a fight".
And on a day when Cameron jeered at Labour for being "union funded", we got reminded of where the Tories get their funds.


WITH two million people on strike across the country yesterday, and many thousands, from teachers and nurses, to physiotherapists and prison officers, marching to within a stone's throw of Parliament. a small group of demonstrators invading an office building on Haymarket may seem just a sideshow.

So it is. But neither irrelevant nor insignificant. In fact the 'Occupy London' commandos may have picked a target that was more significant than they realised, or tame media are willing to admit. They should be congratulated.

The suprise action took place at Panton House, the headquarters of global mining company Xstrata, which occupies the third and fourth floors of the five-storey building. About 40 activists got into the unguarded building and raced up stairs, unfurling a banner on the roof.

Police kettled about 200 more people in the street outside, while territorial support group officers and others were brought in to remove those inside, who had taken up slogan chants about tax evasion and top bosses' pay. Some protesters said they were roughly handled and thrown down stairs by the heavy mob. About twenty arrests were made.

According to Xstrata's annual report its CEO, Mick Davis, received a pay and free share package worth £17.7m in the last financial year.

As one of those held in the police kettle said: "I'm here because the public sector is getting cut. All the people who are getting hurt by them are the poorest in the country. All the people who don't suffer are the bankers and the rich people."

In a press release Karen Lincoln, a supporter of Occupy London, said: "Mick Davis is a prime example of the greedy 1% lining their own pockets. In this time when the government enforces austerity on the 99%, these executives are profiting. The rest of us are having our pensions cut, health service torn apart and youth centres shut down. We refuse to stand by and let this happen."

http://occupylsx.org/?p=1725
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/30/occupy-activists-xstrata-hq-london
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8926752/Arrests-after-protesters-storm-office-block.html

But there is more to Mick "the Miner" (City nickname, bet he never got coal dust in his sandwiches!) Davis than his top salary. In the strange business which emerged this year leading to the resignation of Tory Defence Secretary Liam Fox, Mick Davis was one of three top Zionist lobbyists revealed to have funded the activities of Fox's associate Adam Werritty.

Davis, 52, is chairman of United Jewish Israel Appeal, a British charity which splits its contributions between charitable work in the UK and Israel. But that is just one of his favoured causes. Davis gave £150,000 to Conservative party central office over the last 21 months according to Electoral Commission records. He also gave £7,500 to the office of the education secretary Michael Gove in August.

Gove you may remember intervened to tell London schools they must not have anything to do with a Palestinian children's cultural event this year. The Education Secretary was also on TV yesterday criticising the teachers for being on strike over their pensions, and complaining that the BBC and other media were not doing enough to investigate the political past of union leaders like Unite's Len McCluskey. As though there was anything shady or hidden about the man we elected general secretary of my union, unlike the background of the education secretary's sponsors.

In June, Mick Davis was among a delegation that included Poju Zabludowicz, heir to an Israeli arms fortune and the chairman of the Zionist lobby Bicom, which met the foreign secretary William Hague to discuss the impact of the Arab spring on Israel. Zabludowicz's Liechtenstein-registered company Tamares, which owns property in Las Vegas and the West Bank settlement of Ma'alei Adumim, has been another generous donor to Mr.Werrity and the Tories.

The maverick former British diplomat Craig Murray is continuing like a terrier to worry the government with questions about Mick Davis' protege Mr.Werrity, his trips to Iran, to mention another topical subject, and how he helped arrange for Britain's ambassador in Tel Aviv, Matthew Gould to meet Israeli generals over dinner, and what they talked about.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/18/adam-werritty-pro-israel-funders
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/10/matthew-gould-and-adam-werritty/


But the Middle East is only one corner of Mick Davis interests, helping Israel but a hobby you might say. According to Wikipedia, Xstrata plc is a global mining company headquartered in Zug, Switzerland and with its registered office in London. It is a major producer of coal (and the world's largest exporter of thermal coal), copper, nickel, primary Vanadium" and Zinc, and the world's largest producer of ferrochrome. It has operations in 19 countries across Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America and South America. Xstrata has its primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It has a secondary listing on the SIX Swiss Exchange. Its largest shareholder is Glencore International plc, which has a stake of approximately 34%.

