A vast cloying morass of injustice has visibly submerged the British legal systems in anything connected to Palestine.

In a quite incredible series of linked and kinked events this week, the senior KC representing one of the Palestine Action activists in the Filton trial was in the Court of Appeal arguing against being found in contempt of court for his summing up in that case – a speech which I described at the time as the greatest legal speech I had ever read.

He fell foul of the quite incredible conditions imposed on the defence in that trial – they must not refer to the motive of their clients for action against Elbit, they must not refer to Elbit’s role in the Israeli defence industry, they must not refer to genocide or to ethnic cleansing in relation to Gaza.

Compare this to the public statements of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley and of then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper where they claimed that one of the defendants had attacked a policewoman with a sledgehammer – a blatant attempt to influence the jury in the Filton trial.

What is very plain in the Filton case, as in the Alex Salmond case, is that contempt of court rules are only applied to the defence and not to the prosecution.

Juries had been shown by the prosecution the notebooks of the defendants, with all information about Elbit and their operations removed.

The barristers were also forbidden from telling the jury that they have the right to acquit according to their conscience, irrespective of the direction of the judge.

The first Filton trial famously failed to return any guilty verdicts at all, and all defendants were found not guilty of aggravated burglary, with no verdict returned on more minor charges.

This was extremely important as the aggravated burglary charge carries the meaning of a deliberate purpose to cause harm to persons, not just to property (the phrase “aggravated burglary” does not obviously carry the connotation of intent to harm persons to the layman, but that is the purport in English law).

The acquittals on aggravated burglary were particularly annoying to the Starmer regime because this accusation about intent to harm people was a key part of Yvette Cooper’s entirely dishonest argument for proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

The Filton verdicts were a major setback for the government, and the unfortunate KC was dragged in by the judge for the unforgivable offence of securing the acquittal of his client in a situation which was extremely embarrassing to Starmer and Cooper.

The subsequent contempt case could lead to both the KC being disbarred and to his imprisonment. To add to the incredibly sinister story, this case is entirely secret. It is illegal to mention the contempt case at all – and could lead to imprisonment for contempt of anyone who mentions it.

Yet that is only the first layer of the heaving mass of injustice around this case.

The government has attempted to make it illegal to inform voters of their established right to acquit according to their conscience.

In 2023 Trudi Warner was arrested standing outside a Crown Court in a climate activist trial, for holding a sign which said “Jurors. You have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience”. This legal principle is on a marble plaque in the Old Bailey.

The High Court dismissed the case against Warner, stating that she was informing the jury of an established legal principle. In 2024 the government dropped its appeal against the High Court ruling in Warner’s favour.

Yet astonishingly, the Metropolitan Police have again arrested Trudi Warner, for standing outside the Filton Trial holding the exact same sign. They arrested others holding the same wording as well.

The Metropolitan Police claim different grounds for arrest this time: under section 14 of the 1986 Public Order Act they banned the small protest by Trudy and a handful of others. That the protest threatened serious disruption or intimidation – the bar under the Public Order Act – is plainly a nonsense.

The increasingly fascist Metropolitan Police are simply seeking to find a way to get round the High Court judgment and prevent the jury being informed of their right to acquit.

In Judge Johnson the government have an entirely complicit judge in limiting what the jury may hear, and in the Metropolitan Police they have an entirely compliant tool in keeping knowledge of their rights from the jury.

Now we have to delve still another layer deeper into the stench of corruption around this case. The government decided to go for a retrial of the Filton case on the more minor charges on which the jury had been unable to reach a verdict, having returned not guilty on the major ones.

The limitations of what the barristers could say in their defence speeches were so extreme, that five of the six defendants in the Filton Trial decided to dismiss their barristers before the end of their case and make their closing speeches themselves.

Yes, you read that right. The barristers were forbidden from making the defence case, so the defendants had to speak for themselves.

To be plain, the defendants equally face the risk of possible imprisonment for contempt of court for breaching Judge Johnson’s orders in what they said to the jury, but unlike the barristers they do not of course face professional disbarment.

And what great speeches they all made. The Real Media website has done a fantastic job in documenting the trial, and I highly recommend you to read the closing speeches in full. But just this little segment from Charlotte Head’s closing speech in the Filton trial casts some light on what a monumental attempted stitch-up the egregious Judge Johnson has presided over:

The first thing that you might have noticed about the prosecution case is that they didn’t call a single security guard to give evidence. The prosecutor asked you to see things from Volante’s perspective [described in evidence as the most violent of the Elbit security guards], and you could have. She chose not to call him or any security guard to actually give evidence, because they know that they were the ones intimidating us. And if that wasn’t true, they would have called them to the stand.

The truth is that the security guards, like Elbit itself, have been shielded and sheltered by the state.

If this was a shop that we’d broken into, which I would never do by the way, then you’d expect the owner to come to court. You’d expect him to list all of the items that were damaged, and describe the impact it’s had on his business. But where is Elbit? You’ve heard a very detailed and very boring inventory of the tools we brought to dismantle the weapons. You even have – behind Tab 10 – pictures with information like the brand and the weight and the material of every single tool. So where is that information about the weapons that we dismantled? If this case is supposedly only about damage, then where is the inventory?

And I think that brings me to the CCTV. Everything that we’ve heard about the CCTV system came second-hand from PC Sarah Grant. Once again, the prosecution did not want to put an Elbit Systems employee in front of you to answer for themselves. They know that the explanation of why there is missing footage doesn’t make sense. The low frame rate cannot explain the missing footage. You’ve seen it. We spent way longer than a minute in that alcove. No matter how low the frame rate was, it’s impossible that nobody was pictured on that camera, where Volante was being incredibly violent. Coincidentally, we don’t have any body-worn footage from the alcove either. We also don’t have CCTV of the area where Luke [another Elbit guard] had Lottie screaming on the floor, or body-worn. Or when Mr. Volante hit Jordan in the neck with a sledgehammer – you only saw that because it’s captured on police body-worn.

PC Phoebe Webber accepted that there were CCTV cameras that covered all of these areas, and we know that security all had body-worn cameras. Sarah Grant accepted that someone would have to set the frame rates, but of course, Witness Alpha [described as a senior Elbit employee whose identity has been withheld from defence lawyers] , who hasn’t been here at all, couldn’t remember the password to access the settings. Could anyone really believe that a multi-million pound weapons and technology company that specializes in surveillance drones didn’t have a CCTV system that worked?

Not only were Elbit shielded from anything at all being said about their supply of weapons to Israel, not only was it forbidden to mention genocide and ethnic cleansing, but some key Elbit witnesses – I presume from Mossad or the IDF – were granted anonymity.

I previously reported that the police left the recordings of the video evidence, in their police evidence bags, in the custody of Elbit for over a year. Throughout this prosecution the Metropolitan Police, Elbit, the Crown Prosecution Service and the judge have been a part of a seamless zionist security operation.

This is from the closing speech of Zoe Rogers:

After hearing the 6 of us give evidence you might think it odd that what’s happening in Palestine has gone completely unmentioned, you might have noticed certain words that have been blacklisted, that until our closing speeches the word genocide wasn’t said once. There have been interruptions from the prosecution, quick subject changes from our barristers – it’s almost as if whole topics of conversation have been banned. The prosecution know full well that we are right that this factory is supplying weapons to Israel to be used in Gaza. That is why they are choosing to suppress it rather than contest it. The prosecution have decided that the legality of Israel’s actions is irrelevant in this trial. Because they know you could not in good conscience find us guilty of anything if you were allowed to hear the whole truth.

…Now I’m an ordinary person, with friends, family, a place at university, a cat I love, basically a whole lot to lose by going to prison. But you know that we all actually intended to be arrested on the 6th of August. We intended to go to trial. And I won’t speak for the others here, but the reason I was willing and confident enough to allow that, was because I knew that now, 20 months in the future, I would be standing in front of 12 ordinary people like you. Not politicians, not legal experts, not barristers and judges wearing 400 yr old horsehair on their heads, but a panel of my equals. You are the best counterweight to power and tyranny within the legal system as it exists today. It is a privilege to be judged by you. And I don’t say that to flatter you, but because as you’ve already heard, the right to trial by jury is under threat, with a Bill passing through the House of Commons as I speak. Juries as we know them today may not be around for much longer, precisely because your pockets cannot be weighed down by bribes from the rich and powerful. (And also because juries often refuse to convict in these kinds of cases). And that is a very powerful position for you to be in.

No one can tell you to convict in this case, not even the judge. In fact, the judge is explicitly not allowed to tell you to convict! You, and only you, can decide on your verdicts. But not only can you acquit us, but you have the RIGHT to acquit us. No one can punish you for your decision. No one can even ask you why.

On Tuesday the jury will start its third day of deliberation. Once the verdicts are in, it is going to be fascinating to see if Johnson attempts to find any of the defendants in contempt of court for their closing speeches. They went further than the barrister who has already been attacked in this way.

Let us now leave Woolwich Crown Court (a physical adjunct of Belmarsh prison) and head to the Royal Courts of Justice, where the Starmer regime held this week its appeal against the High Court finding that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful.

I have always suspected that the British deep state will ensure the proscription is upheld at the end of a charade of a legal procedure. I was not diminished in that belief by this article by Joshua Rozenberg, partner of lunatic uber-zionist Melanie Phillips, in which he argues that the extremely unusual forming of a five-judge court of appeal, including England and Wales’s two most senior judges, is to bolster the court with sufficient seniority convincingly to overturn Dame Victoria Sharp and her three-judge panel.

The hearing did not on the surface go terribly well for the Starmer regime. Their primary argument was that the proscription had been democratically approved by parliament and the courts had no right to interfere.

In terms of judicial consideration, the assertion that, in effect, the European Convention on Human Rights does not apply if parliament approves an Order which contravenes it, is problematic (though the English courts would probably uphold it in primary legislation).

In the real world, of course, the sham of democracy ignores the fact that Cooper, Starmer, Lammy and the lot of them are bought and paid for by the zionist lobby.

Huda Ammori’s (co-founder of Palestine Action) legal team made the obvious points of the effect of the proscription on human rights and freedom of expression. This was bolstered by a letter of 1500 signatories openly defying the law and declaring support for Palestine Action and opposition to genocide.

Ammori’s team were able to make rather more of a couple of points that had, in my view, been given insufficient prominence at earlier hearings.

The first is the argument that the measure has a disproportionately severe effect on the Palestinian community in the UK, who feel suppressed in protesting against the devastating attacks on their own people and risk false classification as terrorist.

It is worth noting that Israeli interests were extensively consulted before the ban was imposed, but not one single Palestinian was consulted.

The second is a more pointed emphasis on the astonishing argument by the Metropolitan Police and the Joint Terrorism Assessment Centre in the papers recommending proscription, that designation as terrorism is necessary because Palestine Action keep appointing good defence lawyers and achieving acquittals.

This acknowledgement that the proscription is an attempt to undermine the criminal justice system should be key to the case. It is not a point that to date the judges have been willing to tackle – no judicial decision has acknowledged it so far.

The Starmer regime is intent on the entire subversion of the supposed protections of British justice. It is operating purely in the interests of a foreign state, in order to protect Israel from any potential consequences of the public revulsion against its genocidal onslaught on the Palestinians.

