The Green Ribbon

The Islamophobe International: Vigilant Freedom and the English Defence League

My latest SpinWatch post:

In the wake of the Utoeya massacre in Norway, it is no longer possible to ignore the dangers of the growth in far right, Islamophobic counterjihad ideology. So a new report published by the Center for American Progress is particularly timely. 

Fear, Inc.The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America demonstrates that a remarkably small core group of people are responsible for spreading Islamophobia in the US: 

 A small group of foundations and wealthy donors are the lifeblood of the Islamophobia network in America, providing critical funding to a clutch of right-wing think tanks that peddle hate and fear of Muslims and Islam—in the form of books, reports, websites, blogs, and carefully crafted talking points that anti-Islam grassroots organizations and some right-wing religious groups use as propaganda for their constituency.

The report comes as recriminations over the Norway massacre may now be exposing some of the Islamophobia network's links in Europe. In particular, a bitter dispute between the leadership of the English Defence League (EDL) and counterjihad activist Paul Ray is shedding new light on the EDL's origins.

Read more at Spinwatch.

David Cameron must remember the lessons of Bloody Sunday

My latest OurKingdom piece:

I learned of the London riots last week when I got back from a night out in Belfast only to be greeted by scenes of riot police and burning buses in Tottenham on the TV news. It felt like an uncanny vantage point from which to be watching part of my hometown in flames.

The sense of cognitive dissonance only grew the following evening on my return to a London that was witnessing calls for plastic bullets, troops on the streets and other measures whose disastrous consequences I had spent the previous week learning about.

This August marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction of internment without trial in Northern Ireland, perhaps the most draconian attempt to suppress civil unrest by a British government in modern times.The Féile an Phobail festival in West Belfast last week witnessed testimony from internees and the families of civilians killed during the period. The picture that emerged was one of a disastrous policy that exacerbated the Troubles for decades.

In a new departure, the Féile also heard from two ex-soldiers visiting West Belfast for the first time since the early 1970s as part of a delegation organised by the Tim Parry - Johnathan Ball Peace Centre in Warrington.

Read the rest over at OK.

 

When conniving is not collusion: The Murder of Rosemary Nelson

A recent OurKingdom piece:

Was there state collusion in the killing of Rosemary Nelson, the solicitor who was blown up by loyalists at her home in Lurgan in 1999?

Two very different answers to that question were put forward in the Commons this week, following the report of the inquiry into her death.

For Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson, the report was fundamentally reassuring:

it is clear that just as Lord Saville found no evidence of a conspiracy by the British state, and just as Lord MacLean found no evidence of state collusion in the murder of Billy Wright, so this panel finds no evidence of any act by the state which directly facilitated Rosemary Nelson’s murder.

In contrast, Paterson's shadow (and predecessor) Sean Woodward, regarded the report as damning:

The question that the Secretary of State must address is whether those acts of omission, negligence, failure and prejudice and a mechanistic Northern Ireland Office mean that we are in a very different position from the conclusion of the Wright inquiry, contrary to his statement today. I urge him to examine Justice Cory’s original proposals for the inquiries. Collusion is not just a matter of commission; it may also be an issue of omission. This does not prove collusion, but today the Secretary of State has been too hasty in his dismissal.

Canadian judge Peter Cory was appointed in 2002 to look at six cases in which collusion by either British or Irish state forces was suspected. His report was published in 2004, only after a delay which led Cory to notify some of the families involved directly that he had recommended inquiries.

Read the rest at OK

Open Source Political Economy: an e-reader

I have been doing a lot of reading lately about the potential of networked information technology to empower ordinary people, partly inspired by Guy Aitchison and Aaron John Peters' essay in the Fight Back! reader on the student protests.

There is a wealth of good writing on the subject, much of which is rooted in the open source movement, and is accordingly freely available online. I have compiled a list of relevant ebooks and articles partly for my own reference, and partly for those like me who are just getting into this area. I would particularly recommend Benkler' s Wealth of Networks as a starting point. I would welcome suggestions in the comments.

Graham Seaman, The two economies, or why the washing machine question is the wrong question, 2002.

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, 2004

Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0, 2005

Michel Bauwens, The Political Economy of Peer Production, 2005.

