A MOMENTOUS
VICTORY FOR A FREE PRESS
WITH A GREAT NEWSPAPER
VINDICATED AFTER 28 YEARS-BY
EMERGENCE OF THE TRUTH IN 2006 ABOUT CORRUPT BUSINESSMEN AND POLITICIANS IN
1977
EVEN TODAY SOME OF THE MAIN
PLAYERS WHO PUT THE FREE PRESS IN THE DOCK ARE STILL JUSTIFYING THE LIES WHICH
UNJUSTLY BRANDED A LEADING NEWSPAPER THE PROMOTER OF UNTRUTHS WHEREAS EVEN THEN
IN 1977 THE EVIDENCE OF THE TRUTH OF THEIR ALLEGATIONS WAS THERE FOR ALL TO
SEE.
WHY BRITAIN
NEEDS A FREE PRESS AND POLITICIANS WILL ALWAYS TRY TO SUPPRESS IT.
Daily Mail
Wednesday, January 25 -2006
by
Geoffrey Levy
*
THIS IS A STORYOF POLITICAL
MENDACITY VERSUS A FREE AND COURAGEOUS PRESS
A story that almost brought
about the downfall of the greatest editor of his day, damaged lives, and saw
the Daily Mail being dragged into the High Court to pay out huge sums in
personal damages.
In May, 1977, the
Daily Mail claimed that the great manufacturer British Leyland was
‘paying bribes and
conspiring to defraud
foreign governments’
on a massive scale
in a desperate effect to obtain orders. The company had just been nationalised,
was heavily subsidised and so strike-prone that taxpayers’ money was pouring
away in torrents.
These days, when we
are more inured in scandal, it’s almost impossible to comprehend the sensation
the story provoked.
But almost
immediately the allegations were denied and the
GREAT EXCLUSIVE
became a bigger story as a scandal, which,
for almost three decades, has stained the reputation of this newspaper [Daily
Mail].
Yesterday!
[Tuesday, January 24-2006]
- we learned for the first
time that not only was the story true, but politicians who knew it to be true
effectively covered it up.
Indeed, Labour’s
then Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, who knew exactly what was going on, seized
the occasion to ferociously attack this newspaper for
‘ a display of political spite’.
What a pity that Sir David English, the Mail’s editor at the time, and
Jim Callaghan are no longer alive.
For the Mail there is a
belated vindication; for Callaghan, harsh exposure of the kind of lies we have,
regrettably, come to take for granted from politicians, but which in those days
seemed to be rarer.
But for the
inquisitive eye of researcher
Nick Gilby
Combing through arms sales at the Public
Record Office at Kew, the truth would have remained hidden. Gilby, who works part-time for the campaign
Against the Arms Trade, was examining a fat Ministry of Defence file when he
spotted documents relating to the Leyland Affair.
When he started to
read them he realised he had stumbled across evidence of Leyland’s
‘slush fund’
-that the Labour
Government, and British Leyland, had successfully concealed.
Ministers knew the TRUTH;
Leyland Executives knew the
TRUTH
And
yet NO ONE had the INTEGRITY to back up the Mail’s story, not when David
English wrote a FULL PAGE apology to readers and offered his resignation to
Lord Rothermere. (it was refused), not when the paper was being wheeled into
Court to agree huge damages, and NOT-more pertinently on the grounds that the
public was entitled to know the TRUTH.
THE MAIL, it must be said, did not get everything
right. In the original story the paper
published as genuine a letter allegedly written by Lord Ryder, Chairman of the
Government sponsored National Enterprise Board, to Alex Park, Leyland’s Chief
Executive. It referred to a ‘Special
Account Arrangement’ that had been ‘nodded through’ by the Secretary of State -
the ‘slush fund’.
The letter was handed to the Mail by a high-flying Leyland
executive Graham Barton, who was troubled by the corrupting bribery he knew was
being used by the State-funded car manufacturer to get orders. He was paid £15,000.
BUT the letter turned out to be a forgery, foolishly
written by Burton as the best method he could conceive of to make his point - a
classic case of over-egging the pudding, particularly as Burton had other
documents, which were genuine.
