By Roger Cottrell PhD
Rees Mogg and Truss mean even more bad news for democracy and what was once “Great” about Britain
Like a lot of people I am pretty much sick to the back teeth of watching the Tory Party leadership pageant played out, in all its wretched glory, on TV. This, after all, is a contest in which none of us have a stake but which we are being forced to endure in a manner that befits the workings ot a one party state, which is precisely what Britain has now become. Democracy is dead in the UK, yet we are expected to care which reactionary scumbag succeeds Boris Johnson, who belongs behind bars, as leader of the most corrupt British government in living memory.
All of the prospective candidates, now whittled down to a choice of two, are a shower of extreme Right filth with absolutely no redeeming features and the leader of this all but non event will preside over a government without legitimacy or right to even exist. Johnson’s election, after all, was engineered, like BREXIT before it, through the corrupt and toxic relationship between corporate media and political power in the UK as well as a psychological warfare offensive on-line that was illegally funded by the Kremlin, along with the Russian Oligarchs and others who completely control the Tory Party purse. When the criminal Johnson was forced to stand down, even without revelations as to the worst of his crimes, there should have been a general election. Instead, a few thousand Tory Party members, whom I describe as the Walking Dead, will be allowed to choose Johnson’s repugnant successor until another hegemonically rigged election called on their terms. Nothing, it seems, will remove this scum from office short of a general strike that Keir Starmer has neither the balls nor politics or principles to support.
To continue with the Tory Party leadership contest it is barely worth mentioning Rishi Sunak, once described as a “legend” by Wetherspoon’s Tim Martin. This is because the leadership of the Tory Party is already bought and paid for by Jacob Rees Mogg’s European Research Group whose creature and puppet Liz Truss has completely become. Already, the conspiracy theories are circulating on the internet, courtesy of the troll farms, which may or may not still be in St Petersburg courtesy of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency that helped to illegally deliver BREXIT – and render brand Corbyn toxic. And while I’ve no love for Sunak, the austerity happy tax dodging parasite that he is, the stuff that’s being said about him would make that other Kremlin stooge, Alex Jones, proud. Sunak isn’t only Asian but a former employee of Goldman Sachs, meaning that he is part of a Jewish conspiracy to recruit Hindus to the Tory Party en masse and deliver him into Number 10. I’m not kidding anybody when I say that this kind of crap is out there.
There is one other reason to mention Sunak in passing insofar that if he’s the most moderate candidate for Tory leader, what the Hell else is Liz Truss capable of? Once slightly less enthusiastic about tax cuts for the wealthy than any of his rivals) for all that he was the biggest beneficiary of tax avoidance) he’s hardened his stance on tax cuts since he started flagging in the polls. This has been complimented by Sunak’s attacks on the unemployed and poor who are, of course, the immediate victims of tax cuts for the rich, which won’t help grow the economy or trickle down to the poor because it all goes into tax shelters offshore. Most priceless of all, however, are disclosures in The Independent, regarding a meeting Sunak addressed in Tunbridge Wells on July 29, 2022. Here, Sunak claimed that pouring money into the inner cities and deprived urban areas in the north was a mistake that discriminated against affluent Tory strongholds like Tunbridge Wells. So much for “leveling up” which is proved to be the biggest Tory hoax since the alleged benefits of BREXIT – of which there are none!
Dispensing with Sunak, who is a “socialist” according to Rees Mogg, let’s move on to Liz Truss. Here we have a woman with absolutely no principles who was once a Liberal Democrat and a remainer, and is now a right wing extremist completely in Rees Mogg’s pocket. The Economic Research Group, after all, is the government of this non democracy and Truss knows which side her bread is buttered. In James Ellroy’s excellent Underworld trilogy, a fictionalized J. Edgar Hoover says that nobody is easier to manipulate than a fallen Liberal – other than a fallen Liberal Democrat, one assumes. And nobody has proved this better than Liz Truss since simpering Nick Clegg got Cameron into government, thereby making BREXIT possible, then went to work for Zuckerburg at Facebook.
Meanwhile Liz Truss’ victory is a done deal and it is well worth looking at what this actually means for you and me. Indeed, nothing can stop Truss now and certainly not the fact that she had some kind of squalid affair behind the back of her husband. The days when even the decrepit ranks of the Tory Party rank and file still pretended to believe in family values are, of course, as dead as British democracy itself and I’m sure that somewhere, Edmund Burke is turning in his grave.