Michel Bauwens, P2P and Human Evolution: Peer to Peer as the Premise of a new mode of civilisation, 2005

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 2006.

Lawrence Lessig, Remix, Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, 2008.

Kevin A. Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, A Low Overhead Manifesto, 2010.

Kevin A. Carson, Open Source Government, 2011.

Guy Aitchison and Aaron John Peters, The Open-Sourcing of Political Activism: How the internet and Networks help build resistance, 2011.

 

 

Notes on Cameron's Commons persona

Does Cameron have a problem with his manner at Prime Minister's Questions? Here's a look back over some of the evidence:

5 June 2008

In opposition, Cameron's facility for insulting his opponents won him some plaudits:

David Cameron is able to hit Brown with any number of insults: “Can he give us another of his trade-mark U-turns?…once again dodgy statistics from the Prime Minister…If a company director got up and read out a statement like that the authorities would be after him…I don’t know why they’re [Labour backbenchers] all shouting at me. It’s the Prime Minister who’s given them the lowest poll rating since Michael Foot…What on earth is green about taxing someone who bought a Ford Mondeo five years ago?…What’s this man still doing in the Government?”

This last remark actually referred to a lowly parliamentary private secretary, Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South-West), who had ventured to criticise the new car taxes which will come in next April. (Telegraph)

24 November 2010

In Government, son began to employ similar rhetoric from the dispatch box towards Ed Miliband:

Cameron scorned Miliband's previous role in the Treasury – where he was a special adviser to Gordon Brown – "when they didn't regulate banks properly, when they set up the tripartite system failed, when we had the biggest boom and the biggest bust."

The prime minister added: "The honourable gentleman has nothing to say about the deficit. He has nothing to say about the regulation. He is just a nowhere man of British politics." (Guardian)

On this occasion, however, Cameron's approach began to provoke some unease even among right-of-centre commentators:

How to defeat the Coalition

From my latest post over at OurKingdom:

For the Orange Bookers, as with their Cameronian counterparts, the coalition provided the opportunity to carry out their plans despite a relatively poor electoral performance. That weak legitimacy has induced urgency rather than caution.

Talks on an agenda for the second phase of the coalition began last autumn between senior Tories and Lib Dems at CentreForum. Progressives need their own plan to ensure that second phase never happens. Any such strategy must embrace a number of key principles.

A shorter version is also over at Liberal Conspiracy as Ten ways to pressure on the coalition and defeat it.

 

 

 

Random thoughts on the new Oriental mode of production

Newsnight's Paul Mason is, by common consent, one of the most switched-on commentators on the global wave of social unrest that has emerged in the wake of the financial crisis. His recent blogpost, Twenty reasons why its kicking off everywhere, has deservedly been getting plenty of recommendations on twitter, etc.

I though this point was particularly interesting:

The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.

Mason's picture of 19th century Paris holds more generally for what might be called the pre-industrial left. Geoff Eley provides a useful description of this heritage in his history of the left, Forging Democracy:

The military response to direct action, General Kitson's manual

General Frank Kitson's 1971 counter-insurgency manual Low Intensity Operations has long been of interest to students of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Within months of its publication, its author was commanding 39 Brigade in Belfast where he pioneered the use of the Parachute Regiment as shock troops, and of plain-clothes 'counter-gangs' to combat paramilitary groups.

However, what struck me most when I obtained a copy recently was not the book's obvious significance for such controversial episodes, but its striking relevance to events in Britain in recent weeks.

That's because Kitson gives considerable attention to the question of how a government can combat a campaign of non-violent direct action. He devotes a whole chapter to the subject, despite showing considerable scepticism about the value of direct action as a tactic.

Read more at OurKingdom.

A response to Harry’s Place

An anonymous post on Harry's Place has alleged that I am responsible for posting anti-semitic material by Kevin McDonald on the Neocon Europe website. This allegation is false and I demand that Harry's Place retract it.  

Harry’s place should already be aware that this was false as it had been made perfectly clear by Spinwatch in July of this year when David Miller wrote:

The quote was removed as soon as the mistake was spotted and an apology made. The person involved is no longer a contributor to our wiki projects. 

 I remain a contributor to Powerbase and other Spinwatch projects.