To complete this circle of crazed authoritarianism, after the open hearings on the government appeal over the proscription of Palestine Action concluded, there was a day of “closed hearing” where secret evidence is heard. Huda Ammori will never be told what was alleged in these hearings and never have a chance to answer.

I am the “petitioner” in the parallel judicial review in Scotland. That case should have concluded by now, except the Starmer regime has been introducing “secret evidence” in closed session. I do not even know when such sessions are happening, let alone what is said in them.

My “interests” are “represented” by regime-approved lawyers who are forbidden from any communication with me. We can guess at the lies that are being told in these closed sessions – such guesses might range from Iranian funding to bomb manufacture – but we cannot even testify they are lies.

The Starmer regime has now, for the third time, introduced a motion to “sist” the Scottish judicial review until after the English case has concluded, on the basis that it is undesirable for Scottish and English courts to reach differing conclusions.

This is the third time they have attempted to sist the case, so far without success.

We have applied for interim relief – that the proscription should be suspended in Scotland pending the judicial review, because it is so delayed, in order to avoid people being convicted of terrorism on the basis of an Order subsequently found unlawful.

The Starmer regime is making the process as long and drawn out as possible, partly to postpone a potential politically damaging defeat, but mostly as a matter of lawfare. Each hearing drains our financial resources. I am afraid this tactic against us does have the potential to succeed.

Unless we can widen our donor base we are not going to get this case over the line. That would be a great shame, because it is crucial not only for freedom of expression, not only as a stand against the genocide in Palestine, but as an assertion of the independent rights of Scotland and its legal system.

If you can help fund the case please do so. But if you know anybody else who has the means to make a contribution, and who supports the principles for which we are fighting, please speak to them and see if they can help. I am extremely grateful to the thousands who have contributed so far.

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It was not my intention to run for election to the Scottish parliament from a hospital bed in Caracas, but sometimes we have to take what life gives us.

I went to a clinic a week ago feeling dizzy and was immediately rushed to hospital. My heart rate was fluttering and below 20 bpm. I have since had an emergency procedure to fit a pacemaker.

Long-term followers of this blog (and readers of Murder in Samarkand or The Catholic Orangemen of Togo) know that I am dogged by long-term heart problems which I have to work through. I try to avoid hospitals because such is the apparent seriousness of my condition it is very hard to get out of them again.

In 2005 I was given three years to live with pulmonary hypertension, but I am still here and still fighting for good causes. Now with electronic enhancement.

I can’t however type much as both my hands look like this.

I am not withdrawing from the election, as I believe it is essential to give voters in Edinburgh Central the opportunity to vote for someone genuinely committed to Scottish Independence and who intends to do something about it.

You cannot believe both that Scotland is a nation with the right of self-determination and that London should have a veto.

London cannot afford to lose Scotland’s vast resources and will never agree. Independence will not be given to us, we must take it. When Independence comes, it will be in contravention of UK domestic law. Scottish Independence is therefore a revolutionary cause or it is nothing.

With opinion polls routinely showing a majority for Independence, the SNP will handily win this election on the pretence they will work for Independence. But they have no intention of actually doing so – still less have the neoliberal, Freeport-supporting Scottish Greens.

What will happen is that they will beg London for a referendum, which Starmer has made crystal clear he will refuse, and then they will claim to have tried. The SNP will then yet again forget Independence until the next election needs a slogan, while going back to pocketing their large salaries from the British state for running the colonial administration at Holyrood.

With US bombers taking off from British airports loaded with 2,000 lb bombs for the destruction of children in Iran, with the RAF giving targeting intelligence to the Israelis for the Genocide in Gaza, there is a moral urgency to breaking up the UK. Scotland needs at least some people in its Parliament who feel that urgency.

That is why I am giving people a chance to vote for me as part of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland – an umbrella group for all who support Independence, with other policy choices left to the individual. The party is precisely eight weeks old.

(I had intended to stand for Your Party, which decided firmly in favour of Scottish Independence, but it is not fighting these elections).

Were I able to campaign I would have a good chance of being elected. Scottish parliamentary elections are run under the D’Hondt system. This is a form of (not very) proportional representation in which there are FPTP constituencies, grouped into regions. The voter has two ballots, both marked with a simple X.

The first ballot is a standard FPTP constituent vote. On the second you vote for a party of your choice. This is used to make the regional vote roughly proportional, subtracting the constituency seats won from each party’s vote share, then electing individuals from a party ranked list.

It removes the individual voter choice you get with STV and is not as proportional.

The Alliance to Liberate Scotland commissioned a 2,500-person, properly weighted poll from Find Out Now. This found that – and this is an essential point – when prompted with the existence of Alliance to Liberate Scotland, 7% of voters across Scotland would vote for ATLS and 8% would vote for me, by name, in Edinburgh and Lothians (and similar for my friend Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow).

As I am number one on the list for ATLS in the Edinburgh and Lothians Region that figure would almost certainly see me elected.

BUT real voters are not prompted with the existence of ATLS, and of course the media will keep it that way. That is why an active campaign was so essential and it is so frustrating to be stuck here in hospital in Caracas.

I have not, though, given up. My colleagues are fighting a great campaign and I will get back to join in as soon as I can fly.

Finally, there is really interesting news about the Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action, and I will post on that when able.

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Published by Craig Murray on behalf of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland, Oxgangs Road, Edinburgh EH10 7BD

As I was leaving the University of the Communes in Tocuyito, after a joyful and uplifting visit, an earnest young Professor came up to me and pulled me aside. Very quietly, he asked me what was going to happen. A number of the students were terrified there would be regime change and they, picked as young socialist leaders in the commune movement, would be imprisoned, tortured and executed.

With students at an agricultural project of the Vittoria commune

It was a sharp reality check after a great day at this fledgling university. But it is very real. I had met sober and professional diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who knew exactly which part of the mountains they would flee to with assault rifles in the event of the right coming to power, and were resigned to a life of guerilla warfare, including partners and children. I have met nobody who doubts that a change of regime in Caracas would lead to immediate mass killings of leftists, and a lengthy civil war.

Almost everything you are told in the West about Venezuela is untrue, and the biggest lie is that Machado, Guaidó and the groupings around them are in any sense democrats or liberal. They are not, and have direct family and political links to the murderous CIA-sponsored regimes of the pre-Chávez years. They also have many scores to settle – Machado’s family, to give just one example, dominated the electricity supply before it was nationalised.

A very large number of the “political prisoners” the West is so concerned about, were involved in efforts at military coup or violent insurrection, of which Guaidó’s comic opera attempt in 2019 was only the most publicised. After the disputed 2024 elections many of those imprisoned were actually brandishing weapons – I met the families of three young men who told me their sons were misled into taking to the streets with guns, and hoped they would get out in the current amnesty.

Sanctions caused great economic hardship which affected government popularity. But it is a huge error to conflate discontent at the Maduro government with support for Machado – there is almost no evidence of the latter, no matter how hard you look. That Machado does not have the internal support to run the country is one of the few things Trump has stated truthfully. The alternative to the socialist government is chaos.

So Delcy Rodríguez has to maintain the Socialist Party in government, or see supporters butchered and the start of a civil war. At the same time she has to contend with the blatant colonialist assertion of control over Venezuela’s assets and finances by the USA, while placating the irascible and irrational Trump.

Let us get one thing straight. I have spoken personally to those closest to President Nicolás Maduro. I have spoken with Francisco Torrealba, who followed Maduro as President of the Transport Workers Union and also took over Maduro’s seat in the National Assembly. I have spoken to Maduro’s son, also Nicolás. None of these people believe for one second that Delcy Rodríguez was in any way implicated in the kidnap of Nicolás and Cilia Maduro.

Why does almost everybody in the West believe a narrative that nobody in Venezuela believes, and which I am quite certain is untrue?

That narrative has been force-fed to you. Trump undermined Delcy Rodríguez by open praise of her and assertion that she is his choice. The truth of course is different: as Maduro’s Vice-President, she naturally assumes the duties of President, as confirmed by the Venezuelan Supreme Court. A co-ordinated effort of briefings to journalists by the Trump administration, by the security services, and by Machado-aligned Venezuelans in Miami, gave to the media in a coordinated fashion a detailed story of negotiations between Delcy and her brother Jorge and the Americans, for a strategy of economic reform that included Maduro’s removal.

I have looked again through many articles that forward this narrative, and all of them very obviously come primarily from Washington sources, and it is a narrative that the United States has been very, very assiduous in feeding you.

It begs the question, if Delcy really is a Western puppet, why is the Western Establishment so keen to tell you that? In every other circumstance, like the Gulf monarchies or al-Jolani, they are always anxious to promote the myth that their puppets are not puppets.

My maxim, that if the government really wants you to know something, it probably means it isn’t true, holds in this case. Trump wants it known that Delcy Rodríguez is his puppet because it is part of his victory narrative, the fake story of Trump greatness. It is also intended to divide and weaken the socialist movement in Venezuela.

We have to look at the night of 3 January when Maduro was kidnapped. There is one key fact which again is simply not part of the Western narrative. It was Nicolás Maduro who instructed the military to stand down and not to fight, in the event of an attempt to take him. In fact he was aware that such an event was imminent, though he did not know the exact date.

Maduro’s primary concern was to avoid war between Venezuela and the United States, war which would devastate this peaceful country.

It is important to note that Maduro was consciously following the template of his mentor President Hugo Chávez in his kidnapping in a CIA-orchestrated coup in 2002. (That link is a wrenching reminder that there was once a Guardian and Observer not captured by the security services). Following armed opposition insurrection on 11 April 2002, in which 19 Chávez supporters were massacred and 150 injured, a military coup captured President Chávez and he was flown to the island of La Orchila in a CIA-chartered plane.

Opposition leader Pedro Carmona was sworn in as President by the military leaders and instantly recognised by the Bush regime in Washington. He announced the immediate repeal of all of Chávez’s reform measures. However the people and bulk of the armed forces rose against the plotters and after only 48 hours took back control. Chávez returned to power. This is the basis of the brilliant Irish documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (which, naturally, was never televised).

The key thing to understand is that – remarkably – Chávez did not execute any of the coup participants, not even those in the military. There were in fact few prosecutions, jail sentences were remarkably light and many – including “President” Carmona – were allowed to “escape” into exile. The longest jailings were for those who actually took part in the massacre of April 11. Chávez gave a December 2007 general amnesty.

The same astonishing tolerance was shown to Juan Guaidó, the Western puppet who attempted a farcical military coup on 30 April 2019. While his coup was a pathetic failure and his total number of military defectors was 50, he nevertheless caused the deaths of four people and wounding of 230.

Again the response of the socialist government was astonishingly lenient. Nobody was executed. Proper trials were held of those accused and jail sentences were remarkably light even for those convicted of treason. It is worth saying that the numbers tried and the sentences were notably lighter than those handed down for the Washington Capitol Hill “insurrection” of 2021.

A group of thirty who took refuge in Bolsonaro’s Brazilian Embassy were allowed peacefully to leave the country. Guaidó was never arrested and was tolerated to wander around the country for years claiming to be President, and travel freely in and out, until he was indicted by the Government of Colombia for entering that country illegally in 2023.

The socialists’ refusal to spill blood has never been mirrored on the right. The large majority of those “political prisoners” you constantly hear about were involved in these or a whole series of lesser-known armed attempts, or in the opposition’s very real links to narcotics trafficking and organised crime.