In 1979, a permanent and uninterrupted Thatcherite government was brought into existence, at least in part, by the activities of a Deep State pedophile ring and remains in power to this day. It is also my belief that the network still exists but, irrespective, Boris Johnson himself was having underage sex at parties arranged by Evgeny Lebedev much more recently than this. Specifically, this was when Johnson was corrupt Mayor of London, encouraging still more Russian Oligarch investment both in “Londongrad’s” property market as well as the corrupt offshore banking network that has found Roberto Saviano describing Britain as the most corrupt country in Western Europe.
Without doubt the sordid relationship between Lebedev, whose father was the corrupt KGB head of station in London in the 1980s, and Johnson as mayor formed a turning point in the Tories’ easy relationship with dirty Russian money. Up to that point, it had been the subs bench Tories, in the form of Tony Blair’s Faux Labour, who’d courted the Oligarch wealth, even defending Putin’s genocide in Grozny, during the Second Chechen War. Now, the Russians were switching to the real deal but wanted something in return: namely for Britain’s corrupt offshore banking network to be beyond the reach of European law.
Significantly, Jacob Rees Mogg and others, like Arron Banks, also connected to the Russians, wanted precisely the same thing.
Rees Mogg and the Russians: a Time Line
The turning point came, as we all know, with the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovich’s deeply corrupt autocratic regime in Ukraine in 2014. One year later, in 2015, Rees Mogg founded Somerset Holdings and immediate found himself handling dirty Russian money. A year after that and Roger Gabb, a Ludlow based executive in Robert Mercer’s SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, paid Cameron’s Tories the £707 000 bribe to hold the disastrous BREXIT vote in the first place. After Cameron accepted the deal the Russian millions poured into the Tory Party, no questions asked.
SCL was owned by Robert Mercer in the US, an extreme Right hedge fund boss and member of the Heritage Foundation, whose dark network of influence has been admirably exposed by Jane Meyer of The New Yorker. His close confederates and co-ideologists included Steve Bannon, who had left Goldman Sachs to join an entity called Drexel, notorious for handling suspect Russian portfolios. As well as being Donald Trump’s biggest financial backer in the US, Mercer would also bankroll Bannon’s extreme Right platform, Briebart News.
Where Bannon and Mercer differed from previous Right wing extremists in the US was in their relationship to Russian dark money and Oligarchs such as Dimitry Firtach (a personal protégé of Putin) and Dimitri Rybolovlev, a controversial mine boss in Eastern Ukraine hitherto formerly linked to Viktor Yanukovich’s regime who is also wanted on fraud charges in Monaco. Mercer also enjoys more direct links to the Russian FSB. None of this should come as a great surprise given that Mercer’s company, Renaissance Technologies (RENTEX), is the second largest hedge funds in the US, handles a great deal of dirty Russian money and is a major shareholder in the Russian telecom giant Vimplecom.
In much the same way, Bannon handled corrupt Russian portfolios at Drexel that had their origins in a scam run by Robert Maxwell from the late 1980s. At the time, Maxwell’s business partner was Jeffrey Epstein, later involved with Maxwell’s daughter Ghislane in running a sordid pedophile and sex ring. Indeed, it’s widely believed that Epstein, a MOSSAD agent, sexually compromised one of the owners of Drexel to ensure their cooperation in Russian money laundering and also coerced Donald Trump to enter into property deals with Oligarchs in Florida.
As well as advising the BREXIT campaign, Trump’s election strategy and the campaign and government of Boris Johnson, Bannon advised several openly fascist parties in governments throughout Europe. These included Marine Le Pen’s Front National, re-branded as the National Rally, the German ADF and Viktor Orban’s fascist government in Hungary – closely linked to Britain’s Tories. All have been directly funded by Putin through the First Czech Russian Bank, as exposed by BBC’s Panorama. The only difference in Britain is that foreign funding of political campaigns and parties is illegal so much of the Russian money had to be laundered by Arron Banks, via the disgusting sectarian Democratic Unionist Party in the north of Ireland.
The mechanics of how the BREXIT campaign was funded and manipulated has been admirably exposed, particularly by Carole Cadwaladr in The Observer, and also by the Channel 4 News. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that Channel 4 is in the government’s privatization gun sights and why the news platform may yet lose its franchise, if Johnson, Truss and the rest of this scum get their way. The criminal conspiracy that was the BREXIT campaign linked Cambridge Analytica, owned by SCL, to Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg and also to an Israeli entity called Black Cube.
