As NuLabour Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown tries to divert media attention from the by-election defeat on his own doorstep in Dunfermlline and Fife, his media spin machine has managed to plant a leak of some of the contents of a speech which he is due to give on Monday.
The BBC and The Guardian "berliner", The Independent and The Sun and The Mirror tabloids, report, in almost identical words, presumably simply "cut & pasted" from the Treasury press briefing, without troubling their readers with any sort of any proper analysis or background details:
"As Chancellor, I have found increasingly that an important part of the role of a finance minister is to address issues of international terrorism," Mr Brown will say."And I have discovered that this requires an international operation using modern methods of forensic accounting as imaginative and path-breaking for our times as the Enigma code breakers at Bletchley Park achieved more than half a century ago," the speech will say.
The Treasury spokesman said that "Gordon Brown believes we must now create a specialist centre where Britain's best financial experts can work on identifying, tracking and breaking down terrorist financial networks."
Is Gordon Brown planning to snoop even more heavily on the finacial transactions of the British public ? Is he also planning to attack the privacy and security of the world's financial networks ?
We have some obvious questions which the professional journalists do not seem to have bothered to ask.
WIll anybody in the audience at the United Services Institute dare to ask them on Monday, or will they be bundled out of the room and held under the Terrorism Act, for heckling ?
Gordon Brown was trying to raise his public profile back in a similar way last May 2005: "Gordon Brown tries to be "seen to be be doing something" about seizing terrorists financial assets"
The BBC News 24, and The Guardian have half mentioned a figure of £80 million has having been seized ?
Since 9/11, the UK has frozen £80m in terrorist assets, including money in more than 100 organisations linked to al-Qaida.
This utterly contradicts the Parliamentary Written Answer just before the General Election last year:
22 Mar 2005 : Column 713W--continuedTerrorist Assets
Dr. Vis: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how much money suspected of being linked to terrorist assets (a) worldwide and (b) in the United Kingdom has been frozen since 11 September 2001. [223023]
Mr. Timms: Since 11 September 2001, 44 accounts totalling some £347,000 have been frozen in the UK. In total, 45 accounts, totalling some £378,000 are currently frozen by UK financial institutions. There is no global figure of the total assets frozen--monitoring frozen funds is a matter for individual jurisdictions.
All organisations and individuals whose assets have been frozen in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolutions, associated EC Regulations and domestic legislation are listed, by HM Treasury instruction, on the Bank of England's Financial Sanctions website. Asset freezing is an essential measure in countering the financing of terrorism by denying terrorists and their financiers access to funds across the world. Taking action not only freezes any funds in the UK but also creates a hostile environment to deter terrorists from using the UK's financial system in future.
tiny in terms of even local sweetshop crime, let alone global terror networks or serious organised crime. Much of this figure could have been as a result of actual arrests and searches of homes and offices, rather than Gordon Brown's financial anti-money laundering and terrorist finance red-tape.
Even the claimed £80 million figure is tiny compared with the alleged scale of Serious Organised Crime in the UK (which the Government spin doctors cannot decide if it is about £20 billion or £40 billion a year) let alone the daily financial flows through the City of London.
It is noticable, that the new Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), due to start operations on the 1st April 2006, has not amalgamated the financial expertise available to the the Serious Fraud Office under its "intelligence led policing" umbrella.
All these futile efforts have done is to create very costly, "Know Your Customer" money laundering regulations and bureaucratic red-tape reporting procedures, imposed by Gordon Brown's Treasury, on millions of innocent bank and building society customers.
Where has this figure of "£80 million" figure come from ?
Are we seriously meant to believe that between Septemebr 11th 2001 and March 2005, virtuually no terrorist assests were seized, but since then a £80 million has magically been seized ?
If this is not so, the then Treasury Minister Stephen Timms must either apologise for misleading Parliament or he must resign as an MP and junior Minister at the Department for Work and Pensions.
"£80 million" far exceeds the total amount of assests seized by the Assets Recovery Agency, which mostly seizes drug smuggling gangs assets, controversially without people actually having been convicted in a court. According to their annual report (.pdf) they have only seized less than £17 million for all crimes, in the last year, which hardly covers the running cost of the Assets Recovery Agency itself.
The largest "terrorist related" seizures have been of Northern Irish terrorist assets (less than £4 million) and nothing to do with Al Quaeda.
The words "Bletchley Park" (now a museum) have a sinister significance.
Presumably, these words must have been have been carefully chosen, in front of an audience as well versed in British Military History as the the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies
This audience will no doubt be aware of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) the (West) German intelligence agency which was alleged to have targeted a major intelligence gathering operation (Operation Rahab), specifically against the world's financial bank transfer system, including the Belgium based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network.
What else can a reference to "Bletchley Park" mean, other than that Gordon Brown intends to further increase the snooping and surveillance of British and International financial transactions, through voluntary and invioluntary disclosures ?
Surely, in order to track down the small amounts of money used by terrorists, Gordon Brown, must be planning to fund an unprecedented level of snooping on the financial transactions of millions of innocent people ?
Where are the realistic safeguards against the abuse of such a powerful system ?
This just demonstrates that politicians can use fear of terrorism to justify virtually any kind of activity.
To see things for what they really are you need to ask yourself the following questions:
How many UK citizens lives are lost or directly impacted by acts of terrorism every year?
What percentage of annual UK GDP is lost as a direct consequence of acts of terrorism?
How much public money is spent annually on dealing with the consequences of terrorist acts, such as NHS costs of treating casualties and so on?
These sorts of questions should be put directly to politicians, because I think the answers would be very revealing. Is the amount of money being spent to set up systems such as ID cards or financial analysis departments in any way proportionate to the actual risk from terrorism?
i as a cannabis activist have come up against this shower do you have any idea how i can get my house back after illegal repossession a 5 year investigation and the final outrage of haveing my tax credits stopped dead as well as accusations unsubstantiated of narcotics dealing.