That last sentence really is interesting. It is like you are exploring a cave and think you have come to the end, only to find a small opening to one side opening up into a whole bigger cave system. A dark labyrinth.

"Glencore's history reads like a spy novel"

So said an Australian programme about the company.
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2005/s1300651.htm

We could pick up part of that thread from January 20, 2001, when hours before leaving office, US president Bill Clinton granted a presidential pardon to a businessman called Marc Rich, who had been indicted by then federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliano, and was on the US Justice Department's Most Wanted List. The charges against Rich related to illegal trading with Iran and tax evasion.

Rich, who began in metals trading, had got to know the international materials markets and during the 1973-4 oil embargo he found ways to buy Iranian and Iraqi oil relatively cheaply then resell it for twice the price to US companies. He had reportedly gained a friend and business partner in Ayatollah Khomenei. While the Iranian leaders might fulminate against America and Israel, they needed to sell their oil, and were not too bothered apparently by Marc Rich's profitable sales to America or his donations to the Zionists.

Allegations were made that Clinton had decided on the pardon because Rich's ex-wife, a shoe factory heiress, had donated money to the Democrats. But among other factors revealed, Israeli leaders including then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres interceded with the President on Marc Rich's behalf. So for some reason did Spanish King Juan Carlos

Despite the pardon, Rich decided to stay in Switzerland, living for a time at Zug then moving to Meggen. He is said to hold both Spanish and Israeli passports, and to have boasted of his work for Mossad. He has been awarded honours by two Israeli universities, Bar Ilan and the Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

There were rumours linking Rich with the London-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), This bank, used by the CIA to fund Afghan mujahaddeen and by Abu Nidal for arms puchases, was also implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, by which arms sales to the Iranian regime helped fund support for right-wing Contras in Nicaragua, thus bypassing US Congressional scrutiny. The BCCI was wound up amid scandal twenty years ago, leaving innocent creditors such as Asian shopkeepers stranded.

But Marc Rich and Co. AG survived , having become Glencore International plc a multinational mining and commodities trading company headquartered in Baar, Switzerland and with its registered office in Saint Helier, Jersey. It is the world's largest commodities trading company, with a 2010 global market share of 60 percent in the internationally tradeable zinc market, 50 percent in the internationally tradeable copper market, 9 percent in the internationally tradeable grain market and 3 percent in the internationally tradeable oil market.

Glencore has production facilities around the world and supplies metals, minerals, crude oil, oil products, coal, natural gas and agricultural products to international customers in the automotive, power generation, steel production and food processing industries.
(Wikipedia)

Glencore has mining interests around the world, from Colombia to the Congo, Katanga to Khazakhstan, .

"Glencore is also noted for its association with the publicly traded Xstrata mining group, also headquartered in the low-tax Canton of Zug, Switzerland. Glencore is reported to serve as a marketing partner for Xstrata. As of 2006, Glencore leaders Willy Strothotte and Ivan Glasenberg are on the board of Xstrata, which Strothotte chairs. According to The Sunday Times in 2005, Glencore controlled 40% of Xstrata stock and has appointed the Xstrata CEO, Mick Davis."
(Wikipedia again).

So what does it all signify? No good asking me. But having taken a glimpse at these affairs, and shone a torch briefly into that labyrinth, we must hope that people do ask questions and maybe someone better qualified may start to untangle the web,

Watching David Cameron on TV sneering about trade unionists funding the Labour Party, and accusing Ed Miliband of asking "trade union funded" questions, I reflected that at least the millions of working people who contribute to Labour through our unions are open and honest about how we earn our money and the way that it is spent. We pay our whack of income tax in this country, which is more than a lot of the Tories' backers can say.

Whether we, the mugs in their eyes, get as good value for money from our politicians as the billionaires make sure they get from theirs is another matter, of course.