Tuition fees rebellion sparks coalition crisis

Out of idle curiosity as much as anything I have been taking a look at how individual Lib Dem MPs are likely to vote on tuition fees next Thursday. A full list follows at the end of this post. The best source on this is the blog of Tim Starkey, a Lib Dem councillor who is co-ordinating the rebels.

Starkey wrote yesterday:

Be in no doubt - the lobbying efforts are working. Over the next week it is vital that students, parents and all those who care about widening access to university education write to their MPs and let their feelings be known. As I’ve said before, don’t just target Lib Dems. There are 4 Tories on the government benches who signed the pledge too ( Bob Blackman - Harrow East, Stephen Mosley - City of Chester, Lee Scott - Ilford South, Ben Wallace - Wye and Preston).

If one takes Michael Crick's narrowest definition of '26 plain backbenchers', more than half of Lib Dem backbenchers have already said they will vote against the Government. It is still almost half if one includes spokesmen and 'party whips' who are not members of the Government. This in itself would be a major blow to the legitimacy of the tuition fees hike.

How the MOD played the Knocking Game after Bloody Sunday

 

Lord Saville's Report into Bloody Sunday will be debated in the House of Commons on Wednesday. No doubt the length and cost of the inquiry will feature prominently in the debate. 

The process might arguably have been less protracted had it not had to overcome a Ministry of Defence campaign to obscure the truth. Central to this campaign was 'The Knocking Game' an army document produced within three months of the 1972 massacre, which claimed that the victims were 'amateur gunmen'.

Former army information officer Colin Wallace testified to the inquiry that this document was used to brief the press. In contrast, the former head of the Information Policy Unit at Headquarters Northern Ireland, Colonel Maurice Tugwell, claimed that the document was intended for circulation solely within the army.

Faced with these conflicting accounts, Lord Saville concluded that there was no "evidence that anyone involved in military information disseminated to the public anything about Bloody Sunday, knowing or believing that information to be untrue."

However, evidence found by SpinWatch, but apparently withheld from the inquiry, shows that 'The Knocking Game' was intended for unattributable briefings, and was shown to at least one journalist, confirming Wallace's version of events.

The Hatfield House Mystery - Is a pan-unionist alliance on the cards?

A cross post which originally appeared on OurKingdom on 23 January 2010.

It has been a strange month in the politics of Northern Ireland, and last week was no exception. On Monday, there was optimism that a breakthrough on the devolution of policing and justice was in the offing. A few days later, talks had collapsed amid recriminations between Gerry Adams and Peter Robinson. UUP leader Reg Empey was predicting an assembly election would be called by the end of the coming week, a good indicator of the likely timeframe before a definitive breakthrough or breakdown.

Over-shadowing the week's events was a remarkable scoop from Slugger O'Toole's Eamonn Mallie, the veteran journalist who first revealed the British Government's talks with the IRA in the early 1990s. He reported that last Sunday, the DUP and Ulster Unionist leadership took part in secret talks in England with Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson aimed at "unionist unity and copper fastening maximum unionist support for a future Conservative government, should there be a hung parliament."

The Conservatives denied that any discussion of a hung parliament had taken place, stating:

What this was, was the shadow Secretary of State as somebody who could potentially be the actual Secretary of State in a matter of weeks, holding private talks with representatives of the two main unionist parties to explore how we might overcome some of the political instabilities at Stormont, and to avoid a situation in which we might potentially, should we win the election, inherit a collapsed Assembly and direct rule.

On the face of it, this makes sense, particularly as the DUP would want political cover from the Tories' Ulster Unionist allies in the event of a deal with Sinn Féin. However, a series of intriguing stories undermined this picture. The Belfast Telegraph reported that the DUP was considering giving the Ulster Unionists a free run in two nationalist-held Westminster seats. RTE reported that Robinson was considering an outright alliance between the two parties, and the BBC reported that three Consevative parliamentary candidates had resigned.

The BBC's Mark Devenport summed up the situation at the end of the week:

When questioned about the prospect of Sinn Fein becoming Stormont's largest party, neither unionist leader would rule out their respective parties merging into one bloc. Although the Conservatives claimed there was no discussion of a hung Westminster parliament during the secret talks in England last Sunday, senior DUP sources are talking up the significance a single unionist force could have for the parliamentary arithmetic at Westminster. They are pointing out that 12 pro-Conservative seats equals 24 in a balanced parliament...of course that presumes both North Down and Fermanagh South Tyrone could be counted in such a bloc which is a big assumption. Nevertheless it gives a sense of the kind of calculations now being made.

