Asda be True? (Supermarket exposes BNP lies)

The soaraway Sun had got its scoop and the BNP had mounted a national campaign before the truth had even got its boots on.

The excitement in the newsroom at Wapping would have fizzed when 40-year-old Beth Hoyle called to say an Asian man had refused to serve her because she was wearing a Hope for Heroes wristband.

Asda: Serving suggestion

Beth, from Greater Manchester, has two brothers in the Armed Services and must take great comfort from the Sun-backed campaign for Our Boys.

She was quoted as saying: “I immediately complained to a supervisor, but he said it was his right not to serve me. I was disgusted.”

The bandwagon was set rolling and it wasn’t long before the BNP was nailing a Union Flag on the back, calling for a national boycott of the low-cost supermarket.

Asda denied the story from the start – but they would say that wouldn’t they.

However, the supermarket has now issued an extraordinary statement outlining an extensive investigation into the claim.

Regional operations manager Paul Rowland said: “We’ve completed our investigation and it’s clear this exchange never happened. We’ve interviewed over 400 colleagues in the store, examined over three days worth of CCTV footage and talked to other customers and we can find absolutely no evidence that a colleague said what was alleged.”

He added: “We are disappointed and angry that right-wing groups are using this mythical incident to whip up racial hatred. Thankfully the people of Rochdale will see straight through that. We remain big supporters of the work our troops do serving our country.”

If only the Sun had checked its facts before supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and refrained from gross Islamaphobia to deflect attention from the disastrous consequences.

Perhaps then Beth’s brothers would definitely be at home this Christmas enjoying an Asda turkey rather than facing the prospect of dodging bullets aimed at American foreign policy.

Power Play (review of One Dimensional Woman)

“Where have all the interesting women gone? If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man – probably in that order.”

So opens Nina Power's energizing romp from today's co-option of feminism by Sarah Palin's anti-choice and the imperialist justification of war as an act of emancipation through to the carnivalesque possibilities of “vintage porn” and why “socialism must not exclude human pleasure from its program!”.


Google's take on 'free love'.

The premise of One Dimensional Woman is that modern feminism has coalesced with capitalist consumerism which fails to place the nexus of struggle in the workplace and recognise the sexualisation and denigration of ever increasing casualisation.

Moreover, Power plays with the possibility that pornography, so long the alpha omega of patriarchal sexual domination according to feminists, actually held out the possibility of subversion of monogamous heteronormativity. Instead, pornography today “deploys sex as something to and treated outside of other human and social relations.”

Power asks: “Whatever did happen to those dreams of living differently? To the radical Kibbutzim, co-housing groups, revolutionary cells? … Alternative living these days is more lively to refer to the fact that you've bolted a solar panel to your roof rather than undertaken any practical critique of the nuclear family.”

This tantalising possibility, of the erotic offering a moment of resistance against power, lingers. Laurie Penny, writing in the Guardian, tells how as a teenager she was seduced into stripping as part of a Burlesque troupe because of the desperate desire to capture the sexually subversive.

The blogger, who also goes by Penny Red, wrote: “When burlesque began in the 19th century, stripping wasn't even on the agenda. A form of low-budget theatre for the working classes, its main objective was to parody – or 'burlesque' – the cultural mores of the aristocracy.”

Sexual exploitation in the form of pole dancing and prostitution has been dressed up as empowerment, as Power delicately unpicks. Inversely, the inducement of sexual liberation on the Left all too often ends up as a grotesque parody of itself.

Servants
One Dimensional Woman draws us closer at the introduction by promising the book “looks for utopian intimations in alternative histories, particularly in relation to pornography and to various forms of collective and social living.”

But in the penultimate chapter, From Sexoleftism and Deflationary Acceptance, we are exposed to disturbing memories of Otto Muhl's 1970s Viennese commune where members “must have sex five times a day – romantic love was deemed bourgeois, foreplay old fashioned.”

She adds: “Predictably, sexoleftism rapidly turned into a tyranny of copulation as Muhl is latter accorded droit de seigneur over every young girl who 'comes of age'. Muhl was eventually sentenced in the 1980s to seven years in jail for child sex offences.”

Power is strides ahead of the moralist policing of sex dressed up as feminism and the defence of prostitution as emancipatory. However, there is an unnerving feeling that we have collectively walked full circle and arrived two paces behind Alexandra Kollontai.


All Power to your elbow..

