Bloody Sunday: The Provisional IRA Was Entirely To Blame

The Real Bad Guys

There is a dangerous moral quivalence that emerges over the Saville Report. It suggests that whatever terrible acts were committed by British troops on Bloody Sunday, IRA atrocities were worse, and that this observation in some way mitigates or even justifies the killing of unarmed civilians, some of them teenagers.

This attitude is well represented by an outburst on BBC radio in 1999 by Colonel Wilford, who commanded 1 Para that day: “I have to ask what about Bloody Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and every day of the week? What about Bloody Omagh? What about Bloody Warrenpoint, Enniskillen, Hyde Park, or Bloody Aldershot and Brighton — bloody everything the IRA have ever touched.”

In some quarters, this is described as “a good question”. It is not. The British Army represents our parliamentary democracy and defends our freedoms. We are entitled to expect better of it than terrorists. Its actions must be entirely professional and accountable. Furthermore, to kill civilians is more morally reprehensible for our soldiers and degrades their moral integrity to a level lower than the actions of IRA terrorists, because that is what we expect of terrorists – it is not what we expect of the British Army.

Whether, after this passage of time, there is a public interest in prosecuting the perpetrators of these vile acts is an entirely separate question. But those soldiers stand condemned today by the people they served and those of them who survive today should feel utterly shamed and humiliated. They are objects of contempt. They acted not as British soldiers, but as hysterical thugs and panicking cowards. End of.

This nonsense was written by a professional writer (of sorts) over on the Telegraph blogs today.

I’ve tried to stay away from the whole Bloody Sunday/Saville inquiry thing over the past few, very busy, exam-filled days because I had thought that my limited knowledge of the affair (I only studied it as part of my first degree and knew someone who was there, after all) would hardly be worth sharing and would add very little to the debate. However, I’ve just read something so utterly ignorant, and by a member of the clergy no less, that I figured what the hell, if The Rev George Pilchard, or whatever his name is, can spout a load of codswallop on something about which he clearly knows nothing, then what I say can hardly do any more damage, can it?

First of all, soldiers. They are certainly “thugs”, as Pitcher says, especially (but not exclusively) the rank and file, uneducated but disciplined and usually in their late teens as they are. But “hysterical” and “panicking cowards” are not the words I would use to describe the chap I knew who was there on those Londonderry streets that fateful day. Given, he was no wet-behind-the-ears rookie looking for a firefight. He was a marksman; a dead shot and a ruthless one at that. Yes, he was an army sniper and given the order, his sole aim would be to kill.

What emerged from the ridiculously long Saville inquiry, to me, was that that order had been given, or at least a broad definition of it. "Take back UK soil from a rebel force" was effectively the command. At that point, unless someone intervened and until the objective was achieved, the Bogside effectively became a free fire zone, within limits. Remember, these men were soldiers not riot police. They are (or were) not schooled in the delicate art of crowd control, they are fighters extensively trained to smash things up and kill people (and, , die in the process if necessary). George Pitcher doesn't understand such indelicate realities, however.

Unfortunately, the reason why this was not such a good policy on that day in Northern Ireland was that, as far as I am concerned, the Communist-sympathising, revolutionary Provisional IRA had set the whole thing up from start to bloody finish. It fits perfectly with their propaganda campaign style at the time, trying, as they were, to get the Catholic community to turn on the British troops as quickly as possible so they could launch their colossal campaign of terror with no internal opposition. They were ably aided in this pursuit by the pig-ignorant, pointy-headed Protestant majority, whose persecution of Catholics brought the British Army there in the first place. Lest men like the fool Pitcher forget, the soldiers went in in the late 60s to protect the Catholics!

The point is, and this view is supported by a number of academics, although I hesitate to name the one I studied under here, everyone, almost from the start of the British intervention, played straight into the Provos’ Cuba-esque ‘revolutionary’ arms. And then their leadership had the excuse they needed to use violent intimidation against the community they pretended to be protecting but were, in fact, hiding behind while they prosecuted their revolutionary campaign.

Bloody Sunday partly symbolises, partly embodies, the situation at that stage of the Troubles. A flat-footed, slow-on-the-uptake British government, with the Army an almost perfect expression of that government, combined with the wholesale bigotry, sectarian hatred and viciousness of the Protestant majority meets a long-oppressed Catholic minority whose civil rights cause was on the verge of being co-opted by a ruthless, cunning and utterly dishonest political movement, complete with its own propaganda wing. Into this brew was thrown left-wing public opinion in Britain, which naturally – and with typical, total stupidity – identified with what it saw as an ideologically justifiable, armed struggle against, in this case, British imperialist history! Thus, when the troops opened-fire against the IRA’s sacrificial Catholic lambs at Bogside that day the outcry against the loss of life was gigantic, torrential and game-changing.

Suffice to say, after nearly £200 million, a staggering, totally disproportionate sum, and 11 years, all the Saville enquiry has really revealed is that the killings were unjustified and unlawful and that a few young Paras, intimidated and encouraged in equal measure at the time by the military police, massaged the truth to protect each other from legal retribution.