The location of the talks may be significant: Hatfield House, the ancestral seat of Lord Salisbury, who as Viscount Cranborne was the key ally of Ulster Unionism in John Major's cabinet. His home has hosted a unionist unity conference once before. The UUP and DUP were both represented at this gathering which took place a few months after the election of Tony Blair in 1997. It was ostensibly organised at the initiative of Sean O'Callaghan, a former Provisional IRA member who became an advisor to David Trimble. Another member of Trimble's inner circle, the journalist Eoghan Harris, declined to attend because, in the words of Dean Godson, the event "had too much of the air of 1912-style resistance to Home Rule, with Unionists coalescing with what he saw as reactionary elements on the mainland."

Those words found something of an echo this week from SDLP Deputy Leader Alasdair McDonnell, whose South Belfast constituency is the most vulnerable to a pan-unionist alliance. He accused David Cameron of orchestrating "a cynical attempt by the Tories to grab a few orange votes ahead of the forthcoming Westminster election”.     

There may in fact be a case for a unionist realignment if it unites pro-agreement forces against the Traditional Unionist Voice. If however, it emboldens the DUP to risk the collapse of power-sharing, it will only serve the TUV's agenda. That would attract an extremely negative reaction from nationalists of all shades. It would also raise profound questions for all strands of unionism.

The DUP has spent forty years building at the expense of traditional 'big house unionism.' How will its electorate take to becoming pawns on a chessboard at the home of a Tory grandee?

The Ulster Unionists and the Conservatives have spent months talking up their alliance as the beginning of a new non-sectarian unionism that can attract Catholic voters. If even their own candidates no longer have confidence in that agenda, why should anyone else?

David Cameron believes he is on the verge of winning broad support from the British people as the responsible choice to lead the next Government. So why is he engaging in what looks uncomfortably like an opportunist manoeuvre for a dozen or so seats?

The Neocons, the BNP and the Islamophobia Network

Events in London in recent weeks have highlighted the growing collusion between American neoconservatives and the European far right in stirring up hatred of Muslims.

Richard Bartholomew has details of a meeting at the George Restaurant in east London in August attended by Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer and Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion at the invitation of the Christian Action Network. Also invited were the English Defence League, the group responsible for a number of recent violent anti-Muslim protests.

Robert Spencer says on his blog that he and Murray refused to meet with the EDL, and cites Adrian Morgan as a witness to this version of events. But the presence of Morgan, who did meet the EDL, is itself evidence of the emerging relationship between the neocons and the far-right.

Web 2.0 Warfare from Gaza to Iran

Just a quick pointer to to my latest piece for Spinwatch, Web 2.0 Warfare from Gaza to Iran. It's a story I'm slightly ambivalent in one sense, because there has clearly been important information coming out of Iran on Twitter. There have also been a lot of poorly sourced rumours, of which perhaps the most suspicious is the one cited by Robert Fisk, that the Iranian government is using Hamas and Hezbollah operatives to suppress the demonstrators.

If my story comes across as slightly sceptical about social media, I hope that the links to SpinProfiles and Neocon Europe show some of the potential for using the technology in a more considered way. Indeed, I think there is potential for wikis like these to develop a symbiotic relationship with blogs and social networks, providing a more structure long-term memory for the blogosphere.

Speaking of propaganda networks, David Habakkuk's continuing investigations of media manipulation by Russian oligarchs has produced two new pieces documenting an unsavoury power struggle involving Boris Berezovsky and Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili - A falling out of thieves? and How to rescue a rat.

The Democratic Republican Moment: a Blog Reader

The current fiasco over expenses at Westminster has created a major opportunity for political reform in Britain. You might not know it from the media's focus on celebrity populism, but there has actually been some useful thinking on the left over the past year which addresses the causes of the crisis quite precisely.

David Marquand's book Britain Since 1918 has started a conversation about democratic republicanism as a British political tradition, perhaps the only tradition that addresses the relationship between parliament and people in a way that is adequate to the current situation.