What is surprising to me is not the claimed authoritarianism of the socialist government but, on the contrary, its quite astonishing leniency with the opposition in the face of repeated CIA-sponsored, frequently armed attempts at overthrow.

One has only to envisage how a right-wing Latin American government would deal with repeated left-wing armed coup attempts, to appreciate just how extraordinary this restraint has been. Lack of violence or vengeance has always characterised the Bolivarian Revolution’s reaction to right-wing coup attempts. Though it is admirably principled, I am not even sure I think this extreme degree of tolerance is wise.

It is in the context of this longstanding socialist reluctance to use violence that you have to view Maduro’s decision to stand down the defence forces in the event of an American kidnap mission. This is a government which does not just use revolutionary slogans, it lives by them, and “peace” is a key one. Maduro almost certainly hoped that domestic solidarity would oblige his return quickly, as had happened with Chávez. It is unlikely it occurred to him that Trump would simply – and pointlessly – remove Maduro and leave his government in power.

Multiple sources have confirmed to me that the Venezuelan forces were ordered to stand down. I visited the hillside location at Fuerte Tiuna where young female Lieutenant Alejandra del Valle Oliveros Velásquez, age 23, refused the order to stand down and continued to stand guard with her gun at a vital hilltop communications facility. She died as it was struck by American missiles.

This is also a point missing from the Western narrative of military events. Venezuela’s defensive posture is hopelessly outdated in the age of precision missile warfare. Its radar installations and anti-aircraft batteries are highly visible on open hilltop locations, not in hardened bunkers. Its troops are in open barracks, like the unnecessarily murdered Cuban guards.

Outrage at the entirely unprovoked American assault has restored a much-needed sense of national unity to Venezuela. In the bitter aftermath of the disputed July 2024 presidential election, many government supporters, including some in office, concede that the wave of arrests went too far. That overreach damaged the government’s moral authority at home and handed valuable propaganda ammunition to its critics abroad.

There was not sufficient discrimination between armed and unarmed protestors, and while many would argue that emergency measures were essential to prevent immediate anarchic violence, it is generally admitted that many incarcerations have gone on far too long.

Acknowledging this does not mean accepting the inflated figures and politicised methodology pushed by Western-funded NGOs such as Foro Penal and their international partners. Those counts routinely lump together genuine dissidents with armed plotters, participants in violent insurrection attempts, and outright criminals — many of whom were brandishing weapons or linked to coup networks.

The NGOs’ inflated numbers are not neutral human rights monitoring; they are part of a longstanding information warfare operation, generously funded by the very governments and foundations that have spent years supporting regime change efforts in Venezuela. Their selective outrage and consistent inflation of “political prisoner” tallies serve a clear political purpose: to delegitimise the Bolivarian process and justify external interference.

Broader perspective is essential. The arrests did not emerge from a vacuum. They followed years of sanctions-induced economic pain, repeated opposition attempts to subvert constitutional order through street violence, election disruption both physical and electronic, and what were forged or selectively manipulated election returns from the opposition. The response was heavy-handed, but it occurred against a backdrop of genuine security threats.

The narrative that the opposition won 70% of the votes in the 2024 election is simply absurd to anyone who knows Venezuela. In their final election rallies, Maduro had 1 million people on the streets of Caracas and the opposition had 50,000. Many of the alleged voting machine printouts bandied about by the Biden regime were very evident forgeries – with the same handwriting in different locations, and multiple examples of returning officers or party officials signing with an X in a country with almost 100% literacy.

The Opposition refused to present these printouts to the Supreme Court for verification. The truth is that the electronic electoral process (I am not a fan) was badly affected by external hacking, almost certainly by the USA. There was indeed popular discontent with the effects of economic sanctions, and many seasoned observers think the elections were close. It will never be possible to discover the real result. But Western claims of 70% opposition support are absolute nonsense.

In fact, I do not believe that either the government or the Supreme Court really knew the true result. I certainly do not. But it was American-orchestrated disruption that made it impossible.

Venezuela is a substantively free country. People have criticised the government to me openly and without fear, including on camera. There was an opposition demonstration in Caracas a few weeks ago. It was very lightly policed. Speakers could say what they wished – support for Donald Trump was a key theme – and nobody has been subsequently questioned. About 500 people turned out. I have seen three or four opposition posters around town. Nobody takes them down.

I have been filming all around Venezuela in total for six weeks, and have never been asked who I am by officials or police, or required to produce identity papers. I received a permit from the Ministry of Communications but nobody has ever looked at it. Nobody has ever suggested what I should say, or instructed me not to film something.

I have been to many different areas and provinces. Everywhere the shops are fully stocked and the bars and restaurants fully operational. People look well fed. I have not seen one drug addict, beggar or homeless person. I have seen five police or military checkpoints in six weeks – three at the Presidential residence, Police HQ, and National Assembly; one checking car tyres and lights; and one at the exit to a national park doing wildlife conservation enforcement.

I have been rather obsessively keeping check because Western journalists always put in police and military checkpoints in their imaginary descriptions of Venezuela, penned from thousands of miles away. The Machado opposition have made it a meme, putting out advice saying you are not obliged to show identity documents at police checkpoints. It would be very hard to find a checkpoint to show your documents to.

This is not a repressive government. The atmosphere of repression is entirely absent and that is because the mechanisms of repression are entirely absent. There is no heavy police presence. People are not scared of informers. I have seen very few guns carried by police, and zero guns carried by anybody else.

The narrative now dominating Western media — that any economic liberalisation or pragmatic opening under Delcy Rodríguez is a sudden capitulation forced by Trump’s pressure — is simply false. Nicolás Maduro himself initiated processes of economic liberalisation years earlier, as a direct survival response to the crushing weight of sanctions. These are Maduro’s policies. The recent legislation liberalising the hydrocarbons sector was entirely developed under, and approved by, Nicolás Maduro.

Dollarisation spread from below as ordinary people sought stability; the government gradually relaxed price controls, permitted greater private-sector involvement in imports and distribution, and developed workarounds for oil sales. These were pragmatic adaptations forced on the revolution long before Trump returned to the White House.

As I told the students at the University of the Communes, if late-stage capitalism were (as it claims) the natural order of society, rather than a series of entirely artificial institutions and arrangements designed to produce an extreme concentration of resources in the hands of an elite, enforced ultimately through the violence of the state, then the capitalist states would not need to crush states practising other systems, through crippling sanctions and isolation from exchange of resources and capital, and ultimately through military force.

Its own founding ideology states that capitalism will naturally prevail eventually in any society through its greater beneficence and more efficient distribution of resources. Yet the rulers of the capitalist states constantly seek to crush any state practising any alternative system. They do this for fear that their own population will see the possibility of a better path than working as effective slaves while the value produced by their labour concentrates entirely into the hands of the Epstein class.

We will never know how the Bolivarian Revolution would have developed were it not for the financial and trade sanctions that crippled it.

But this is the key fact. Venezuela was targeted because of the extraordinary successes of Chavismo, not because it was a failed state. Poverty was more than halved. Literacy increased to better rates than the United States. Free education and healthcare were instituted. Pension recipients were tripled. Utilities were nationalised. Massive amounts of social housing were provided. These were the achievements that precipitated sanctions.

The economic collapse of 2017 was not caused by failures of a socialist system. The collapse – and the subsequent mass wave of emigration – was caused entirely by the sanctions regime, and particularly the blocking of all payment systems and financial transactions.

There is an obvious point seldom discussed: sanctions — particularly the financial sanctions that block normal international payment transactions and banking channels — do not merely cause hardship.

Sanctions actively breed corruption.

When a sovereign government is prevented from conducting legitimate trade and finance through standard global systems, it is driven into the arms of those who specialise in sanctions-busting, informal transfer networks, and money laundering. These forced partnerships with elements outside the formal economy then infect the state apparatus itself, creating new avenues for graft and abuse.

It is a vicious, predictable cycle engineered by Washington policy.

Sanctions force states for very survival to do things classified as illegal, and draw their operatives into the ambit of actual criminals. Some of the criticisms of the Maduro government should be viewed through this prism; and of course there is not, and has never been, any state entirely free of corruption.

Maduro’s rule is not the failure that is routinely portrayed in the West. The economy has rebounded remarkably. Under Maduro, the government scored measurable successes in public security. Murder rates have dropped by over two thirds and the narco gangs are almost entirely off the streets.

Large-scale operations significantly curtailed narcotics production and trafficking routes through Venezuelan territory. Venezuela reported record drug seizures to the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs — nearly 66 tonnes in 2025 alone, the highest level in two decades. UN data states that Venezuela plays only a very marginal role in global cocaine flows, and almost none in production. On fentanyl it doesn’t feature at all.

Maduro has succeeded to an extraordinary degree in suppressing drugs on the streets of Venezuela and in stopping trafficking. That he is now in a US jail charged with “narco-terrorism” is truly a sign of how depraved the United States has become.

At the same time, the overall crime rate fell sharply. Cities that once ranked among the most dangerous in the world became noticeably safer for ordinary citizens. Even Venezuelans critical of the government on other grounds acknowledge this improvement in daily life and personal safety. Just two nights ago I was talking to a Venezuelan visiting home from Germany, who told me she used to be terrified to walk the streets of Caracas at night, but now felt perfectly safe.

It is important to understand what kind of socialism Venezuela actually practised under Chávez and Maduro.

The Bolivarian project was never the full state ownership of the means of production and distribution envisaged in classical Marxist texts. Venezuela has always been a mixed economy. Its distinctive feature — and its greatest strength — was the heavy reliance of the state on ownership of the full range of oil sector activity, upstream and downstream, to channel large public revenues into socialist-oriented goals: universal free education from cradle to university, a national health service that brought clinics and hospitals into every barrio, expanded social security, housing programmes such as the Gran Misión Vivienda, and subsidies that kept basic foodstuffs affordable for the poor.

The nationalisation of utilities — electricity, telecommunications, water — followed the same logic. In many respects it resembled the Western social-democratic model of the 1970s, when European governments used progressive taxation to fund the welfare state while leaving large parts of the economy in private hands. The massive scale of affordable decent quality public housing in Venezuela is truly a marvel to behold for a developing economy.

What made Bolivarianism different, and ultimately more radical, was the commune movement. Its philosophy is genuinely grassroots. The communes did not spring from decrees in Miraflores Palace; they grew from below, from the communal councils that ordinary people in poor neighbourhoods formed to solve their own problems — fixing roads, organising rubbish collection, building clinics.

Chávez gave these organic commune structures constitutional recognition and legal power, but the energy came from the communities themselves.

Decision-making in the communes is direct democracy in action: assemblies debate and vote on how to spend the funds allocated to them. The people decide their own priorities. I have always been a sceptic of people’s assemblies and direct democracy. Visiting Venezuela’s communes has converted me. The key factor is the quite astonishing prevalence of political education and social awareness among the ordinary members of the Venezuelan working class.

For a long time the communes remained largely a mechanism for redistributing oil revenue in a more democratic and transparent way. But it was still, in essence, social democracy with revolutionary rhetoric — spending the rents from oil on social goods.

But the commune movement has not stood still. It has begun to push outward, asserting communal ownership over the means of production and distribution. Increasing numbers of communes now run their own small factories, agricultural cooperatives, bakeries, abattoirs, transport collectives and distribution networks. I have discussed with senior government figures how to use commune-owned enterprises as a spearhead in liberalised sectors of the economy, to socialise profit.