The killings were always unjustified and unlawful because the victims were unarmed and, in some cases, had little or nothing to do with the civil rights protests (with which I still sympathise in some ways) anyway. But never forget that the Provisional IRA was there, its members heavily armed. They wanted this thing to happen, so they kicked it off. What the hell does Pitcher, in all his clerical wisdom, think Martin “Bloody Sunday” McGuinness was doing there with a sub-machine gun? Protecting people? You see, to me, the establishment still hasn’t learnt. Possibly they never will and the IRA – or Sinn Fein as it now is, all respectable and besuited in government, pretending to be reformed – will continue to run rings around it.

This will sound callous but the killings were not just unjustified, even unlawful, (although once the British decided that a part of British soil had fallen under rebel control, I can’t see what other outcome there could have been), but they were also utterly, utterly stupid. What people like Pitcher will never be able to comprehend is that the British soldiers at work there were just instruments of war doing what they do best. But there were other, more menacing forces at work there on that day. They were scheming, political, revolutionary forces, represented by people like McGuinness and they would stop at nothing to get their war, even if it meant a massacre of their ‘own’ (revolutionary ideology is morally self-justifying, remember. Pitcher doesn’t get that).

They were the real cowards, not the British soldiers. But, as others have written, when will they face their inquiry for their role in these events? Where is the moral outrage, voiced by fools like Pitcher, against people like Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister? Not on Pitcher’s blog that’s for sure because it's an issue that is clearly far too complex and nuanced for the good vicar to contemplate.

And that's all you need to know about him. End of.

Vandal Brown Deserves An ASBO

Hitler Brown

This article, buried away in the Sunday Telegraph, had me chuckling quietly into my cornflakes this morning - at first. Apparently, mysterious and severe damage to an antique table in Downing Street was caused by Gordon Brown ferociously scribbling on documents containing stuff he didn't like and either scraping so hard he punctured the paper or missing it altogether and just scrawling illegibly on the wood. Years of this abuse have left the table so badly scratched that it will be too expensive to repair in this post-Crash Gordon age of austerity. Here's a bit of the entertaining piece.

The damage to the table is so severe that cleaning staff have been unable to remove the marks despite frantic polishing. "The marks to the table were noticed by people using the room on the very first day of the new Government. People were curious about what had caused the damage," says Mandrake's man in No 10. "We learnt it was the room that was regularly used by Gordon Brown. It became apparent that the marks were caused by his manic scratchings. He was clearly writing very angrily with his pen and the marks came through the paper on to the table. Some are two or three inches long and very deep."

Now I know this all smacks of a bit of Downing Street propaganda, but it just sounds so totally plausible that I think it must be true, and, if true, then it's not a smear. With that in mind, personally I think this, combined with Brown's many other acts of weirdness, falls comfortably into the category of "anti-social behaviour", complete with expensive damage to public property and a high nuisance value for the recently arrived, new tenants of the building. Since such "low level" criminal activity can't be punished any more in post-Labour Britain, realistically justice will have to be seen to be done with the only instrument of public retribution left: Ken Clarke must serve Brown with an ASBO.

Better still, let's just send the vandalising old fraud the bill, or take it out of the MP's salary he's still drawing but not earning these days. I'm serious about that last option. About £160 Billion should cover it. Well, some of it.

And I Quote...

Hunt: "...pushy little media tart"

Cool writer and all-round good egg, Toby Young, pulled no punches on his DT blog this afternoon in his description of Tristram Hunt. Hunt, as I understand it, is a nulab stooge pop-historian, Mandelson protege and BBC darling (no surprise there) who's just triggered a selection storm after being shoehorned into the Stoke on Trent Central safe Labour seat (are there any of those left?) in a risibly rigged run-off.

Someone called Gary Elsby, who is the local Labour party secretary apparently, is so angry, Toby Young reports, that he's now threatening to stand against Hunt as an independent. Marvellous.

Anyway, here's Young on Hunt:

I don’t think there’s anything exceptionally ghastly about Tristram Hunt. He’s clearly a pushy little media tart with an eye to the main chance, but that hardly makes him unusual within the modern Labour Party.

Ouch! But, you know, the truth often hurts, right?

Priceless.

Update:
The Spectator has an interesting scoop on the prospective anti-Hunt campaigner, Gary Elsby. He's a complete loony, and a very unpleasant one, too.

Curious bunch, these Labourists. Curious and corrupt.

The Battle For Labour

The resurgent confidence of the militant tendency among the leadership of Labour's giant union financial backers is a clear sign that a vicious civil war has started in the Labour movement. Charles Moore's article for Saturday's Telegraph on this disturbing development, in which he provides bullet proof evidence that the far left, who long ago infiltrated and took control of the unions, are planning to seize power, is dynamite. He says, for instance:

Unite is led by Tony Woodley. From today, he is pitting his union against hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers in a strike designed to break the will of British Airways, which could go bust. And yesterday Unite's traditional allies in the rail union RMT promised an Easter strike of signal workers.

