After over two months of keeping BSR and Russia on the back burner while I established my base in the UK and took care of pressing medical issues I got back in the saddle this week with a resounding bang!
On Wednesday  I attended the ru.style launch of Russia & CIS Networking events at 43 South Molton Street. My invitation from Allina and Nadia came through Linked In, the business networking site.  Progressing from Oxford Street to the club at 43 South Molton Street I found the Drum Risk Management team killing time on the pavement so I connected with Peter Hopkins and his colleagues from Russia, Sergey Vasilkov and Leonid Krivenko. While Peter was recently in Moscow his time is being increasingly consumed by Africa where his group has grown to six operating companies.
At the Club, spread over four stories of Imperially decorated rooms, we found a packed crowd of Russian-connected business people ranging from Turkish bankers to a lady representing a King’s Road antique furniture showroom. Victor Balagadde, director of Kommersant United Kingdom was there as was Kenneth Tan, the CEO of Birmingham-based Qontix software developers. While there were entrepreneurs there were also representatives of mid-sized British companies looking to Russia as a potential market for their goods and services. This is definitely an event to watch.
Elena Sproston,  a lady with Russian connections who combines her work with Jewellery Direct Supply in Hatton Garden with being a friend of the Henry Jackson Society, invited me to yesterday evening’s panel discussion on Russia 2010 – an Appraisal, in the Boothroyd Room at Portcullis House, across Bridge Street from Big Ben and Parliament. Former British Ambassador to Russia, Sir Tony Brenton, kicked off the proceedings with a spirited review of  what’s gone right with Russia in the last 20 years rather undercutting the anti Putin diatribe from his fellow panelist, the Tregubova, the “Kremlin Digger” author and journalist Elena Tregubova who has exiled herself in London in fear for her life since in 2004 a bomb exploded outside the door to her Moscow apartment. No one was injured and officials claimed it to be "an act of hooliganism".
Charles Grant, the founder and director of the Centre for European Reform gave his view that Russian leadership was hostile towards integration and that a “lot of people with a lot of power were doing very well from the current situation and don’t want to modernise the Russian economy.” He told the audience that Germany is dominant in EU-Russian relations and he sees no common EU policy towards Russia emerging very soon.
Mr. Grant said he had found on recent visits to Russia a growing fear of China and worries about the vulnerability of the Russian Far East to a Chinese take over. He said that in China there was great contempt for Russia, with the Chinese feeling that Russia did not know how to run their economy.
Gisela Stuart MP, The Labour member for Birmingham Edgbaston who is on the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, was the final speaker and she recalled years of meetings between European parliamentarians where the praised the Germans for being accurate in their prognosis for Russia and the British, “We have always got Russia wrong!”
She said one the saddest manifestations of the loss of British interest in Russia was that contemporary Russian literature was no longer translated into English the way it was into German and the interest in Russian studies was falling away.
She voiced the opinion that the biggest threat to security was not a Cold War scenario based on conventional weapons but use of cyber-terror.
Speaking to Ms  Stuart after the debate we agreed to meet, but she cautioned that she might be a tad engaged until after the impending general election.

Last weekend I was in the North London suburb of Colindale. Almost at the end of the  Edgeware branch of the Northern Line Colindale is a 90 minute ride by bus and underground from my home in Dulwich. I was there to use the ultra modern facilities in the 1957 brick structure of the British Library Newspaper section searching for scraps of journalism from my youth. In June1969 I had taken my embryonic journalism career to the North African shores of the Mediterranean and at the precocious age of 20 years assumed the mantle of Editor of the Tripoli Mirror, one of two English language newspapers in the Libyan capital, and carried with me letters of accreditation from the Observer’s venerable and academic Diplomatic Correspondent Robert Stephens.

I had traded these for a Libyan press card  - a sort of mini-passport bearing the Sanussi Royal crest – by September 1 1969 when Muammer Gaddafi led his free officers movement in the bloodless coup d’etat that swept the ailing King Idris from power. John K. Cooley, the Christian Science Monitor Middle East
Correspondent wrote in his account of the Libyan Revolution “Desert Sandstorm” ( 1982, Holt Rinehart and Winston), “Virtually no western correspondents were in Libya on September 1”. Well I was there and the Observer had the only Tripoli by-line of any western newspaper for two weeks. When I visited Beirut regularly from Amman, Jordan, John Cooley and I became firm friends during the early 1970's.

