What a grim and depressing election campaign this has been, full of smears, spin, obfuscation, sinister euphemisms and outright lies. None of the leading politicians, especially not the Conservatives, have been able to deal with the reality of the jihadi Islamist terror threat or even what is actually behind all of them.
Three times in the space of a few months in 2017, Britain has been targeted, twice in during an election campaign. The previous Westminster Attack was carried out by Khalid Massood, a low life drifter who's only real possible connection to jihadism might have been connected to the 5 years he spent teaching English in Saudi Arabia.
None of the national newspapers or media outlets even mentioned this or asked questions about what he might have been doing there. In fact, within a few days it was airily asserted, once the usual flower laying and vigil had taken place that 'we may never know what motivated him to commit the attack'. It was 'time to move on'.
From South Manchester to Libya and Blowback.
The suicide bomb attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester was carried out by Salman Abedi, the son of a long term jihadist with a prominent position in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Force from the 1990s onwards. He had an IS flag hanging out of his window, was reported to the authorities and yet nothing was done.
The LIFG was part of the rebel militias ranged against Colonel Gaddafi in 2011 and were regarded then as assets that could be deployed against him. MI5 and MI6 were reported to have actively recruited British Libyans to fight or else to remove the control orders of those known to be involved in jihadi Islamist causes.
The aim of this could have been to transform domestic threats into useful fighters as well as to gain inside information as to what was happening in Libya. The assumption would have been that Britain aligning with the Islamist militias and creating a new post-Gaddafi democracy would mollify jihadism as a potent force.
By 2011, the 'global war on terror' had been officially dropped by Foreign secretary David Miliband. Collusion with dictatorships to 'render' jihadists across battlefield earth was out and it had been decided the Western Powers ought to align with their Gulf State partners, especially Qatar during the Arab Spring, to advance 'democracy promotion'.
The problem with that was it meant the danger of jihadists, empowered by the Western and Gulf States, hijacking the revolutions against decrepit secular-nationalist dictatorships and trying to enforce their own dogmatic and distinctly unpluralistic vision of an Islamic State on each of the lands where they were a presence.
This was very much the case with Libya. While British based Libyan Islamists would have been glad of the assistance PM Cameron gave the rebels, they regarded them and the Gulf States as 'useful idiots' whose power they could use to destroy the Near Enemy first only then to turn their focus of attack on others and then the Far Enemy.
The Manchester Attack was clearly blowback from the Libya War as it created a huge pool of jihadists within the ungoverned space of a failed state. Salman Abedi would have had connections to them and perhaps even to Islamic State. The London Bridge Attack was less connected directly to IS, the first was a pretext to launch a second.
The Connection to Saudi Islamist Ideology and Terror Funding.
May claimed both attacks showed 'one evil ideology' at work even if both the Manchester and London Bridge Attacks weren't linked. In a sense, this is true but the big lie requires that this ideology is not connected to the projection of power of Saudi Arabia, not least the huge oil wealth and acquiescence it buys from the British elites.
Boris Johnson accused Corbyn of 'siding with Britain's enemies' as a distraction card from having to deal with the central and most disturbing fact that has come out of the campaign-that Theresa May is trying to suppress a report into Saudi funding of intolerant Wahhabi and Salafi Islamism in Britain's mosques.
Rudd is lying when she claims it is an internal report. It was one agreed to as a concession from Cameron for the Liberal Democrats agreeing to voting for the use of air power against ISIS. Rudd is a repellent functionary who is ruthless in trying to conceal the scale of Saudi backing for jihadi terrorist groups and ideology.
Corbyn was right to raise the report on the Saudi and to demand it is published. If the supposed all of Britain is complicit in funding the very threat Britain claims it is fighting at home and abroad, this would call into question the validity of May's claim before Easter in Riyadh that the alliance helps 'keep us safe'.
It's known that Saudi Arabia supported Sunni militias and jihadist organisations in Syria, including Al Qaeda affiliated ones. Many of these which were armed and trained to fight Assad then broke off to go and form IS which carved out the Caliphate and spread later into Libya after Gaddafi's state was destroyed.
Qatar was also instrumental in bankrolling jihadists in Syria but also in Libya, including the rebel militias that the Manchester suicide bomber's father belonged to. So not only is there a need to publish the Saudi funding report. There is also the need to have, as Patrick Cockburn has well argued, a public enquiry into the Libya War.
Whatever faults Corbyn has demonstrated in the past are more than offset by the Conservative Party's appeasement of violent radical Islamism. It's a pity Corbyn repeats the mealy mouthed word 'extremism' in line with the Tories instead of calling it Wahhabism or jihadi Salafism as this is the proper term for it.
The power of the national security state and its cynical and lethal power games needs to be held to account and urgently. It would appear political agenda and risky geopolitical strategies supported by Britain on behalf of the Gulf States have taken priority over the domestic security of the British public.
The Growth of a Corrupt National Security State.
Corruption and bribes paid with British taxpayer's money, information on which was suppressed in 2009 when the SFO investigation was sabotaged by both the Brown government and establishment insiders, have their place in oiling the British-Saudi alliance. But it is also interconnected with geopolitical strategies.
Much of BAE's production capacity is melded with the US military industrial complex. This is a consequence of the alliance underpins the US-British 'special relationship' with each other as well as Saudi Arabia's oil wealth in funding their armaments sector and so Britain's auxiliary status as Global Player.
The danger is that as Trump in the US moves towards authoritarianism, that Britain under Brexit could shift towards this model of a more authoritarian national security state with a pliant media, widespread censorship and ubiquitous surveillance over all citizens and its rigged semi-democratic component.
Rudd is acting like an aggressive functionary of a gimcrack authoritarian regime, with her phoney outrage over Corbyn even meekly connecting domestic terrorism with foreign policy, her censorious impulses and choreographed smearing of 'enemies within'. Corbyn is not without faults but Rudd is overtly sinister by comparison.
Unfortunately for Corbyn, he was associated with certain hard left functionaries himself in the StWC , such as Andrew Murray who defended the North Korean regime and lauded Stalin simply because he was 'anti-imperialist'. He tends to get judged by the company he has kept when he was on the streets as extra-Parliamentary rebel
Even so, the Tories are too lazy to argue effectively on that. Boris Johnson claimed Corbyn 'sided with Britain's enemies' but he has never sided with Assad or Saddam or Gaddafi unless being against wars against them is considered the very same as being an enemy of Britain or the British state and so of 'the people'.
The Tories historically have been ranged against the idea of authoritarian dictatorship within Britain, if not always against them abroad during the 1930s or during the Cold war . But the Saudi 'special relationship', the terror threat it breeds ( 'terror breeds terror' indeed ) is creating a corrupt unaccountable national security state.
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