The Commissar of Social Welfare in the post-Revolution euphoria in Russia, Kollontai enacted the most advanced legislation ever seen: one-week divorces, abortion and contraception on demand, the establishment of nurseries and socialised child care.

Before the machismo sadism of Stalin, she was an advocate of “free love” but also a realist in terms of what could be delivered under capitalism. “Only the fundamental transformation of all productive relations could create the social prerequisites to protect women from the negative aspects of the 'free love' formula”, she wrote in The Social Basis of the Woman Question exactly a century ago.

“Are we not aware of the depravity and abnormalities that in present conditions are anxious to pass themselves off under this convenient label? … All those masters of the house who rape their servants and throw them out pregnant onto the street, are they not adhering to the formula of free love?'”

Beautiful
Kollontai and Power both present seething and compelling accounts of how the workplace dehumanises and exploits women in their own eras. The 100 years of history which separates them holds in its arms the invention of the Pill.

Capitalist technology has delivered emancipation from nature and conception, allowing women in some societies sexual freedom without the constant fear of childbirth and consequent starvation. It has not yet stripped “the much of ages” in which family values and male sexual domination coexist.

This limited new freedom has given rise to a complex and considered adaptation of 'free love' among feminists, LGBT communities and anarchists. The book, The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities by Dossie Easton and Catherine A Liszt formulates some of the “constellations” and new relations made possible once monogamous family is jettisoned.

Socialists have a long tradition of embracing open relationships stretching back to the theory and practice of Fredrick Engels, author of Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. From this text springs Kollontai's belief that communism means free love and communal childcare.

Socialists today could abandon their fear of sex sects and not so older men can enamour themselves to young female activists. Rather to strip the stigma from and celebrate current practice in so many working class communities where “infidelity” and the breakdown of monogamous relations cause so much pain and division.

Sexual liberation is not utopia. But the possibility of non-exploitative tactile affection can remind us of the pleasure that comes with human interaction outside the razor sharp competition of the labour market. We can then discover it's not sex alone which needs to be rediscovered.

Power ends chapter 3.3 with an extensive extract from an interview with Toni Morrison published in Time magazine and in doing so brilliantly tips the discussion from sex to communal childcare, and human love.

“[Teenage single mothers] can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That's my job. I want to take them in my arms and say, 'Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me – I will take care of your baby'.

“That's the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don't want to pay for it.”

One Dimensional Woman, by Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. Published by Zero Books and available at all good book shops - and Amazon.

Who Framed M15?

People reading The Defence of the Realm might be forgiven for wanting to sign up to MI5 - for no other reason that you would clearly rise to the top.

The secret services have enjoyed billions of pounds of funding since their formation a hundred years ago and would like us to think they have hired the finest young men and occasional woman from Oxford and Cambridge.

Enemy Within: Did MI5 reach the heart of NUM?

However, an agent with access to a local lending library and a newsagent would have better intelligence than the agency, if you are to believe anything in Christopher Andrew's 1032 page tome.

For a start, even I could tell them that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi did not place the bomb on the PamAm Boeing 727 which crashed into Lockerbie in December 1988. The evidence against him is weak even before you consider the millions in CIA cash paid to witnesses.

Andrew must be an MI5 asset if he can keep a straight face while writing: "No significant hard evidence pointed towards Libya until some fragments of clothing classes as 'category one blast damaged', and therefore from inside the case containing the bomb, were eventually traced to an outlet in Malta, where the shopkeeper recalled selling the clothing to a man resembling a suspect intelligence officer..."

This does in fact sum up the prosecution case and should never have troubled a judge because of the self evident weakness: just read the parts of the sentence before and after "therefore".

The MI5 official history fails to state is the shopkeeper was paid millions by the CIA and his initial description did not resemble Abdelbaset Ali Al Megrahi in the slightest. The evidence was, literally, threadbare.

Amid the six inch wadge of paper there was space only for one mention of Colin Wallace who is described only as "an MoD information officer in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1975" guilty of giving "allegations of dirty tricks" by MI5 "continuing currency."

The investigative journalist Paul Foot found somewhat more to say in his book "Who Framed Colin Wallace", and had he been alive would have found little comfort in the fact that the Secret Service has confirmed now that Colin worked for them.

The former army intelligence officer was a loyal press officer who fed authorized false stories to the national press, including Robert Fisk now famously investigating the War on Terror for the Independent. He made the appalling error of refusing to work on "Clockwork Orange", the plot to overthrow Harold Wilson as Prime Minister.

