Fireworks: the Honest Truth - from Scotland

It was good to be interviewed by Sally McDonald of the Sunday Post about my new book A History of Fireworks from their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion Books). Here's what I told her

Who let that thing out!? My new book 'Assassins' Deeds'

 

Out today. My new book Assassins’ Deeds. A history of assassination from Ancient Egypt to the present day. It does what it says on the cover.

Assassins’ Deeds identifies the earliest assassination in history so far as I can tell. An Egyptian pharaoh murdered about 4,300 years ago by his bodyguards. Then there is Britain’s first assassination in 293 AD – of Marcus Carausius, the self-styled ‘Emperor of Britain’, who was hired by the Romans to protect the south-east coast of England from Saxon raids, but was more interested in grabbing loot from the raiders than protecting the local residents.

I analysed 266 assassinations from ancient Egypt to the present day, and discovered the ace sniper of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal is a rarity. Most assassinations are up close and personal, with only 19 performed at a distance. Until the nineteenth century, stabbing was the favourite method, but even when firearms took over, it was usually the handgun at close quarters rather than the sniper’s rifle.

The book covers some of history’s weirdest assassinations – the king of Scotland killed by a booby-trapped statuette, the Swiss military leader hacked to death by a man disguised as a bear, and the Austrian empress murdered with a customised needle so fine the victim did not even realise she had been stabbed. She could count herself particularly unlucky as her assassin, an Italian anarchist, had been hoping to murder someone else, and she was a late substitute.

Fate moved in mysterious ways for some assassins too. An Italian nationalist was sentenced to the guillotine for a failed assassination attempt on the French emperor Napoleon III, but the emperor had a lot of sympathy for the would-be assassin’s cause of unifying Italy, and reprieved him at the last minute. He was sent to Devil’s Island for life, but escaped to the United States and went on to fight in and survive Custer’s Last Stand.

Then there is the story of King Zog of Albania, probably the only monarch to survive an assassination attempt by opening fire on the men who attacked him (as he was leaving the opera in Vienna).

Assassins Deeds’  also tells the story of history’s most famous assassinations – Julius Caesar, Thomas Becket, the French revolutionary Marat, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, etc., coming right up to the present day with the murder of Kim Jong-nam, renegade brother of the North Korean dictator, whose killers thought they were taking part in a reality tv show.

Assassins’ Deeds. A History of Assassination from Ancient Egypt to the Present Day by John Withington is published by Reaktion Books, price £18.

http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781789143515

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Assassins-Deeds-History-Assassination-Ancient/dp/1789143519

 

 

Brexitwatch; Get back to the Commons! Write to your MP

Now Scotland's highest civil court has declared that Boris Johnson's silencing of parliament is illegal, MPs should be flooding back, occupying the House of Commons chamber, and continuing with the business of fighting the Brexit Coup. 

Email your MP to demand they get back there. This is what I've sent to mine - Labour's Brexit spokesperson, Sir Keir Starmer:


Dear Sir Keir,

What are you waiting for? The courts have ruled that Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament is illegal. 

The Court of Session, Scotland’s highest court, has delivered a damning verdict, with all three judges ruling that the suspension was 'motivated by the improper purpose of stymying parliament' and was therefore unlawful. 

Heaven knows what Messrs Johnson and Cummings had planned for when they'd got MPs out of the way.

You and your Labour colleagues need to get down to Westminster right now and get into the Chamber to work out what you can do to stop the Brexit Coup. Elect your own Speaker if necessary.

At the moment there is still time to stop Boris Johnson destroying British democracy, but if you pussyfoot around much longer, there won't be.

Yours sincerely,
John Withington 

Brexitwatch: to keep Britain in the EU write to your MP NOW

The moment of truth is approaching. Once Theresa May activates Article 50, it will become much more difficult to keep Britain in the EU. So if you want to prevent Brexit, it is important to write to your MP NOW. It is generally believed that MPs are more impressed by letters than emails.

My MP is Sir Keir Starmer, who happens to be Labour's spokesperson on Brexit, but what I have written to him could be used as the basis for a letter to any MP. I reproduce it below:-

Sir Keir Starmer, MP,

House of Commons,

London, SW1A 0AA

23 January 2017

Dear Sir Keir,

I call on you and your Labour Party colleagues to oppose the government’s plan to activate Article 50 and give notice that we will leave the EU.

You and your colleagues are behaving as though they are compelled to go along with Brexit, but you are not.