This was my first foray into international reporting and I have to say, the young revolutionaries got me off to a flying start. In that first week I was given a pass allowing me freedom of movement during curfew yours by a young crinkle-aired captain at the Bab Al Aziziyah barracks – whom I later found out was Gaddafi’s right hand man, Abdul Salam Jalloud.

By the end of the month I had conducted the first interview by a western correspondent with revolutionary Libya’s first prime minister, the petroleum lawyer and jailed activist Dr. Mahmoud Suleiman al Maghrabi and early November I had the first interview by a western correspondent with a member of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council. Although he insisted on remaining anonymous, I soon found out the Captain was Abu Bakr Yunis Jaber, who today is a Major General and Minister of Defence. It was he who recently visited Russia and signed contracts woirth $1.8 million for military hardware.

Libya gave me my grounding in Middle East journalism from interviewing Yasser Arafat to crossing the Sahara to visit Toubou training camps of the Chad rebel movement led by Hissan Hibre.

My by-line in the Observer soon brought me similar freelance appointments from UPI, The Financial Times, Springer Foreign News Service, and the BBC. The connection I made with Yasser Arafat stood me in good stead when I moved onto my next posting in 1971 – Amman and a greater Middle East role for Springer and The Sunday Times, to whom I switched allegiance from The Observer.

After 40 years I no longer had the clippings of my first articles. But the British Library Newspapers section has a project to digitise British newspapers and on their computers I rapidly found the clippings and was able to printout photocopies of the pdf files of the articles for my scrapbook.

What’s the difference?

Over the last two months, getting accustomed to being back in the UK after the last 15 years in Russia, I have of course found many things to be very different between the two countries. While I am delighted to find a network of Russian Produkti where I can buy tvorog, smetana, black bread and priyaniki or pick up a copy of Pulse London (a Russian language free newspaper like Pulse St. Petersburg) there are some aspects of British public life which make me smile because of their similarities to what the international media have habitually castigated Russia for over the years: crooked cops, corrupt politicians and vote rigging.

Russians should take heart that at the centre of modern democracy (Magna Carta and all that) parliamentarians have been routinely robbing the public purse, a top cop has blustered his way around Scotland Yard bringing the ethical standards of the Teheran bazaar to London and that the government of the day have found there’s no reason to stuff ballot boxes when you can just allow into the country 1.3 million new voters (of whom the majority are likely to vote Labour). By curious coincidence that is almost the number of new unemployed in the country that the world economic crisis has created.

In May there is likely to be elections for a new parliament in the UK, which means a new government lead by whichever party gains a majority of seats. At this stage it is in the balance but while the electioneering is gearing up there are many MP’s from the old parliament who are not standing for re-election having been embarrassed by revelations that they robbed the public purse by falsifying expenses claims to the tune of a combined £1.1 million. While 390 MP’s (out of 636) have been ordered to repay their falsely claimed amounts three Labour MP’s and a Tory peer are to go to court next month on criminal charges stemming from their false accounting.

Several MP’s have already resigned from parliament while others have announced they will not stand for re-election. The number of MP’s involved and the scale of the fraud ranging from payments for mortgages that had already been repaid in full to £1,645 for a floating duck island in an MP’s pond has astounded the public, and brought politicians into the same level of disrepute in Britain that democracy has in Russia.

Metropolitan Police Commander, Iranian-born Ali Dizaie’s blustering, philandering, race-card waving, conniving 24-year career during which he consorted with prostitutes, drug dealers, illegal immigrants and foreign diplomats came to a shuddering halt this month when he was jailed for four years for misconduct and perverting the course of justice after a courageous young Iraqi web designer resisted attempts by the £90,000 a year Police Commander to frame him for assault and get out of paying him £600 for a personal web site.