While Russian manipulation of the BREXIT vote is widely acknowledged the role of the Israelis is generally understated even by opponents of BREXIT. Later, the Russians and Israelis worked together, a second time, in undermining Jeremy Corbyn, thereby delivering the most corrupt British government in history.
On the one hand, individuals like Margaret Hodge, compromised by her past role in pedophile cover ups in South Vale care home in Norwood, worked with mainstream media to falsely accuse Corbyn of anti-Semitism. On the other, the St Petersburg based Internet Research Agency dealt in more lurid conspiracy theories. These linked Corbyn to the IRA and both claims were false. Both, however, served to render brand Corbyn toxic ahead of what was in fact a completely rigged election.
What was particularly pathetic as regards the BBC’s David Ware, and a completely scurrilous Panorama program in this criminal conspiracy, is that the BBC is also in the government’s privatization gun-sights. That said, a mediocrity like David Ware would always be guaranteed work with the likes of Murdoch or some total scumbag operation like GB News. As a journalist, Ware has been completely useless since he left the Worcester Evening News for the BBC and all his stories covering the Troubles in the North of Ireland were completely spoon fed by MI5. Indeed, he’s no more than a mouthpiece and stooge of Britain’s secret police.
During the BREXIT conspiracy, and Trump election that followed it. Mercer met regularly with Dimitri Rybolovlev at a location in the Virgin Islands. Mercer sailed to the clandestine rendezvous out of Long Beach, where Jeffrey Epstein was also based, on board his yacht, The Sea Owl. Rybolovlev sailed to the same location in his yacht, The Anna. The meetings made perfect sense and Rybolovlev is widely believed to have directly served as a conduit to Putin himself.
Prior to Yanukovich’s downfall, Rybolovlev’s corruption was central to a serious mining accident at one of his sites in the east of Ukraine where several workers were killed. Indeed, this played a major role in the Orange Revolution and thus in Yanukovich’s downfall. Indeed, Yanukovich stood to lose billions of rubles until Putin annexed Crimea. By contrast, Mercer did lose millions in the share value of Vimplecom after the annexation of Crimea. Both men therefore had a vested financial interest, as well as an ideological interest, in preserving the corrupt offshore financial networks, destroying the EU and ensuring Putin’s complete domination of Europe’s gas and oil market. .
The logic of BREXIT was always a fascist logic and it was fueled by racism and Islamaphobia from the outset. This much was self evident from the poisonous output of Russia Today and the relentless incitement of hatred for Muslims, as well as refugees and asylum seekers that was being pumped out by Prigozhin’s troll farms. But for the Economic Research Group itself, effectively now the government of the UK, it was always all about economics and finishing the job that Margaret Thatcher started through BREXIT. This much has been admirably noted by, among others, Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, and it is here that Liz Truss comes into play.
The gospel of the ERG
Jacob Rees Mogg is a corrupt offshore financial broker who personally made millions out of BREXIT, according to The London Economic. He is also a staunch believer in the dogmas of Milton Freidman regarding “creative destruction” and what is sometimes referred to as “disaster capitalism.” Indeed, according to Naomi Klein, Rees-Mogg could be accurately described as a free market fundamentalist. This much was demonstrated when Rees Mogg described the COVID pandemic as an investment opportunity then set about lining the pockets of his cronies (and himself) to prove it. However this, together with Rees Mogg’s own obscene and vile persona, makes “Lord Snooty” an untenable candidate for Prime Minister, even among a backward and demoralized electorate disengaged from it’s own history of struggle and partially integrated into its own enslavement by what De Bord called “The Spectacle.”
This explains the need for Truss to stand in as Rees Mogg’s stunt double.
The ERG’s objective, as previously stated, is to use BREXIT to finish the job that Thatcher started, at the expense of the working class and wider population. This includes preserving tax breaks for the rich and the corrupt offshore banking network as well as attacking the unemployed and poor, looting public services and forcing down wages while extending privatization initiatives, including that of the NHS, BBC and Channel 4.
However, even with a population as alienated and demoralized as that of Britain, where the working class seemed long to have forgotten how to fight back, there’s only so much of this abuse that said population will take, especially amidst an unprecedented cost of living crisis that BREXIT has made much worse. Already we’re seeing the stirring of a fight back in the form of the RMT strikes, resistance from other public sector workers and professionals and there is even talk about general strikes on social media. As Naomi Klein also points out in her important book, The Shock Doctrine, there comes a point when oligarchic wealth is concentrated in so few hands, at the expense of everybody else, that democracy becomes a luxury that a corrupt elite can no longer indulge.