The sequence of
events is crucial to this tale of political deceit. Two days after the initial story, on Saturday May 21, the Mail
headlined its front page. -
‘Ryder forger confesses’
It quoted David
English as saying:
‘I wish to apologise
unreservedly to Lord Ryder, Mr Eric Varley (Secretary of State for Industry)
and Mr Alex Park. I deeply regret that the Daily Mail was misled into
publishing a forgery in the course of its investigating.’
Interviewed on television,
[David] English normally crisp and ebullient, looked and sounded like an almost
broken man. Opprobrium cascaded on him
and vultures wheeled in the sky, among them 100 MPs who signed a letter calling
for his resignation.
The following day, Sunday,
May 22, ‘Sunny’ Jim Callaghan, who had taken over as Prime Minister the
previous year from Harold Wilson, assembled senior Cabinet Ministers at
Chequers for lunch.
After they had eaten, he
chaired a special, secret meeting.
Among those present were the
Chancellor of the Exchequer
Dennis Healey
Energy Secretary
Tony Benn
Industry Secretary
Eric Varley
There was ONLY ONE
ITEM on the AGENDA.
THE BRITISH
LEYLAND AFFAIR.
In view of the
mail’s abject apology the previous day, you might have thought such a meeting
singularly unnecessary. But after Mr Varley opened the meeting by handing the
Prime Minister andInterim Report’ on the Leyland Affair, it became clear
- very clear - just why this meeting had been called in haste.
THE REASON WAS
THAT, despite the Lord Ryder letter being a forgery, there was still anxiety at
the heart of the British Government because of the thrust of the Mail’s
revelations was
TRUE.
Minutes of the Meeting
stamped SECRET
And unseen until
discovered by
Nick Gilby at Kew
-have Industry
Secretary - Eric Varley admitting:
‘About 10 per cent of our
trade…probably involved some type of practices which we would normally consider
improper in this country’.
[A complete vindication of
the thrust of the Daily Mail’s
Investigation]
THE MEETING
continued:
The Management of
British Leyland International had ‘tried to make arrangements for various types
of payments to ensure that they were neither contravening Bank of England
regulations nor breaking United Kingdom law…some of the sums of money which had
been paid were no more than normal commission; others would require further
investigation.
He [Eric Varley] added that
the problem was ‘part of a wider question and that it did not just involve
British Leyland’.
Dennis Healey did
not mince his words, saying there was
‘no doubt that bribery had been going on for years on a large
scale in the Middle East and Africa and that organisations responsible to
Government (including defence sales and nationalised industries) have been
involved.’
Prime Minister
Callaghan concurred, adding that it involved ‘Defence Sales and nationalised
industries’.
He had no doubt the
best course was to hush the matter up, explaining:
‘Given the heavy reliance of
the British economy on exports, it might be more difficult for us to accept as
high standards in this matter as, for instance, the Americans.’
But [Jim]
Callaghan wasn’t frequently referred to as ‘Slippery Jim’ for
nothing. And the minutes of the MEETING record that he thought it would be
important to implicate the Conservatives. For his part, the Tories’ James
Prior, according to Callaghan, had promised he would play the matter down,’ even
having a word about it with Mrs Thatcher, at that time the party’s new leader.
Meanwhile, a
private report was prepared for Ministers’ eyes ONLY - by Lord Ryder. It showed that -just as the Mail had said -
British Leyland had been secretly operating a ‘slush fund’, offshore in
Lausanne, Switzerland
*
[This reminds us
today in 2006 when the alleged ‘slush fund’ for ‘facility payments’ to
all signatories of all the EU treaties since 1972 which included the recent New
EU Constitution for a United States of Europe with its 25 member states who
received their pay-offs which we understand to be connected to an account held
by Credit Suisse in Zurich
Switzerland
labelled the ‘SBC’
Charcol Account, held a total of some
$470 BILLION
$470 BILLION
( just in case you
did not see it the first time)
-when last reviewed by sources. These funds, which were originally derived
from
NAZI FUNDS AND
ASSETS,
are routinely used
to pay top politicians and officials to sign successive European [EU] COLLECTIVE
treaties- the latest top up being the so-called
European Constitution
According to:
The International
Currency Review
www.worldreports.org
www.c/story@worldreports.org
Tony Blair allegedly
received $75 million, which was passed into an offshore bank account held in
Belize, the former British Honduras.