PS A Footnote

I believe this is called serendipity, a happy coincidence, though not pehaps for friends and patrons of messrs. Cameron, Hague, Fox and Werrity, it is a remark by Robert Fisk in the Independent on Wednesday:

"Anyway, the Iranians trashed us yesterday and made off, we are told, with a clutch of UK embassy documents. I cannot wait to read their contents. For be sure, they will soon be revealed".

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-sanctions-are-only-a-small-part-of-the-history-that-makes-iranians-hate-the-uk-6269812.html

Veolia in trouble with protesters and investers

DAYS after failing to win a contract with Ealing council in west London, the French waste and water company Veolia announced last week that it would scale back its operations in several countries after a surprising first-half net loss of €67.2 million.

The company's difficulties are being greeted as heartening news by campaigners working for a boycott of firms that profit from the Israeli occupation and settlement regime in the occupied Palestinian territories. Veolia has been among companies singled out by Palestinian civil society organisations asking for solidarity in the form of a boycott.

With headquarters in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, and shares quoted in Paris and New York, Veolia Environment SA is one of the main international companies to have grown by spreading into what were previously public service areas in many countries. It is involved in water supply and management, waste disposal, public transport, and energy. In 2009 it employed around 300,000 employees in 74 countries.

Among its subsidiaries, Connex lost rail service contracts in both Australia (Melbourne) and Britain. It had been due to run services in London and the South East until this year, but in June 2003 the Strategic Rail Authority decided to cut the South Eastern franchise short, citing poor financial management and "a serious loss of confidence... in the ability of the company to run the business in its widest sense".

The objection to Veolia's partnership in the Jerusalem Light Rail project is another matter. This system links West Jerusalem to illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, bypassing Palestinian villages and furthering the annexation of East Jerusalem. Veolia also operates bus services in the West Bank which run on the settlers-only roads, a refinement on South African-style apartheid. By helping the occupiers to divide the West Bank and enfold what should be the Palestinian capital, the French company is helping obstruct any progress to peace via a Palestinian state.

Dumping on the Occupied Territory

In May this year the Israeli Human Rights organisation B'Tselem published a detailed report on how the Israeli authorities and companies which work with them use - and abuse - land and resources in just part of the occupied West Bank, the Jordan valley and northern Dead Sea region, which successive Israeli governments and the Army appear intent on holding on to regardless of any peace agreements.

Besides mentioning the Israeli company Ahava products, the report has a section on waste.

"The environmental-nuisance disposal sites Israel built in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea area are primarily intended to serve Israeli governmental authorities – the city of Jerusalem, the settlements in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea, and settlements elsewhere in the West Bank. Establishing the sites in the Jordan Valley enables the disposal to take place far from the territory of the Israeli authorities, saves valuable space for the Israeli governmental authorities, and reduces costs for transporting and handling the material at the disposal sites inside Israel. For many years, Israel has not invested meaningful sums in the sites in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea area. Had it done so, they would be operating in accordance with the relevant regulations and standards applying inside Israel, thus preventing environmental pollution.

......

North of the Yafit settlement, next to Tirza Reservoir, the Samaria Towns Environmental Association operates the Tovlan waste-disposal site. Alongside it is a fertilizer manufacturing operation that uses the waste from the Tovlan site. The Tovlan site has been operated since the 1990s as a private business, without a plan approved by the regional council, and without infrastructure to prevent ground pollution and emission of greenhouse gases, or a plan to rehabilitate it. In 2004, the Towns Association upgraded and enlarged the facility to give it a “national dimension,” with a capacity of a thousand tons of refuse a day.