Distabilize
He also tried to report horrendous abuse of boys in a Northern Ireland care home. Colin soon found himself forced out of the Army and then imprisoned for a manslaughter which he simply could not have committed. Facts too uncomfortable to warrant a denial.

Then there was the MI5 agent at the heart of the NUM during the Great Miners' Strike, chanelling funds around the world and then leaking false information to The Mirror. His role was brilliantly exposed by Seumas Milne in The Enemy Within. Andrew has read the book, or at least listed it in the bibliography.

In the body of the work we are told "a best selling history of the miners' strike later claimed that [Stella] Rimmington [while head of MI5] was heavily involved in dirty tricks against the NUM" but not the title nor the name of the author.

Truth
He continues: "According to a Commons motion by a group of Labour MPs, Roger Windsor, the NUM chief executive officer during the strike, was 'an agent of MI5 under Mrs Rimmington, sent into the NUM to distabilize and sabotage the union at its most critical juncture'."

So, was this true? Did the Secret Service successfully undermine the biggest strike for generations? Has Andrew unearthed some compelling MI5 documents that would settle this cataclysmic allegation one way or the other?

No. We are told the Prime Minister John Major and Mrs Rimmington denied the allegation. And the Daily Express paid "substantial damages" for failing to prove Windsor was an agent. All of which has been in the public domain for 20 years.

It would have been foolish to expect anything approaching the truth from an official history of a secret service which dubbed itself in 1917 as "the hidden hand". But for £30 the reader could expect something more than what has been written about at length in the popular press.

Or at least some plausible excuses for framing an entire country and allowing terrorists to go free, for framing one of their own because he refused to undermine an elected head of government and for framing NUM leader Arthur Scargill and helping crush the biggest strike in the last 80 years.

Seattle Hint*

The prickles of tear gas, the thud thud of anarchist black bloc marching bands with chains and bricks and the memory of peace campaigners waving white painted hands in the air as Italian riot police waded in with truncheons.

The anti-capitalist movement of the 1990s for me will always be associated with Genoa and the sight of burning cars and the whirl of tear gas canisters inches above your head.



Of course, it all started with Seattle which this November will reach its tenth anniversary. The coming together of the Teamster union members and the turtle dressed environmentalists opened up a spectacular battle between the many thousands of protesters and the few heads of state at conference.

The global movement which grew out of Seattle with world social forums and demonstrations plaguing the WTO meetings and G8 summits remains scarred on the retina because of the brilliance of the design and use of emerging technologies to organise.

When anti-capitalism came to the UK the most outward looking an innovative organisation was Globalise Resistance. Where anarchist-only groups mainly wore black and met in secret, GR organised mass participation, used the mainstream media and threw an orange bucket of paint into the movement.

The train to Genoa carring more than a thousand protesters across Europe so they could try and breach the Red Zone was the high water mark. But the explosion of design has also left its mark.

Noel Douglas was the brains behind the Globalise Resistance designs and the university lecturer is now curating an exhibition titled Signs of Revolt to mark the anniversary of Seattle and celebrate the grass routes design that followed in its wake.

Noel writes on the event website: "Signs of Revolt is an exhibition that weaves together the story of the past decades social movements, drawing out the influences and connections between and across the movements against capitalism, war and climate change.

"Using archive material and documentary photography and video from movement photographers and filmmakers, it reveals the story of how we got from Seattle to Copenhagen.

"Interspersed in this narrative are works by artist and designer activists and collectives, produced during, within and for the movements."

"This is the first time such a collection has been brought together in the UK and it will be a chance to reflect upon and celebrate the new creative impulses that the movements spawned.

The blurb concludes: "As capitalism threatens our very existence, Signs of Revolt defiantly maps out possible routes to a future filled with hope…"

Jonathan Barnbrook of Adbusters, illustrator Jody Boehnart, Stop the War designer David Gentlemen, John Jordan formally of Reclaim the Streets and political montage duo kennardphillipps will be represented along with the Rebel Clown Army, Movement of the Imagination and the Space Hijackers.

Guy Taylor, who was at the centre of Globalise Resistance, said: "It all looks to be quite a momentus occasion, the likes of GR, the Clowns and the Hijackers along with Barnbrook, kennardphillips and Gentlemen represent almost all the serious and influential parts of the design of resistance in the UK."

