If on 16 May this year, you thought Rick Perry had a chance at being selected as the Republican nominee for President in next year’s election, you’d only need to have bet £3 to make over £1,000. The Texas lodestar has built a momentum that is hard to justify – he’s neither centrist enough to win the election (even in these partisan times), nor does he have the sort of business experience that could be used as a Republican trump card against Obama – who is looking increasingly tired in office.

Yet, with Betfair the ability to back as well as lay means you can back an outsider and then lay them as their odds come in. I’m now in the nice position of winning £90 regardless of which candidate is selected as the Republican nominee.

But these changing odds cause a seperate dynamic – as the bookies reduce the odds of Perry winning – it becomes a story in itself. Momentum is essential in any primary race. The underdog has a tactical advantage, especially in the US, where presenting yourself as outside the Washington establishment is now necessary. Perry is probably over-valued. But he has momentum – and that in politics counts for a lot.

Image (c) Gage Skidmore

According to Wordstream’s Internet Marketing Blog, ‘Insurance’ is the Google AdWord which attracts the highest pay-per-click premium, with the search terms “lawyer” and “attorney” both making the top 10.

“Google AdWords is a dynamic, auction-based marketplace where advertisers bid on keywords to compete for top ad placement. The minimum bid per keyword is 5 cents, but this research shows that in highly competitive categories, Google can make up to $50 per click. Despite a diversified product portfolio, advertising on Google sites accounts for the vast majority of its billions in annual revenue.”

With some keywords costing more than a copy of Windows 7 Starter OEM, the power-shift from Microsoft to Google continues apace.

Lawyer as a google adword

At $42.51 CPC, the term lawyer still raises nearly as much as a search term as the more American “attorney”, showing how lucrative legal fees are on either side of the atlantic.

Originally published in the New Statesman, 11 July 2011.

A bigger state isn’t necessarily a better state, argues Mike Harris.

Under Gordon Brown the Labour party went through an intellectual desert in which radicalism of any shade was viewed as highly suspect.

While the Tories took big ideas to the core of their mission – especially Phillip Blond’s Big Society (demolished in the London Review of Books here) – Labour went into the last election with an ideology so narrow and statist we may as well have used Hobbes’s Leviathan as our manifesto. The public viewed us as the ‘big state’ party.

As Josie Cluer, John Denham’s former special adviser, says:

During 2010, Labour sometimes sounded like we thought all that mattered in public services was increased investment. To any question raised about quality or poor service, every Labour minister and activist had been taught to trot out the real terms increase in spending on key public services since 1997. We resorted to cheap political point-scoring by deploying “Tory cuts vs Labour spending” dividing lines. In fact, they were more damaging to us than our opponents.

In opposition, Labour is undergoing an intellectual renaissance. Sadly, much of it seems to be replaying the Blair/Brown/left dialogues of the past. Even if it isn’t, the blinkered media (many of whom made their careers upon spreading each camp’s smears) want it to be.

Pragmatic Radicalism, a series of snappy articles by Labour’s next generation, attacks the aridity of the past, and attempts to break out from the Blair/Brown rut we found ourselves in.

Luciana Berger MP launches the project tomorrow in committee room 12 of the House of Commons alongside Lord (Stewart) Wood, Ed Miliband’s strategic adviser, and the editor John Slinger, who if there is any justice ought to be in the next intake of Labour MPs.

The articles are diverse. Will Straw and Nick Anstead want reform of the party itself. In a brave move they embrace the offer in the coalition agreement to fund open primaries. Amanda Ramsay wants a one per cent football transfer tax to fund school playing fields. Larry Smith wants to ‘unsqueeze the middle’ with targeted VAT cuts.

One common theme is that the last Labour government felt that more state was better state. Josie Cluer writes: It’s a common doorstep conversation: why should I pay my taxes and work hardm when others milk the system?” She adds:

It’s the little things. Even though there are five million people on waiting lists for social housing, some people still rent out their council homes… those responsible for the 12.6 million missed GP appointments and the 4.3 million missed nurse appointments are not just wasting millions of pounds, they’re preventing people who really need healthcare from getting it…

The more often principles of fairness are undermined, the weaker public support for public services becomes.

