Victoria Pendleton's win in the sprint cycling was a great moment, but was completely marred by a classic propaganda moment by the monolithic state broadcaster. No, I don't mean Chinese TV, I mean the BBC pumping New Labour as usual.

Victoria flashed across the line, and within two seconds the BBC cut to a shot of Tony Blair standing and applauding, holding him on screen for some time. It completely spoiled the moment for me - a sporting triumph marked by a war criminal. To complete the puff, the commentator praised Tony Blair's "generous support for the British team".

Bollocks - it was another example of a politician trying to gain kudos from national sporting achievement. And to describe Blair as "generous" is risible. Whenever you see Blair pop up anywhere, the first question to be asked is, who is paying for him? The great freeloader never pays for his own holidays, as has been frequently documented. On a previous visit to China, he received a US $500,000 payoff.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/08/china.tonyblair

Bkair has been to Chima at least four times since then - visits which would seem to have but a tenuous connection with his official role as chief facilitator of illegal Israeli settlement in Palestine. Blair has been making himself useful to the Chinese, and obnoxious to human rights and environmental campaigners, by arguing that politics should be kept out of the Olympics.
http://tonyblairoffice.org/2008/08/olympics-should-be-about-sport.html
So who is funding Blair's Olympics?

The Mail is asking the same question, and got this response:

Earlier today Mr Blair's spokesman insisted the couple were on a 'family holiday' but refused to comment on whether they had paid for it from their own pockets. He would also not be drawn on whether the Blairs were in China as someone's guest

I think that we can take that as an admission that the revolting Blair is being paid off again. The question is, for what?

It says volumes for where our far right New Labour government now stands on world affairs that they regret the political demise of this odious dictator. Here is David Miliband, the neo-con muppet who is New Labour's hope for political revival:

"The Musharraf years yielded significant dividends… It is important to highlight President Musharraf's commitment to tackle terrorism, to promote dialogue with India, especially over Kashmir, and to root out corruption," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/18/pakistan

Yeah, right. Come to think of it, why don't we have military dictators all over the developing world? Plainly Miliband holds that these dusky foreigners need the smack of firm government. Why Miliband believes that rooting out corruption is a good thing, while his own government pro-actively harbours and protects it in the BAE scandal, is beyond me.

Miliband is no more than a foolish, shallow little disgrace. Despite New Labour's best efforts, this is still in many ways a lovely country. It is both astonishing and appalling that it should be represented by someone as insubstantive as Miliband.

Anyway, there is a rather lame but surprisingly extended attack on me in the Sunday Times over my comments on the Fringe. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article4547834.ece

This is a particularly poor piece of journalism as the newspaper failed to contact me for comment. There are also a number of extraordinary omissions or distortions. To clarify:-

- I have never accused the Fringe of failing to promote Nadira's show. They got the Fringe office to comment on something I haven't said. I did point out they had listed it in the wrong category. If the Sunday Times had asked them to comment on that, I imagine they would have agreed they had done so. Promotion in general has been very good.
- Nadira's show has had super reviews. It has had in Edinburgh in total (that I can find) two five star, four four star and two three star reviews. The Sunday Times has chosen to quote only from the two three star reviews.
- My complaint was very plainly that one publication had reviewed the Show without actually seeing it. That is obvious from the blog entry below. It is completely out of order for the Sunday Times to omit what my complaint actually was.
- I am very happy with audiences. An average of fifty is brilliant for the Fringe at 1.30pm.
- I stand by my more general comments that there is an excess of bad comedy and loutishness at the Fringe nowadays. I am not against comedy. I love good comedy.

Here are some of those reviews. Unlike the Sunday Times I am giving you a representative sample of one 5, one 4 and one 3 star review.
http://www.broadwaybaby.com/fringe/reviews/thebritishambassadorsbellydancer
http://edinburgh.threeweeks.co.uk/review/4638
http://living.scotsman.com/music/Musical-review-The-British-Ambassador39s.4356893.jp

I suppose that I should be beyond being upset by a foolish piece of journalism like this. But the lack of professionalism of the Sunday Times, and their obvious malice, is very annoying.

The Murdoch press remain great cheerleaders for Alisher Usmanov. Stuart MacDonald appears to be trying to outdo his Dirty Digger stablemate Mark Franchetti in the worst journalistic standards stakes. But I think Franchetti is still ahead.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/10/mark_franchetti.html

But we cannot just say that all the major powers involved are behaving terribly. That is true but not enough. Lenin's Tomb has an excellent analysis.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-cold-war-escalates.html
But it is marred by the tendency of the left to think anyone opposed to Bush must be a good thing, and so give Putin the benefit of the doubt. Putin has plenty of blood on his hands also, and not only in Chechnya.