I've been collating some of that conversation for my own reference, and I thought it was worth sharing it here. Please feel free to suggest any other relevant links in the comments.

Audio David Marquand, Kenneth Morgan, Philip Stephens, The Strange Career of British Democracy, IPPR, 18/09/08

Tom Griffin, The democratic republican moment, OurKingdom, 19/09/08

Richard Reeves, The Dynamics of Power, New Statesman, 25/09/08

Giles Radice, Surveying the Left, Progress, 28/11/08

Anthony Barnett, Gerry Hassan, Britain's Neo-Liberal State, OurKingdom, 29/11/08

Pamphlet Anthony Barnett, Gerry Hassan, Breaking Out of Britain's Neo-Liberal State, Compass, 05/01/09

Sunder Katwala, Uneasy allies? Progressive dilemmas revisited, Liberal Conspiracy, 02/02/09

Sunder Katwala, Progressive dilemmas and the democratic republican tradition, Next Left, 3/02/09

Stuart White, What is democratic republicanism?, Next Left, 03/02/09

Tim Gore, Democratic republicanism... and the EU, Next Left, 07/02/09

Video Paul Lay, Quentin Skinner, Geoffrey Robertson, Melissa Lane, Liberty, Sovereignty and Republicanism, Convention on Modern Liberty, 28/02/09

David Marquand, How Free Are We? Liberty in Britain, History Today, 03/09

Stuart White, 'Progressive Conservatism' or democratic republicanism? Next Left,  03/03/09

Tom Griffin, Modern Liberty: The Levellers' republican legacy, OurKingdom, 04/03/09

Stuart White, Democratic republicanism and the economic crisis, Next Left, 06/03/09

Melissa Lane, Liberty as a Social Value - Lessons from the Levellers, OurKingdom, 11/03/09

Anthony Painter, Coming to Terms with Change, Progress, 31/03/09

Pamphlet Richard Reeves, Philip Collins, The Liberal Republic, Demos, 07/05/09

Stuart White, 'The Liberal Republic': How Liberal? How Republican? Next Left, 07/05/09

Anthony Barnett, Mulgan Says, "Sod em", OurKingdom, 11/05/09

Richard Reeves, A Republican Moment? Demos, 19/05/09

Richard Reeves, Is Cameron a republican liberal? Demos, 26/05/09

Stuart White, Cameron's Agenda: Populism not republicanism?, Next Left, 26/05/09

Breaking Up Britain

Today is the tenth anniversary of the creation of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. The indefatigable Mark Perryman is marking the occasion with the launch of a new anthology of essays Breaking Up Britain : Four Nations after a Union.

Perryman's opening chapter is available online:

Most Observer readers would probably feel a little uncomfortable holding up bits of paper to form a flag of St George at a gig. Kitty Empire, Observer

Billy Bragg opened the second half of his 2008 St George’s Day celebration at London’s Barbican theatre with Jerusalem. And, as Kitty Empire put it in her review, the audience responded ‘coyly’ when Billy invited them to join in by holding above their heads the carefully laid out sheets of red and white paper distributed on the auditorium’s seats to form one huge St George Cross. Hardly an exercise of Leni Riefenstahl proportions, but more than enough, apparently, to get Observer readers searching for any excuse not to join in.(A Jigsaw State (pdf))

In a previous collection of essays, 2008's Imagined Nation, Perryman explored the possibilities for English national identity in the wake of devolution. A session on English nationalism at last year's Compass conference provided the inspiration for the new volume, which broadens the debate to look at the prospects for all of the nations in the UK.

There is plenty of Irish interest with contributions from Arthur Aughey, Gerry Adams, Inez McCormack and Peadar Kirby. Adams' contribution is largely based on his speech to February's Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, but it's interesting to see it set in this context, not least because Sinn Féin has often been wary of drawing parallels with nationalist movements in the various nations of Britain. 

Kirby calls for a revival of the civil society activism that shaped modern Ireland, a suggestion that has interesting parellels with the emergence of civil society as a theme in post-credit crunch debates on both the left and the right in Britain.