Mr Woodley is backed by the faction in his union called United Left, which declares that it wants "a socialist economic, social and political system", and wishes to "regain" the Labour Party. It has a motion down for the union's policy conference after the election that calls for the union to "give no support" to any Labour MPs who do not seek to abolish the "anti-trade union laws". This threat could be powerful: Labour campaigns in 148 constituencies are funded by Unite, and 167 Labour MPs and candidates are members of the union. Unite produces a quarter of Labour's money.

This is just a taste. The rest of the article is so powerful, I would hazard it could turn the election. That is if, as Moore says, Cameron starts to move with a bit more political athleticism in taking advantage of it. The stakes are so high, it's difficult to frame them. We are now faced with the real possibility, if Cameron gets it badly wrong (and he would have to get it very badly wrong, admittedly), not just of five more years of Gordon Brown (hideous though that thought is) but of a hard left Labour regime in Westminster.

Whatever the speculation about policy and the intricacies of poll variations, one thing is now clear: the real fight, the fight for the nation's soul, has now begun. And it's a fight we, and the Conservative Party, have to win. Or we all lose.

Two-Faced Telegraph Needs A New Ed

Just what the hell is wrong with the Daily Telegraph? Not satisfied with hiring easily the worst columnist in any newspaper in the form of Mary Drivell, taking a schizoid stance on the climate change scam (which itself smacks either of editorial opportunism or serious infighting - both bad signs), it has now gone into Tory-bashing overdrive. By hiring a sitting, partisan, left wing Labour MP in the form of the ghastly Martin Salter as a regular blogger, and by allowing green (in more ways than one), wet behind the ears lightweights like Will Heaven to attack Tory policies he doesn't even 'get' - and his fellow bloggers - whenever he feels like it (and he's not the only one), one can only conclude that some kind of major civil war has broken out in that newspaper's offices.

We all know that Will Lewis is a mate of Brown's and that Lewis's brother, Ivan (I think that's his name - don't really care, though), is Brown's accident-prone spokesman, but honestly, how much longer can this go on before people really do start voting with their feet. I gave up on it some years ago when they hired Lewis and then that venomous, sub-Toynbee Labour-groupie, Riddell. I suspect many others will feel they must follow suit before too long.

It's not just the Telegraph's political identity crisis that is frustrating readers, however. Once again today, we have evidence of its totally split personality on all things environmental, too, with its own bloggers regularly and flatly contradicting stories appearing in the same newspaper on the same day. Not sure I've ever seen anything quite like that before - and it is, at least to me, further evidence of that civil war I was talking about. On the one hand, you have a dutifully, totally uncritical article - (if not a tacitly supportive article) - about James Hansen's, one of the most discredited scientists in the world, implicated, as he is, in the Climategate scandal and a proven cooker of figures, latest lies about global warming, while on the other, with what has become slightly predictable haste, you have James Delingpole shooting down the article (and the man) in flames - again. The odd thing is, however, at no point does Delingpole mention the article in question which is something that I find extremely odd, if not quite disturbing.

The point is that while I accept that these examples taken in isolation do not amount to much, but taken together they reveal a worrying trend for that newspaper. It is completely at odds with itself and to say that it is drifting badly in terms of its journalistic cohesion and editorial coherence would be to put it very mildly. The fact is, it reads now like it's being put together every day by a bunch of warring factions, each desperately vying for the attention of its (falling) readership. None of this represents healthy signs for what was once a great, well-edited, confident, broad-church conservative, and usually Conservative, institution.

At the moment, the Telegraph comes across as being at the very least two-faced. Not even the Grauniad has that problem. Which just goes to show how very bad things have got at Buckingham Palace Road, at least to me. It really is time Will Lewis was fired and replaced with someone who isn't such an utterly divisive and horribly compromised figure. Someone sound, in other words (like the Telegraph used to be).

How about Matthew D'Ancona? I hear he's available - and he's a hundred times better than left wing Lewis will ever be.

Until the change comes, the crisis at the Daily Telegraph will only deepen. Sooner or later, something's gotta give.

Blogger Tebbit

Lord Tebbit's second blog post cheered me up no end after a long day. For one thing, he's an absolute natural, writing with relaxed cogency and richness and engaging his many commenters - fans or otherwise - with authoritative charm. His chief idea - that tax thresholds which harm the poor so much and destroy any nascent inclination for self-improvement must be raised radically and swiftly - is one that resonates powerfully, too.

His introduction to this second post was brilliant, I thought:

Well, well. What an introduction to blogging. At first I thought it was quite unlike anything else I’d done in my political life, but after a while I realised that it is really rather like an old-fashioned political public meeting of the kind that has melted away since television took politics away from the grass roots in the constituencies and concentrated it into the TV studios. It is a pity we can’t have real-time heckling (yet?) but blogging has got life and guts.

Talk about putting it in a nutshell. He's made a observation that no one else has, as far as I know - that people want to be involved in politics, not just when there happens to be an election about, but all the time. And they always have, but while the MSM (TV and the modern DTP) certainly took politics to the masses, in a sense, it also stripped people of their ability, incentive - and right - to engage directly with their political representatives and servants. New Media is correcting that error and "Norm" has just revealed to me why I blog (I didn't realise, see. I thought it was just because I was angry!).

