UK politics

That special relationship in full

UK politics, War on Terror
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The CIA has set up an intelligence network in the UK:

Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.

A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.

And a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama told The Sunday Telegraph that the CIA has stepped up its efforts in the last month after the Mumbai massacre laid bare the threat from Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the attacks, which has an extensive web of supporters in the UK.

The CIA has already spent 18 months developing a network of agents in Britain to combat al-Qaeda, unprecedented in size within the borders of such a close ally, according to intelligence sources in both London and Washington.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama, told The Sunday Telegraph: “The British Pakistani community is recognised as probably al-Qaeda’s best mechanism for launching an attack against North America.

“The American security establishment believes that danger continues and there’s very intimate cooperation between our security services to monitor that.” Mr Riedel, who served three presidents as a Middle East expert on the White House National Security Council, added: “President Obama’s national security team are well aware that this is a serious threat.”

But Jacqui Smith said it was illegal for foreign intelligence agencies to operate in Britain? Tru, but she forgot clause 83: “Except for America”.

Mandy covered in goo

UK politics, Video
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Childish? Perhaps. But with our rulers and better so isolated from the everyday realities they enforce on us, splashing them with green goo is about the only way we can get a little payback. Pieing or gooing somebody like Mandelson is about the only way in which you can puncture his comfortable bubble of respect and show the disdain and loathing that he’s held in outside the Westminister clique.

And hey. it’s not as if he doesn’t deserve worse.

BNP use a 303 squadron Spitfire in their anti-Polish campaign

Funny, UK politics
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But 303 squadron was a Polish squadron:

The party’s 2009 European Elections poster shows a nostalgic picture of a Second World War fighter plane under the slogan “Battle for Britain”.

But RAF history experts have identified the iconic Romeo Foxtrot Delta Plane as belonging not to Britons but to a group of Polish pilots instead.

The plane was actually flown by the celebrated 303 Squadron of the RAF – made up of Polish airmen rescued from France shortly before Nazi occupation.

BNP party chiefs defended their use of the image and insisted they knew all about the background.

However, John Hemming, MP for Yardley, Birmingham, blasted the far right party for using the image to front a campaign which includes stemming immigration from Poland.

He said: “The BNP often get confused and this happens because they haven’t done their research. This is just another example of them getting it wrong.

“They have a policy to send Polish people back to Poland – yet they are fronting their latest campaign using this plane.

“It is absurd to make claims about Englishness and Britishness fronted by this image.

“It’s obvious they just picked an image at random and they are really clutching at straws if they say this was deliberate.”

Whoops.

Apathic students are good for business

Activism, Dutch politics, Gaza, Israel/Palestine, UK politics
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Hicham Yezza looks at the student protests against the Israeli re-invasion of Gaza and what this meant for the political awareness of students:

For anyone interested in the health of our political system, these events are highly instructive. For a start, they would have been unthinkable a decade ago: everyone remembers the quasi-proverbial, and not wholly undeserved, reputation students have cultivated over the years for extreme political apathy. Indeed, the extent of the indifference to the political process among the youth was a source of national despair, wistfully and routinely bemoaned by politicians across the spectrum.

More importantly, these protests have also been very indicative of some larger truths: not only have they highlighted a rise in political awareness among a new generation raised in the shadow of the Iraq war debate, they have also exposed what has for long been a suspected but unspoken reality: rather than being the centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore, British universities are now little more than businesses purveying a product, employable students. The message is unambiguous: political engagement might be good for the mind but it is very, very bad for business.

Of course I doubt these “centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore” ever really existed apart from in golden Baby Boomer memories of ’68… Universities have always been as much if not more guardians of the existing order as incubators of radicalism and any room for political engagement has to be created by the students themselves. What has happened in the last few decades is that this room, hard won during the sixties, seventies and eighties, has disappeared as universities “went commercial” while succesive governements made it more difficult for students to do anything but study. If you have to depend on a student loan of several (tens of thousands) of pounds to be able to study, you’ll be less likely to waste your time with political activity, especially if, as in the Netherlands, your loan or grant is made dependent on your study results. It’s perhaps no coincidence that there was little if any student protest over here against the invasion of Gaza, certainly not on the scale of the UK protests.

If the name of Hicham Yezza sounds familiar, it’s because he was the student arrested for supposedly downloading an Al Queda terrorism manual, which turned out to be made available at the U.S. Department of Justice website and who, once he wasn’t charged under the anti-terrorism law, was re-arrested for unspecified offences against the Immigration Act — wouldn’t want to waste an investigation after all. Here’s what you can do to help him.