The truth is that life for ordinary people in the ex Soviet countries which have had "Orange Revolutions" like Ukraine and Georgia, is much, much better than in those which have not, like Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. That is so evident as to be undeniable to anyone who has actually been there.

Yet resurgent Russian nationalism is a major threat to Europe, and so Georgia must be supported as Russia tries to increase its hegemony over the former Soviet Union.

Russia's attempt to leverage its Russian minorities into political power has been most obvious in Georgia and remains a major threat in the Ukraine. Given its own opposition to separatism for the many ethnic areas within Russia, this is not a question of principle. I posted on this last week.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/08/china_and_the_u.html

Most commentators have quite correctly picked up on the fact that this is in large part about control of oil and gas pipelines. Those who have seen me lecture know that I have been talking about Russian pressure on Georgia for the last four years. My professional eye on the diplomatic dances around the invasion shows me that, as I predicted, energy dependency has made Germany a Russian client state within the European Union.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/06/russian_journal.html

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/05/uzbekistan_and.html

Those in Poland and Scandinavia who have been campaigning against the Nordstream gas pipeline project are absolutely right. European dependence on Russian hydrocarbons is not only an environmental abomination but also a major security risk. A Russian pipeline through Poland would be designated a major strategic national security interest for Russia - and for Germany. I can see easily see it becoming a cause for future conflict.

An immediate ceasefire is required now and a de facto Russian annexation of South Ossetia must not be permitted, unless we eventually want a war for East Ukraine. Sadly, the West will learn the wrong long-term lesson. The answer is not to strengthen NATO. NATO is part of the cause of the problem, not the solution. By encircling and humiliating Russia, not least with new missile systems, NATO has creaated the climate in Russia so favourable to Putin.

The new NATO is the main symptom of the West's chronic inability to create a new post cold war security structure. By clinging to and expanding NATO, we merely made the return of the Cold War inevitable - much to the benefit of the arms industry and military establishment. If our leaders had any imagination, they would realise that the answer is to wind down NATO and create new structures into which Russia should be drawn.

It is already a decade late for such thinking. With Bush and Brown at the helm and the military and arms industry in grater control than ever of policy in both the US and UK, it is currently impossible.

A couple of things have rather spoilt my mood today. I gave an interview to Radio Scotland for a morning talk show called Shereen. It is at the end of this feed (the link only works for one week). http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00cy4m1

As the last word an alleged journalist named Penny Taylor accuses me of exploiting Nadira, which is pretty nasty. I am not sure in what sense she meant - I am subsidising rather than benefiting from Nadira's show. If she meant in our relationship, well Nadira is 26 now and well capable of making up her own mind. But what is especially annoying is that Ms Taylor has neither seen the show nor read my book.

If you listen to the whole programme (which I don't recommend) you will hear that Ms Taylor was also giving strong views on the Georgian crisis despite being blissfully ignorant that South Ossetia is actually part of Georgia. I don't mean she felt it should not be part of Georgia - I mean she really didn't know that it is. Most of us are reticent to speak on subjects of which we know not the most basic facts. But evidently not Ms Taylor.

Giving forth opinions on a show you haven't seen is foolish. Writing a review of a show you haven't seen is thoroughly reprehensible. That appears to be the most likely explanation for what Greer Ogston has done in The List. http://www.list.co.uk/article/10991-the-british-ambassadors-belly-dancer/

Ogston writes:

Nadira Aleiva (who was mistress to the controversial former ambassador in Uzbekistan, Craig Murray) tells her story through the medium of song and dance

Now it would be difficult to sit through seventy minutes of The British Ambassador's Belly Dancer and fail to notice that it is not a musical. Nobody sings, at all. But the Fringe Festival office made a major cock-up and listed the show under "Musicals and Opera" in the Fringe programme. So if you hadn't actually seen the show, but were cobbling together a review from the material about it you can find on the web, you might feel you could safely say the story was told through song and dance.

You would of course then end up looking very stupid. Take no notice of The List.. It publishes fake reviews.

This is where I come out as a grumpy old man. The abundance of silly review sheets, giving five star ratings to appalling amateurish shows by their friends in the incestuous world of fringe theatre, is a minor annoyance. Much more annoying is the almost complete absence on the Fringe of any endeavour of serious artistic intent.