After thanking commenters on his previous post, he then turns to his main argument:

Then thank you, “michealp”. I think you answered my question: What is it that has changed our society for the worse? In your words, it is “because actions no longer have consequences”. Well, they do perhaps, but they are often perverse. It seems to me that our masters these days are willing to use a carrot and stick approach, but they almost always use the stick on the poor old donkey’s nose and inflict a terrible indignity on the beast with the carrot at its other end.

People are not daft. They do respond to incentives. If you let a burglar go free and jail the householder who defends his home and family by thrashing the burglar, the message is loud and clear and well understood.

And I hate to say it, but only one party leader seems to have grasped that, if you construct a system where unskilled people are worse off by taking a job than by staying on welfare, they remain trapped in poverty – and that is Nick Clegg. Lord knows, Frank Field and Iain Duncan Smith spelled it out in words and figures that only a simpleton could fail to understand, but the two main parties are unwilling to bite on the bullet and commit themseves to raising the income tax threshold from £6,475 to something like £10,000 or £12,000.

It is madness to claim that people so poor that they need welfare payments are at the same time sufficiently well-off to pay income tax. The effect is that people at the bottom of the stack living on benefits who try to get back into work are hit by 20 per cent tax, 11 per cent National Insurance and benefit losses that can add up to amost 100 pence in the pound. It is all very well for the better-off to complain about the disincentive effect of losing 50 per cent of every extra pound they earn, but what about the poor devil at the bottom of the stack who loses 90 per cent?

It neeed not cost that much. There would be a huge saving in benefits if we got those people back into work. We could redeploy all those people shuffling paper and money around the tax and benefit system to some useful work. And it would be easy enough to lower the 40 per cent threshold so that better-off people did not benefit from the increase in the basic rate threshold – so why don’t “the party of the workers” or “the party which believes in incentives” say they’ll do it? Why leave it to the Lib Dems, who are not going to have the power to do it?

It's a damn good question. I also note that he carefully (loyally) leaves deducing the obvious implications of it up to the reader: it's a pretty damning indictment of Conservative policymakers that this is not right at the very heart of the Tory manifesto, namely, a pledge to stop taxing people who are borderline impoverished, in UK terms, altogether. Another implication here is that he has dismissed Labour, New or Old, as a party capable of helping the poor, shout and jeer however much they like. They brand themselves the party of the poor, and then imprison them in a tax system designed to keep them down and reliant on the dishonest 'benevolence' of the Big State. Labour betrayed people just like Tebbit long ago. We should listen to him.

All in all, Lord Tebbit's blog seems to promise rich insight and entertainment for us commoners - and some serious and, perhaps, slightly unpalatable food for thought for David Cameron. (He should listen, too!)

Above all, however, the blog will (unintentionally) provide people from all over the political spectrum, but especially from the moderate-right end of it, with a daily reminder of just how formidable a politician Norman Tebbit is, and how much the Conservative party and the country still needs his tuned-in wisdom and his unwavering vision. On the strength of his writing so far, both of these signature Tebbit qualities appear to be undimmed by the years. How lucky we are.

Labour's Decade of Shame

Being, as I was, virtually incapacitated by a stinking-though-happy hangover yesterday, I missed this excellent blog in the DT by David Hughes, cataloging quite succinctly Labour's decade of shame. Before reading it, however, (if you already haven't, that is), it's probably worth remembering that he's merely chosen a selection from a far wider, monstrous litany of abject dishonesty, perfidy and incompetence that characterises this whole period of "New" Labourism. He omits, for instance, the illegal Labour party funding scams and ultra-sleaze (Levy/Abrahams etc.), by the far the worst examples of corruption at the highest levels of government in modern times. There are many other examples, of course, not least the various PFI scandals. Even so, those that Hughes does list do not, as he says, make for 'happy reading.'

All governments get into scrapes, make mistakes, let people down – that’s the nature of politics. But it’s hard to think of any government in recent memory that has behaved quite so shamefully, quite so frequently, as this one. At the turn of the decade, here’s a reminder of just how low Labour has stooped.

1. Tony Blair led the country to war on the basis of a lie – the 45-minute dossier was a disgraceful manipulation of some very sketchy intelligence. More than 200 soldiers have been killed, a similar number grievously wounded, while tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have lost their lives.

2. The suicide of Dr David Kelly after he had been exposed by Downing Stret as the source of leaks to the BBC about the soundness of weapons intelligence (see above). The most nauseating moment in this episode came courtesy of Alastair Campbell, an unelected Labour functionary, who summoned a press conference to crow over the findings of the Hutton inquiry into Kelly’s death which inexplicably decided it was all the BBC’s fault.

3. Tony Blair’s warmongering extended beyond Iraq – there was Kosvo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan – but a common theme was that British forces were routinely expected to put their lives on the line with inadequate kit and equipment. Much of the responsibilty for that lies with Gordon Brown who, as Chancellor, just did not “get” the military.