That Liz Truss, following the script of her masters and betters in the ERG, plans to use BREXIT to finish Thatcher’s economic objectives should be seen as a given, but she also intends to use it as a blunt instrument to demolish what little remains of human rights. In the UK, effective trade union based resistance has been criminalized since the 1980s through various anti-trade union laws that we saw on grotesque parade both during the miners’ strike and at Fortress Wapping. More recently, with the Police, Courts and Sentencing Act of 2022, all forms of Parliamentary Direct Action are now also criminalized and more or less defined as terrorism, which is exactly what autocracies like Russia do.
What is singularly grotesque, in this context, is that Kier Starmer, who colluded in undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s election and used lies about anti-Semitism to purge Labour’s Left, wasn’t even going to oppose the Police and Courts attack until the brutal Metropolitan Police assault on the Sara Everard vigil. He has since refused to support the RMT and penalized both member of the shadow cabinet and Labour MPs for doing so. That he thinks that he, or anybody else, can make BREXIT work is as sick a joke as Lisa Nandy listening to backwardness on the doorstep.
None of this, however, goes far enough for Liz Truss and her odious puppeteer, Rees Mogg. They now want to destroy what remains of democracy by tearing up the European convention on human rights completely.
The destruction of British democracy did not begin with this corrupt government, vile and repugnant as it is. The rot set in with the crushing defeats of the working class movement in the 1980s that paved way for fire sale privatizations and the financial deregulation of the city of London, and offshore network that goes to the very heart of Britain’s sick body politic.
According to classical politic theory since the Enlightenment, a functioning democracy requires separation of state executive, legislature and judiciary. To this I would add a free press and media and functioning Fourth Estate to hold power to account. On all four counts, and as academics like Paddy Hillyard have demonstrated, Britain has increasingly failed since the 1980s, since the war on terror and particularly since BREXIT. The state executive is totally emerged with the financial sector and big business to the extent, as Naomi Klein would have it, that the revolving door has been completely replaced by the great arch.
Lobbyists have played a role here, as in the US, but politicians also serve as consultants to big business and build substantive financial interests through office. On retirement from politics they are almost guaranteed their seats at an ever more corrupt high table, with this even applying to New Labour – but more so to the Tories. Meanwhile, the actual legislature becomes increasingly irrelevant as Prime Minister’s Question Time is curtailed, meaningful opposition withers away and the one party regime is allowed to consolidate itself.
The transformation of the law into a naked instrument of class rule began with the anti trade union laws of the 1980s but has also gone far beyond this, as the Police, Courts and Sentencing Act proves. Not only does this facilitate corruption in the police, which if anything are now more corrupt than before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, but of an increasingly politicized judiciary that serves an ever narrower economic and political elite.
In both cases freemasonry helps.
Finally, any semblance of a free press holding power to account went into terminal decline with the Murdoch-Thatcher Axis to the extent that corporate media soon became a further threat to democracy in its own right. That corporate media and big business, particularly in the corrupt financial sector, were increasingly merged as one found representation in Murdoch’s presence at various Davos summits and role in choosing political leadership successions, including in the Labour Party from 1995. Theresa May met Murdoch more often than she met her own cabinet and Keir Starmer’s courtship of News Corps is as grotesque as it is pathetic.
In the early 2000s, the late and great Gavin McFaddyen, formerly of World in Action and my own personal mentor in investigative journalism spoke of a crisis in investigative journalism in the UK. Things have not improved since.
Certainly since the Asylum Act of 1993, racism played a key role in the destruction of democracy, rendering it politically acceptable to significant swathes of the public. As might be expected, this situation got worse with the war on terror and the Islamaphobia that both domestic and foreign policy inevitably generated. By 2008 the gravest economic crisis in capitalism’s history had merged with the worst ever humanitarian refugee crises since the Second War. This provided a perfect storm for the government and a Kremlin financed fascist Right that both have milked for all its worth.