Previous attempts to bring him to book including an investigation by a team of 50 police officers costing a reputed £7 million failed when the crooked cop was acquitted in two Old Bailey trails and his repeated threats of racial discrimination claims so cowed the British establishment that Home Secretary David Blunkett was said to have brokered a deal to get him reinstated, promoted and paid compensation of £60,000 in 2003.

Britain's top crooked cop is said to be contemplating receiving £1 million in pension benefits when he leaves prison. What he deserves is to be stripped of his citizenship and returned to the land of his birth where his bullying approach to law and order would fit well with the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, although his womanizing and drinking may suffer curbs. There again, there are probably ways round that, even in the Islamic Republic.

Migration Watch UK (http://www.migrationwatchuk.org) has uncovered the political motivation for the social engineering experiment behind the British government’s liberalized immigration policy since 1997 under the now discredited leadership of Tony Blair. In a press release of February 10, the organisation, headed by Sir Andrew Green, said the “massive increase in immigration under Labour was a deliberate policy undertaken for “social” as well as economic reasons”.

This is the conclusion of a study by Migrationwatch of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

In an article for the Evening Standard last October, Andrew Neather, a former speech writer for (Tony)Blair, (Jack) Straw and (David) Blunkett (respectively Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary   and Home Secretary) in the early 2000s, revealed that mass immigration “didn't just happen: the deliberate policy of Ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year... was to open up the UK to mass migration".

He went on to describe a Government policy document which he had helped to write in 2000. He said that "drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was paranoia about it reaching the media."

The paper was eventually surfaced as a purely technical product of the Research Department of the Home Office but earlier drafts that he saw "included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural."

Migrationwatch obtained an earlier draft of that policy paper, circulated in October 2000, and have compared it to the version eventually published in 2001 by the Home Office Research Department as a rather obscure economic paper. The draft had already been censored but it was to be neutered still further. In the Executive Summary six out of eight references to "social" objectives were removed from the version later published. These included a remark that "the entry control system is not closely related to the stated policy objectives. This is particularly true in the social area, where in the past the implicit assumption has largely been that keeping people out promotes stability." Also cut out was a statement that "in practice, entry controls can contribute to social exclusion" as well as other politicized passages in the main body of the document.

Commenting, Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migrationwatch, said “Andrew Neather later tried to play down the significance of his revelations but these documents show that his original account was correct. Labour had a political agenda which they sought to conceal for initiating mass immigration to Britain. Why else would they be so anxious to remove any mention of social aspects unless they feared that they would reveal their true motives? Only now that their working class supporters are deserting them in droves have they started to talk about restricting immigration. Our population is heading rapidly towards 70 million, largely as a result of immigration, but they still refuse to set any limits.”

The Labour manifesto of 1997 made no reference to an increase in immigration. It said only that "Every country must have firm control over immigration and Britain is no exception".
The Labour manifesto issued in 2001, after the publication of this document, said only that "People from abroad make a positive contribution to British society. As our economy changes and expands, so our rules on immigration need to reflect the need to meet skill shortages".
Commonwealth citizens automatically acquire the right to vote in British general elections as soon as they put their names on the electoral register. Since 1997 there has been net immigration of 300,000 from the Old Commonwealth and about one million from the New Commonwealth.

Research into voting patterns was conducted for The Electoral Commission in May 2005, just after the last election. The “Black and Minority Ethnic Survey”, conducted by MORI, asked which party respondents had voted for in 2005. Of Caribbean and African voters, 80% had voted Labour, 2-3% Conservative and 5- 11% Liberal Democrat. Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshis voted 56%, 50% and 41% for Labour. The equivalent figures for the Conservatives were 11%, 11% and 9% while Liberal Democrats came in at 14%, 25% and 16%. Mixed and other categories were similar to the Asians.

So, why bother stuffing ballot boxes when you can just open the doors to groups of migrants up to 80% of whom could be expected to vote Labour? Courteously, Old Etonian, David Cameron who is leading the Conservative Party into this election has said he won’t play the race card. Ali Dizaie would not have missed such an opportunity!

