A License To Break The Law

If there is any one thing that lays bare the rottenness of the British political system for all to see it’s the news that following the court’s excorating decision on the Saudi Arms for Oil and bribery deal yesterday, the Tories are to support Labour in giving the Attorney General powers to shut down politically sensitive criminal investigations just by citing ‘national security’.

As with the attempt to censor coroners’ courts in the matter of soldiers’ deaths by inadequate equipment in Afghanistan, not only do they want to cover up their own past lawbreaking they want to print themselves a license to break the law in the future.

We cannot question or protest, it because it is secret. Why is it secret? Because it’s secret. Shut up, it’s national security.

But national security has little to do with this nor do the jobs of arms industry workers, though the profits of the arms companies is certainly a consideration. What’s really at stake is the personal security of the great and the good in parliament, the cabinet, the civil service, diplomacy and finance, who have committed crimes not just of political expediency but greed, trading others’ human rights for their own personal aggrandisement in order to mainstain the arms and oil industries and their longterm collusion with a vicious theocratic dynasty that tortures and beheads its own people (and sometimes ours, too)to maintain its power.

The Al-Yamamah deal and the corruption around it well precedes the current administration – Thatcher set it in motion – but New Labour joined in with enthusiasm once they had a taste of Saudi largesse themselves. New Labour’s starry eyed petty-bourgeois, tempted by riches and power, were easily persuaded that to reveal and prosecute in the Al-Yamamah deal could bring down the entire edifice of British government – and worse prominent politicians of both parties could go to jail. That there’s a revolving door between government and the the arms and oil industries has been a standing political joke for decades. .

Few hands are clean in any party and then of course, if the SFO pursues Al-Yamamah, then it must pursue Bush the CIA and the US government, since the deal was handled through Bush family vehicle Riggs Bank. the US justice department is considering a investigation, but if it’s shut down here, then what will there be to investigate?

For the sake of saving their own skins and Bush’s both parties are handing a future government and Prime Minister – and who knows what or who that’ll be in ten years, given the current fashion for repression – the power to commit whatever crimes they like under cover of protecting us. They mustn’t be allowed to get away with it.