It’s not just that Labour’s bigger state often failed the fairness test; it was given too many powers. I call for the rebirth of liberal Labour – whose heyday under John Smith saw Labour call for the European Convention on Human Rights ‘brought home’ into British law.

In a lecture to Charter 88 in 1993 he said: “I want to see a fundamental shift in balance of power between the citizen and the state – a shift away from an overpowering state to a citizens’ democracy where people have rights and powers.”

Smith’s ‘rights and powers’ is so much more uplifting than Blair’s ‘rights and responsibilities’. Key to a reborn liberal Labour is recognising the importance of the liberal tradition in our party’s history – a history that former Stalinist John Reid and David Blunkett did their best to bury. It’s a history we need to reconnect with in order to begin winning elections again:

Labour is now perceived as the big state party. Our reckless disregard for the personal sphere lost us 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010: we were the bossy party.

To recognise this history, Labour should call for a Bill of Rights that creates a home-grown privacy law, protects free speech and demarks the boundaries of state intrusion.

Admittedly, in otherwise thought-provoking articles in the collection, the Pavlovian impulse to make cheap points about the Tories sometimes obscures sounder criticisms.

In Tom Tabori’s article on housing he outlines some depressing statistics: 1.5 million adults in the UK live in homes with overcrowded conditions; a quarter of overcrowded families have children sleeping in living or dining rooms; the Government classes 250,000 social homes as overcrowded. Yet according to the Government, five million people are still stuck on waiting lists.

Labour failed on social housing, but Tabori is too polite to say so. I would argue that without the ability to criticism the last Labour government, whose record on housing was patchy at best, we’re unable to discover our blind spots.

It’s been a good seven days for Ed Miliband. He took on the largest media owner in the country – and won. If he is prepared to listen to his vocal membership, Labour has a manifesto in waiting: both pragmatic and radical. The disastrous 2010 election must not be repeated. Never again should ‘big’ ideas be taken so lightly.

Mike Harris is a Labour councillor in Lewisham Central and Head of Advocacy at free speech organisation Index on Censorship. He tweets: @Cllr_MikeHarris

Following on from my article in Forefront magazine on trade unions and social media, I’ve been advising Unions21 the leading think-tank, on how trade unions you use social media to improve their public image. You can read the publication ‘The Future for Union Image’ online.

As Director Dan Whittle says:

Unions have not had such a high media profile for years.

Writer and trainer Paul Richards argues that trade unionism, like every other walk of life, has developed its own slang, jargon and insiders-only language, every bit as impenetrable as polari, doctors’ slang, cockney rhyming slang, computer hackers’ slang… He reminds us that talking about collective bargaining, constructive dismissal and transfers of undertakings is language impenetrable to most people and off-putting and alienating to many.

Please do contact me, for an informal consultation on how your union can improve its image using social media.

I have recently worked with documentary Tracy Worcester to raise awareness of her film ‘Pig Business’. One method of profile-raising has been to engage leading actor Dominic West in the campaign and help him write about Tracy’s campaign and individuals can do. In an article in the Daily Mail, with help from MJR Harris, Dominic outlined his concerns over industrial factory farms:

When public figures speak out about animal welfare issues, their views tend to be received with weary sighs. But the way we treat our livestock is not just a moral question. Industrial farming is making us ill.

Across Europe, in countries including Germany, Romania and Britain too, industrial pork production is on the rise. It is subsidised by our taxes, and yet no politician has ever asked us if we want it.

Thankfully, people power is on the march. Last Wednesday, I joined some of the locals who are objecting to plans for an industrial pig farm near the village of Foston in Derbyshire.