In using racism to further destroy democracy, through BREXIT, Truss can count on Priti Patel who is frankly the most evil Home Secretary in living memory as well as Nadine Dorries, the Minister of Culture Wars. She can also count on dangerous Right wing media demagogues such as Piers Morgan and their relentless drivel about “woke.” Already, Britain has gone much further than an EU that already panders to the likes of Viktor Orban, who should be thrown out of the EU in any case. While the EU pays the likes of Libyan militias to corral refugees in their own countries, no questions asked, Britain deports them to Rwanda or throws them in jail for five years. Expect more on this when the European Declaration on Human Rights is torn up.
Which brings me, as Columbo would have it, to one final question: if the ERG owes its existence to dirty Russian money, and Liz Truss is their creature, by what conjuring act and PR sleight of hand has she managed, as Foreign Secretary, to project herself as the champion of the Ukraine.
To understand this we need to look at some earlier conflicts and how it all went wrong for Britain during the war on terror itself.
The Libyan Precursor
Before the attack on the twin towers the Gaddafi regime was in big trouble. Framed for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, in which it played no part, it was also forced to pay compensation to the family of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, who was actually shot dead by criminal assets of the CIA in St James, London, in 1984. Gaddafi was also very scared of Islamic Fundamentalism and the moment the wat on terror was declared he wasted no time offering his services to the West.
The first thing Gaddafi did was offer up his torture chambers to the CIA and MI6. The next thing he did was to enter into negotiations, particularly with BP, about oil and gas exploitation in the Gulf of Sirtre. But Qaddafi also nurtured a highly ambitious agenda that didn’t always converge with that of his new and fair-weather friends in the West.
Gaddafi remembered that in 1973-74 he precipitated the oil crisis that followed an October war with Israel in which Libya played no military role. He also remembered that the main beneficiaries of that oil crisis were the Saudi Arabians. As a brilliant article in Bloomberg reveals, it was Richard Nixon who deployed David Simons to the Kingdom to secure a deal that would shape the US economy and foreign policy for generations and which Robert Baer refers to as the US-Saudi Covenant.
Under the covenant, the Saudis would invest their oil revenues in the US and lay the foundation for much of the personal corruption involving the Bush political dynasty. They would also buy infrastructure from the US and its closest allies followed by arms – a lot of arms. Significantly, al Yamamah was a bi-product of this as, perversely, was the arms-to-Iraq scandal. Then the biggest arms deal in British history al Yamamah was mired in corruption that may have involved the Deep State pedophile ring. It made Mark Thatcher personally wealthy to the tune of £60 million.
Now, Gaddafi wanted a covenant of his own and the so called “deal in the desert” was the result. In exchange, Tony Blair released Abdelbaset al Megrahi from prison in Scotland, on humanitarian grounds, but the British government never overturned the unsafe conviction at Camp Zeist. Gaddafi now talked about privatizing some of his industries, offering opportunities for Western investment and his son was allowed to purchase a PhD from the London School of Economics, as Gulf Arab brats had been doing from British Universities since the 1980s.
What nobody knew at this point was that, as part of this covenant, Gaddafi also planned to establish a Pan African currency based on Libyan oil reserves.
Significantly, when Lindsey Hilsen of Channel 4 News arrived in Tripoli, during the revolution and war in Libya, one of the first things that she noticed was that Halburton and all the “usual suspects” from the Green Zone in Baghdad were already established in Tripoli, under Gaddafi. Shortly afterwards, The Guardian revealed how the CIA and MI6 were operating torture facilities in Libya and had been since the war on terror began.
Libyan Meltdown
When Gaddafi signed a deal with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela to limit oil production in 2008, thereby raising the price of oil, this was not to the liking of western governments but was hardly enough to make them contemplate regime change – at least in Libya. The fact that Gaddafi was about to launch a Pan African currency was a different matter, however, and especially to the French, who still control the national reserves of at least 14 countries in Francophone Africa.
Ironically, Gaddafi had part financed the election of the deeply corrupt Nicholas Sarkozy, as President, in France.
In contrast to the ridiculous claims e.g. of Russia Today and other Kremlin financed sites the Arab Spring was no more a “CIA plot” than the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, in 2014, that overthrew corrupt autocrat Viktor Yanukovitch. All the revolutions that formed part of the Arab Spring were authentic and that in Benghazi was no exception. Inspired by the revolutions elsewhere in the Arab world it built on the fact that a previous insurrection had been bloodily suppressed, in 1996, also in Benghazi, after which there were mass exterminations in the Libyan prison system.
What is important to remember, in the context of what happened next, and of British government claims to support the Ukrainians today, is that British firms were still exporting weapons to Libya when Qaddafi’s tanks were already in the suburbs of Benghazi.