Communes are moving beyond simply receiving and spending state money and towards controlling the actual creation and allocation of wealth. This is the qualitative leap that marks Bolivarian socialism as something more than 1970s-style welfare statism.

Maduro instituted the University of the Communes in 2025. It is predicated on providing practical university-level teaching in the areas of particular value to the communes, ranging from public administration to electrical engineering and agriculture. Agricultural production is an area where many of Venezuela’s over 7,000 communes are engaged.

Agriculture collapsed in Venezuela long before Chávez. This is in common with many oil states.

My first overseas diplomatic post was an appointment to Nigeria in 1986, as Second Secretary (Agriculture and Water Resources), where my favourite statistic was that Nigeria went, in just 8 years, from being the world’s largest exporter of palm oil to being the world’s largest importer of palm oil. Oil-backed currencies frequently make agricultural exports uncompetitive and imported agricultural products cheaper than domestic.

This collapsed Venezuela’s cocoa, coffee, maize and other agricultural sectors decades before Chávez came to power.

The communes are reintroducing agricultural production from ground level up. I visited local commune Vittoria not far from the University. It has over 20 agricultural production units, and students were assisting in developing, for example, bamboo cattle pens to replace iron hurdles no longer imported due to Western sanctions.

At the other end of the production process I visited the Metro HQ in Caracas on the day when all the Metro workers and pensioners are given monthly packages including cooking oil, pasta, flour, eggs and tinned meat and fruit, all of it now produced in Venezuela, and almost all are new products since the 2018 crisis.

What strikes every visitor is the extraordinary level of public awareness of socialist philosophy. In the communes, in the Bolivarian universities, in political education circles, ordinary people discuss with real knowledge the difference between social democracy and socialism, the role of the commune as the “cellular tissue” of the new society, and the necessity of moving from distribution to production.

Ideology is lived daily practice. I have heard teenagers and market sellers quote Chávez and Marx with ease, and with confidence their interlocutors will follow.

These are the fundamental elements of Bolivarian socialism that Delcy Rodríguez is now fighting to preserve and safeguard in the face of the Trump onslaught: the oil-funded social democratic state, the nationalised utilities, the direct-democracy structures of the communes, and the moves to spread the assertion of popular ownership over production.

Consider this: Venezuela has the most beautiful Caribbean beaches I have ever seen. They are as good as Mauritius or the Maldives. These are my own photos and the colours are not retouched.

What is remarkable about this is that all the people you see are ordinary Venezuelans. There is not a foreign tourist in sight: no beachside bar, restaurant or hotel chaining off stretches and covering them in sunbeds. Instead you have happy Venezuelan families with coolboxes enjoying the day for free. That is because, Isla Margarita aside, the Bolivarian Revolution protects Venezuela’s hundreds of miles of white sand beach by National Parks.

Where Chavismo sees a great amenity for the people and an astonishing habitat to be preserved, the Kushner and Machado worldview sees billions of dollars of prime beachside real estate, ripe for condominiums and huge hotels. Do not for one moment believe that they do not have their eye on it as part of the Imperialist grab. They do not want Venezuelans frolicking with their families on those beaches. They want them reserved to American and Israeli tourists, with the only Venezuelans in white shirt and bow tie carrying trays of drinks.

It may seem a small digression, but it is I believe a potent, and poignant, symbol of the clash of worldview that is at the heart of the struggle in Venezuela.

What the opposition wish to do is dismantle this entire architecture. Machado is pledged to abolish communes, to privatise utilities, to return Venezuela to the pre-Chávez model in which oil wealth flowed upward to a tiny elite and foreign corporations, while the majority existed only to serve. Delcy’s task is to hold the line so that the communes, and the consciousness they have created, can continue to develop while the universal education, healthcare and social provision are retained.

But this is the reality Delcy Rodríguez now confronts: Trump imposed a physical naval blockade on Venezuelan oil exports. Tankers carrying Venezuelan oil to buyers not approved by the US were physically seized by the US Navy. The US thus, by military force, imposed control over Venezuelan crude sales.

Revenues were initially routed to a US-controlled account in Qatar, later shifted to US Treasury accounts. Disbursements to the Rodríguez government are discretionary and ad hoc — for example, only $300 million of the first $500 million was released, with US approval required for its spending. The mechanism operates under executive emergency powers in the USA but under no Venezuelan authority. This is not with Delcy Rodríguez’s agreement.

It is totally illegal in every possible way. The naval blockade, the seizure of tankers, the stealing of oil revenue. All of this is absolutely against international law. Precisely what “Emergency” is justifying Trump’s powers, even in US domestic law, I have no idea.

The United States has no treaty agreement with Venezuela or international mandate permitting it to seize Venezuela’s oil and sell it. It is simple theft.

By controlling the tankers, Washington seized control of Venezuela’s only significant source of foreign revenue and crippled the government of Delcy Rodríguez. Oil accounts for over 70% of Venezuelan government revenue.

Oil cargoes approved by the United States are now sold on the international market, but the proceeds are not paid to Caracas. They are, incredibly, paid to the United States Treasury. The Trump regime dispenses ad hoc payments back to the Venezuelan government — whatever portion it chooses, whenever it chooses — to allow basic state functions to continue. It is a system entirely governed by the whims of Donald Trump, controlling another sovereign state.

This is less structured than the formal occupation authority the United States imposed on Iraq after 2003, but the principle is identical. Iraq’s oil revenues have been treated this way for 25 years. A great many people are unaware that all of Iraq’s oil revenue is stolen into United States Treasury accounts: the legacy media never tell you.

It is the classical colonial model. It is exactly how the British East India Company ran the princely states of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the local ruler was allowed to remain in nominal office, but the taxes were collected by the British and the local ruler given back whatever they chose. Senior East India Company officials in post were actually titled “Collector”.

Western coverage calls it “safeguarding,” “protection,” or “leverage”; the reality is pure, physical piracy.

Yet Delcy Rodríguez is stuck. She has no military force capable of countering it. The Venezuelan navy cannot challenge the US fleet, while the USA’s giant bombers can reach Caracas with 2,000lb bombs direct from US airbases in Florida. Any open attempt at defiance would spark the US military regime change which would lead to massacre.

Rodríguez is therefore reduced to negotiating with the occupiers over how much of Venezuela’s own money she is allowed to spend on her own people. She is obliged to host a series of sickening visits from smirking Trump henchmen, openly humiliating and raping Venezuela. The claims that Rodríguez wants this, still more that she engineered this, are nuts.

I have seen criticism from the political left in the West, that Venezuela should have fought, should still fight, should join the anti-Imperial resistance. I have seen Venezuelans criticised as “sell-outs”.

Rather few of those making these criticisms have personally taken to the mountains with an AK47 to fight a superpower which has openly abandoned all pretence to follow the laws of war on protection of civilian life and infrastructure. It is certainly an option; but the death toll would be appalling and Venezuela would be condemned to many years of civil war and US military occupation.

It is a suicidal option, as Maduro himself recognised.

Delcy Rodríguez is struggling under an almost unbearable burden. A lifelong socialist whose own father was tortured to death by a CIA-run Venezuelan security service, she now finds herself effectively a prisoner of the United States. Venezuela is not Iran. It does not possess the military capacity, the strategic depth or the alliances to fight the United States. If Trump wakes up one morning and decides on full regime change — and he could — the result would be an immediate bloodbath and the total erasure of all the social gains of twenty-five years of Chavismo.

To prevent that catastrophe Rodríguez must placate Trump. She must speak the language of economic liberalisation that Washington wants to hear, even though the actual policy shifts amount to only the smallest rightward adjustment in an economy that remains overwhelmingly mixed. The fundamental social-democratic achievements — the education, the health missions, the housing programmes, the pensions and welfare, the privatised utilities — are being preserved.

Rodríguez’s strategy is therefore one of grim endurance: hunker down, preserve what can be preserved, and wait for a change of political wind in Washington. Sources very close to her repeatedly mention the November midterms in the USA as the next possible turning point.

The tragedy is that this woman must endure the portrayal abroad, spread from Washington, as a traitor to her class and her country. She cannot publicly kick too hard against Trump without risking the provocation of the psychopath to the very violence she is trying to avert. A friend who has known her for decades told me: “She is doing what she can to keep the peace in this time of war.”

There is very concrete evidence of Rodríguez’s loyalty to Maduro. Far from erasing Maduro or positioning herself as the new face of the revolution, Delcy Rodríguez has covered Venezuela in highly visible “Free Nicolás and Cilia” billboards and street art, while introducing no material that praises herself or attempts to construct her own cult of personality. This public symbolism is a powerful, real-life counter to narratives of disloyalty or betrayal.

One of my personal critiques of Chavismo is that it is too centred on cult of personality. It is a key fact that Rodríguez is doing the very opposite of trying to move that spotlight onto herself.

Most of Rodríguez’s critics, especially those in the Western media and commentariat, know almost nothing of Venezuela. Most of what the Western public think they know is the very opposite of the truth; the ability of Western media to maintain a false narrative is astonishingly evident on a visit here.

I have now spent a total of six weeks in the country over two trips, talking to students, diplomats, union leaders, commune activists and people inside the government – and a great many barmen. What I have seen and heard convinces me of one thing above all: Delcy Rodríguez is not a traitor. She is a socialist doing the only thing possible to her in this impossible situation — buying time for the Bolivarian Revolution to survive.

———————–

As I end my second Venezuelan visit, we have now spent substantially more on this than we raised and I am personally out of pocket. There is still quite a lot of video footage and the editing process is stalled for lack of funds. Please help if you are able – Our GoFundMe link for the Venezuelan operation is here:

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The extreme nature of sanctions against Venezuela made it very challenging to keep economic activity going. One example is Caracas’s impressive five-line Metro system, where for almost twenty years they had to keep things running with no spares or maintenance support from the train manufacturers.

Yet resilience and ingenuity kicked in, and Venezuela actually reverse engineered and manufactured parts – the need to do this in the oil sector also created a burgeoning small foundry industry, for example. Eventually, sanctions will stimulate domestic production. I spent some time with the Metro looking at how this happens.

As ever we need to spread the load and please we are looking primarily to those who have never donated or contributed before. Our GoFundMe link for the Venezuelan operation is here:

This is the same crowdfunding account we used for Lebanon so discount the first £35,000 raised as it was spent in Lebanon.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of subscription payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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What if Trump’s apparently chaotic thought processes and intuitive decision making are all a blind, a charade? What if we are really witnessing, in the Middle East and more widely, a carefully constructed plan with very definite objectives? Has Trump in fact “planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway”, while flinging the chaff of apparent chaos? I realise that this is not intuitive, but bear with me…

What kicked off my thinking was the revelation by Lockheed Martin that they had been instructed by Trump, months in advance of the attack on Iran, to massively increase production of interceptor missiles, with a short term goal of quadrupling capacity of THAAD. In January, before the start of the current conflict, Fox News was already reporting on various deals, including a trebling of PAC3 MSE interceptor deliveries, having been finalised between Lockheed and the Department of War.

While obviously there are supply chain and production line constraints on the ability to ramp up production within months, the urgency of this activity – almost entirely focused on interceptor missiles – that started in 2025 is in hindsight a clear indication that early war with Iran was expected. It is plain evidence of premeditation.