This is my home town. As a young man I saw Steven Berkoff play Hamlet in a college gym, and Brian Blessed play a (surprisingly subtle) Macbeth in a church hall. Real actors of merit and experience crafted challenging performances for their art and for self-development. You always got the earnest student productions, and they are still around and welcome, but you are lucky to find a good one. But with over 2,000 fringe shows, we are deluged by purveyors of highly derivative stand-up comedy of mostly mediocre quality. At night the Fringe venues are positively anti-intellectual, as drunks roam around and belch laughter to "Observation comedy" about when your relationship is established enough to let your partner see the skidmarks in your pants. Bill Clinton famously described the Hay on Wye festival as "The Woodstock of the Mind". Edinburgh is becoming its Ibiza.

I was slightly surprised to find that Oswald Mosley was still campaigning in London in the 1960s. What a tolerant people we are. Certainly if either of my grandfathers had seen him, they would have beaten the hell out of him.

If Max Mosley had finished his days as a retired solicitor in Hendon, I would not have begrudged him mild prosperity just because of his dad. But titular head of Formula 1? What are they thinking of? Couldn't they track down any Hitler relatives for the post?

Infuriatingly, Max Mosley's legal win over the News of The World (a case in which life sentences for everybody involved would have been fully justified - including the judge) has added to my difficulties in publishing The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. We already face FCO censorship, separate libel threats from Tim Spicer and Peter Penfold, and a friendly fire attack from Clare Short who doesn't want me to publish her over-enthusiastic and well-oiled dinner party denunication of the British Empire (she denies it happened).

Now I have received the comments from my publisher's lawyers, who suggests at several points that changes are needed due to the Max Mosley case.

The BBC just broadcast an interview with a Chinese dissident who said his greatest desire was for freedom of speech. Me too.

The Uighurs are one of a swathe of Muslim peoples across Central Asia, who fell into the thrall of foreign Empires between the middles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are at least eighteen of these identifiable and mostly Turkic ethnicities, running from the Chechens in the West to the Uighurs in the East. About half the groups who fell under Russian, then Soviet, rule are now in "independent" republics named after Turkic ethnicities. But their political, cultural and religous freedom is still generally repressed as a consequence of continued domination by Soviet apparatchik elites who cling to power through ruthlessness. Meanwhile both Russia and China keep down the Turkic ethnicities within their borders through fierce and relentless brutality.

The War on Terror has enabled Russia, China, Karimov and other Central Asian leaders to characterise any manifestation of a desire for freedom in the region as Islamic terrorism and extremism. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, combining China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan*, is a dictators' club. Despite having several theoretical fields of activity, the main practical focus is entirely on security and, in the words of their declaration, combating "terrorism, separatism and extremism". That is code for repressing any moves to freedom in Central Asia. Co-operation extends to false flag operations and fake intelligence. The Uzbek government response to the Andijan massacre was an example of this, with the Russian government providing "Evidence" to back the Uzbek government's story that the massacred demonstrators were terrorists organised by Chechens and funded by the USA (sic).

One good thing about the Olympics going to Beijing is that the western media has run a few articles on the plight of the Uighurs, of whose existence I suspect few western reporters knew a couple of weeks ago. It is entirely predictable that the Chinese governemmt is responding by organising "terrorist incidents" to try to blacken the Uighurs as part of Al Qaida. Do not be taken in by this rubbish.

*The Tajiks are not Turkic but Persian

Read this next bit carefully. Under New Labour's New Rules, FCO employess may not, for as long as they live publish, broadcast or comment upon, in book, article or interview anything they have learnt or may have learnt in the course of their employment.

Read it again - astonishing isn't it. The ever-excellent Brian Barder has been blogging about it for some time, including this:
http://www.barder.com/ephems/708

The idea, of course, is that only the ministers' version of truth will enter history. You can be confident that Jack Straw's memoirs will not tell you that he instructed Richard Dearlove that we would use intelligence from torture, or that we colluded with torture and extraordinary rendition in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. You needed my memoirs for that. If Jack Straw had his way, I would not have been able to publish my book telling you the truth; in fact the new regulations were born directly out of Straw's fury at Murder in Samarkand.

We now have a government so despised that it strives to protect itself further and further from scrutiny. The entire mess can be traced back to the decision to abandon international law and go for illegal war, torture and assassination. It is impossible to adopt such rotten tactics while maintaining liberalism at home. What New Labour have given us is a fundamental shift towards authoritarianism, which occasionally manifests itself in a dramatic symptom like this one. The body politic of this country is rotting from within.

I was horrified by the original conviction and the case has been on my mind from time to time for the last eight years. I have no idea who killed Jill Dando or why, but plainly it was very professional. It was carried out with a custom modified and silenced gun, leaving no evidence of the killer on site. George, who needed help with his shoelaces and became confused and lost if on the streets on his own, plainly was simply not up to it. In the police laboratory a single micro-fleck of gunpowder residue, invisible to the naked eye, reached his coat.