Originally published by anti-totalitarian journal Dissent Magazine on 31 May 2011

WHEN THE reactor at Unit 4 of the V. I. Lenin Atomic Power Station, Chernobyl, exploded twenty-five years ago, the people of Belarus were sacrificed by a secretive political system. Pilots such as Major Aleksei Grushin were sent into the air above Belarus to seed clouds with silver iodine so they would rain down what had spewed from the inner core of the reactor onto the fields below. That political decision kept Muscovites safe—but as a result, 60 percent of the disaster’s radiation fell on the hapless people of Belarus.

It was a national catastrophe. As author Svetlana Alexievich points out in her masterful Voices from Chernobyl, the Nazis took three years to destroy 619 Belarusian villages during the Second World War; Chernobyl made 485 villages uninhabitable in hours. Today, 2,000,000 Belarussians, including 800,000 children, live in contaminated areas. To give an idea as to how contaminated this land is, 100,000 people live on land with a radiation level 1,480 times greater than the level typically found on a nuclear bomb test site. Between 1990 and 2000, the incidence of thyroid cancer in adolescents in the region increased by 1,600 percent.

To begin with, the Soviet Union said almost nothing to its people about the catastrophe. But after the contamination spread across the Iron Curtain to Sweden, setting off radiation level alarms, there was an admission of an accident. Even so, stories in Pravda Ukrainy and Sovetskaya Belorussia parroted the official party line that Western propaganda was making the accident out to be worse than the “contained” incident it supposedly was. The long-term effects were said to be a few hundred additional cancer deaths over a generation. Farmers were told that afflicted land could soon be returned to productive use (a statement backed by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] in Vienna, a certain Hans Blix).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, little changed in Belarus: one authoritarian regime was replaced by another. The country’s dictator since 1996, Alexander Lukashenko, a former collective-farm boss, is keen to get people back onto the land. He has personally intervened to support studies that show this land is safe to bring back into agricultural use. In 2004 he declared that it was time to build new homes and villages in the contaminated regions, stating triumphantly, “land should work for the country.”

Many international organizations, including the IAEA, backed Lukashenko’s aspirations. But Belarus isn’t a place to question the wisdom of the authorities. It is one of the least free places on earth, ranked below Zimbabwe and Iran for press freedom. And so the Soviet silencing of dissent continues.

A scientific expert on the effects of Chernobyl, Yuri Bandazhevsky, openly criticized the policy of bringing contaminated land into use a decade ago, suggesting that the government was knowingly exporting radioactive food. For this he was jailed on anti-terror charges. In 2001, he was sentenced to eight years in prison on “corruption charges.” He was released in 2005 and now lives in exile in France, unable to research the disaster’s effects on the people remaining in the evacuation zone.

Lukashenko is unfazed by such criticism. Since his reelection in December (deemed “unfair” by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s election observers) he has ruthlessly clamped down on any opposition to his rule. Over 600 arrests were made in the days that followed the election result. Seven of the nine opposition presidential candidates were jailed, five of whom have now been sentenced to multi-year prison terms. The bombing of the Minsk metro on April 11, in which twelve civilians died, has been blamed by Lukashenko on his rule being overly liberal. He told his crony Parliament, “There was so much democracy, it was just nauseating.” As in Soviet times, fear stalks the country: mysterious terrorist acts, the near-total jailing of the opposition, KGB arrests in the dead of night, and allegations of torture abound.

In the absence of open politics, the remembrance of Chernobyl’s victims has become an intensely political act. Protests demanding justice for the victims until recently have been led by the opposition. In 2006, 5,000 protesters shouted anti-government chants declaring a cover-up on the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Alexander Milinkevich, the main opposition leader, led the crowds.

For those living in the affected areas, political fear is compounded by a vacuum of information about the disaster. Detailed maps of the land contaminated in the Ukraine are readily available; not so in Belarus. The vacuum is filled with hysteria and fear. According to Richard Wilson, professor of physics at Harvard University, “The truth is that the fear of Chernobyl has done much more damage than Chernobyl itself.” To this day this fear infects daily life. A fear of deformities means there are more abortions than live child births in Belarus. One psychiatrist, Dr. Havenaar, studied the people of Gomel, one of the worst-affected areas. He found that local people said they were five times as sick as people in similar towns not affected by Chernobyl’s radiation. But after physical examinations, the level of illness among those towns was broadly similar. It was the psychological distress in Gomel that was far, far greater. Fear is literally making people sick.