The second thing that triggered my thought that this is all carefully planned, is the nature of the breakdown of the nuclear deal talks. It appears there was a broad consensus that Iran offered concessions which made a deal very practical, in particular giving up its stocks of enriched uranium into trust (a proposal Iran had historically rejected when Putin offered to hold the material). Both the hosts, Oman and the British thought a deal was there.

The failure of the talks is being spun as due to the incompetence and lack of technical knowledge of Witkoff and Kushner. But I just don’t buy this. The sending of unqualified negotiators was part of a ploy to use the negotiations as cover for an attack – the second time in a year that the United States had pulled the same trick.

They didn’t need competent negotiators, because they had never intended a good faith negotiation.

The attack on Iran was always planned by Trump. He was not “bounced into it” by Israel. It had been in gestation for months. That fact had been held within a very tight circle to avoid both political opposition and institutional opposition from the US military and intelligence community.

January’s protests in Iran found ordinary people genuinely ready to protest, motivated by economic hardship caused by sanctions. But they were guided and abused by Mossad and CIA agents among the Iranian people, who committed and encouraged violence and initiated pro-Shah chanting.

There was never the slightest possibility the protests would bring regime change, but that was not the intention. The purpose was to incite an over-reaction by the Iranian government that could “justify” the planned attack on Iran. The dead protestors have been great martyrs for Trump’s – and Israel’s – wider cause.

The planting by Western state-sponsored individuals and organisations of ludicrous claims throughout Western state and corporate media of thirty to forty thousand killed, was a deliberate and considered plan to reduce domestic opposition in the West to the forthcoming war against Iran.

Now factor in another apparently random act by Trump – the astonishing kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela on 3 January, a month before the attack on Iran.

Trump’s naval blockade of Venezuela’s oil has secured a US monopoly of its sale and distribution. As with Iraq, only US-approved contractors can buy the oil and payments are made to a Trump-controlled account in Qatar, from which revenue is given to the Venezuelan government entirely at Trump’s discretion.

This audacious imperialist grab of the world’s largest oil reserve further insulated the USA against the effects of the forthcoming closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Again, the narrative is being spun that Trump did not foresee the closure of the Strait by Iran. That is plainly a nonsense – every commentary on a potential Iran war for half a century has focused on the Strait of Hormuz. The only possible explanation is that Trump does not mind the closure.

While, as Trump says, the United States does not need the oil that comes through the Strait, the apparent weakness in his case is that higher oil prices are universal and hit Trump’s support, particularly as Americans fill their gas tanks. But to concentrate on this is to make the fundamental error of imagining that Trump cares about what is good for the American people. He does not. He cares about what is good for Donald J. Trump and his immediate circle.

Here is the Chevron share price over the last month:

And here is Lockheed Martin. Note that the start of the 40% leap in share price coincides with those instructions last year on massively ramping up interceptor production.

Not to mention, of course, that the really big fortunes will have been made in oil and derivative commodity futures by those who knew this war was coming (acting through proxies).

The $200 billion Trump is requesting from Congress to continue the war is going to make an awful lot of well-connected people even richer.

So the plan is the making of fortunes, the strengthening of the military-industrial complex and the ratcheting up under cover of national cohesion in war of the authoritarianism that has reduced freedom of speech and outlawed dissent against Israel across the Western world.

To benefit Israel is the other predominant motive.

Trump’s thrashing about to articulate objectives for the war in Iran is performative, a blind to cover his true and steadfast objective – simply the annihilation of Iran as a functioning state, the infliction of the maximum amount of death and infrastructural damage, the reduction of Iran to the condition of Libya.

It goes without saying that the seizure of control of Iran’s hydrocarbons by the US is the ultimate endgame of this destruction, exactly as in Libya and in Iraq. But a linked and crucial objective is the elimination of the source of the only physical resistance to the expansion of Israel. Iran and its allies in Yemen and Lebanon have been the sole support of the Palestinians for years.

The colonial settler state of Israel is central to the projection of imperialist power in the Middle East. Its expansion is an essential part of the plan.

Destruction of Iran on the scale envisaged will take years of hard pounding. Again, it is planned – you don’t ask Congress for an instalment of $200 billion for a war you plan to wrap up in a month. Again, Trump’s taunts about having already won, objectives being achieved and about possibly finishing soon, are all just smoke and mirrors. The scale and horror of what is planned for Iran has to be obfuscated to limit a public revulsion that would be echoed in parts of the state apparatus.

Netanyahu yesterday revealed an interesting part of the endgame – construction of an oil pipeline that brings Iran’s oil out to be shipped from a Mediterranean terminal in Israel. That is a breathtakingly audacious plan, but absolutely aligns with Netanyahu’s and Trump’s actions.

Which brings us to the Greater Israel side of the project. Israel is not going to put any of its ships or soldiers in harm’s way in Iran – that is the American contribution. But while the world is primarily watching Iran, Israel is starting a large-scale invasion of Lebanon with the aim of annexing all of Southern Lebanon permanently, even beyond the Litani River and including the cities of Tyre and Nabatieh, both currently under Israeli evacuation orders.

This land of course adjoins the annexed Golan Heights and the much larger area of Southern Syria that Israel has annexed in the past year with the acquiescence of Zionist puppet “President” al-Jolani.

It is essential not to lose sight of the bipartisan nature of the United States’ long term plan. In a very real sense Trump is continuing – if greatly accelerating – the policy under Biden, who protected and enabled the Genocide in Gaza. The success of this US policy is phenomenal. Just consider that only 18 months ago the Zionist “Presidents” al-Jolani of Syria and Aoun of Lebanon were not in power. Both were brought to power as a result of US-aligned military action, by Israel against Hezbollah and by the CIA- and MI6-sponsored HTS forces. Put in place by Biden, they are now central to Trump’s strategy.

Aoun and al-Jolani are now united in threatening Hezbollah in the rear as it fights a desperate action against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Meanwhile Israel officially occupies over 60% of the Gaza Strip – under cover of Trump’s “Board of Peace”, and continues to murder, blockade and starve the inhabitants of the remnant, while the de facto expansion of Israel into the West Bank and the levels of settler violence are escalating to levels of the utmost barbarity.

Iranian resistance is noble and Iran’s resilience has surprised many. It will be able to make any ground invasion, or even limited incursion, extremely costly for the United States. But as in Gaza or Lebanon, if the US and Israel are content simply to pound from the air for years with devastating force, and with no concern whatsoever for civilian casualties, ultimately all Iran can do is hang on and try to survive.

Given another year of destruction at the current levels of intensity, I do not believe that Iran would effectively be sending many missiles and drones back in self-defence. In a week or two we will hit the period of maximum Iranian effectiveness, where depletion of US-supplied interceptor missiles coincides with Iran retaining significant strike power. Israel’s fragile civilian morale will then be tested severely for a few weeks.

Iran’s capacity to defend against massive, years-sustained aerial bombardment is limited. We should not blind ourselves to that fact out of current joy at the Americans and Israelis getting a bloody nose.

It is comforting to see Trump as a buffoon, to accept the facade he presents of a blustering and ill-educated ignoramus, who swings wildly between policy options, and who does not understand the world of geopolitics.

But that is nonsense.

I have no hesitation in characterising Trump’s genius as evil, focused on personal gain and willing to inflict any amount of death, maiming and deprivation on innocent civilians to attain his goals. But he is indeed attaining his goals on the world stage.

Trump has forced the Security Council to underwrite his Board of Peace. This was a quite astonishing diplomatic triumph over a helpless Russia and China, both of which decided that other negotiations with Trump were more important. Trump has presided over Israel expanding on the ground by the day. Trump has taken Venezuela’s oil, the largest reserves in the world. Trump is currently killing the people of Iran and destroying their infrastructure, while feigning indecision.

You should hate Trump: but he is no clown.

———————————

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There is no place like home, and a few hours after arriving back in Scotland I was in Glasgow giving a talk to Pensioners for Independence. I still covered quite a wide sweep, but my focus came back to what I care about more than anything – the freedom, prosperity and just position in the world of my own nation of Scotland.

With thanks to Scottish Independence Podcasts, IndyPod Special, and of course to Glasgow Pensioners for Independence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBCwV6HUE4c

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I today met our legal team and instructed them to submit an application for interim relief in the Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. If successful this will immediately lift the proscription in Scotland, pending the review.

Scores of people in Scotland face imminent conviction for terrorist offences simply for exercising free speech and expressing their opposition to the proscription. Most of these are summary cases with no jury, but up to six months imprisonment. Others face up to 14 years in jail for speeches supporting Palestine Action.

A terrorism conviction is life-changing even without a prison sentence. It routinely leads to loss of employment and inability to get another job, to debanking, and to severe international travel restrictions.

Most of those facing these massively disproportionate effects are entirely respectable citizens who merely wish to oppose the facilitation of genocide.

My calculation is that submitting the application for interim relief is likely in itself to lead the Crown to drop the prosecutions for speeches, placards and T shirts. The UK government is desperate to avoid the situation of Palestine Action being legal in Scotland and not in England, with all the constitutional questions that arise.

Dropping the prosecutions would remove our main argument for interim relief (and probably make that avenue impractical for us). But this would be a huge win, removing the threat of a terrorism conviction from large numbers of peaceful campaigners in Scotland.

If the Crown does not drop the prosecutions, I am very confident our interim relief application in Scotland will succeed. In England, the High Court refused interim relief and then refused to lift the proscription pending appeal, even after it had ruled the proscription unlawful.

This nonsensical position is explained by the fact that in the English case, Judge Chamberlain was replaced at the last moment by three hand-picked very right-wing judges with a long history of finding for the government in “security”-related cases. In Scotland we are not on that kind of rigged pitch.

On the original timetable the judicial review was due to start this coming Monday. It has however been postponed at least until June because the UK government is introducing “secret” evidence from intelligence that we will never be allowed to see or reply to. The veneer of democracy and human rights in the UK has worn extremely thin.

The extent of Zionist domination of the UK government was shown in the astonishing decision to ban the annual al-Quds march for Palestine, which has been taking place for 47 years without incident.

The Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Sarah Sackman, called for the demonstration to be banned.

The Israeli and USA attack on Iran is, beyond argument, illegal in international law. Iran is not a proscribed organisation. It is not illegal to express support for Iran. Whether it is “anti-British” is a matter of opinion, not of law. Personally I think supporting the genocidal apartheid state of Israel is “anti-British”. But expressing an opinion is a specific legal right.

Sackman worked as a clerk in the Supreme Court of Israel. She is a fanatical Zionist with a long-term financing record from the Zionist lobby. As “Courts minister” she has been the leading advocate for the government’s proposed abolition of many jury trials. She is behind the plans for five-at-a-time, two-and-a-half-hour trials in England for 2,700 Palestine Action activists.

The positioning and empowerment of this Zionist monstrosity is yet more evidence of how deep Israel’s tentacles run in the UK Establishment, and in Starmer’s Labour Party in particular.

Interviewed on Sky News yesterday, Sackman condemned “Iranian attacks on civilians” but refused to condemn the US bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, describing this as “the realities of war”.

We are fighting against a deeply entrenched evil. The legal campaign against the proscription of Palestine Action is a small corner of this fight, but it is essential as an assertion of our freedom to carry the fight at all.

I am afraid the full Scottish judicial review is going to be very expensive. The latest estimate we have from the legal team is a final cost of £263,000 – without going to the Supreme Court. Of the £263,000 we have to date through all donation avenues raised a total of £189,000. We are therefore currently an estimated £74,000 short.