Currently, the site is used only by Israeli settlements. In addition to settlements in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea area, large settlements such as Ari’el and the Barkan industrial area also use the site. The site is operated by a subsidiary of a French corporation Veolia, T.M.M. Integrated Recycling Industries, that pays royalties to the Jordan Valley Regional CouncilDispossession and Exploitation : Israel's Policy in the Jordan Valley and Northern Dead Sea, B'tselem, May 2011

Veolia's involvement in the Jerusalem Ligh Railway (along with that of Alstom engineers) led to opposition ranging from Irish transport staff refusing to train Israeli recruits for the project to Dutch institutional investors withdrawing funds. A legal case in France had less success. And Veolia has profitable contracts in both Saudi Arabia and Iran.

In London, Palestine solidarity campaigners are lobbying against major waste contracts going to the French firm. They drew some satisfaction in April when the ((April 7) reported "The £1bn battle to deal with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of South West London’s household rubbish has come down to its final two bidders.Viridor and the Waste Recycling Group will now go head-to-head to persuade Croydon, Sutton, Merton and Kingston they have the best solution for 200,000 tonnes of waste produced in the boroughs each year.The four boroughs, which form the South London Waste Partnership(SLWP), hope to announce the winning bid early next year".

Evidently Veolia was out of the running. Ben Soffa, Secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said: ‘Local activists and PSC branches organised a really vocal campaign to oppose awarding this contract to a company that is complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation. This is just the latest in a series of setbacks for Veolia, which has failed to win a string of other public contracts in France, England, Wales, Ireland and Australia, at a cost totalling billions of Euros".

Then on Wednesday Ealing council failed to select Veolia for a comprehensive tender for its domestic refuse, street cleaning and parks maintenance contract. Veolia had been given the previous parks maintenance contract. Activists had written to and met with councillors, detailing Veolia’s involvement in the illegal Israeli occupation. The contract would have been worth approximately £300 million over 15 years – one of Ealing Council’s largest single contracts.

Sarah Colborne, Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) Director, said in a press release: “Veolia’s loss of this contract, following its failure in a number of significant bids in Britain and internationally, is a clear sign that Veolia is paying a high price for its complicity in Israel’s occupation and violations of international law.”

The company's fortunes may be running into other kinds of trouble. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Veolia “announced a corporate overhaul of the company that includes divestitures and a significant geographic scale-back”. They also reported Veolia’s disclosure of 2007-2010 accounting fraud in the US, amounting to €90 million. Company officials are reported to have said the scale-down is related to “financial difficulties encountered by Veolia’s customers”.

Meanwhile in West London ...

Environmental campaigners in Brent, north-west London, are concerned about Veolia's existing contract with the council and fear expansion to link with other boroughs could mean waste from better-off boroughs being brought in for dumping or incineration. Veolia already has a waste depot in Alperton and is proposing sites there and in Park Royal as it touts for the new West London Waste Authority contract.http://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2010/11/brent-waste-capital-of-west-london.html

Meanwhile, in a message to campaigners the secretary of a local group says:
"We may not know the precise reason that Veolia was not selected for the bid, but the systematic lobbying by members and supporters in Ealing of councillors, council officials and the provision of detailed legal and factual analysis of Veolia's grave misconduct in the West Bank and Jerusalem certainly forced the issue into the Council's deliberations. We should therefore rightly see this as a campaign success; and thank you to everyone who was involved in this.

"We now need to put our focus on the next campaign against Veolia. Six London boroughs – Ealing, Hounslow, Hillingdon, Richmond, Harrow and Brent – have combined to form the West London Waste Authority (WLWA). The WLWA is in the process of asking companies to tender for an approx. £ 485 million residual domestic waste contract. We know that Veolia has made it onto the shortlist for this contract. Our job is to put real pressure on the WLWA to kick Veolia out of the process. Now we need as many residents of the six boroughs as possible to sign the letter which we will send to the WLWA to show the amount of opposition there is to Veolia’s bid".

For copy of letter being sent see:
http://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/p/letter-to-west-london-waste-authority.html

Keeping their faith in Prince Rupert

MURDOCH and minder. Third wife Wendy Deng responded fiercely to shaving-foam pie wielder.

