In early August I blogged The Ingenuity of the Markets – featuring a skit by the brilliant British satirists John Bird and John Fortune.

This is in similar vein about the famous South Sea Bubble (circa 1720).

It was not the Bubble to End All Bubbles as advertised. They never are…

If you haven’t heard the Corrigan Brothers‘ excellent ‘No-one as Irish as Barak Obama‘ by now, you may be deaf or live in a Trappist monastery.

The Corrigan Brothers: three cheeky black boys from North Tipperary

Now the incorrigible Corrigans have come up with a gem about the British MPs expenses rorts scandal.

Outrageous revelations of absurd expenses claims have been crashing, like a giant steel wrecking-ball through the collective credibility of Britain’s political establishment for several months.

There’s more to the MPs’ expenses  scandal than meets the eye. Lots more.

The ‘rorts’ that scandalized the nation are ridiculous in many cases and perfect fodder for the press. But they amount to chicken-feed compared with the billions spent on Britain’s bloated military expenditure and massive investment in the machinery of an Orwellian police state.

It would be an interesting exercise to scrutinize the expenses claims of 600+ executives in any large modern corporate for comparison. How about the expenses claims of News Corp executives, for example? Can we see them? How about expenses claims by members of the so-called ‘Intelligence Services’? Who’s watching out for rorts there? (Answer: that’s an ‘Official Secret’)

Whistle-blower Craig Murray: His campaign in the forthcoming Norwich North by-election has been invisible to BBC viewers

Of course, people expect higher standards from elected politicians, who are paid taxpayers’ money and expected to act in the public interest. On the same basis, how about a trawl through the BBC’s executives expenses claims? After all, they’re paid taxpayers’ money too – and expected to act in the public interest.

July 2009: record death toll for invading troops in an eight year war... who's counting Afghan casualties?

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear:
“A fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East”

- Excerpt from ‘Songs from Books‘
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Even though he’s a bumbling, arrogant, ridiculous humbug of a man, steering his political party towards doom and his nation to financial and moral perdition, Gordon Brown remains in power… just.

Brown is politically weak – and he gets by one long week at a time. Amazing really, that the British Labour caucus puts up with it.

Naively, one might think it’s even more amazing Brown isn’t the butt of a sustained mass media campaign to bring him down. Media magnate Rupert Murdoch for one knows very well how to do that. He did it to the Whitlam Government in Australia in the 1970s. In Britain, he vilified Labor in the late 1970s and 1980s – then dumped on the Tories in 1996 (once Labour was back in safe ‘New’ hands).

Gordon Brown: Hanging onto the keys to No 10 for now, courtesy of his puppetmasters

So why hasn’t this chronically unpopular Prime Minister already been run to ground, with the assistance of a media pack smelling blood?

Gordon must be doing something right. Presumably, he’s continuing to sell out British civil liberties and national interests at a faster rate than his opponents could be expected to match?

Tory Leader David Cameron has been groomed to say the right things about Israel and the current spate of Zionist-inspired wars – and most of the right things about civil liberties – so a relief team is waiting in the wings. But there’s nothing quite so useful as a deeply compromised Prime Minister who’s also politically on the nose. In the ‘Westminster system’. they are the easiest PMs of all to manipulate, for obvious reasons.

The Israeli Tourist Board is keen to get more Britons to visit the SLASOUPT (Shitty Little Apartheid State on Usurped Palestinian Territory).

It’s latest advertisement carries the rather modest slogan: “Few countries pack so much variety into such a small space as Israel!”

Fancy bird-watching in the Golan Heights? How about a fishing holiday in Gaza? Don't miss the all-inclusive tours of checkpoints and Palestinian refugee camps!

Users of the London Underground have been treated to these delightful ads in the form of large wall posters (presumably secure beneath the watchful eyes of CCTV cameras, strategically located to discourage paint-bomb attacks?)

But the advertisements may may not be up for long. Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority received a torrent of complaints and has upheld the principal  concern: the ad includes a map which, to put it bluntly, wipes Palestine completely off the map!

The boundaries of Gaza and the West Bank are marked, but with lines so delicate they’re almost invisible.The ad is therefore in breach of the Committee of Advertising Practice Code 7.1 , which comes under the quaintly old-fashioned heading of ‘Truthfulness”: “No marketing communication should mislead, or be likely to mislead, by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration, omission or otherwise.”

According to the BBC report Advert Implied Gaza in Israel:

Advertising Standards Authority: promotes honour among thieves

This post features one of my favourite quotations from World War One – and one of the best-known war poems of modern times.

The quotation is from John Viscount Morley’s Memorandum of Resignation from the cabinet of John Asquith in August 1914, at the outbreak of war.

John Morley - a real hero of the Great War

Morely resigned when it became clear a majority of the British cabinet supported the push, led by Foreign Minister Edward Grey, to declare war on Germany.

John Morley was one of the very few members of the cabinet who remained steadfast in opposing Britain’s entry into the war. This short extract from his  memorandum is eerily prescient:

“…What grounds for expecting that the ruinous waste and havoc of war would be repaid by peace on better terms than were already within reach of reason and persistent patience. When we counted our gains, what would they amount to, when reckoned against the ferocious hatred that would burn with inextinguishable fire, for a whole generation at least, between two great communities better fitted to understand one another than any other pair in Europe? This moral devastation is a worse incident of war even than human carnage, and all the other curses with which war lashes its victims and its dupes.”