Political decisions in Moscow made Belarus the dumping ground for over 100 times the radiation released by the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Now the aftermath of Chernobyl itself is intensely political. Prior to its post-election suppression, the opposition demanded answers from a secretive regime about the health effects of the disaster. Now Lukashenko is committed to building a new nuclear power plant bordering Lithuania (to the horror of Lithuanians)—on one of the country’s tiny patches of uncontaminated land—and to opening up the contaminated land for human inhabitation. Last month, Lukashenko visited the village of Dernovichi in the evacuation zone and delivered a speech on the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. His intentions for the area were quite clear:

In Narovlya district milk is produced which is used for the production of children’s food. The re-specialization of agriculture gives farmers work again. In the Gomel Region—there are 34,000 hectares from which it is possible to receive clean products. Besides, tourists are ready to come to this zone.
As for Major Aleksei Grushin, he was awarded a medal by Vladimir Putin at a state ceremony. This is a state secret in Belarus. In countries where dissenters are silenced, disasters like Chernobyl are magnified. The tragedy is twenty-five years on, and Belarusians are no more free.

This article originally appeared on Left Foot Forward

A rather traditional battle between a tabloid newspaper and a rich individual seems to be concluded (unless, of course, it goes to appeal). Max Mosley, son of fascist Oswald Mosley, and the former head of Formula 1, wanted to force newspapers to give prior notification when they could be in breach of an individual’s right to privacy.

He is no stranger to arguments about free speech. In 1961, he campaigned for “Free speech for fascists”, when his father’s invitation to speak at the Oxford Union was opposed.

Mosley launched his current case after the News of the World published allegations that he cavorted with five prostitutes in a basement flat in London in a Nazi-themed orgy. Mosley’s assertion that the UK government breached his human rights by not insisting that newspapers gave prior notification before publication was rejected by the European Court of Human Rights.

It is undoubtedly a success for press freedom and one backed by Index on Censorship who made a submission to the Court.

Prior notification would be disastrous for investigative reporting – by national newspapers or NGOs. It would lead to a situation where a local newspaper wanting to publish a fact-checked story on councillors embezzling public funds would have to tell the offenders before the story is published.

Immediately the councillors would take out an injunction and no local paper would have the £60,000-£100,000 that media lawyers estimate it costs to overturn such an injunction. The story would be buried – and voters none the wiser.

This rule isn’t just about the press: human rights NGOs would be affected too. Human rights NGO Global Witness indicated that if Mosley’s rule was brought in, they would not be able to publish on topics such as blood diamonds, and notification would put their staff and sources in danger. And European Court judgements aren’t just about the UK – oligarchs in the Russia and the Ukraine could use this tool to muzzle the little independent media left in these countries.

It is worth pointing out what the judgement did and didn’t say.

Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun has spun it as:

“You don’t need to be a tabloid journalist to celebrate orgy-loving Max Mosley’s crushing defeat by the European Courts.”

But this isn’t an unmitigated triumph for free speech. Mosley won his case against the News of the World for breach of his Article 8 right to privacy and received record damages of £60,000. The European Court did not find these damages excessive stating:

“…no sum of money awarded after disclosure of the impugned material could afford a remedy in respect of the specific complaint advanced by the applicant.” [72]

The Court also made a clear distinction between the ‘public interest’ which would merit a defence under Article 10 of the ECHR (the right to free expression) and ‘lurid news’ (including tabloid gossip) which would not be protected under this defence:

“…reporting facts – even if controversial – capable of contributing to a debate of general public interest in a democratic society, and making tawdry allegations about an individual’s private life…