AS Rupert Murdoch and his minions stand pilloried, and custard pied, from all sides, one faithful band of friends of the multi-media emperor remains loyal. "Put not your faith in princes", advises the Good Book, but the Zionists who claim it as a title to real estate have disregarded this, among other counsels, or at least not considered it applied to press barons.

Here is a comment from the Jewish Chronicle, lamenting Murdoch's fall from grace:
"Anyone following the way Israel is portrayed here in Britain will be concerned. Murdoch's publications (from time to time, at least) provide rare counter blasts against the prevailing winds of anti-Israeli hostility. His commitment to Israel is resolute. In a speech last year to the Anti-Defamation League he spoke of "the disturbing new home that antisemitism has found in polite society - especially in Europe", and of "an ongoing war against the Jews".As long as Rupert is at the helm, The Times, the Sunday Times and the Sun are safe from the anti-Zionist consensus".

If like me you thought the media was overwhelmingly pro-Zionist in bias, you have to realise that this all depends where you are standing. If you sense a lot of people around you were not happy with, say, the Israeli bombing of Gaza, you have to blame it on the media. That the BBC refused to broadcast a charity appeal for the victims was an overdue acknowledgement that news coverage had been biased.

That the Sun carried a front-page story claiming (on the basis of a hoax) that Muslims were planning a campaign of attacks on prominent UK Jews, was irresponsible, you might say, but these things can be forgiven among friends. (Though not by Sir Alan Sugar, http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/people,2013,allan-sugar-sues-the-sun,75090?WTmc_id=rss).
A bit of tension keeps the troops in line.

The Zionist fears for the future of Murdoch's empire have been noted by my fellow blogger Mark Elf.
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2011/07/zionists-panick-over-possible-loss-of.html

Among those he mentions are Issi Leibler, a former fellow-countryman of Murdoch now domiciled in Israel, from where he denounces allegedly less fervent defenders of the Zionist state, such as our Board of Deputies of British Jews, accusing them of succumbing to a growing anti-Israel, indeed anti-Jewish atmosphere in Britain.

In his own blog, Leibler says:

"For Israel, a major erosion of the Murdoch media would have highly adverse repercussions. In an era in which the liberal global media has increasingly turned against Israel, most of the Murdoch outlets maintain a fair and evenhanded approach.

"Murdoch, whom I met personally on a number of occasions, is himself unquestionably a genuine friend of Israel. In fact, he has frequently been falsely described as Jewish by hostile Muslims and other extremists.

"While always sympathetic to Israel as the plucky underdog, the turning point in his relationship was 1982, when Ariel Sharon hosted him with a group of editors on a helicopter tour where he witnessed 'the vulnerability of the country' in terms of defensible borders".

(That was of course the same year when vulnerable little Israel, the 'plucky underdog' bombed Beirut and invaded Lebanon, and unleashed the Christian Falangist massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Chatila, for which an Israeli inquiry held Ariel Sharon morally culpable).

"His friendship towards Israel was publicly displayed when he was honored in 2009 by the American Jewish Committee and more recently in 2010 by the ADL. At the AJC meeting he stated: 'In the West, we are used to thinking that Israel cannot survive without the help of Europe and the United States. I say to you: maybe we should start wondering whether we in Europe and the United States can survive if we allow the terrorists to succeed in Israel… In the end, the Israeli people are fighting the same enemy we are: cold-blooded killers who reject peace… who reject freedom… and who rule by the suicide vest, the car bomb and the human shield'.

"If Murdoch is found to have been aware of the transgressions, his reputation will be destroyed and he will face major punitive sanctions. But as of now, while his enemies continue baying for his blood, most Israelis will be hoping that despite the criminal nature of the News of the World scandal, Rupert Murdoch and his senior management will be exonerated of direct malfeasance and his media holdings will remain substantially intact.

ileibler@netvision.net.il

This column was originally published in Yisrael Hayom

-----------------------

Leibler has recently been in Britain observing how intimidated we Jewish people are by the anti-Israel mood, but he was heartened to meet a group of militant young Zionists hoping to emulate the right-wing US "Stand by Israel" outfit waging its brave war on the West Coast, and by such heroic figures as Jonathan Hoffman, of the Zionist Federation, and Daily Mail columnist Melanie Philips, author of Londonistan.