The event opens at the Old Truman Brewery in East London's Brick Lane with evening drinks on Friday, November 13 through the weekend. For more info contact visit the website, email show@signsofrevolt.net or call 07989 471159.

*This is a repost, but I think a worthwhile one!

Joe Jailed

The mother of Lance Corporal Joe Glenton has spoken out against the arrest of her son for his public opposition to the war in Afghanistan.

Sue Glenton has condemned the decision of the Ministry of Defence to arrest and imprison Joe yesterday after he attended a national Stop the War demonstration. The soldier faces ten years behind bars.

Sue said: "You've got government ministers, army commanders and MPs speaking every day in support of the war. What's so scary about a Lance Corporal having his say? My son is only speaking out for what he thinks is right."

Afghan MP Malalai Joya has sent the following message to Joe: "Stay strong! The majority of the Afghan people are with you and we respect and admire the stand you have taken.

"When there is no justice, it is better for honest people to go even to jail rather than go to war. Down with the occupation. I send you my warmest greetings and solidarity."

The Stop the War Coalition has launched a campaign to defend Lance Corporal Joe Glenton and his right to freedom of speech. A protest will be held outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall from 5pm on Thursday 12 November.

Home Office "suppressed" Forced Marriage Report

What does the government do with research which doesn’t fit its policy agenda? Refuse to publish the findings and rubbish its methodology, of course.

The Home Office commissioned research ahead of raising the age for marriage visas for non-European spouses from 18 to 21. The policy, Jacquie Smith said at the time, was to prevent forced marriages.


Professor Hester sees report binned despite extensive research

The Immigration Research and Statistics department duly contacted Professor Marianne Hester, a highly respected academic with a prolific publications record.

The department chose a feminist and expert in domestic violence and presumably sat back and waited for proof to fit the policy.

The researchers contacted government departments and NGOs alongside 45 stakeholders from Birmingham, Manchester and Tower Hamlets, conducted interviews with 38 “survivors” of forced marriage and produced a mapping survey of 80 advice organisations.

They contacted 28 departments and projects about existing data on forced marriages and held fifteen focus groups involving 82 women and 15 men.

And the report found … raising the age for entry into the UK for spouses would be detrimental to those suffering forced marriages.

Many survivors talked about suicide and some organistions warned the higher age of 21 would increase the risk of self harm and “ensure a longer period of abuse”.

This was a significant finding with serious consequences from extensive research. So obviously the Home Office decreed that it was “not sufficient quality to be published in the Home Office Research Series.”

The report was released only after a Freedom of Information request and was this week discussed at the High Court.

Diego Aguilar from Chile with the support of his wife Amber, from North London, argue that their right to a family life is being curtailed by the law. Their case has been taken to the High Court for Judicial Review by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

A total of 2,000 couples aged 18 to 21 have been refused a marriage visa following the rule change, of which an estimated 19 have been identified as being forced marriages.

Nicola Smith, Deputy Director of Immigration Policy at the UK Boarders Agency said in a witness statement to the court that the methodology of the study was “sound”.

And then she rubbished the methodology on the grounds of “insufficient sampling size”, “quantitative data insufficient”. She claimed there was sampling bias towards South Asian communities despite stating earlier that 77 percent of confirmed forced marriages were from this group.

But in a twist George Orwell would have been proud of, she suggested they could not trust the results because the participants themselves “might perceive the study as instrumental in further restricting immigration”.

With 2,000 overseas nationals barred from living in the UK with their husbands of wives under the new law, how could they have possibly reached this conclusion?

The Home Office last month also confirmed its satisfaction with Professor Hester's work generally by awarding her team a grant of £25,295 to review new powers to "control" perpetrators of gender-based violence.

Police held file on Peach before death attack

The Metropolitan Police held intelligence on ANL activist Blair Peach before he was killed by a member of the Special Patrol Group at Southall, the-sauce.org can reveal.

The teacher was fatally struck with a lead stick by an unnamed officer when police attacked protesters outside a National Front meeting on April 23, 1979.

The identity of the officer has remained a closely guarded secret despite the fact ten independent witnesses testified at the following inquest that Peach had been struck across the head by a uniformed policeman.

David Ransom, author of The Blair Peach Case: Licence to Kill, recorded that at the time many protesters suspected that the police deliberately targeted leading ANL members during the rioting - including Blair Peach.