“In respect of the former, the pre-eminent role of the press in a democracy and its duty to act as a “public watchdog” are important considerations in favour of a narrow construction of any limitations on freedom of expression. However, different considerations apply to press reports concentrating on sensational and, at times, lurid news, intended to titillate and entertain, which are aimed at satisfying the curiosity of a particular readership regarding aspects of a person’s strictly private life…

“Such reporting does not attract the robust protection of Article 10 afforded to the press.” [114]

The Court did, however, rule out pre-notification. It argued that:

“…any pre-notification requirement would only be as strong as the sanctions imposed for failing to observe it. A regulatory or civil fine, unless set at a punitively high level, would be unlikely to deter newspapers from publishing private material without pre-notification” [128]

And if set at a ‘punitively high level’ these fines would in effect be incompatible with the Article 10 right to freedom of expression. Looking at this and the wider public interest, the Court concluded that an individual’s Article 8 rights are not violated by the absence of a requirement on the media to notify the individual in question prior to publication.

This does not mean that newspapers who do publish stories that violate an individual’s privacy can get away with it. Huge damages are here to stay. But the long-established custom of “Publish and be damned!” is intact, and as such the British media will collectively breathe a sigh of relief. The British government will be pleased too, as the Court’s emphasis on the “margin of appreciation” (the legal space for national law within the ECHR) means they won’t be set for a damaging battle with “foreign judges” (in the technical language of our august media).

Hugh Tomlinson QC of Matrix Chambers says on the Inforrm blog:

“The press won the battle but the judgment confirms that it has lost the ‘privacy war’. The Court makes its disapproval of the conduct of the News of the World crystal clear and emphasises the need for a “narrow interpretation” of freedom of expression where sensational and titillating press reports are involved.”

This judgement comes as our privacy law comes under increasing scrutiny. The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday that there have been more than two million tweets breaching various ‘super-injunctions’. A twitter account (which you can easily Google and find – but would land Left Foot Forward in Court if mentioned here) published details of the use of six such injunctions.

Former Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer said:

“If a point is reached as a matter of evidence when everyone knows who the injunctions are about then they become pretty pointless… It is concerning that people can do this and break the law. It sounds like it’s very difficult to make sure that injunctions like this are complied with.”

Tory MP Claire Perry, never knowingly in defence of free expression, added:

“This is making a mockery of the existing law and we need to make sure thatthe law catches up with the technology.”

In one aspect, I agree with Max Mosley who said, on last night’s Newsnight, that there is little difference between a pub conversation and the stream of consciousness that Twitter represents. But for politicians the anarchic atmosphere of the internet presents a threat. There is little doubt that curbs on internet freedom are in the pipeline, whether Ed Vaizey’s threatening noises on copyright infringement, or perhaps as touted yesterday by Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, a Privacy Bill.

Net freedom will come under attack. Press freedom is now curtailed due to Strasbourg jurisprudence on privacy. What’s complex is the debate over individual privacy is not clear cut. Whilst many people would argue that Max Mosley’s private peccadillos are his own personal business, and his alone, few would wish to see those breaking super-injunctions via Twitter found in contempt of Court and jailed. As the European Court found, effective sanctions that uphold privacy may be in breach of the fundamental right to freedom of expression.

Rights are often balanced – the very difficult question for Parliament is how to balance free expression and personal privacy.

A really interesting report from digital media consultant Kathryn Corrick is embedded below.

London remains the world’s no. 1 Twitter city; 12% of Twitter users are “not aware of Facebook” (too cool for school), 11% earn over $100k, and 40% are under 25. The investment the BBC has made in new technologies has paid off – it has 2 out of the top 10 brand accounts – and holds no. 1 position.

In more twitter-related news, I learnt that I am no. 10 in the “Twitter elite” of Lewisham (and what an elite it is!)

Hat tip: the Wall Blog

The state of the Twittersphere, February 2011

I have recently written a chapter on libel law reform for Alex Deane’s excellent book on civil liberties in Britain available from Amazon here.