We need everyone who can contribute to contribute, even if it is only a pound, dollar or euro. And we need everyone who already contributed to think of another person who they can ask to contribute. All of us have to look towards people we know of good heart with means.

If we succeed, we will save many scores of people from the life-changing consequences of a terrorism sentence and from possible jail. But PLEASE do not contribute if you really cannot afford it – we are trying to make people’s lives better, not worse.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/scottish-challenge-to-proscription/

I know these are the most difficult of times. But that is why we have to keep fighting. The sums needed to mount a successful legal challenge to the power of the state can be eye-watering. But we are the many. Every penny helps, but please do not cause yourself hardship. You can contribute via the crowdfunder above or via these methods:

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of subscription payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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The United States and Israel are both revelling in inflicting the maximum possible death and suffering on Iran. After the genocide in Gaza, on a far larger field in Iran, those in power in Israel and the USA have a lust to kill and they revel in impunity.

The Epstein files reveal the same dynamic. We live in a society where those who obtain power wish to exercise it in the cruellest possible ways against the most defenceless. It appears to be a feature of late Western capitalist society, where sociopathic tendencies are essential to obtaining power, in a society which rejects altruism and cooperation as concepts and promotes competition, self-love and ruthlessness.

Iran is showing commendable fighting spirit, but as my last article stated, American military power should not be underestimated. They have the ability to destroy Iran from the air, to obliterate the institutions of the state and all of the key civilian infrastructure. Electricity, water, healthcare, education, administration, policing all can be knocked out just as they were systematically in Gaza and – on a scale insufficiently recalled – in Iraq.

Trump is already asking Congress for $50 billion to fund the operation and replenish stocks. The scale of destruction Netanyahu envisages will cost at least half a trillion dollars from the US Treasury. But there is nothing that can stop them.

I witnessed close up over five months the 80 to 100,000 homes destroyed in Lebanon by Israel in the last three years. We have all seen what they did to Gaza. The notion they cannot do this to Iran is simply wrong. It requires a colossal effort of will, a mania for killing, a vast amount of money and the depletion of the US arsenal. But they can do it.

Only political action by the peoples of the West against their leaders can stop it.

Iran and its allies have been the only physical opposition to the creation of Greater Israel. If the physical destruction of Iran is achieved, Greater Israel will be established at pace. One of the world’s greatest civilisations will lie in ashes, covering millions of corpses, but none of that will prevent the extraction of oil.

Pete Hegseth, American Secretary for War, simply comes over as a Nazi thug. He plainly is enjoying this as much as Netanyahu, Ben Gvir or Smotrich. He has gloatingly promised “Death and destruction from the sky, all day long”. He repeatedly signals ever-escalating bombing.

The Iranian Red Crescent has listed the bombing destruction so far. It includes:

• 5,535 civilian residential units
• 1,041 commercial units
• 65 schools
• 14 hospitals and medical centres
• 13 Red Crescent Society bases

By contrast, there has been no credible claim that Iran has inflicted widespread civilian damage. It has very tightly targeted specific facilities – collateral damage seems almost entirely confined to debris from intercepted drones and missiles.

But we know the US/Israel axis targets hospitals and medical facilities. It is proven beyond doubt in Gaza, and I witnessed it in Beirut.

In gloating about US military superiority, Trump advised Iranian civilians:

“Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere.”

Yet they are deliberately bombing residential buildings, exactly as in both Lebanon and Gaza. Trump is attempting to terrorise Iran into “unconditional surrender”.

At the Battle of Waterloo – an epic, large-scale and unmissable event – approximately 15,000 people died on the field of battle (more died later of wounds in an age before antibiotics). You are supposed to believe that the Iranian government in January killed twice as many demonstrators as died at Waterloo. This using only small arms and despite the complete lack of visual evidence of killing on anything like that scale.

At the same time you are supposed to believe that tens of thousands of tonnes of the highest explosives have been dropped into the centre of cities all across Iran but that these are “precision attacks” killing very few civilians.

It is obvious nonsense.

AI targeting only adds a new layer of dystopia to an entirely vicious and unnecessary war. The indifference of the Western media to the slaughter of 160 Iranian schoolgirls leads to really difficult questions about the type of society the West has become. Racism is just the beginning of the problems.

The effort to coerce the Kurds into yet again fighting for the USA, only to be abandoned when no longer deemed helpful, is reckless in the extreme. It is bound to lead to further war and fragmentation in Iraq. The repercussions in Turkey are potentially extreme – and possibly may jolt Erdoğan from his complacent furthering of the US/Israeli agenda.

Civil war is close in Lebanon. The traitorous Zionist regime of General Aoun has no forces capable of taking on Hezbollah; but the other Zionist puppet al-Jolani has concentrated forces on the border with the Bekaa Valley ready to attack Hezbollah from the East while they fight Israeli invading forces in the South. Macron has indicated he may send troops and armour to assist Aoun.

This entire conflict sounds like a dreadful regional disaster in which millions could die – and it is. But to the US and Israeli Zionists, the prospect of a devastated region is precisely what they wish to achieve to facilitate Israeli expansion and American seizure of resources.

There is an urgent need for regime change – in the West. The only way for this carnage to stop is for the people of the West to remove their Zionist-controlled ruling classes.

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My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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There has scarcely been an attempt to pretend any justification in international law for the attack on Iran and murder of its leader. The response of the UK government, focusing almost entirely on condemning Iran for exercising its legitimate right of self-defence, takes the Starmer dishonesty meter further off the scale.

The RAF has been actively involved in genocide in Gaza for two years with its surveillance and logistic support for the IDF. It is now fighting for Israel again; intercepting Iranian missiles is not defensive; it is joining in the attack on an already vastly overmatched opponent.

I am afraid that the truth is the Iranian attempt to defend itself militarily will be less impactful than many anti-imperialists hope. The astonishing amounts of money spent by the US government on military and surveillance technology simply do have real-world effect.

Here in Venezuela, having seen the major sites struck by the US on 3 January, I have concluded that no act of betrayal was needed. Just overwhelming force and precision technology applied against a technologically unequal opponent whose key capabilities were all on open hilltops or in unhardened barracks.

Iran is much more militarily sophisticated, but facing exponentially more force. Khamenei was killed in his own home, not hiding away. He is going to prove a lot more powerful as a martyr than as a ruler with his internal critics.

We are facing not only a period of unapologetic imperialism to which virtually all Western countries are prepared to defer, but a return of medievalism, both in the sheer barbarity and scale of physical abuse, as witnessed in Gaza and in general Israeli brutality, and in use of kidnap and murder as methods of high policy. Legitimising the killing and kidnap of leaders of opposing states is of course a double-edged sword.

Having sanctioned genocide, mass killings and deliberate destruction of medical facilities and staff, the mass murder of children, as well as the kidnapping and murder of Heads of State, it is hard now to imagine almost any atrocity which the Western powers are in any moral position to condemn.

While Iran’s military ability to strike back is limited, the ramifications of this attack will not be. The rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have reverted to the norm of being not only reliable US and Israeli satraps, but promoters of atavistic hatred of Shia Muslims.

The West is deliberately exploiting the Shia/Sunni divide, as it has for centuries; but this will now destabilise the region for decades. Iraq in particular is going to be convulsed, and so will Pakistan. In Bahrain, the Shia population has been held in check by its Sunni rulers using systematic Western-sponsored murder and torture. Using it as a base to murder the Ayatollah is going to blow back.

It would appear that we are going to witness an aerial campaign to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, as in Iraq where 65% of clean drinking water, 50% of hospitals and clinics and 80% of electrical generation was destroyed by “liberation” by the NATO powers. The object is the destruction of Iran as a viable state.

It is worth recalling that Iran used to be a Western-style state with a reasonable democracy. It was the election of the Socialist Mosaddegh in 1951, and his nationalisation of British Petroleum, which was met by the MI6- and CIA- sponsored coup of 1953. The vicious and vainglorious rule of their puppet Shah was the cause of the theocratic revolution.

Escalating Western sanctions were imposed by the US or EU on Iran in 1979, 1984, 1995, 1996, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2025. There were UN-approved sanctions imposed from 2006 to 2010. These very substantially hampered Iran’s economic development.

The curious thing is that the founding myth of the Western powers is that economic development leads to an expanding, educated middle class which promotes both economic and social liberalism and produces the conditions for democracy. By this reading, if you wished to cement in power an authoritarian government, then limiting economic development is the way to do it. There is something in this reading; I do not doubt that the West’s relentless efforts to strangle Iran – which have had some real success – have hampered its political development.

That is not to accept all the Western myths about Iran. Female education is very strong, and there is extensive female participation throughout economic and governmental institutions. Iran has an extremely good record of tolerating and even supporting minority religious communities, including the Jewish community. There are plenty of women in Tehran without head coverings – Iran is far more tolerant in this regard than Saudi Arabia. While it retains a retrograde intolerance of gay people, it acknowledges gender dysphoria and assists trans people.

I am not prepared to give a moment of countenance to arguments that bombing Iran back to the nineteenth century is going in any way to improve the lives of its people. It did not do so in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. It was a disaster which unleashed waves of refugees upon Europe, leading directly to the rise of the far right.

I think it is unlikely to change the form of government in Iran in any significant way. Regime change by bombing is a highly problematic concept.

What it has done is to remove Ayatollah Khamenei, whose fatwa on the creation of a nuclear weapon was the only reason Iran does not have one. It is delusional to believe that Iran, with its excellent scientific base, could not have developed nuclear bombs in secret away from those monitored enrichment programmes, had it chosen to do so. What is likely to result in the medium term from this conflict, if it long continues, is a more primitive, more atavistic and nuclear-armed Iran.

The Iran nuclear deal torpedoed by Trump in 2018 had provided a rare moment of hope. With sanctions easing, there were chances of both smoother economic development and reform in Iran. That is why Israel wanted the agreement scuppered.

The attempted obliteration of Iran is part of a systematic attempt to eliminate by physical force all pockets of resistance to American hegemony. We have seen Rubio’s astonishing assertion of Imperialism as a positive force. Matthew Lynn in the Washington Post exemplified the new Western doctrine. He mocked China for its pacific policy. He argued that for China to build infrastructure for the Global South was futile because the United States might simply seize, blockade or destroy any infrastructure by military force. This he viewed as not shameful, but a great triumph.

What long-term lessons China, Russia and the Global South are learning from the abandonment by the entire West of the principles of international law, we shall see in the decades to come. None of this is going to be good for anyone. It is not just a Trump phenomenon. Biden fully supported the Gaza genocide. Almost all major political parties throughout the West are under firm Zionist control, as is all of the significant major media and the ownership of every significant alternative media platform.

Iran has provided, directly and through proxies, the only military opposition to the creation of Greater Israel. This war is for Greater Israel. But it is also a wider effort to re-establish the failing economic dominance of the United States by military control of key resources. There is no part of the world which will be safe from the fallout.

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My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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On the face of it the English High Court ruling that the Palestine Action proscription is unlawful makes the decision that the proscription remains in place pending appeal utterly illogical. But what if the High Court ruling is deliberately designed to fail at appeal?