Following a Freedom of Information request from the-sauce.org, the Met Police has confirmed that they held "information or files" about Peach before the date of his death.

However, the force has refused to confirm the nature of the information held for the time being.

Current Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson has confirmed the Cass report, following an investigation into the police 30 years ago, will be published within the year. The information on Peach held before Southall will be released at the same time.

The request from the-sauce.org asked for "any information or files which are kept by the Metropolitan Police or its partners relating to Blair Peach up to but excluding the date of his death on April 23, 1979.

"This information may be arrest or caution records intelligence gathered by or passed to the police and any images held before April 23."

The police response states: "In relation to my first duty under the Act, which is to confirm if the requested information is held by the MPS, I can confirm that I have located information relating to your request...


Inspector Murray this year denied killing Blair Peach

"The MPS have decided that there will be some information released about the investigation into the death of Blair Peach and this release is likely to be made at the end of the year. I am unable to give a specific date at the present time.

"However we feel that it would not be conducive to the effective and efficient conduct of the service to release information in a piecemeal fashion.

"This would not be fair to those who were close to Mr Peach and others involved in the investigation and would not appear to be a professional way of managing the release."

The initial request also asked for any information which had been gathered, held or passed to Special Branch or private agencies. This part of the request was refused outright on the usual grounds of keeping the activities of the secret service secret.

The Cass investigation was conducted to reassure the public that the death of Peach was taken seriously by the force. Reports suggest that six officers were named as the most likely suspects in relation to the killing.

The list of six officers included Inspector Alan Murray who was in charge of Unit 1 SPG when Peach was fatally wounded.

Murray has never accepted responsibility for his officers' violence. He is now a lecturer in Accounting and Corporate Social Responsibility at Sheffield University.

Harman Dies

Leading British Marxist activist and theoretician Chris Harman has passed away this morning in Cairo after suffering a cardiac arrest, reports 3arabawy with the comment: "What a loss for the international socialist movement."


Photo taken Friday evening at Cairo’s Press Syndicate.

Martin Smith, National Secretary of the SWP, said: "Our condolences go out to Talat, his partner, his children and all his family and friends.

"Chris Harman was a towering figure on the left in Britain and he made an immense theoretical and personal contribution to the Socialist Workers Party over many decades.

"He was greatly loved and will be sorely missed. We will let comrades know about the funeral as soon as we know any details."

Harman was a member of the central committee of the Socialist Workers' Party and editor of the International Socialist Journal.

He was also author of dozens of books including A People's History of the World and most recently Zombie Capitalism.

Terror State: Israel and the Bevin Bomb Plot

The word "terrorism" in today's society has become soldered permanently to the phrase "Muslim extremist".

The publication of The Defence of the Realm, the Authorized History of MI5, offers a useful reminder of the real history of terrorism in the Middle East.



The author, Christopher Andrew, who has not typed a single line of text which would have the censors nervous, offers the chapter: Zionist Extremists and Counter-Terrorism.

The section begins with the observation: "The terrorists came not, as later in the twentieth century, from Palestinian or Islamist groups but from the Zionist extremists of the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang..."

Andrew adds: "In March 1946, B3a [of MI5] received information from a 'reliable' source in Palestine, in 'direct contact' with the Stern Gang', that 'terrorists are now training their members for the purpose of proceeding to England to assasinate members of His Majesty's Government'.

Beat the Dog
"The wartime track record of Zionist terrorists ensured that such reports were taken seriously. In November 1944 the Stern Gang had assinated the British Minister of State in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, and Zionist extremists had made several attempts to murder the British high commissioner for Palestine, Sir Ronald MacMichael."

It is a matter of historic record that the leader of Irgun, Menachem Begin, blew up the British Palestine HQ in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with 500 pounds of explosives packed into milk-churns. Andrew states in passing that Begin was "the future prime minister of Israel".

Irgun and the Stern Gang were, MI5 believed, planning the assasination of Ernest Bevin, who became the Labour government's foreign secretary in July 1945 for having the temerity of calling for a settlement between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

The new book cites an intelligence report from Palestine made on August 23, 1946 - just a month after the King David Hotel bombing.

The communique states: "Irgun and Stern have decided to send five cells to London to operate in a manner similar to the IRA. To use their own words 'beat the dog in his own kennel'."

A second report from September 1946 adds: "In recent months it has been reported that [the Stern Group] have been training selected members for the purpose of proceeding overseas and assassinating a prominent British personality - special reference having been made several times to Mr Bevin in this connection."