After Nick Clegg’s speech on civil liberties on Jan, I wrote this piece for Left Foot Forward:

This morning, Nick Clegg made a speech on civil liberties, the sound of the left gloating as the deputy prime minister stumbled over control orders drowning out his critique of Labour’s authoritarian instinct; Mike Harris, a contributor to Big Brother Watch’s ‘The state of civil liberties in modern Britain’, reports

The gloating is an instinct I remember well when I worked for a Labour MP as our government attempted to bring in 90 days’ detention. Even my meagre bag-carrying at the time made me feel complicit in something immoral. Labour friends would shrug their shoulders in bars as we discussed where it all went wrong: the party who had Roy Jenkins as home secretary also managed to accommodate former Stalinist John Reid.

But Labour was possessed by a group-think that imagined the civil liberties agenda was a minority pursuit by a radical Hampstead fringe; that to be in favour of protecting liberties against baser gut instincts was, in itself, a sign of moral weakness: of political frailty.

The reference to John Reid’s Stalinism is deliberate. Many of our friends in the Labour movement’s politics arose not from Methodism but Marxism. Their vision for government was not as a regulator or provider of goods, but as a totality, the State as the rational omnigod. As Francesa Klug said at last year’s Compass conference this

“… intellectual tradition never really saw the problem with the state – provided it was in the right, or rather left, hands.”

It was Ed Miliband’s dad, Ralph, who warned socialists of the danger that the state had it in the potential to be an oppressive force in ‘The State in Capitalist Society’. Whilst Labour did much in government to make Britain more tolerant, we also made painful mistakes.

Clegg opened his speech with a powerful salvo, which is worth reading:

“Ed Balls has admitted that, when it comes to civil liberties, Labour got the balance wrong. Ed Miliband has conceded that his government seemed too casual about people’s freedom.

They made Britain a place where you could be put under virtual house arrest when there was not enough evidence to charge you with a crime. And with barely an explanation of the allegations against you. A place where young, innocent children caught up in the immigration system were placed behind bars. A Britain whose international reputation has been brought into question because of our alleged complicity in torture.”

In the last year of a Labour government, 1,000 children of asylum seekers were imprisoned. Yet, as a party there is no mea culpa. Many of the myriad special advisers and ministers who advocated ever more authoritarian powers are still in place. I still hear, “they aren’t talking about it in the Dog & Duck”, as a catch-all phrase that is fairly sinister.

People don’t focus on their human rights until they are taken away. The majority of Belarusians are currently getting on with their lives in Europe’s last dictatorship. It’s the 28 in solidarity confinement in a KGB prison in downtown Minsk for whom human rights are important.

There’s no doubt that Nick Clegg’s attempt to demonise Labour today was political posturing. He ignored Labour’s introduction of the Human Rights Act; that Labour were in office after the talismanic episode of 9/11; that civil liberties are dependent in a democracy on public support (which often wasn’t there). But rather than receiving Nick Clegg’s speech with jeers, Ed Miliband needs to reappraise the party Labour ought to be.

As I wrote before for Left Foot Forward, Labour is toxic to many of the people it ought to be a natural bedfellow of. Many Muslims in places like Oldham East and Saddleworth voted Liberal Democrat not just because of Iraq, but because they felt victimised. Many of the much-derided ‘Hampstead liberals’ are some of the five million votes Labour lost between 1997-2010.

Newspapers that ought to be on our side turned against us. It’s no coincidence that it was a liberal party, the Liberal Democrats, who opposed our authoritarian streak who made the largest electoral gains in 2005 and 2010. And it’s a surprise that we didn’t take this lesson on board. For Labour to win the election in 2015, we need to take a look in the mirror.

A very slightly edited version of this article was originally published in The Independent newspaper on 8 September 2010.