There was something medieval about the conviction - a crime has been committed, so let us convict the local mentally disabled person. Lessons must be learnt urgently about the need to protect the mentally weak from the Police and from the prejudice of juries. The case is almost exactly the same as the horrible miscarriage of justice that destroyed the life of Stefan Kiszko and his family. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7052109.stm That again was a case of simply harrowing the local mentally disabled member of the community.

We have learnt nothing in the last thirty years. And judging by their arrogant and disgraceful attitude today, Scotland Yard have no intention of learning anything.

The huge bribes which the sleazebags in BAE gave to disgusting Saudi crooks were channelled through middlemen including Wafic Said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/nov/29/topstories3.politics
As the Guardian politely puts it: "Wafic Said is one of Britain's wealthiest men. But how he accumulated his estimated £1bn fortune is somewhat opaque."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/07/bae17
In other words, he is a crook.
http://intl-news.blogspot.com/2006/11/uks-bae-systems-caught-bribing-saudi.html

But in this brave new world where Universities exist not to advance the sum of human knowledge, but to oil the wheels of commerce, being a succesful crook opens the door to governing boards and gilded statues amidst the groves of academe. Witness the (vomit warning) Oxford University Wafic Said Business School.
http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/news/archives/Main/Wafic+Said+creates+25+million+fund+for+Said+Business+School.htm

And who is this on the Said School's Business Advisory Forum - oh look - it's Alice Perkins, aka Mrs Jack Straw!!
http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/corporate/baf/

Some may think it is a bit strange for the wife of the Minister for Justice (sic) and Lord Chancellor to sit on the board of the foundation of a suspect in a major crime who has just been let off by the government on grounds of "National Security". But in these brave days of New Labour, it doesn't matter at all.

Jack Straw's wife was a senior civil servant and I am sure she was entirely competent. But there are many thousand retired public employees around of equivalent rank, and they don't get nominated to positions by dodgy Arab arms dealers, or for that matter to the board of that rip-off mis-managed monopoly, the British Airports Authority.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/aug/20/businesscomment.theairlineindustry?commentpage=1

Incidentally, there are some lovely people on the board of Said's business school. There is the former chairman of Centrica, owners of British Gas who just put the price of fuel up 35%. And there is the former chairman of the Charities Commission. See my post on the Smith Institute immediately below.

The Smith Institute would be perfectly fine, were it not for the fact that it has charitable status as an independent research organisation and thus dodges hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in tax. There is a good report here from Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?
pid=20601102&sid=a40bVP9nqITA&refer=uk

But the article fails to hit the real point. This is the most transparent bit of crookery imaginable. Plainly the Charities Commission in Scotland is fully aware that this is part of New Labour. And yet for years the Smith Institute has been given chance after chance after chance to meet the regulations, without ever having its charitable status removed. No other fake charity would be treated so leniently. Is the Charities Commission yet another quango that has been stitched up by New Labour?

The Law Lords have this morning upheld an appeal by the Director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) against the High Court's ruling that he acted unlawfully in terminating a corruption investigation into BAE Systems' arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

The appeal followed a High Court judgment in April that the SFO, acting on government advice, had dropped the investigation following lobbying by BAE and a threat from Saudi Arabia to withdraw diplomatic and intelligence co-operation if the investigation were not dropped. This judgment was in response to a judicial review brought by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and The Corner House.

Nicholas Hildyard of The Corner House said:

"Now we know where we are. Under UK law, a supposedly independent prosecutor can do nothing to resist a threat made by someone abroad if the UK government claims that the threat endangers national security. The unscrupulous who have friends in high places overseas willing to make such threats now have a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card – and there is nothing the public can do to hold the government to account if it abuses its national security powers. Parliament needs urgently to plug this gaping hole in the law and in the constitutional checks and balances dealing with national security. With the law as it is, a government can simply invoke 'national security' to drive a coach and horses through international anti-bribery legislation, as the UK government has done, to stop corruption investigations.”

Symon Hill of CAAT said:
"BAE and the government will be quickly disappointed if they think that this ruling will bring an end to public criticism. Throughout this case we have been overwhelmed with support from people in all walks of life. There has been a sharp rise in opposition to BAE's influence in the corridors of power. Fewer people are now taken in by exaggerated claims about British jobs dependent on the arms trade. The government has been judged in the court of public opinion. The public know that Britain will be a better place when BAE is no longer calling the shots.”

CAAT and The Corner House will issue a more detailed statement following an analysis of the Lords' judgments.