There, official eyebrows were naturally raised at the Central bank of
Belize, where we [ICR] notice
that all of a sudden, the official reserves of foreign exchange jumped from
$49.72 million in February 2005, to £164.53 million in March.
Since the
corrupt payment ‘due’ at the completion of the IGC will be remitted in or about
July 2004, this may suggest that the funds have subsequently (in March 2005)
been taken into the foreign exchange reserves of the local Central Bank, so
that their actual ownership can be disguised, a ‘new form’ of money-laundering:
through a Central Bank!
[More details on EDP
bulletin board]
*
But to continue:
Its clandestine pay-offs amounted to £4.2 million - around
£20 million today. Many of these payments had opened the doors to deals for
Land Rovers and Buses in Iran, Iraq, other Middle East countries and Nigeria.
When Leyland sold a fleet of specially-equipped Land
Rovers to Saudi Arabian National Guard, the inflated £5 million bill included a
special £700,000 (15 per cent) ‘commission’, paid through the offshore account,
to a ‘Mr N. Fustok’ at the Chase Manhattan Bank.
The secret files disclose that Mr Fustok was the
brother-in-law of Prince Abdul Aziz commander of the National Guard. It proves how right the Daily Mail was to
talk of the bribery’ defrauding foreign governments’.
Lord Ryder, of course, was
implicated in all this.
Not that anyone accepted this at the time
and, indeed, when he died in 2003 his obituaries mentioned false allegations
for which he successfully sued the
Daily Mail.
Leyland was an
obsession with him. As Enterprise Board Chairman he was determined to
re-establish it as a world leader and poured resources into it. He was in the habit of visiting its car
factories and personally urging the workforce to greater efforts. Against such
a backcloth, it was just a short step to pushing international sales with
bribery.
But who would accept the
Mail’s word after the ghastly error of the forged letter?
Little surprise
that Ryder was successful in his lawsuit against the paper and its editor David
English, walking away with some £40,000 damages (worth £200,000 today) in an
out-of-court settlement that now appears as undeserved as Jeffrey Archer’s
£500,000 libel damages when he convinced a jury he hadn’t slept with prostitute
Monica Coghlan.
SO WHAT HAPPENED TO
THE OTHERS IN THIS SQUALID SAGA?
Barton’s reward as
a successful man who had acted purely out of public spiritedness and disgust at
what was going on at British Leyland was to be charged with forgery.
NOWADAYS, despite
his over-enthusiasm for his cause, he would probably be hailed a folk hero. But
those were different times, and he was jailed for two years, although his
allegations have now been
UTTERLY
VINDICATED
Others in the
story, like
Lord Ryder
emerged somewhat
richer from the episode, their reputations intact.
Eric Varley now (Lord) Varley,
the Industry Secretary, who now lives comfortably in Chesterfield, his
old constituency and attends the House of Lords, was also awarded damages
against the mail in the High Court, after he and his family were said by his
counsel to have suffered ‘distress’ over the Mail’s allegations.
‘Very substantial’ damages
went to Alex Park, Leyland’s chief executive, and David Andrews,
the company’s executive Vice-Chairman.
*
Stewart Stephen
Who masterminded the Investigation, was suspended
for three month’s and his Fleet Street standing seriously damaged to the point
of being mocked by rivals
[we don’t have to mention them as they are often making the
same mistakes today]
He [Stewart Stephen] was, however, later to edit
THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
-but he had heart problems and his health was never robust.
He died two years ago aged 68
The reputations of the reporters involved were also
dreadfully undermined. They soldiered on, but they were embittered by what they
knew to be the INJUSTICE of it. One of
them became an alcoholic and died in his 40s.