I believe that it is. They chose an extremely narrow path to rule that proscription was unlawful and produced an extremely weak judgment. This gives an impression of fairness in the judicial system – except that nothing has changed, the ban remains in force. And it remains in force because the judgment is designed for the government to win at appeal.

The judgment for the most part is precisely what you would expect from three hand-picked, known right-wing, judges. They:

• State that Palestine Action is a terrorist group within the meaning of the 2000 Terrorism Act (para 134);
• State that they do not accept the United Nations assertion that the UK definition of Terrorism is incompatible with international norms (para 141);
• State that in any case international law has no impact on English statute law (para 142);
• State that all those arrested for showing support for Palestine Action – specifically including for holding placards – were rightly arrested as they were deliberately committing a criminal act (para 118);
• State that there was no need for Yvette Cooper to consult before the proscription (para 60);
• Repeat the Crown’s assertions of the Filton case as fact with no reference at all to the findings of the jury (paras 34, 139);
• State that comparisons with Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are not valid as those organisations have not carried out serious property damage (para 144);
• State that the motive of Palestine Action in trying to stop Genocide is not “material” (para 70);
• Argue that the interests of national security and protection of the rights and freedoms of others justify the interference with freedom of speech and assembly (para 128).

The judges have therefore supported the government on almost all of its key propositions. You may well ask, how did they find all that and still find the proscription unlawful?

Well, they chose a deliberately narrow and precarious path through. They first found that the proscription was unlawful in that it contradicted the Home Office’s published policy on how the discretion of the Secretary of State would be applied in deciding whether to proscribe a terrorist organisation.

It is important to understand this. The ruling is that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation, but that the Secretary of State is not obliged to proscribe all terrorist organisations but may use her discretion.

I have read the judgment again and again and it is incredibly obscure as to in what way the Home Secretary did not follow her policy. It seems to be that she did not consider the factors peculiar to Palestine Action, but merely proscribed as though that automatically followed a determination that an organisation is terrorist. Rather than consider the question in the round, she merely looked at the “operational advantages” of proscription.

I assume the underlying assumption is that this means she failed to take into account the disadvantages of proscription, but it does not say that. I don’t think I am being obtuse. You try.

92. This conclusion may appear to rest on a very narrow basis – the Home Secretary had, after all, formed the belief that Palestine Action is an organisation concerned in terrorism and in these proceedings the claimant does not challenge that decision. However, this conclusion is a direct and necessary consequence of the policy the Home Secretary has applied to the exercise of her discretion to proscribe such organisations. The purpose of the policy is that not all organisations that meet the concerned in terrorism requirement should be proscribed.

93. Any decision-maker who adopts a policy for a particular purpose is at liberty to disapply or modify that policy in a particular case, but any such disapplication or modification must be express and must be for a sufficient reason. In this case, the Home Secretary’s approach was to apply the policy (a policy of long-standing, dating back to the time the 2000 Act was enacted), without modification.

94. The operational consequences and advantages of proscription is not a factor consistent with the policy for the obvious reason that such consequences and advantages will apply equally to any organisation that could be proscribed – i.e. any and every organisation that meets the requirement to be an organisation concerned in terrorism. In principle the position could be otherwise if in a particular case, by reason of an organisation’s structure, membership, activities or otherwise, the measures in the 2000 Act that are the consequences of proscription would be unusually effective. In such a case, it could be consistent with the policy to regard the operational consequences of proscription as an “other factor”. But that is not the present case. There is no such evidence so far as concerns Palestine Action. Nor in the present case could it be contended that the reliance placed on the consequences of proscription was immaterial to the exercise of the discretion or the application of the policy. Both in the note of the meeting of the Proscription Review Group and in the 26 March 2025 ministerial submission, the operational advantages are relied on as providing a clear case to use the discretion to proscribe. Each suggests that it is an important matter going to the exercise of the discretion, if not the central consideration in that exercise in that case.

95. The consequence and conclusion of this point is that, notwithstanding the latitude that the policy provides, the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was not consistent with her policy. The closed material does not affect our conclusion on this ground.

There are two problems with this aspect of the judgment.

Firstly it seems so obscure that it is designed to fail at appeal.

The notion that its proscription was unlawful because the Secretary of State had failed to follow, not the established law, but the precise procedures in some buried Home Office policy document that nobody had ever read, is not one that I would have expected to carry the day compared to all the other issues.

It is indeed an established legal point, but one used in objections to planning applications rather than cases of alleged terrorism. Which is what I believe the Court of Appeal will say.

Secondly it leaves it open to the Secretary of State just to change the published policy, then proscribe again.

The second ground on which the court found against the government is that the proscription is incompatible with Articles X and XI of the European Convention on Human Rights – Freedom of Speech and Assembly.

But again this is not what you think.

Remember the judges found that the 2700 people arrested for opposing the ban have been quite rightly arrested, as expressing support for Palestine Action is a criminal act. The court does not hold that their right to freedom of speech is infringed.

In fact the court rehearses all the ways that speech will be chilled and people will be de-platformed as a result of the proscription, but does not find they are unreasonable to combat “terrorism”.

128. The Home Secretary’s pleaded case is that the purpose of proscription was to “disrupt and degrade PA so as to protect the rights of others and maintain national security”. The submissions on behalf of the Home Secretary sought to define the objective as “controlling terrorism” or “controlling terrorist organisations” through proscription of organisations that engage in “terrorism” as defined in s.1 of the 2000 Act. It seems to us that the latter is a description of the means of obtaining the objective. The identified legitimate aims of the proscription decision are “the protection of the rights and freedoms of others” and “the interests of national security”. Those aims appear in each of articles 10(2) and 11(2), respectively and are objectives that, in principle, are capable of warranting an interference with each Convention right.

129. Although the claimant raised the question whether there is a rational connection between the means chosen and the aim in view, no basis for suggesting there is not a rational connection was put forward. Proscription is rationally connected to the objective of disrupting Palestine Action so as to protect the rights of others and the interests of national security. That is so whether the objective was limited to curtailing actions by Palestine Action causing serious property damage within the meaning of section 1 of the 2000 Act, or extended more broadly

When after all this support for the government, the judgment finally delivers the key paragraph on why the proscription was unlawful, it suddenly leaps out at you: the result of a proportionality exercise the judgment had not previously defined or given a methodology.

140. Considering in the round the evidence available to the Home Secretary when the decision to proscribe was made, the nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities, so far as they comprise acts of terrorism, has not yet reached the level, scale and persistence that would justify the application of the criminal law measures that are the consequence of proscription, and the very significant interference with Convention rights consequent on those measures.

It is a goal entirely against the run of play in the previous 139 paragraphs. I am afraid to say that I think the marked lack of intellectual underpinning again makes it a structure designed to fail.

Three known very conservative judges were appointed at the last moment to replace the liberal judge Chamberlain, who was unceremoniously booted off the case. It seemed astonishing that these known sympathisers with the security state had found the proscription unlawful.

But they cannot really think both that it is unlawful, and that it should continue pending appeal. That is utterly illogical.

They cannot really think it is an unlawfully disproportionate interference with freedom of speech, and that those arrested for holding placards opposing it were criminals and rightfully charged.

That is a logical impossibility also. Yet both sit side by side in this judgment.

The judges are not stupid. It can only be that they do not really mean it when they state one of those opinions. All the signs are that it is para 140, swinging entirely unsupported and exposed and waiting to be struck down, that they do not really mean.

If they believed in their own judgment, the judges would have quashed the proscription pending appeal.

Palestine Action was a proscribed organisation before this judgment and it is a proscribed organisation after this judgment. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

That is why it is essential that the Scottish judicial review goes ahead. I for one am very interested to discover whether the paragraph

142. We doubt that the consensus claimed exists: see and compare R v Gul (Mohammed) [2013] UKSC 64, [2014] AC 1260 per Lords Neuberger and Judge at paragraphs 44 – 51. In any event, this submission faces the further obstacle that, when taking her decision, the Home Secretary was entitled to rely on the definition of terrorism in the 2000 Act. Indeed, she was required to apply that definition. Had she purported to rely on any other definition for the purposes of her decision she would have acted unlawfully. A “consensus” in international law is not a trump card in English law; any such consensus cannot permit either disregard of or derogation from an English statute save to the extent permitted by statute.

which specifically references “English law”, applies equally in Scotland. The English legal tradition is that the “Crown in parliament” is sovereign and may do absolutely anything it wishes, irrespective of international law, individual rights or any other consideration. The Scottish legal tradition is that the people are sovereign and protected from arbitrary or oppressive executive action.

Should Huda Ammori again win at appeal, Shabana Mahmood will certainly appeal to the Supreme Court. It would be extremely difficult for the Supreme Court to rule against the highest courts of both England and Scotland. So there is reason to continue the Scottish action even if the English case continues to win.

Should the UK government win at appeal in England, the Scottish case becomes still more crucial.

The UK government has succeeded in postponing the Scottish case, in order to give time to prepare for the admission of secret evidence. This is an incredible authoritarian procedure where they can submit “intelligence” to the court, which neither I nor my legal team will ever be permitted to know about, let alone have a chance to reply.

My interest will be “represented” by a “special advocate” with whom I shall never be able to communicate and thus will have no ability to give them the answer to whatever lies the UK government has put forward – probably about non-existent Iranian funding or entirely invented bomb plots.

This system is simply fascist. We have no idea to what extent the “secret evidence” used in the English case contributed to the court’s agreement that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation.

We push on. I hate to say this, but we are now desperately short of funds to continue this action. I cannot keep asking the same supporters to give more, but if you know people who can afford it and will contribute, please activate them.

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As the trial finished at Woolwich Crown Court of the six Palestine Action activists who entered the Filton factory to destroy Israeli killer drones, Starmer, Cooper, Lammy and Mahmood are left bereft of a single guilty verdict in the case on which they relied heavily to label Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

I could not, on pain of imprisonment, tell you this during the trial. One item produced by the prosecution as evidence was the notebook of Charlotte Head, on which she had written details from her training session with Palestine Action and of the proposed direct action against Elbit’s drone factory.

The first ten pages of her notes were about the Israeli weapons company Elbit, their footprint in the UK, their corporate structure and the weapons they manufacture, and the evidence of the use of their weaponry in the genocide in Gaza.

The jury were shown the notebook but were specifically not allowed to see the first ten pages. Throughout the trial anything that referred to the crimes of Elbit, their role in the mass killing and mutilation of women and children, and their cosy relationship with the British government, was excluded from the jury. The judge continually stopped the defence lawyers from asking or saying anything about who Elbit are or why their property was being attacked.

The defendants were not permitted therefore to explain to the jury why they did what they did – which you might have believed was a pretty fundamental right. The jury were additionally, in effect, instructed by Judge Johnson to convict on the least serious charge, that of criminal damage.

But despite the state taking every possible precaution to ensure that the state got its convictions in this show trial, the jury refused to find that trying to stop Genocide is a crime.

This trial was fundamental to the government’s argument that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation. And the key to that was the accusation that Palestine Action from the start intended harm to people, not just to property. That is why these defendants were all charged with “aggravated burglary”.

Aggravated burglary is an extremely serious charge, carrying a potential life sentence. It is the offence of breaking into a property with the intent to use a weapon. On aggravated burglary, all six defendants were found resoundingly Not Guilty.

So the attempt to portray Palestine Action as an organisation involved in violence against persons has fallen flat on its face. Because the jury could see it was stupid and obviously untrue.