4. Brown’s uncontested accession to the premiership – after years spent undermining Blair – revealed just how rotten Labour had become. This was more akin to the Politburo than a modern democratic party. The one consolation is that it has proved an unmitigated disaster for Labour.

5. While Chancellor, Brown perfected a whole armoury of tricks to obscure what he was actually doing – double and triple counting, endless re-announcements of the same policy, stealth taxes by the score. So intent was he on his smoke and mirrors games that he seemed not to notice he was sending the economy down the tubes.

6. Bernie Ecclestone’s £1 million donation to Labour was an early indicator that Labour’s moral compass was non-existent and that Blair’s claim to be a “pretty straight kind of guy” was to be taken with a sackful of salt.

7. Parliament under Labour has been utterly marginalised. Both Blair and Brown have treated the Commons with contempt and we now have the weakest (as well as most dishonest) legislature in memory.

8. Labour’s failure even to attempt to control immigration has led to profound changes in this country that people did not want. Yet any attempt to debate the issue was branded racist by Labour – until it finally dawned on them (far too late) that their own supporters were furious about the changing nature of their communities.

9. A spending binge without precedent in this country’s history has delivered the most paltry improvements in the public services. A great opportuntiy to modernise Britain has simply been frittered away.

10. Labour’s Big Brother intrusiveness into all aspects of our lives is without precedent outside communist or fascist regimes. A government that has trumpeted its commitment to human rights has systematically eroded them.

It doesn’t make happy reading, does it?

I still think that when the campaigning for the general election begins in earnest, and some might say it did today with Cameron's excellent speech outlining what his party would do to bring some basic honesty and accountability back into politics, the dwindling number of the Labour faithful will realise that they are deservedly facing absolute catastrophe - at least for Labour, though certainly not for the country - and that the only way to avoid total meltdown in a defeat that will surpass, in terms of scale, the Tory rout of '97, is to oust the chief architect of their (and our) calamity, Brown. Otherwise, I'm now totally convinced that they will be wiped out for a generation or more.

But don't take my word for it, even Polly Toynbee agrees with this view for heaven's sake! So let's hope they do an impression of the dodo and stick with the fraudulent, hypocritical, mendacious old wrecker.

Climategate: Booker's Verdict

With characteristic clarity of style, Christopher Booker has summarised the Climategate scandal and its implications in an article for the Sunday Telegraph that I've been looking forward to since the story first broke. I wasn't disappointed. It's powerful, thought-provoking and simply cannot be ignored, (can it?).

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

White On Sugar

DT sports guru and recent convert to rhymeless political doggerel with a tinge of satire, Jim White, has come up with a little bit of a witty gem on his blog this evening. The format he generally favours (comedy dialogues) can be somewhat hit or miss. But in his characterisation of bonehead multimillionaire Brownite Labourist, Lord Sugar of Generic Electronic Tat, this one is a palpable - and really rather funny - hit. (His Rafa Benitez is pretty goofy, too.)

"The Government's new enterprise tsar, Lord Sugar, has dismissed complaints from an audience of small businessmen about the difficulties of raising credit with the curt observation that such firms were "moaners" who "don't need the bank – they need an insolvency practitioner". But what if he was asked to give similarly robust advice to others with work-related problems?

[The scene is the boardroom at Lord Alan's headquarters. He is sitting at a table, flanked by a couple of silver-haired assistants. He picks up the phone.]

Lord Alan: Send in the first client would you please, Frances.

[An overweight young man with stubble walks in, sits down and slings his feet up on the boardroom table.]

LA: And you are?

Newcomer: Don't pretend you don't know, Al. It's me, Moylesie. Chris Moyles? Wit, comedian, funnyman, saviour of Radio One?

LA: Sounds like things are going all right, so what you wasting my time for?

CM: Well, there's talk they might replace me on the breakfast show.

LA: Oh yeah?

CM: Seems I've lost 700,000 listeners.

LA: That's mighty careless. Where've they all gone?

CM: They're listening to Evan Davies on Today.

LA [suddenly reddening with anger]: You mean him off of Dragon's Den? Don't talk to me abaht Dragon's blahdy Den. Nicking all my viewers from The Apprentice, claiming they're interested in small businesses. I'm the small business tsar. I'm the one who should be telling small businessmen to get lost. Now get out for mentioning his name. Frances, next one, please.

[In walks David Haye, the British boxer]

LA: What you doing here?

DH: I'm about to fight for the World Heavyweight Championship against Nikolai Valuev, a seven-foot Russian.

LA: So, whatchoo gotta worry abaht? You're right at the top of your game.

DH: I'm worried I'm going to lose, because I can't reach his chin.

LA: Well buy a bleedin' stepladder and stop moaning. Next.

[A slightly overweight man with a goatee beard and spectacles walks in, sits down and starts gesticulating.]

LA [addressing his notes]: It says here you're called Rafa Benitez. And what do you do, Rafa?

RB: I am manager of Liverpool Football Cloob.

LA: And what's your problem?

