The Blair Impeachment Project: Time for action at long last

My latest piece for RT.com

With just over six weeks to go before the long-awaited release of the Chilcot report into the Iraq War the calls for former Prime Minister Tony Blair to be properly held to account for the lies he told us in the lead up to the illegal invasion are increasing by the day.

A few days ago, the foreign affairs spokesperson for the Scottish National Party (SNP) Alex Salmond MP, told RT’s Going Underground program that he would like to see Blair impeached by the British Parliament and also stand trial at the International Criminal Court, if the families of those killed and the wider public agreed.

Other MPs have also expressed their support for Salmond’s initiative....

You can read the whole piece here.

We'd Be Doomed! Project Fear Campaign to Keep UK in EU Goes Into Overdrive

 

 

My latest piece on the EU Referendum for Sputnik News....

One the highlights of the television week in the UK is watching Saturday night repeats of the much-loved 1970s comedy show 'Dad's Army'. The classic sitcom - which even outperformed BBC2's much-hyped live Shakespeare "special" featuring Prince Charles - tells the story of a brave, but rather incompetent Home Guard platoon in World War Two.

All the characters are quite wonderful and very-very funny, but a particular favorite of mine is the gloomy undertaker Private Frazer — who's always forecasting doom and disaster. Recently, I've been wondering if Frazer has secretly been put in charge of the Remain campaign, because some of the claims are pure Dad's Army.

You can read the piece in full here.

Architects of disastrous Iraq war are still at large

My latest piece for RT.com

Bombs going off in Iraq? Well, it happens all the time - what's there to see? Let’s all move along shall we?

On Thursday, at least 13 people were killed in a ISIS attack on a café in Baghdad for the 'crime' of watching a football match. The day before at least 88 people were killed in three explosions across Baghdad; scores were injured. 
Yes, these events got some coverage on Western news channels, but they weren’t the main stories.
The neocon war lobby, who, remember, couldn’t stop talking about Iraq in 2002/3, and telling what a terrible threat the country’s WMDs posed to us, would of course like us to forget the country all together now. They’ve told us lots of times we need to ‘move on’ from talking about the 2003 invasion and instead focus on more important things - like how we can topple a secular Syrian president who’s fighting the very same terrorists who are bombing Baghdad.

The next few months though are going to very tricky for the ‘Don’t Mention the Iraq war’ clique...

You can read the whole article here

V-Day - Ignore the neocons and remember the 27m dead

My new piece for RT.com to commemorate Victory Day.

May 9 is Victory Day – the day that Russia commemorates the tremendous sacrifice made by the people of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War.

Many nationalities took part in the fight against the Nazis, but no single country shed anywhere near as much blood as the Soviet Union. Overall, 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in the war. Yes, that’s right: TWENTY-SEVEN MILLION. There’s no typo.
Yet today, for geopolitical reasons, the enormous contribution that the Soviet Union made to the defeat of Hitler’s forces is being deliberately – and shamefully – downplayed by elites in the west...

You can read the whole piece here.

The Sarmada bombing & the selective outrage of Philip Hammond

 My latest article for RT.com- on the double standards of UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond didn’t take long to pin the blame on Thursday’s bombing of a refugee camp near the Turkish border in Syria on President Assad - even though there was no evidence that Syrian air forces were responsible.

"The Assad regime’s contempt for efforts to restore the cessation of hostilities in Syria is clear for all to see," the neocon declared in a bellicose statement.
Not only did Hammond blame the Syrian government for a ’horrifying’ attack, which the government has denied (and which could have been carried out by Al-Nusra Front), he also took a swipe at ’the regime’ for - wait for it - holding a classical music concert in the ruins of Palmyra - the historic city which was liberated from ISIS by Russian and Syrian forces in March.

You can read the whole article here.

The Panama Papers and Privatisation

My new Public Ownership column for the Morning Star- on the link between the Panama Papers and privatisation.

IT ALL began in 1979. That was the year when privatisation was launched in Britain (back then it was called “denationalisation”) and exchange controls were lifted.
On October 23, Thatcher’s chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Geoffrey Howe stood up in Parliament and announced the abolition of all existing exchange controls — except those applying to Zimbabwe.
The controls which Howe was abolishing had existed for 40 years — and, like public ownership, were an integral part of the social democratic economic system which existed after WWII. But for the Thatcherites they were an unwelcome restriction which prevented the rich from becoming even richer.

You can read the whole column here