Throughout the campaign, one of the leading demands of the Brexit side was that the UK Parliament should be sovereign. Well, the UK Parliament decided that the referendum on EU membership should be advisory only. There is, therefore, no legal requirement to take us out of the EU.

Nor is there any moral requirement. The Leave side won by a very narrow majority (which, judging from by-election results since the vote, has already evaporated) in a referendum in which almost 30 per cent of people abstained.

The Leave victory was secured by a systematic campaign of lies and deception (as has been admitted by a number of the Brexit leaders) and its leadership offered no coherent alternative to EU membership.

So if you and your Labour colleagues vote to support the triggering of Article 50, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of your constituents and of Labour voters support staying in the EU, that is a CHOICE that you are making.

And I find it difficult to understand how any MP who cares about the future of our country could make such a choice. There is no evidence of any kind that leaving the EU will benefit us, and a huge volume of evidence that we will be harmed by quitting.

In those circumstances you and your colleagues have a duty to do everything in your power to prevent this disastrous step. This is the most crucial decision Parliament has had to make in decades, and your duty to your country and your constituents outweighs any considerations of party loyalty.

As an intelligent man, you must know that once you allow the government to trigger Article 50, leaving the EU will be inevitable. Even if you can persuade Theresa May to seek Parliamentary approval for the deal she has been able to negotiate with 27 other countries, the European Parliament etc (good luck with that one, Theresa!) you will be faced with a fait accompli.

You will either have to accept the terms she comes back with, however bad they may be, or leave with no agreement at all, which would be a complete disaster.

No. Labour cannot sit on the fence any longer. This is the last chance to keep us in the EU. It is fight or flight time, put up or shut up. And if Labour continues its present policy of chasing the UKIP vote, I fear the wipe out in Scotland will be repeated in many other parts of the country.

Theresa May has no coherent plan for a viable alternative to EU membership. She does not even appear to know whether, once activated, Article 50 can be revoked if negotiations show that the Brexit the British people have been promised cannot be delivered.

For my part, I will not be voting for any politician or political party that supports leaving the EU.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Brexitwatch: New Year musings. Is Theresa May engineering a UK break-up?

1. The possibility that Brexit might break up the United Kingdom has generally been seen as unfortunate collateral damage if Theresa May is foolish enough to take us out of the EU, but perhaps detaching England (and possibly Wales) from the troublesome Scots and Northern Irish who do not vote Conservative, is the real Tory project?

Labour would find it very hard to win a majority in the resulting rump state of Little England, so however bad a UK break-up might be for the rest of us, it would be good for the Tories.

2. Michael ‘back-stabber’ Gove has partially backed down on his ‘I’ve had enough of experts’ stance. Even Gove seems to have realised that getting a randomly selected passenger to fly the aircraft instead of the pilot isn’t a great idea.

So now he’s retreated to: ‘we’ve had enough of economists’. Presumably because none of them has a good word for Brexit. Apparently we should all do a detailed examination of the hundreds of pages of complex evidence on which the economists' conclusions are based, and then make up our own minds. So what percentage of Brexit voters have assured you they are prepared to do that, Michael?

Brexitwatch: What Boris Johnson really thinks about the EU - 3

A few months ago Boris Johnson did an interview with Der Spiegel. He was asked what would happen if we voted to leave the EU and he replied: 'The Foreign Office, the German Foreign Ministry and everybody else would get together and invent a series of bilateral deals and virtually reconstruct the relationship.'

'There would be several disadvantages. First, we wouldn't be able to stick up for what we believe in. Secondly, we would face some penalties. And then there is the Scottish factor. If we get out, what happens in Scotland?'

So let me get this right, Boris? If we leave Europe, we spend huge amounts of time, money, and effort getting back to something not as good as what we have at the moment, during which time, we lose Scotland and our economy goes down the pan.

Why don't we just Vote Remain?

Quintinshill - Britain's worst train crash

Tonight at 2100 the BBC4 tv channel will tell the story of Britain’s worst ever rail disaster, which happened 100 years ago tomorrow. It was a three train pile-up during the First World War at Quintinshill near Gretna on the West Coast main line early on the morning of 22 May 2015, in which about 226 people died, most of them soldiers on a troop train.

The troop train was carrying about 500 men south on the first leg of their journey to Gallipoli. It was made up of gas-lit wooden coaches. Congestion in the area that morning meant that a local train was being held stationary on the main line.

The troop train ploughed into it, and then shortly after, a sleeper coming up from the south ran into the wreckage. The carriages of the troop train were soon alight, the blaze spreading with nightmare speed.

