Political Assassinations and Secret History

Auntie's recent series about Mrs T was as usual interesting as much for what it left out as for what it included. The convoluted but essential history of the Labour Party's vicissitudes in the 1980s was almost entirely neglected. The Falklands and the Belgrano were skated over briefly and the yomp to Port Stanley was barely mentioned. But most intriguing, given that the Brighton bomb was covered in some detail, was the absence of any assassinations.

Airey Neave in fact got several mentions from the time when he was Mrs Thatcher's campaign manager. But his assassination by the INLA was entirely ignored. And Ian Gow, who was similarly assassinated by the Provisional IRA, didn't so much as see the light of day.

On the one hand yes there's the BBC's commitment to the "peace" process. Mention Fenian violence and you'll get complaints. And on top of that there's Auntie's perennial implicit anti-Catholic bias, which in the case of Neave and Gow works in a particularly interesting way. Because Neave and Gow were almost certainly targeted specifically because they were "Catholics" (or rather, in Gow's case, an "Anglo-Catholic"). So even less reason than usual to mention them? Possibly!

But what about the Beeb's similarly perennial anti-Right bias? It may seem odd to complain about that Tory favourite old chestnut when considering a series that was for the most part admirably objective and even-handed. But one can't escape a lingering uneasy feeling that they wouldn't have wanted to make Neave and Gow into martyrs. Partly this will be because they wouldn't want people to know how right-wing they really were. The Far Left have always wanted people to think Mrs T was on the Right of the Party, when in reality she was always in its liberal pro-abortion, pro-gay, anti-Rhodesia and anti-Apartheid "centre". And the libertarians conversely now want to claim her as one of their own. Either way, remind people that an Ulster integrationist and a pro-Rhodesian anti-abolitionist were amongst the Lady's closest political allies and you'll get more than just complaints.

Somewhere in the middle though is of course just good old-fashioned squeamishness about the role of political violence in a liberal democratic order. Neave and Gow were murdered for political reasons and, however unpalatable the truth may be, yes, political murders can work. Mrs T's career could have been quite different if Neave had lived. And Gow's death helped to isolate her in the Cabinet as her enemies within her own party plotted her downfall. It just shouldn't be surprising that a "liberal" Establishment doesn't like to imagine that even as recently as the 1980s we still lived in that sort of world.

Who are Bellingcat?

Or rather, and more to the point, what are they for?

The big argument (and in a sense it's their argument) for Bellingcat's activities, nay the organisation's very existence, is that they can do things that the state's intelligence services can't.

Whatever that means, frankly I'm calling bullshit. State intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic break the law almost routinely (or in our case try to find ways of getting around it). And obviously the state has resources available to it (especially money) that the dear old private sector can only ever dream of.

The only resource that the state's intelligence services currently lack - and they have done for fifteen years or so - is public trust. Blair's politicization of the UK civil service and the collective failure of the US "intelligence community" to stop 9/11, closely followed by the debacle over Iraq's WMDs (not to mention the joint decision by Blair's top spin-doctor and the BBC's even more sinister agents to hound a UN weapons inspector into an early grave), all served to damage ordinary people's image of the once proud guardians of freedom and democracy. And yes, the conspiracy to try and stop Trump, which included elements from within both the American "Deep State" and the British Establishment only served to deepen that tarnishing when (a) it failed and (b) it was also quite brutally exposed

So, with James Bond and George Smiley (not to mention Jack Ryan, Jack Bauer, and even Mulder and Scully) all on the naughty step, who was going to help when politicians in Pennsylvania Avenue or Downing Street need their smoking guns? Where are we to turn when we need an authoritative voice to denounce our enemies overseas - and by enemies I mean New Cold War foes (i.e. what remains of the "Axis of Evil", plus Russia)? The answer of course is those cool techy-type hipster kids with their laptops who know how to code. I mean, who doesn't trust hipsters? Am I right? Especially if they're funded by George Soros! And if they leaven their anti-Assad and anti-Putin stuff with the occasional shocking revelation about the US military, well that's even better.* 

So it should come as no surprise that besides Uncle George they're also funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (i.e. with money from the American government - i.e. the White House and Congress, just in case there's any doubt about what people even mean anymore when they refer to that famously nebulous entity).

And of course as well as the authority of political "independence", the Establishment also get deniability when the cool kids fuck up. I don't know whether Peter Hitchens's "leak" from the OPCW about problems with their report about the Douma gas attack was for real or not. (My basic feeling is that in these international organisations there'll always be enough people on all sides for someone to be able to cough up a minority report about pretty much anything. You can't fool all the people all the time, but by the same token there are some people who really are just fools. And without getting into Hillary-type conspiracy theories one should always be alert for the smell of Russian bullshit as well as our own.) But we'll see. At least this time they'll be able to spread the egg over a couple more faces.

And of course they'll be able to blame Trump.

*That old vendetta between Langley and the Pentagon is never going to blow over.