Much of this is already in the public domain. Interestingly, the book carries a clipping from the Express newspaper from August 25, 1948, headlined: "Stern Gang Gave Bomb Girl A Party."

The story runs to nine short paragraphs and quotes Betty Knouth stating: "Did I post letter bombs? Unfortunately, the Belgian police got me before I could do so. They are a Stern Gang patent.

"One was addressed to Sir Alan Cunningham, another to Sir John Shaw...Belgian experts said they were deadly. I'm sorry none of them were delivered."

This reportage contrasts so starkly with today where newspapers have no resources to gather news so instead ramp up any arrest, any cobbled together government statement relating to terrorism and run it across the first five pages.

But more generally, what do we learn from this episode in history? If you want to commit terrorism then aim to become a terrorist state. And seek funding and arms from the US government by offering to act as a military base in an oil rich region.

Heathrow Blow

A catastrophic breach in security at Britain's busiest airport has been discovered by undercover government investigators, the-sauce.org can reveal.

The secret probe into security measures at Heathrow found that terrorists would have been able to smuggle a bomb "airside" under the noses of the private company checking vehicles going into one of the main gates.

The investigation was run by the Department for Transport and the breached resulted in a warning being issued against the private company running the gate where immigrants being deported are searched.


Lockerbie: would security prevent the same happening today?

Members of the security team at the firm responsible, Wilson James Secure Logistics, were told that the government had considered closing the airport because of the serious nature of the breach and they had just 30 days to upgrade their work.

Security at Britain's security was supposed to have been hugely tightened following the terrorist attack in London on July 7, 2005 and car bombing at Glasgow airport.

The bombing over Lockerbie followed a break-in at Heathrow and the best evidence available suggests this is when the bomb was smuggled into baggaging at the airport.

Swine
The most likely culprit for the Lockerbie bombing, Ahmed Jibril of the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, remains at large.

The security lapse happened at the Rapid Goods Screening Centre at gate CP14 of Terminal 4 where deportees held by the Home Office are searched before being taken to their flights.

Lorries carrying food for plane passengers, linen and other goods are also searched by WJ Secure Logistics staff before passing through the BAA controlled gate to the runways.

A member of security staff, who refused to be named, said: "A blue van had been searched but left the area with its back doors open. The DfT was able to smuggle an object onto to the back of the van.

“They must have been watching the site for days without being noticed to know that vehicle would come through unsecured.

"We are the last people to search the vans. Once they get through the gate they can access any part of the airport, including baggage areas and the planes.

“We've not been told what was placed on the van but the point of the exercise is to show that a bomb could have got through."

Security staff at the gate blame a £300 cut in monthly pay, a reduction in staff from more than 70 to 50 at the site and the introduction of 12 hour shifts for a serious decline in standards. One member of staff also contracted swine flu.

Operational Issues
Department for Transport staff were able to”smuggle” an “alien object” onto a light blue transit lorry owned by Morgan Est, which has a depot near the gate, after it had been searched by WJ Secure Logistics and which was then cleared by BAA to go airside.

A line manager at CP14 called staff into a meeting on September 28 and explained the Department for Transport had managed to breach security, telling them: “We came that close to being closed down. They were going to shut Heathrow”.

Wilson James won the contract to run the security post after it was outsourced by BAA, which runs Heathrow. The company is responsible for searching and x-raying more than 250 vehicles a day and also body searching deportees before they are allowed airside.

BAA, which runs Heathrow, today denied a deficiency notice had been served against them or – as the security guard claims – against WJ Secure Logistics.

A spokeswoman added: “I'm not going to speculate on that (whether WJ Secure Logistics failed to prevent DfT staff smuggling items airside). I have looked into this and there has been no deficiency notice served either against BAA or the company.”

The Department for Transport regulates aviation security through the National Aviation Security Programme (NASP). The Programme sets down the security standards that apply at UK airports to ensure the safety of the travelling public.

A spokesperson for the Department for Transport said: “Ensuring the safety of the travelling public is our highest priority, which is why we regularly inspect aviation security standards. While we do not comment on specific operational issues, we will not do anything that puts passengers at risk.”

UPDATE: The uberblogger Iain Dale referenced the-sauce.org the other day, bringing in 1,500 - a new daily record. Perhaps I should invest more time in link baiting!