In the 19th century, Persia was courted by two pushy suitors:  Czarist Russia and Imperial Britain. It was one of the key arenas where the so-called ‘Great Game’ for control of central Asia was ‘played’ by these two giant imperial powers. Eventually two ‘Areas of Influence’ were established, with Russia dominant in the north of the country, Britain to the south.

After World War One and the Russian Revolution, Britain became the supreme foreign power in Iran. This continued until after World War Two, when the ascendant USA took over as Iran’s chief  ‘ally’. In the late 1970s a popular revolt toppled the Shah and Iran’s Islamic Revolution ushered in the current era.

Dr Younes Parsa Benab: a left-wing historical perspective on Iran

For most of the 20th century, a secular left-wing was a significant force in Iranian politics. It was was not monolithic and had pro-Soviet and independent elements, like the left in most counties. It was recurrently suppressed by authoritarian Iranian regimes, acting with the support of Britain and America. After the Islamic Revolution, repression of the secular left did not come to an end.

Iran has been the plaything of domineering external interests for generations – and the determination of Iran’s current leadership to chart an independent course is not hard to understand. Those in the west with secular and ‘progressive’ aspirations for the Iranian people might do well to reflect on how those influences came to decline in the first place. The centuries-old western imperial remedy – yet more external manipulation – is no way to help this generation of Iranians.

Australians are frequently reminded of the deep gratitude we should feel to the USA, which ’saved’ us from Japan in World War Two. The American Alliance, we’re told, is the essential bedrock of our freedom…

USS Essex: a warship America can't afford pissing on a post it doesn't need to foul

Over the last few days, a US warship has been berthed in Cairns, less than 50 kilometres from where I sit. The USS Essex may be bearing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Longstanding US policy is to ‘neither confirm nor deny’ whether weapons of mass destruction are carried on its military vessels into friendly ports.

Raise any complaint about this, and before too long at least one Australian will venture the standard opinion that “if it wasn’t for the Americans, we’d all be speaking Japanese!” (They never seem to explain why, fond as Australians are of sophisticated Japanese technology and its tasty cuisine, we should consider speaking Japanese a fate literally worse than death.)

Actually, the comfortable official saga of how our genial American cousins preserved Australia from the dreaded “yellow peril” in the 1940s leaves out some rather significant elements of a very complex story. As a reaction against the conformist verities that stultify debate and fresh thinking about contemporary ‘Defense’ policy, here’s another view on Australia and World War Two. I’ll call it the ‘Neutral and Pro-Peace version of events’. I admit it’s selective too. I’ve just selected different facts from those emphasised incessantly in the mainstream narrative…

After being seduced by Zionist cash in the mid 1930s, the corrupted British politician Winston Churchill proceded to sell out British national interests – and the interests of people under British protection by Leaugue of Nations mandate – to his sponsors.

It’s true that Churchill had the most repulsive supremacist attitudes to most people in the Briitsh Empire. Even so, his bias towards the Zionist cause in Palestine – to the detriment of the indigenous Arab population – stands out like the proverbial ‘dogs balls’.

A scenario for partition suggested by the 1937 Peel Commission: were Zionist aspirations the real trigger for World War Two?

Here’s an extract from David Irving’s biography of Churchill (vol i) -Struggle for Power – about the 1937 Peel Commission into the future of Palestine. This was the inquiry that led to a House of Commons vote in March 1939, strongly opposed by Churchill, that put severe limits on further Jewish immigration to Palestine out of respect for majority opinion in the British Protectorate.

In the following comments, we hear a ‘bought-and-paid-for’ politician. In contemporary  vernacular, consider Churchill’s behaviour ‘cash for comments’ – or a quintessential MP’s ‘expenses scandal’: (emphasis added)

He (Winston Churchill) testified to the Peel Commission on March 12th, 1937. His startling proposal was that all Palestine be turned over to the Jews. He spoke of their right to immigrate and Britain’s ‘good faith’ toward them.

By the 1930s, it seemed the long political career of Winston Churchill was all but over.

He was a man out of time – an old imperial War Horse in an era when the patience of the British people for war-mongering was wearing thin. While Winston fulminated against Indian independence and beat the old imperial drum for more military spending, the world seemed to be moving on.

Winston Churchill: catspaw for Zionist interests?

The Great War of 1914-18 had bled the British people dry. Gandhi’s non-violent campaign for Indian independence was earning widespread respect. The peace movement was on the ascendant, having won support from some of the country’s finest intellects such as Aldous Huxley. Many hoped the age of British militarism was drawing to a close – and a slow, dignified decolonisation process lay ahead. In that scenario, Britain would remain a prosperous, productive and uniquely well-connected society – but a nation at peace.

Yet by May 1940, Britain was again at war and Churchill was Prime Minister. Rejecting German peace overtures, he immediately committed the British Empire to a ‘no holds barred’ fight-to-the-death: total war with the Axis powers. Eventually, after forging alliances with the USA and Soviet Union, Churchill led an exhausted, bankrupt nation to ‘victory’ five years later.

Winston Churchill suffered decisive electoral defeat in the 1945 post-war general election, then returned to power in 1951 for an undistinguished finale as Prime Minister.