Two signalmen were blamed for the crash. One was sentenced to three years’ hard labour, and the other to 18 months in gaol, but pre-publicity for tonight’s programme suggests it may have new information on the causes.

For more on Quintinshill, see A Disastrous History of Britain.

Britain's worst military disasters 3 - Mons Graupius AD 83 or 84

We tend to think of the Roman conquest of Britain as extending only as far as Hadrian’s Wall, but, in fact, in AD 83 or 84 (historians cannot agree on the date), a Roman army won a stunning victory perhaps as far north as Aberdeenshire.

Having subdued Wales and the north of England, the Roman governor Agricola had advanced up through Scotland, but found it difficult to bring the Caledonian tribes to battle, Eventually, though, about 30,000 of them confronted him at ‘Mons Graupius’ which many modern-day historians believe to be in the Bennachie range, north-west of Aberdeen.

The Caledonian vanguard was on the plain, with the rear stretching up Mons Graupius.    Agricola held his legionaries in reserve, and sent in his ‘barbarian’ auxiliaries to close with the enemy.    Roman armies were at their most effective in this close, hand-to-hand combat, and they broke through the Caledonians and started to advance up the hill.

The tribesmen fought bravely, but when Agricola sent in his cavalry, they were routed, and the Roman historian Tacitus put their losses at 10,000 against just 360 for the Romans.  It was too late in the campaigning season, though, for Agricola to advance any further, and his troops withdrew to forts further south.  Never again would the Romans penetrate this far north.  

*Article about Britain’s 20 Worst Military Disasters in the Bath Chronicle.   http://www.thisisbath.co.uk/6th-century-battle-near-Bath-new-book-Britain-s/story-13843963-detail/story.html

Lockerbie + 22 - the tangled web

On the 22^nd anniversary of Britain’s worst ever terrorist outrage – the Lockerbie bombing – the only man ever convicted of it, the Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, is said to be in a coma and close to death.

Later today, a US senator is due to unveil the results of his own personal inquiry into Megrahi’s compassionate release last year. What the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic seem desperate to prevent, though, is any inquiry into who really planted the bomb that blew up the Pan-Am jumbo.

Megrahi was released only after he agreed to drop his appeal against conviction, and ten days ago it was revealed that an 800 page dossier compiled by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, examining the flaws in the case against him, is to be kept under lock and key. The commission had identified at least six grounds for thinking Megrahi may have been wrongly convicted. The UK government has also rejected requests for a full public inquiry.

Dr Jim Swire, who daughter was one of the 270 victims of the bombing, believes Megrahi was released in order to prevent an appeal that the authorities might have found ‘very embarrassing’. Now two of the Libyan’s children say they are preparing to sue the powers-that-be in Scotland for wrongfully imprisoning their father. Will that lead to the issues finally being properly examined? Or will the authorities just pay up so they can maintain the silence? Come on Wikileaks!

Lockerbie - let's have the right inquiry

I worry more and more about the BBC’s supposed flagship 10 o’ clock Television News. Last week it consumed more than half the programme in an extraordinarily repetitive, virtually information-free report on the hunt for Raoul Moat.

Last night it devoted seven minutes to American outrage over the release eleven months ago of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. You will remember that al-Megrahi was freed from his Scottish prison on compassionate grounds, after being diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

Two BBC reporters told us how cross the Americans were that al-Megrahi had had the temerity to not die, that the new UK government now considered the release a “mistake”, how the Americans were accusing their favourite villain, BP, of having engineered the release etc, etc. Neither reporter seemed aware that there are very serious doubts about al-Megrahi’s guilt, shared by the families of some of the UK victims. (These doubts appear not to be much thought about in America where questioning the guilt of Arabs is not really part of the culture.)

Jim Swire, whose daughter was killed in the attack, has condemned the US’s “mass hysteria” and its cynical attempt to use al-Megrahi as another means of taking “revenge” on BP. The Scottish government are standing firm and have coolly pointed out that the prisoner was released under due process of Scots law, after taking into account the testimony of independent medical experts.

The Americans want an inquiry into al-Megrahi’s release, but Scottish MSP Christine Grahame has a better idea. Why doesn’t the US stop blocking a full independent inquiry into who really bombed Flight 103? Then we might finally get the truth. The new British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is in Washington next week. He has promised to be less subservient to the Americans than Labour were. The next few days may reveal whether he will keep his word.
(See also my blogs of 27 July, 16 and 22 Aug, and 19 Sept, 2009)