"She represents a beacon of light, fearlessly exposing the cant and hypocrisy of the viciously anti-Israeli media".

Like Mad Mel, Issi Leibler is concerned about Islamic and Saudi influence, indeed he has accused the World Jewish Congress of "grovelling" to the Saudi rulers by attending a UN-approved Interfaith conference in Saudi Arabia from which overtly pro-Zionist bodies like the ADL and Conference of Presidents were excluded as "too political". Mind you, he also accuses Shimon Peres of a "servile" approach to the Saudi monarch.
http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=331

So I thought we might note this piece of news information:

Saudi Prince to retain shares even as News Corp's shame grows

Rebecca Hawkes ©RapidTVNews 11-07-2011

The UK phone hacking scandal rocking Rupert Murdoch’s media world will not result in any change to News Corporation’s second largest shareholder’s “strategic investment”, according to Prince Alaweed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

The Saudi billionaire told Reuters yesterday (10 July) that the commitment in News Corp by Kingdom Holding, which controls 7% of News Corp votes, is not in jeopardy - despite the decision by Mr Murdoch to close the most widely read newspaper in the UK after sickening accusations its journalists hacked the phones of a murdered teenager and victims of terrorist acts.

"The crisis does not make Kingdom Holding blink at all. It makes our partnership stronger," Prince Alaweed bin Talal is quoted as saying by Reuters.

The investments between the Saudi billionaire and News Corp are reciprocal. The Saudi conglomerate Rotana Media, which is owned by Kingdom Holding, has recently had a US$35 million cash injection from News Corp, which raised its shareholding by 50% to 14.53%.

News Corp took a 9.09 stake in Rotana Media for $70 million at the start of 2010. The deal forged then provided Rupert Murdoch’s group with an option to double its holding within 18 months – a facility it drew upon in May 2011.

"Since the crisis erupted I have been in touch with them [News Corp] to contain this problem," Prince Alaweed bin Talal told Reuters. "Their decision to shut down this tabloid [News of the World] in England is supported by me because we have to put this issue behind us."

......................

For the EMEA region, News Corp plans to launch Sky News Arabia - an Arabic language version of BSkyB’s 24 hour rolling news channel – free-to-air in spring 2012. News Corp already broadcasts 12 channels in the Middle East and North Africa through its Fox International Channels arm, in addition to its Sky News channel which is available locally on pay-TV platforms.

Analysts had predicted the increased shareholding in Rotana Media would help News Corp to further expand its televisual presence in the Arab world, given the potential offered by a youthful audience sharing a common language.

http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/2011071113508/saudi-prince-to-retain-shares-even-as-news-internationals-shame-grows.html

Incidentally, so far as Rupert's own religion goes, notwithstanding the superstition among some backward Muslims and old-fashioned conspiracy theories, I know of no evidence that he is even remotely "Jewish". In America, where born-again Christian fundamentalists can be much more fanatical than any mere Jewish Zionists, he is known as a church-goer and admirer of evangelist Billy Graham. He was also ennobled as a Papal knight by John Paul II, one assumes for his generous donations to Catholic institutions and causes, rather than his newspaper's contribution to faith and chastity. Perhaps at his age this is like taking out double insurance,

Here the Church of England, which might have tolerated the titillation offered in the News of the World, must consider whether the passing of that other Sunday institution in the path of the 'phone hacking scandal is good or bad news for its £4 million holding in Murdoch's News Corporation.

Blind eye on tax dodgers, Met spies on protesters

AT a time when we are all supposed to be in it together, accepting cuts to reduce the deficit and pay for the bankers' crisis, protesters have been pointing an accusing finger at major businesses, with names familiar on any High Street, who avoid paying taxes.

But we should not worry. Scotland Yard is on the job, dealing with this issue.