The insurgency that followed had precious little to do with the Arab Spring itself for all that some of the insurgents were former democracy activists. Others were Islamic Fundamentalists, including those once funded by the CIA, who had little or no love for the Arab Spring. Now, according to a remarkable article that was buried in the business pages of The Guardian, a group of Benghazi businessmen who also had nothing to do with the Arab Spring travelled to London to meet with Tory Party official and “fixer” Christian Sweeting, who introduced the Benghazi team to Tony Buckingham of Executive Outcomes.
Executive Outcomes is a corporate mercenary outfit from South Africa, largely consisting of ex South African Special Forces, that acquired particular notoriety (alongside Sandlines, later Aegis, later Garda World) in Africa’s first blood diamond war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. Executive Outcomes fight for mineral concessions and have a subsidiary called Heritage Oil. Under the deal brokered by Sweeting their mercenaries would lead insurgent forces in Eastern Libya in an assault towards Tripoli in the West. These were supported by NATO air cover.
To start with, according to cabinet documents leaked to The Guardian, the majority of Cameron’s government seemed happy to accept a partitioned Libya to perhaps salvage something of Blair’s “deal in the desert.” After all, if the British backed insurgents ended up controlling the east of the country, and Qaddafi was replaced by his son, then they would still control oil exports through Tobruk. In a BBC Panorama documentary on the subject, a Libyan insurgent complained that the air support thinned out the further West they got. But the French in particular were having nothing of it.
Now, a second front was opened out of Tunisia, in the West of the country, mainly backed by the UAE. NATO then escalated its offensive by bombing the man made river project that supplied 70% of Libya’s water supply. As an important article on the Counterpunch website pointed out, at the time, this was a war crime that served no military purpose. Indeed, while the water pipeline was being trashed a nearby air to surface battery in Briga was left untouched.
As with Saddam, nobody in their right mind should shed a bitter tear for Qaddafi but NATO’s objective now went way beyond “regime change.” As with the “shock and awe” in Iraq, which Donald Rumsfeld and his advisors had been planning since 1996, the objective was now to completely smash Libya’s infrastructure, to dismantle the state and loot both Libya’s resources and services. Above all, the purpose of this “creative destruction” was to provide business opportunities for western investors while ensuring that no African leader ever talked about a Pan African currency ever again.
“Creative Destruction” in Ukraine: Rees-Mogg’s wet dream
This, suffice to say, is precisely what is happening, now, in Ukraine, with the caveat that it is Putin who is doing most of the dirty work, destroying most of the infrastructure, amidst horrific war crimes on a scale unseen in Europe – even including Bosnia – since World War II.
Bought and paid for by dirty Oligarch money, the British Tory government in particular has actually accepted the partition of Ukraine as a fait accompli. Meanwhile, they provide just enough weapons and logistical support to perpetuate the conflict but not enough to turn that conflict, in the East of the country, in Kyiv’s favor. This guarantees arms sales but also, by posing as the friend of Ukraine, a British stake in the country’s IMF imposed reconstruction, with lucrative contracts awarded particularly to the cronies of the Tories.
In Lebanon in 2006, following Israel’s brutal assault on the country, we saw what an IMF led reconstruction looks like. And for someone like Rees Mogg and his cronies this will be like the COVID crisis on steroids. It is small wonder, therefore, that as well as Nadine Dorries, Truss is enthusiastically backed by Liam Fox. Tis, after all, is the corrupt former Minister of Defence who also made a financial killing out of the genocide that he helped finance and back in Sri Lanka.
Learning From Blair’s Mistakes
In Iraq, Tony Blair acted as the sales rep for an illegal war only to see the Americans get the lion’s share of the contracts. In Libya, with the deal in the desert in ruins, western carpet baggers lost out the moment that Khalifa Hafter, supported by the Kremlin and Russian mercenaries, seized control of the oil terminal at Tobruk.
Johnson and his likely successor, Liz Truss, herself bought and paid for by Jacob Rees Mogg, are determined that this time they are the first with their snouts in the trough, availing of Volovsky’s ban on trade unions and strikes, and suppression of workers’ rights.
Once again, “creative destruction” means making a financial killing out of a genocide.