I am six weeks back in the UK capital and getting to grips with a major change in lifestyle. It’s a shock when you realize that systems and bureaucracy work, and with a smile. The overwhelming attitude by employees of national and local government departments is that their job is to help the public, with a smile even, and is reinforced by the fact that we are all now called ‘customers’!  And they are so grateful if you have all the information they might need to hand and volunteer it!

So in six short weeks I am officially registered as a pensioner, have come under the care of the amputee clinic at the Douglas Bader Rehabilitation Centre of the Queen Mary’s Hospital Roehampton, and I am registered with a GP who is ensuring I get a thorough health screening  and that my general health is taken care of. One of the major reasons for coming here, therefore,  is well in hand and I can expect my first new leg in about a month. My doctors have promised me a second prosthesis after that to enable me to go beachcombing and swimming! Khao Lak – I’ll be back!

I have a pleasant 2-room furnished flat in West Dulwich in South East London. I have my pensioner’s travel card and I am coming to grips with London’s variable Internet service. It astounds me that in parts of London, and where I am living is one of them, that mobile Internet service – speed and reliability of connection – is worse than Moscow suburbs!

Being officially retired I have gravitated to a mentoring role at BSR Magazine which my son Saif now runs a couple of miles away from me, having very efficiently assumed control while I was ‘swanning’ around the pleasant climes of South East Asia and Arabia at the end of last year.

Having got the taste of travel back into my blood I am enthusiastic about our new product which will launch in March alongside the new issue of BSR-Russia – BSR Travel, an English language travel magazine.
Needless to say we are looking to recruit editors, contributors and photographers for both BSR-Russia and BSR-Travel. More importantly we are seeking to appoint an advertising manager for both publications so if anyone knows of anyone…. As we have proven over the last two years our team can be based anywhere – the power of the Internet allows us to produce a virtual online magazine with a virtual staff.

But it does take a certain kind of self disciplined, self-motivated individual to work away with only e-mail and Skype calls and chat to link them to the centre.

So we can alert you when fresh blogs go up, do please join our Facebook Group. Just click on the Facebook logo on this page.

The late King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan once told me, apropos of the Arab Israeli conflict, that the farther protagonists in the conflict were geographically removed from the site of the conflict the more extreme the positions they adopted.

He was commenting on the attitude of Zionist organizations in the west compared to that of Israel’s leaders on the ground, with whom he was in secret discussion and negotiation. Thirty plus years later, sitting in Moscow and reading the international newspapers commentary and punditry on Russia I am convinced this still applies today.

Businesses interested in advertising to Russian and Russian oriented decision makers in Business Special Report Russia Magazine can now view the advertising inventory, place orders and even pay for ads online. The inventory and sales solution provides real-time availability and pricing information, making booking and buying adverts in the magazine easier and cheaper than ever before.

Russia’s leading online business magazine, Business Special report, launched it’s Russian language web archive today on http://www.bsr-russia.com . This latest announcement demonstrates the website’s ongoing development over the last three months which has seen its audience increase by over 2800% - According to Alexa.com the global website traffic analysis and ranking service from Amazon, bsr-russia.com is now in the top 2.5% of web sites in the world.

Like most of the restaurants on Alors street, which runs parallel to the tourist magnet of Bintang Walk, Sam Kee’s is Chinese food. Apart from a couple of Thai places, the cuisine on offer on this street is universally Chinese.

When I say ‘on the street’ I mean it. The kitchens are stalls on the pavement and the restaurant expands at night as traffic slows. More folding tables are brought out and set up, spreading over the pavement and spilling onto the road, first one lane and then two lanes of traffic replaced by al fresco diners.

Political buzz gets Malaysian media excited

This is the political season in Malaysia with Party General Assemblies, new party launches and Extraordinary General Meetings getting the talking heads and newspapers excited. Top billing went to the Umno Party’s Annual General Assembly where the country’s new Prime Minister and party president, Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razzak gave an inaugural speech which electrified the more than 2,500 delegates in the Putra World Trade Centre and delighted most Malays who form the majority of the population. His speech, titled Upholding Tradition and Effecting Change, called on party leaders to go to the ground and get closer to the grass roots as the party implements amendments to its constitution making it more transparent, inclusive and democratic and closer to the rakyat (people).