It has deployed undercover officers. To watch the protesters.

A report in yesterday's Guardian says the surveillance officers were first used at a protest in October, despite an assurance given to parliament last year that only officers in full uniform kept an eye on demonstrations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/03/uk-uncut-protests-undercover-police/print

Some activists have said they can't see what the fuss is about. "We all now about snoops infiltrating demonstrations". Some protesters taking part in the campaign about tax avoidance, called UK Uncut, remember the campaign against Heathrow airport expansion, when a man hired by the airport interests posed as a militant in meetings to plan protests, and even turned up in full pirate gear at one demonstration.

Some people have murmured suspicions that agent provocateurs infiltrated recent student demonstrations.

But the obvious irony of the Scotland Yard surveillance is that the businesses being protected are not paying for it!

HM Tax Inspectors are, like Health and Safety officers, job centre staff, hospital workers, firefighters and even police, being hit by cuts. Chancellor George Osborne says jobs must go, and services be cut, to remove a massive £83 million deficit. Big emphasis has been put on alleged benefit fraud, with private companies hired to remove unemployed and disabled people from benefits.

Civil service union leader Mark Serwotka has said each member of staff in the merged Tax and Customs and Excise departments brings in an average of £658,000 to the revenue. But 19,000 of their jobs have gone, and more are threatened.

UK Uncut aims to draw attention to the estimated £25bn the Treasury loses each year in tax avoidance. While ordinary taxpayers are made to pay more for less, hundreds of big companies have invested in expert advice and complex arrangements to avoid paying their due.

Sir Philip Green, the billionaire owner of British Home Stores, Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, Burton and Miss Selfridge, has generously given of his time to be an "efficiency" adviser to this government. He is to give advice on spending for the next three years, reporting to Sir Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office and Danny Alexander at the Treasury. Sir Philip's high street businesses are mostly owned through Taveta, an investment company based in Jersey. In 2005 his business paid a £1.2 billion dividend to his wife Tina, who lives in Monaco.

UK Uncut has decided to target Sir Philip's stores after previously focussing on Vodaphone. Other companies that were being targeted for demos today include bankers Barclays, Lloyds and HSBC, as well as Boots the chemists.

Barclays used the courts last year to gag the Guardian and other newspapers from publishing reports on the bank's alleged schemes to avoid tax on a £1 billion in profits. A Barclays whistle blower had leaked information about the bank's affairs to senior officials of the Liberal Democrats' party, now of course forming part of the coalition government.

One of them said of the ruling: "This is a sad day for democracy. British taxpayers are being asked to underwrite Barclays' loans. I believe full disclosure of these documents, showing how Barclays use tax havens for tax avoidance, would be in the public interest. Banks use the finest legal brains money can buy to avoid tax, but HM Revenue & Customs is underpaid and overstretched, so it is far from a level playing field."

That was the Lib Dem's then Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, MP for Twickenham, now Business Secretary in David Cameron's government.

Starting with a bunch of people talking in a nortth London pub, UK Uncut has been spread around the country, mostly by young people using Facebook and Twitter, and its campaign has inspired anti-cuts groups' participation, as well as support from the Jubilee Debt Campaign, War on Want and Compass. "Over 15 times more is lost to tax avoidance at the top, than is lost to benefit fraud at the bottom," says Compass campaigns organiser, Joe Cox. "We want to make sure the government acts."

On October 27, people who turned up at a rendezvous on Piccadilly for the first Vodaphone protest were joined by at least two undercover police officers working for the Metropolitan Police Forward Intelligence Teams (FITs), according to the Guardian. "Until then, FIT officers had always conducted 'overt' surveillance with cameras. This time they were dressed as shoppers. A press photographer, Jonathan Warren, recognised one FIT officer and took their photograph. "They suddenly became very shy, as if I had spooked them, and then they just disappeared," he said.

The day the teenagers turned on Top Shop:
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/12/hope-young-education-angry

See also:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/sep/09/error-cuts-revenue-customs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/series/tax-gap