RB: There is my owners, who do not give me no money to buy decent players. There is Lyon football cloob, who scores lucky equaliser when they should be allowing me to do my job. There is my players, who expect me to pass time of day with them in training ground. I am working with my hands tied behind my back. Yet the press, the fans, the board, they all call for me to be sacked. What to do?

LA: That's bleedin obvious, innit?

RB: This is what I want to know.

LA: Win some blahdy football matches and stop moaning. Next.

[In comes a man in a pinstriped suit.]

LA: You look a bit faceless, who are you?

Faceless Man: I run the Royal Bank of Scotland. We racked up losses of £2.7 billion last year and I'm concerned about my bonus.

LA: Listen, my good friend, don't you worry abaht that. Frances, get Alistair on the blower, pronto. [To pinstriped man] I know someone who'll sort you aht with a few notes, no worries. We wouldn't want your sort suffering, would we?"

Quite.

Labour's Last Chance Has Gone

So says Matthew D'Ancona in a refreshingly clear-sighted piece of commentary in the Sunday Telegraph. The chief problem, (as if it needs mentioning)? Gordon Brown, whose detachment from reality appears actually to be growing as Britain slides further into recession and debt. Anyway, here's a few choice morsels. Labourists in particular would do well to take note.

Sequestered in an economic and political Neverland of his own devising, surrounded by a dwindling coterie of sycophants, with a very angry chimp called Balls, Wacko Gordo lives out the last months of this Government in a world of his own. He talks about his upcoming "General Election" tour of Britain as his big comeback, and about his exciting plans for a "zero per cent rise" in public spending. Staring at their shoes in embarrassment, Wacko's Cabinet colleagues wonder whether he will even make it to the comeback trail.

NB: There will be some who think the reference to the recently departed singer is in poor taste. I'm not one of those people but I would understand how some would be offended. Michael Jackson was never as weird as Gordon Brown.

Anyway, on with the show...

For those on the Labour side who are still thinking straight – more than you might suppose – the greatest frustration is that the Prime Minister is squandering a serious political opportunity. Take it as a given that the recession and the extent of public debt mean that we are entering an era of spending cuts. Assume that the electorate knows this, and is waiting anxiously and irritably to discover where the axe will fall, as it must. And then (if you are the Labour Party) insist that only the centre-Left can be trusted to make such savings: that its motives are decent; that it gives priority to the vulnerable; that it can be trusted with frontline services such as the NHS and education. Let the cuddly progressive wield the scalpel sensitively, rather than the nasty Tory with his brutal scimitar. Well, you can imagine the script

There are plenty of reasons, of course, why such a message might not gain traction. Labour has lost its once-solid lead on the economy and economic decision-taking: an achievement for which George Osborne gains insufficient credit. In "decontaminating" the Tory brand, David Cameron has drastically changed the public's perception of Conservative motives. All the Tories' private research show that he himself – if not the party as a whole – is trusted as a prospective custodian of the NHS. Worst of all for Labour, the electorate is self-evidently bored to death after 12 years of the governing party.

Not half, pop-pickers. D'Ancona then goes off in a different direction for a few paragraphs, describing, rather bizarrely in this reader's humble, how Jon Cruddas has become "the most intelligent tribune of the Labour Left, who argues for an "austerity socialism" rooted in the values of R H Tawney." So, Christian socialism all round, then. I am not as convinced as the author seems to be about the authenticity - indeed, the sincerity - of Cruddas' missives. For one thing, this "socialist austerity" to which the latter refers sought to solve the problem of the economic crisis of its day with a vast, enforced redistribution of wealth.

If Cruddas is advocating punitive taxation and an expanded welfare programme, and the nationalisation of industry, then he should say so. The fact that Mandelson apparently supports the idea in principle strongly indicates that this is no more than a gimmick, the sole intention of which is to wrong-foot a Conservative party that has won the argument on how to manage a ruined economy. For that reason, they will win the next election (stupid emails to supporters notwithstanding). Thanks to Brown's inability to be straight with himself, let alone with the electorate, about anything - ever - Labour's last chance has now gone.

I will leave the rest to D'Ancona, who sheds a small amount of fresh light on the Balls Affair and concludes that Brown is incapable of grasping the truth that he will never be elected Prime Minister because he is a liar, and the truth that his resignation is now long overdue.

Mr Brown's promise at PMQs of a "zero per cent rise" may indeed have been, as he claimed, a slip of the tongue. But as with his other alleged "slip of the tongue" in December – when he claimed to have "saved the world" – one is inclined to see Freudian forces at work. Just as he probably does believe that he has personally saved the planet from financial disaster, so it is axiomatic to Gordon, an article of faith, that spending rises under Labour: if that rise is zero per cent, so be it. A rise of nothing is (in the strange Brownite universe) still a rise.

True, the PM shifted his position ever so grudgingly in an interview with the BBC's Nick Robinson on Wednesday, conceding that there might be "efficiency savings" involving bureaucracy and administrative costs such as Tippex ("If these programmes are cut, then that's fine"). But there is much more work to be done if Brown is to be forced out of the comfort zone he occupies with Mr Balls, in which bad Tories "cut" and good Labour politicians "invest": forever and ever.