On Friday, Aleh Byabenin, one of Belarus’s leading journalists and human rights activist, was found hanged in his country home. His beloved 5 year old son’s hammock was around his neck, hung so low that his feet touched the ground. Andrei Sannikov, the leader of Charter97, the organisation Byabenin co-founded, was one of the first at the scene. He has grave doubts about the coroner’s official verdict that Byabenin hanged himself: “No suicide note was found, and his last SMS to friends showed they planned to go to the cinema”. I landed in Minsk on Friday to meet Byabenin and other civil society activists. On Monday I will attend his funeral. People are in no doubt as to what really happened – and talk through tears about a man who had devoted 15 years of his life to fighting against President Lukashenko’s dictatorship and was in no mood to quit. In hushed tones everyone fears a return to the period between 1997 – 99 when suddenly activists, business and journalists ‘disappeared’ without trace.

In the last year, human rights activists have faced continual intimidation from the authorities. On 6 December 2009, Yahen Afnagel, a youth leader, was kidnapped in broad daylight on the streets of Minsk and taken by van to a forest just outside Minsk. His hands were bound together and a bag placed over his head. He told me he was subject to a mock execution and men screamed at him it would be carried out for real if he continued to question the authorities. In just two months, 6 youth leaders faced mock executions.

The death of Oleg Bebenin in Europe, today

All of this is happening, today, on European soil. When Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi visited Minsk last November he told the country’s dictator President Lukashenko, that his people “love you, which is shown by the elections”. Never mind that the OSCE, which Italy is a member of, declared that the “presidential election failed to meet OSCE commitments for democratic elections.” Realpolitik is order of the day, and the opening up of markets by the IMF and World Bank are paying dividends for businessmen and their political cronies in capitals across Europe. Britain is no better. Lukashenko has hired Lord Chadlington, one of David Cameron’s closest allies (he bankrolled his leadership bid), on a public relations contract to improve his country’s image. Lord Chadlington clearly has no qualms about taking money from a nation ranked 188 out of 195 countries for press freedom; where every single gay club has been shut down and gay websites are blocked, and where Lukashenko has personally approved the turning of Jewish holy sites in Belarus into multi-storey car parks as part of a vicious national campaign of anti-Semitism, according to the World Association of Belarusian Jewry.

Culturally too, Western artists are helping to soften the image of Belarus. This month Sting will perform a concert in the Minsk Arena. His rider is for potted trees in his dressing room. If he looks beyond them, across the road is Lukashenko’s private residence built in the area of town that during the Nazi occupation hosted the mass killing of military prisoners. Whilst Sting performs, in an abandoned house on the other side of Minsk the banned Belarus Free Theatre will perform ‘Discover Love’, their play about the abduction and disappearance of businessman, democrat, and foe of Lukashenko, Anatoly Krasovski and his friend. Unlike the audience at the approved Sting concert, those attending performances of the Belarus Free Theatre are subject to harassment by the KGB.

Whilst Europe ignores the plight of the Belarussian people, the dictatorship is intensifying its efforts to stifle dissent prior to the Presidential election to be held at latest by February 2011. The KGB and intelligence forces are developing new, more subtle ways to target opponents. Accusations of scientology (illegal in France and Germany) and criminal libel abound. The short-term arrest and detention of political activists is now so routine that one youth leader told me he ‘couldn’t possible count’ how many times he had been arrested. Yet, the old methods are still the most effective. Yesterday an anonymous comment on the Charter97 website simply read: “We will wipe all of you off the face of the earth. None of your relatives will ever produce the like of you again.” The site’s moderator, Natalia Radzina has recently been sent emails and SMS messages that say, “We will rape you”, followed by her address. Yesterday she told me: “Lukashenko cannot frighten the IMF and other international investors by obviously murdering journalists and activists so my worry is, over the coming months up to the election, we will see a spate of mysterious suicides, road accidents and poisonings.”

The case of Aleh Byabenin ought to ring alarm bells across Europe, yet it has barely been reported outside Russia. We cannot let Europe’s politicians sleep walk into a cozy accommodation with a tyrant. Natalia Koliada from the Belarus Free Theatre, a close friend of Aleh asked me, how many more people must disappear or commit suicide until we take notice? Belarus is Europe’s shame.