Like Imagined Nation, Breaking up Britain includes some strong contributions on the implications of debates about national identity for ethnic minorities. Salma Yaqoob argues that the anti-war movement has done more to cement the place of Muslim communities in British society than official narratives of Britishness. Charlotte Williams worries that homogenous Scottish and Welsh nationalisms way simply replicate old problems.

Several contributions reflect on the challenges that the post-devolution UK presents for the democratic collectivism of the labour movement. Guy Lodge and Michael Kenny suggest that engaging with the English question may be an important starting-point for Labour Party renewal. John Harris looks at the prospects for an English realignment in the event of Scottish independence. 

The left must engage with the dynamic unleashed by devolution if it is to build the alliances with which to confront the prospect of a resurgent Conservatism at Westminster in the years ahead. This book is an important step in that process.

The Neocons on the Peace Process

A new piece based on some of my research for Neocon Europe.

Does the Irish peace process have lessons for the Middle East? Many of the key players in the Good Friday Agreement seem to think so. Tony Blair has cited the precedent as cause for optimism in his role as Quartet Envoy, while Gerry Adams called for inclusive negotiations during his visit to Gaza last week. The analogy isn't universally welcome, however.

Two recent articles reflect the parameters of the debate. In the New Statesman, Blair's former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, argues that the British government's engagement with Irish republicans provides a model for an Israeli approach to Hamas. In Standpoint, Douglas Murray reiterates a longstanding neoconservative critique of such suggestions, arguing that "the claims of the peace process in Northern Ireland itself are unproven - but they are also unhelpful to the point of uselessness."

This dispute is significant given the identity of some of the key actors now emerging on the Middle East stage. US envoy George Mitchell was a key mediator in the Good Friday Agreement, while Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is arguably more closely aligned with American and British neoconservatives than any other major figure in Israeli politics.

More over at OurKingdom.

Propaganda, the internet and the media: from CounterJihad to the Decent Left

Over at the Yorkshire Ranter, Alex Harrowell comments on the ongoing story of Glen Jenvey, who featured as an anti-terrorist 'expert' in a Sun story about threats, which it now appears he posted himself, against public figures on a Muslim web forum.

It's a very good question just how many terrorism stories (especially ones that have the "Internet" flag set - it means "stuff I don't understand" to a lot of editors) are the work of these people, whether the upscale, Decent version or Jenvey's Comedy Gladio.

That put me in mind of a quote from former Pentagon Neocon Abram Shulsky:

Soviet front groups might have been more effective, but Stalinist paranoia made impossible the operational autonomy needed to succeed. To the extent that future practitioners of this type of propaganda have learned lessons from the Soviet experience, we may expect that the nonstate groups will be controlled in a more sophisticated manner and their ties to a given state will be less obvious.

New methods of spreading propaganda (such as via Internet web sites of Non-governmental organizations [NGOs], or specialized email lists) allow a deceiver to reach target audiences via multiple channels. Many of these channels may remain relatively invisible to the public at large. (Elements of Strategic Denial and Deception by Abram Shulsky in Strategic Denial and Deception: The Twenty-First Century Challenge, edited by Roy Godson and James J. Wirtz, Transaction books, 2002, p23.)

Shulsky went on to note that "Despite the media's self-image of hardheaded cynicism, it is relatively vulnerable to this type of manipulation." (p24.)  The Sun's experience would seem to bear this out.

Republicanism in Dublin and London

Time once again to dust off the cobwebs on here and draw together a few threads from my writing over the last couple of weeks.

First of all my report for OurKingdom from the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis two weeks ago. It was a very interesting time to be in Dublin, with 120,000 people marching on the streets against the Government's swingeing austerity measures. Gerry Adams cannily tapped into the mood by calling for a left-wing alliance with the Labour Party.

The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known, by Craig Murray

Thanks to legal threats from mercenary Tim Spicer, former British diplomat Craig Murray has been unable to find a mainstream publisher for his new book, The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known. As a result Craig is publishing the book online today. The Green Ribbon is delighted to be one of the many blogs supporting Craig by hosting a copy of the file here.

You can also support Craig (and a range of charities) by picking up a privately-printed hard copy edition from Amazon.

The book includes an indispensable account of Murray's dealings with Spicer during the Arms to Africa Affair, as well as his views on Spicer's role in the Peter McBride case and his subsequent career in Iraq.