Black's propaganda

Fresh from a US prison sentence for fraud, former Telegraph-owning tycoon Lord Black is touring TV studios seeking "rehabilitation."

Black says he is not a criminal because he overturned so many charges that he only went to jail on three counts of fraud. Which is three more counts of fraud than I have.

Black is trying to make himself look good, but is really reminding us about the rottenness of the Establishment.

In particular, he shows how people who lied about the war on terror were crooked all round.

Black, who was imprisoned in the US for defrauding his company, is claiming innocence by attacking the US justice system.

According to Black, "The whole system is a fraudulent, fascistic conveyor belt for the corrupt prison system."

Last week he was ranting and reeling off statistics on Newsnight about unfair imprisonment in the US. You half expected him to raise a fist and shout: "Free Mumia!"

Maybe we should be pleased for a convert to the cause. But under his ownership the Telegraph pumped out articles headlined "The American approach to law enforcement has long been ridiculed as barbaric, pointless and expensive. But putting people behind bars works."

Black's Telegraph called the US's most famous wrongly imprisoned man Mumia Abu-Jamal a "US police-killer."

The paper took the most grotesque attitude to justice in the "war on terror."

Under Black the Telegraph printed absurd lies about Iraqi WMD to encourage war, with pages of phoney "proof" of Saddam's weapons hidden in secret bunkers under "hospitals, schools and mosques."

(Oddly enough, the other main newspaper group promoting lies about Iraq - News International - also turns out to have criminal practices.)

Black's Telegraph printed leading articles claiming that Guantanamo prisoners were "humanely treated, decently fed and allowed to practise their religion freely" and calling for "serious consideration" of the "indefinite detention of British subjects without trial" in Britain.

Black's wife Barbara Amiel, through her column in his paper, accused those worried about Guantanamo of having the "flabby belly of reflex anti-Americanism" and "chanting the mantra of anti-Americanism" just because of "photos of kneeling captives at Guantanamo Bay, manacled, goggled and wearing bright orange puffa jumpsuits - always a difficult colour to wear and a desperately unflattering look."

But one short sentence and her flabby-bellied husband is chanting his mantra against the US. I guess we either say convert or hypocrite - or not bother and look real US victims of injustice at www.freemumia.com.

• Morning Star readers may recall my 2010 article about Peter Dean, one of Cameron's top donors.

That year his company, Dean Foods Group, gave the Tories £50,000.

Dean runs a British egg supply business which was investigated by the Competition Commission. Dean is the Egg Man, dominating the business. Farmers feel squeezed and forced into bad egg deals.

Since then, Dean's firm - renamed Noble Foods - has given the Tories more cash, making another £50,000 donation last November.

This gives Dean membership of the Conservative Leaders' Group, whose "members are invited to join David Cameron and other senior figures from the Conservative Party at dinners, post-Prime Minister's questions, lunches, drinks receptions, election result events and important campaign launches."

Noble also gave Cameron £35,000 worth of helicopter rides during the 2010 election campaign.

But this week, as Felicity Lawrence revealed in the Guardian, the Gangmasters Licensing Authority found Lithuanian staff catching chickens for Noble had been horribly abused - they were beaten, threatened, had money illegally docked and were driven around Britain in a van from job to job at all hours. They were working 17-hour shifts and either slept in the van or were given squalid, overcrowded conditions.

The gangmaster supplying the staff has been closed down and police are investigating.

Noble says it was unaware of the abuse, although Dean must know his estimated £70m personal fortune comes from a business marred by grim working conditions.

We do not know what Dean talks to Cameron about, but we do know that the Tory-led government is slashing the Gangmasters Licensing Authority budget and wants to tear up "red-tape" regulations on working conditions.

• Alan Cave, architect of the Department for Work and Pensions Work Programme, is leaving the government to join Serco, a firm with £114 million of Work Programme contracts.

The scheme doesn't seem any good for helping the unemployed, but big contractors and former civil servants seem to be doing very well from it.

Cave is the DWP's "delivery director." His own CV says he was "responsible for strategic commissioning and performance of government's £1bn annual spend on employment programmes. Leading the delivery of the new Work Programme" since 2007.

Cave was central to the Work Programme launch. When the coalition came into power, some Labour employment schemes were still running.

At the recent Tory conference, DWP minister Lord Freud described the Work Programme's beginnings, saying he could "remember the moment when Alan Cave said: 'I think we can rip up everything and start again,' so that's what happened in June 2010."

At Cave's suggestion, existing schemes were scrapped and the entirely contractor-delivered Work Programme launched.

Serco runs the programme for £114m in South Yorkshire and the West Midlands.

Cave is leaving the DWP before much-delayed figures showing the effectiveness - or not - of the Work Programme are released.

The DWP says Cave will not be running the Work Programme for Serco. However, as David Cameron has recently announced the extension of Work Programme-style "payment by results" programmes across social services, Cave's experience will be invaluable for Serco, with his inside knowledge how government contracts are calculated and structured.

The government is involved in wider, intensely secret, discussions with Serco. In February Cabinet Minister Oliver Letwin met Serco representatives to discuss "open government," or privatisation.

The Cabinet Office denied my freedom of information request, refusing to give any details of the meeting, including who attended.

A Cabinet Office official said transparency was good, but "against these public interests I have weighed the commercial interests of Serco" and found them more important.

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