The manic quality of this conviction was brought home to me last week when the Spectator's political editor, Fraser Nelson, filed a post on our Coffee House blog that accused Mr Balls of telling porkies. The Schools Secretary had said on the Today programme that there would be "less debt" thanks to Government policy – which is obviously nonsense. He proceeded to phone Fraser and myself, demanding that we "take the post down". I offered Mr Balls the chance to rebut the claims online, but he was not interested. Only total obedience will do with this lot. Funnily enough, as power drains from them, the more megalomaniacal they become.

There is a halfway decent Labour message to be deployed at the next election. Brown might pay lip service to it occasionally. But his heart will not be in it. Why? Because once a man starts doing the political equivalent of sleeping in an oxygen tent, and living in a theme park, and hanging out with a chimp, there's not much you can do for him. Especially when, deep in his heart, for all the wretchedness, and for all the misery, he still believes the crowd are longing to see him moonwalk.

The time came months ago for Wacko Gordo to take the advice, implied in this article, to Beat It.

Randall Rubs It In

That peerless pillar of the commentariat and occasional Sky anchor, erstwhile BBC Business Editor, Jeff Randall, has penned a piece for the DT that makes mincemeat of Gordon Brown's claims that he isn't the most isolated and unwanted PM in this country's history. But what he also talks about is the economy, specifically Brown's attempts to fool the population, with his typical doublethink, about Labour's vast cuts in spending which were carefully buried away in the small print of his tame Chancellor's recent budget.

After the roasting John Humphreys gave Andy Burnham on the same subject on Today this morning, it seems that the wool Brown is still so desperately trying to pull over our eyes about the economy he has ruined has become so moth-eaten and worn-out, it's disintegrating in his clammy hands. But first, the humiliation:

Imagine the scene. It's late and the lights are out in Downing Street – except for a lamp burning on the Prime Minister's desk. Alone, brooding, he stares at a political map of the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the European elections. The colour red appears to have been rubbed out.

Of the 15.6 million people who voted, 84.3 per cent did not put a cross in Labour's box. How dare they! Who are these 13,244,063 ingrates? Right across southern England, from Penzance in Cornwall to Margate in Kent, more than 90 per cent of the electorate rejected the party of Gordon Brown. Even in Labour's redoubts of Scotland and Wales, close to 80 per cent turned away.

It seems that no one in Labour even now has the guts to face-up to the real reason for their total, epic failure in these elections. But try as they might to prop-up their hopeless leader, they simply can't come-up with a plausible alternative reason. As Randall lists, some of the excuses for Labour's poll implosion are priceless.

For a ruling party at Westminster, this was close to humiliation. Having told us that he had saved the world, Mr Brown was unable to save face on home turf. As the horror show developed through Sunday night and into Monday, there began a desperate search for excuses. The Prime Minister and his coterie of sycophants plunged into their lunchbox of red herrings, porkie pies and cheesy one-liners, hoping to distract us from the real reasons for Labour's drubbing.

First to be blamed were MPs who had fiddled while their homes earned. "It was the expenses scandal," shrieked Agent Harman, the Opposition's secret weapon inside Labour's high command. Of course it was, dear, except that The Daily Telegraph's exposé of moat clearances, duck islands and the double-claiming of husband-and-wife MPs had shown many Tories to be equally shameless.

Alistair Darling, the Big Borrower, fingered his party's poor communications. "We need to explain ourselves better," he said. "We need to set out clearly what we are for." Wrong again. His problem was that Labour had explained itself too well – and we, the coping classes, were appalled.

What I like about Randall, apart from the fact that he is usually right, is the way he expresses himself. You just know in your bones that when he calls Alistair Darling 'the Big Borrower', what he's actually thinking, but can't write in a 'serious' newspaper, is 'that Brainless Bankrupt' - or, perhaps, worse. Where he says 'we, the coping classes, were appalled' what he really means is 'we, the people who have to pay for your incompetence, are f**king pissed off and want to see you ritually disembowelled at our earliest convenience'. It's all in the tone, and Randall usually finds the right one.

His real point in this piece is not about Labour's unpopularity, however, deserved as it may be for a whole forest of reasons. It's about Labour's - and particularly Brown's - abject dishonesty. Over immigration and Europe, their perfidy has been so complete it beggar's belief and, in Randall's view (and mine) it has caused their own, traditional core-vote to feel betrayed and to desert to the lunatic fringe in the form of crypto-fascist throwbacks, the BNP. The middle class vote that Blair had wooed have deserted to UKIP, at least on these issues. Randall makes no play on the subject, but I think these voters (the 'coping classes' as he calls them) on the economy are drifting back to the Tories. When times are tougher, middle Britain's natural conservativism tends to emerge. Simples!

It's on the economy, though, that Randall saves his best shots for Brown Labour:

Labour's leadership is resorting to what George Orwell called "political language". This, he said, was "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind".