The drumbeat of war
Inevitably, the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime strengthened the position of Iran as potentially the major regional power in the Persian Gulf. Under the al Malaki government in Baghdad, however, this position was considerably enhanced by the defeat of ISIS, by the Popular Mobilisation Units, in which the Iranians played a key role. Effectively, the Iranians now had control of a state within a state in Iraq. Together with Putin, they also played a key role in keeping Bashir Asad in power, in Syria, once the Arab Spring there was bloodily suppressed.
This was not a situation that would be tolerated by Saudi Arabia and its allies for long.
Already, Wiki-leaks had revealed the existence of a developing Israeli-Saudi Axis whose objective was war with Iran. Evidence to support this claim was meantime provided by several targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, mostly by MOSSAD. When Donald Trump was elected President of the US, with the support and collusion of the Kremlin and its agents, he made it pretty clear that he would endorse such an axis in a future conflict with Iran and showed his support for such a project by scrapping the Iran nuclear deal.
In this Trump was supported by his stunt double and buddy in the UK: Boris Johnson.
Trump’s support for the Israeli-Saudi Axis endured beyond the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Karshoggi which he basically endorsed. He moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on the very anniversary of the Nakba, igniting protests in the Gaza Strip (the world’s biggest open prison) in which 100 Palestinians were murdered.
What was significant, here, was that neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE condemned Israel’s actions, with this applying to their various allies and puppet regimes in the Arab World. Neither, for that matter, did Putin, who’s Oligarchs enjoy a corrupt and comfortable lifestyle in Israel itself. Shortly afterwards, these regimes all started to recognize Israel, which promptly annexed East Jerusalem in response.
Sudan’s vile autocracy was removed from the US list of terrorist states precisely because it recognized Israel, Israeli fascists ran amok in the country proclaiming “death to Arabs.”
Britain’s role in this process was even more venal and the government had little, if anything, to say about the gruesome murder of Kashoggi, on instruction from Mohammed bin Salman himself, in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Under David Cameron, Britain hadn’t only armed Saudi Arabia’s bloody suppression of the Arab Spring both in Bahrain and Saudi itself, it had been an active participant in the repression – particularly in Bahrain. This had been subject to a media blackout as, indeed, was Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Saudi led genocide in Yemen, also largely unreported in the West.
Indeed, it was the reporting of this very genocide that led to Jamal Karshoggi’s murder.
As Trump’s Kremlin backed cohort, corruptly in the pockets of Russian Oligarchs and Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group, Boris Johnson continued Cameron and May’s policy towards Saudi Arabia and its crimes with a vengeance. He also did his own bit to escalate a conflict with Iran. When British Iranian born journalist Nazazin Radcliffe was arrested in Iran it was Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, who falsely stated that she was “training journalists” in the country.
No matter how stupid Boris Johnson might be he must have known what the consequences of this statement would be. In 1989, Rupert Allasson falsely outed Frazad Bazoft as an MI6 agent, and signed his death warrant in Iraq, to bury evidence of British complicity in the arming of Saddam Hussein’s regime. In 2016, Boris Johnson made damned sure that Mrs Radcliffe rotted in an Iranian prison to deliberately prepare for war with Iran.
The Current Situation
When Joe Biden succeeded Trump as US President there seemed to be a window of opportunity that US led Foreign Policy in the Middle East might improve. Biden did temporarily suspend arms sales both to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for all that his support for Israel’s Apartheid State, and its crimes, remained steadfast. The game changer here, for Biden, has been the war in Ukraine while for Britain’s singularly corrupt government it has been business as usual where Saudi crimes are concerned. Both Jamal Karshoggi’s murder and the genocide in Yemen that formed its back-drop have been forgotten by the US administration while Britain’s complicity in the latter continues relentless on the watch of Boris Johnson and his anointed successor, Liz Truss. Both are completely in the pockets of Jacob Rees-Mogg and his European Research Group, closely aligned to the corrupt activities of Rees Mogg’s Somerset Holdings as we have described above.
Ergo, in exchange for Saudi Arabia’s obscene rehabilitation and for British complicity in the Yemen genocide itself, rich Emiratis and Saudis are being afforded a similar role in Britain’s corrupt offshore financial network, which is the biggest money laundering operation on the planet, that was previously afforded to Putin supporting Oligarchs and by which BREXIT and the final death of British democracy was bankrolled.
Again, Somerset Holdings is preparing to play a lucrative role here. Such Gulf Arab investment will of course come with similar strings of political influence.
As Roberto Saviano says, the most corrupt country in Western Europe.
Watch this space for more.
