Football: not coming home

The 2018 World Cup has been awarded to Russia, and 2022 to Qatar. Enjoy those 40C + temperatures and the ban on alcohol outside a few licenced hotels in '22. Oh, and homosexuals: sorry. The Russians don't like you and the Qataris have a legal ban on homosexuality. You'll have to get your kicks (sorry) elsewhere. Straights are in trouble too: kissing in public is illegal. I'm quite looking forward to footballers being arrested for overly-demonstrative goal-celebrations.

Good. The Panorama programme a few days ago proved fairly conclusively what we already knew: that FIFA (like many international sport governing bodies) is riddled with corruption, and that any country wishing to host an event has to agree to exploitation and fraud: FIFA's demands included exemption from minimum-wage, taxation and money-laundering laws.

If you've read even a small part of the Wikileaks reports on Russia, you'll recognise that a country with no distinction between the mafia and the ruling class and government is the ideal location for a corrupt, arrogant and exclusive event. All those ticket scams, construction rackets, prostitution rings, and on and on ad infinitum. They're suited to each other.

And on top of all that, David Cameron looks extremely stupid, flying to Switzerland to apologise for the BBC's journalism, flying back for PMQs, then out to Switzerland for more lobbying and schmoozing.

FIFA of course have done nothing about the corruption evidence. Their ethics committee says that no official has been convicted of bribery, neatly overlooking the fact that bribery wasn't a criminal offence in Switzerland (predictably) at the time. Who's the head of the ethics committee? Why, it's that former Tory Scum MP Sebastian Coe!

Perhaps significantly, Russia is 140th and Qatar 120th on the Index of Press Freedom. I wonder if Panorama did sway the voting to some extent! No pesky investigations in these countries!

The eagle flies at midnight

I'm quite enjoying this Russian spy scandal. One of the set-pieces whenever these stories come around is the confected outrage expressed by the 'victims', in this case the US. It implies that such behaviour is beyond the moral pale, whereas every country does it, all the time. The US has spies in Russia, as does the UK, and Russia spies on both countries. They're all at it because they see each other as political and commercial rivals.

In the last decade, we have had two major expulsions of our spies in Moscow, who were caught on film red-handed trying to do exactly what the FBI caught the Murphys at. In one case, the British resident spymaster used a mentally unstable junior Russian diplomat, Platon Obukhov, to spy on his father, a former Soviet deputy foreign minister and one of the main negotiators of the intermediate nuclear forces treaty removing medium-range missiles from Europe.

The real hypocrisy is the self-righteousness expressed when they catch others at it.

Two aspects interest me. Firstly, these 'spies' seemed to do little more than gather gossip and publicly available information. So why are they being treated more harshly than the Israeli spies (and here, and here) in the US (and let's not forget Israel's repeated forgery of allied countries' passports, the kidnapping of Mordechai Vanunu from Italy and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior). Rosen and Weismann were let off because the 'secrets' they disclosed (on US-Iran attitudes) weren't hugely secret - I assume these Russians will get off on the same grounds, and be expelled for immigration/passport offences.

The other thing that caught my eye was this delightful statement by a neighbour of one of these super-spies:

They couldn't have been spies," said Jessie Gugig. "Look what she did with the hydrangeas."