Mr Brown exuded another blast of hot air this week when inviting voters to distinguish between Labour's future "investment" in public spending and Tory "cuts", after shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley admitted the need for targeted budget reductions to restore financial sanity. In effect, the Prime Minister was trying to repeat the scare tactic that had worked so well for Labour at the last election in 2005, ie the Tories will obliterate our public services.

Aside from the fact that after 2011, when inflation and debt interest payments are factored in, Labour's own plans will necessitate a seven per cent cut, about £26 billion at today's prices, it was Mr Brown's use of the word "investment" that was so telling. In truth, much of Labour's spending is naked consumption, money burned in the pursuit of votes, with no return for the taxpayer.

The truth revealed by Fraser Nelson's scoop a few months ago about Darling's hidden cuts appears finally to have taken root in the MSM and it is only a matter of time before it spreads to the popular consciousness. Once Brown is checkmated on this, it will become a mantra: "Brown's stealth cuts." And there will be nothing he can do about it - mainly because it is true. But Gordon doesn't do truth. Convinced as I am that the man lost his two remaining marbles just after Smeargate ("I take full responsibility so I've had those responsible shot," or whatever it was), he will simply become more and more detached from reality and keep on repeating his stuck-record, garbage 'message' of 'do-nothing Tories/Tory cuts' until he sounds so ridiculous, even the press will be hard-pushed to suppress a fit of giggles whenever he opens his goldfish gob.

Randall sums it up thus:

When Margaret Thatcher was at Number 10, an MP who had studied several prime ministers told The Observer: "You see, they all go mad, they all start hearing voices… they are cut off from the real world." After almost exactly two years in the job, Mr Brown has joined that club. While the sound of an unhappy electorate is ignored, the voices in his head are coming over loud and clear.

Cameron Out For Blood

The Daily Sleazygraph has just published a potentially explosive story in which it says Dave Cameron is calling for the phantom mortgage fraudsters to be prosecuted. In an interview with the newspaper he says:

“If people have broken the law in claiming expenses, like mortgage payments for mortgages that don’t exist, should they be subject to the full force of the law? Yes of course they should.

“I’ve said it’s not for me to call in the police but the police know what the law is and if they feel it’s been broken they should be able to look at that without fear or favour.”

He's putting the boot in on the day Elliot Morley was forced to stand down over his fraudulent expenses claims for a phantom mortgage and seems to be upping the ante and inviting open conflict with Brown over their respective parties' handling of the scandal.

Let's hope he's hurt them. Let's hope he finally flushes Brown out and then keeps on kicking. He's done a reasonable job with his wayward troughers; Brown has dodged the issue at every turn and deserves to get hammered for his useless dithering and double standards.

Mr Morley and other MPs with “phantom” mortgages are expected to be the focus of police interest.

It is understood that Sir Paul Stephenson, the Scotland Yard Commissioner, wants detectives to announce as soon as possible whether a criminal investigation will be instigated.

I don't really care who ends-up being sent-down for these frauds - for which us mere mortals could expect to be serving some serious time - but I want an arrest soon, and it might as well be the worst of the worst who have their collars felt first: Morley and Chaytor. That would be a start.

Whatever you might think about him and his party, Cameron is right on this - and he's right to be out for blood. The problem for him is that he's playing a bloody dangerous game here. But hey, isn't that what decent leaders do? Gordon 'Courage' Brown take note.

The Twilight Zone: Heffer vs Piggy

Sir Alan "Posh Piggy" Haselhurst

Simon Heffer, the Telegraph's pompous voice of the old right and scourge of all things Cameron, all things Left, has now threatened to stand against grandee Tory piggy and front runner for the Speaker's vacant seat, Sir Alan Haselhurst, if the latter fails to pay back £12,ooo-worth of gardening expenses.

This new twist might not have been quite what Dave Cameron had in mind when he threw open the Tory PP candidates list to all-comers: "The Heif" has about as much time for Call-Me-Dave as a cow has for roast beef.

Of posh porker Haselhurst, Heffer said:

“If he does not, between now and the opening of nominations for the general election, admit error, apologise, pay back the £12,000 and promise to behave, I shall stand against him as an independent. If Sir Alan thinks I am joking, I warn him I am not. I have backers and volunteers. I say this more in anger than in sorrow: we are all angry. Doesn’t he get it?”

Haselhurst might not 'get it' but you can bet your most violet wisteria that Cameron does. That money will be paid back instantly - with interest - or Haselhurst will be out before you can say 'large, female cow'.

But this is weird sort of old Tory, country gent, farmyard politics that doesn't really compute for most folk, including me. We're into real Twilight Zone stuff now and as more Z-list celebs and self-important numbskulls put their names forward as independent, 'anti-sleaze' candidates ala total windbad, Martin Bell in 1997 things can only get worse. Esther Rantzen? Robert Harris? David Van Day? David Van Day FFS!! I guess he's standing on the 70s Shitpop Revival ticket. You know, "A Vote For Van Day Is A Vote For Dollar!".

Could get confusing.

Simon Heffer Heifer pictured in 2005 interviewing Ann Widdecombe in the grounds of his country estate