Alex Park,
now 79, was in
abrasive mood when the Mail called on him at his home in Purley, Surrey,
yesterday.
‘have you come
to give me some money?’
he jeered.
‘If it had been
up to me David English would have got the sack.’
No sign of an
apology there, then.
Lord (Dennis)
Healey.
Who lives in comfortable retirement, muttered,
‘Oh all that
stuff’ when the Leyland Affair was mentioned to him.
‘Why had the
Mail been allowed to take such concentrated fire when he and his colleagues
knew the story was fundamentally true?
‘It would have
done more harm than good to tell the TRUTH, was his response.
‘OK?’
Frank enough,
certainly, but 29 years too late, and NO, it’s not OK - it stinks.
More
pertinently, it is potent proof of
WHY
WE NEED A FREE PRESS IN THIS COUNTRY
-and the lengths
politicians will go to suppress that
FREE PRESS.
*
[Font
altered-bolding & underlining used-comments in brackets]
* * *
January 25 -2006
*
|
THE PEOPLE
HAVE SPOKEN-IS THE EU COMMISSION LISTENING?
*
Ditch the EU TREATY after
IRISH REJECTION
SAY
VOTERS
by
Daniel
Martin
Political
Reporter
[Daily Mail-Wednesday, June
18,2008]
MORE THAN HALF of voters believe Britain
should drop the controversial European Treaty in the wake of
its rejection in last week's
IRISH REFERENDUM'
The poll comes as the Tories launch a
last-ditch bid in the
HOUSE of LORDS
today to delay the
RATIFICATION
OF THE TREATY.
And
10,000 people
have signed a
PETITION
on the
DOWNING
STREET- WEBSITE
within the past few days
JUNE16-2008
, calling on the
GOVERNMENT
NOT TO RATIFY THE BILL
[WHY DON'T
YOU?]
Downing Street
website is
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Abandon-Lisbon/
*
JUNE 18-2008
|
*
*
13th October,2007
So You Want Out Of The EU
THEN WHY NOT SIGN THE
RENUNCIATION of EU CITIZENSHIP
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Optout
Details from petition creator
With the signing of the Maastricht Treaty the
people of Britain were given
DUAL CITIZENSHIP
-both
EUROPEAN and BRITISH
The extra tier of citizenship was thrust upon
the people without their consent -and in many cases knowledge.
The PEOPLE of GREAT BRITAIN should be allowed
the option of opting out of the EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP if they so wish. The
GOVERNMENT will then be able to provide those who have opted out with
BRITISH DOCUMENTATION
-only such as British (not EU) passports,
driving licences and other national documents.
EU laws will also NOT APPLY to those who
HAVE OPTED OUT OF EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP
[PETITION OPEN UNTIL OCTOBER
08]
*
www.noliberties.com
[Latest Addition - June07]
*
www.eutruth.org.uk
*
www.thewestminsternews.co.uk
*
www.speakout.co.uk
*
Daniel Hannan - Forming an OPPOSITION
to the EU
www.telegraph.co.uk.blogs
*
PETITION
FOR A
REFERENDUM
SIGN TODAY ON LINE
telegraph.co.uk/eureferendum
*
July 18-2007
VOTE
-2007
TO
LEAVE
THE
EUROPEAN
UNION
WITH THE ONLY PARTY WITH A MANDATE
TO SET YOU
FREE
THE
UK
INDEPENDENCE PARTY
www.ukip.org
TO RECLAIM YOUR DEMOCRACY DON'T VOTE
FOR THE TRIPARTITE PARTIES IN WESTMINSTER
BUT
SMALL PARTIES THAT SPEAK THEIR MINDS
WITHOUT SPIN AND LIES.
*
ONLY
PRO-PORTIONAL
REPRESENTATION
WILL
BRING
DEMOCRACY
BACK
TO
THE
ENGLISH
PEOPLE
*
Home
Rule for
Scotland
WHY NOT
HOME
RULE
for
ENGLAND
*
MAY/07
[All underlined words have a
separate bulletin