When it comes to events after the activists were attacked by security guards, three of the six were found not guilty of the charge of “violent disorder”. On three others the jury could not reach a verdict.

Most interesting of all perhaps was the charge of criminal damage to Elbit’s machinery and instruments of genocide. Here Judge Johnson to all intents and purposes had instructed the jury to convict. Yet enough of the jury could not accept that stopping Genocide is a crime.

The final question was the charge against Samuel Corner of Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent. This was the famous incident where the security guards attacked the defendants with weapons and there was a melee as they defended themselves.

It is worth stating that the tabloid stories and right-wing meme of “a policewoman’s spine was fractured” was always utter nonsense. As the defence closing speech stated:

The prosecution have said it was a fracture to the spine, a deliberate choice of words which although technically accurate, conjure up a break, a snapping of the spinal vertebrae. Maybe that’s what the jury had in mind until they saw the CT scan – it was actually an injury that wasn’t obvious. The doctors looking at the first X-rays didn’t identify any bone damage, nor in an MRI later.

The injury didn’t require surgery and Sergeant Evans was advised to take painkillers and do physiotherapy. The agreed facts state from medical evidence that you’d expect such a fracture to heal in six to twelve weeks, with full healing in three to six months, and no long-term consequences.

The unfortunate policewoman suffered no damage at all to her spinal cord. She had a possible hairline fracture to the wing of one vertebra. That there was any fracture at all was never definitive from the X-rays and MRIs. Whether it reached the bar of grievous bodily harm was disputed; how it was caused was disputed; and whether there was any intent to harm was disputed. The refusal of the jury to convict was completely consistent with the evidence heard in court.

This has driven right-wingers into a frenzy with completely false claims about the extent of the injury, and continued reference to a highly edited brief video clip.

That video clip is extremely important because it represents the height of the state’s attempt to use this incident to demonise Palestine Action. The police were permitted, during the course of the trial, to release a single and highly edited clip of video said to represent the injury of Sergeant Evans by a sledgehammer. A great deal of other video evidence was not released. This resulted in a massive media frenzy.

Even before this, Yvette Cooper and Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Mark Rowley had caused massive prejudice by stating that a policewoman had been attacked with a sledgehammer.

None of these deliberate attempts to affect the trial was censured by the judge nor resulted in any proceedings for contempt of court. Yet we were strictly told we absolutely could not mention that the judge was withholding the evidence about Elbit from the jury, as that would prejudice the trial and we would face contempt of court proceedings.

On Sergeant Evans, she has become a cause célèbre for the right, but I should say there is no evidence she is herself whipping this up. Her behaviour on the night was admirable. She was not herself involved in the excessive use of force – and, despite her own painful back, tended to others after the event quietened.

In my view, this prosecution was doomed by the overcharging and exaggeration used by the government to demonise Palestine Action. The “aggravated burglary” charge was ludicrous. To attempt to claim that the activists entered the factory with the intent of using weapons against people, went so far against the evidence it was bound to fail.

The massive over-exaggeration of the extent of Sergeant Evans’s injury has successfully whipped up right-wing hysteria, but did not really meet the threshold of grievous bodily harm, and the decision to add intent to that charge was again not backed by evidence.

On criminal damage, the jury plainly refused to accept the destruction of weapons of genocide was a crime. For that, I salute them. For the rest, they simply applied robust common sense to the evidence before them.

The “policewoman attacked with a sledgehammer” nonsense of course featured heavily in the English judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. In the Scottish judicial review, they cannot really use this – not without a caveat that a jury did not agree with them.

The Filton result is great news for the Scottish judicial review. We have to submit all the paperwork for that, in just seven working days. I hate to say this, but we are now desperately short of funds to continue this action. I cannot keep asking the same supporters to give more, but if you know people who can afford it and will contribute please activate them.

You can donate through the link via Crowd Justice, which goes straight to the lawyers, or through this blog.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/scottish-challenge-to-proscription/

Alternatively by bank transfer:

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I have now been here a week and I think that I have absorbed enough to attempt a little analysis, as opposed to the simple impressions I gave shortly after arrival.

Those impressions remain valid however: this is not a repressive state. I was on the Randy Credico show live on WBAI New York on Friday, and by chance my friend, the renowned FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley was also on, from Minnesota (where I have stayed with Colleen and her husband in their home).

I was explaining that, in a week of going all round Caracas, I had yet to see a checkpoint, that nobody had at any stage asked me who I am, what I was doing or prevented me from going anywhere, and that the shops, bars and restaurants are all functioning normally.

Colleen reported from Minneapolis that there were checkpoints everywhere, that the streets are full of heavily armed men, that people are frequently stopped, questioned, asked to produce documents, and diverted, and that many shops bars and restaurants are closed because the staff are afraid to venture out into the streets. Colleen is heavily involved in detainee support and in getting supplies to people sheltering in their homes.

Remind me again, which of us is in a supposed dictatorship?

I want to tell you a couple of things to help explain Venezuela. I visited the mausoleum of Simon Bolivar, a genuinely heroic man. He has now been removed from the main Venezuelan Pantheon into a connected dedicated modern mausoleum. The Pantheon itself contains the remains of many of the heroes of the Venezuelan War of Independence, and monuments to all of them.

The Venezuelan War of Independence was, of course, in many respects similar to the United States war given the same name. It was a war between colonial elites and their metropolitan masters. Unlike the founders of the USA, Bolivar himself was genuinely opposed to slavery, but that was not true of many of his key allies.

So the Pantheon as originally conceived in the late 19th century was inhabited by the remains and memories almost entirely of those heroic people of Spanish descent who fought against the colonial control of Spain. This is the great founding ideal of Venezuela.

When Chavez and Maduro came to power, they made a very important change. They added a monument to the liberated slaves who had fought against the Spanish. Then Chavez and Maduro each added an extra monument: to leaders of the Native Americans who had fought against Spanish invasion in the first place.

This caused outrage among right wingers furious that the purity of the Pantheon, the great focus of Venezuelan nationalism, was being desecrated for what they viewed as political purposes. Which brings me to what I think is a fundamental observation. Politics in Venezuela are basically racial.

I am treading on eggshells here, but in 2019 I published this post noticing the contrast between opposition and government group photos. The leadership of the right wing are basically whiter. That is simply who they are.

Of course the divide is not absolute, and individual exceptions exist. But it is there. Politics in Venezuela are strongly class based, and in this post-colonial society it is difficult to disentangle race from class.

What the opposition want is simply to turn back the clock and restore economic apartheid in Venezuela. I had a very interesting talk with Ricardo Vaz of Venezuela Analysis. He explained how Chavez’s revolutionary policies had brought people into political discourse who had always been ignored in what was historically an extremely unequal society:

“The rulers, now the opposition, suddenly found that their cook, their cleaner, their driver and even their gardener were learning to read and write and starting to get political ideas. They did not like this at all”.

They still don’t like that. It is not possible for me here now to capture what happened exactly in the 2024 elections. Plainly the opposition performed relatively well, though I do not in the least believe they got 68% of the result. Maduro’s closing rally had 1 million people while the opposition’s had 50,000.

For the government to remain in power against the will of 68% of the population would require a degree of state repression which simply does not exist here. There is very little surveillance compared to Western states, let alone to acknowledged dictatorships. There are no politicised police or militias in the streets. There are no restrictions on people moving around and mingling.

Machado has discredited herself, as effectively as she has discredited the Nobel peace prize. Giving the prize to Trump made her look foolish and suppliant, and praising the bombing of her own country which killed fellow citizens has really not gone down well at all, even with opposition supporters.

But even that has not harmed her nearly as much as her remark to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee that 60% of Venezuelans are involved in narcotics or prostitution. This is not quite what she said, but it is near enough and it really annoyed people here:

We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60% of our populations, and not only involving drug trafficking, but in human trafficking, in networks of prostitution. So this has turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas…

Which takes me back to personal impressions. I have, as those who follow me would expect, assiduously been checking out the bars of Caracas. I have found some very beautiful ones – Juan Sebastian Bar is one of the most lovely bars that I have ever seen. A piece of stunning interior design. I took these photos before it opened one evening. It serves mojitos even better than you can get in Havana.

That is not a mirror, those are two grand pianos!

The point is that not in my hotel, not in any bar, not on any street, have I seen a single person who appeared to be operating as a sex worker. Not one – and I might perhaps be viewed as a pretty archetypal target. Similarly I have not seen any sign at all of narcotics abuse. In two days in Salisbury investigating the Skripal hoax I was shocked by how many obvious drug addicts we saw on the streets. There is nothing of the kind in Caracas.

While I appreciate that the allegation is that Venezuela exports narcotics rather than consumes them, you always get clusters of addiction around production points and transit nodes. I just see no evidence that the common tropes about Venezuela and Venezuelans are true: and I am a trained and seasoned observer.

Sanctions against Venezuela did not start after the disputed 2024 election; they have been applied by the Western powers more or less since the very start of Chavez’s socialist experiment. The repression of socialism in Latin America has been US policy for a century, and the more Chavez succeeded the more the West sought to suppress it. France refused to provide spares for the Mirage jets of the Venezuelan air force, and equally refused to supply spare parts for the trains of the Metro service.

The gold and foreign currency reserves abroad of the government of Venezuela have simply been stolen by foreign governments, and the blocking of Venezuela from the Swift bank transfer system for a while caused havoc. It has however spurred BRICS to develop an alternative, not fully adopted, not finished but working in Venezuela, which accounts for the full stocks in the shops and ultimately might represent a significant moment in international economics.

Slowly, unwillingly, the Socialist Party under Maduro has been forced precisely by the crippling effect of sanctions to allow more space for the private sector and move from a fully socialist to a more social democratic model – though to describe the reforms under Maduro as “neoliberal” is ridiculous. It may theoretically be possible to build socialism in one country, but if the major economic powers join forces to destroy you, it becomes very difficult indeed.

A dangerously simplistic narrative about what has happened in Venezuela has taken hold in the West, fuelled by Trump, CIA and Machado/Miami sources.

On this reading, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez is in collusion with Trump, betrayed Maduro and stood down defences on the night of his kidnap, and is now instituting neoliberal policies, including a new petroleum law which states only the USA may ship Venezuelan oil and that payments for it will go exclusively through the US in Qatar.

In fact this is not true at all. Venezuela’s new petroleum legislation contains no provisions banning oil exports to China or Russia and no provision for payments to be routed through the USA. The new petroleum law is in fact legislation which sets out a new commercial basis for the operation of the Venezuelan petroleum sector on the same kind of concession, licensing and royalty basis as pertains in almost every other oil producer.

The key point is that the legislation was drafted under Maduro, with extensive consultation and debate. It came for its first reading to the Assembly literally the day after Maduro was kidnapped. That was already scheduled, not a result of the kidnapping. The notion that Maduro opposed the legislation and Rodríguez had to get rid of him to get it through is patent nonsense.

The legislation is unrelated to the United States’ current hijack of the sale of Venezuelan oil. This is proceeding through simple piracy. Trump decreed that only two companies, Vitol and Trafigura, would be allowed to load Venezuelan oil, and those companies would pay for the oil to the United States, into a special account held in Qatar under Trump’s name.

This new scheme has been enforced by simple piracy. Any tankers carrying oil not owned by Vitol and Trafigura from Venezuela have been illegally seized at sea by the US Navy, sometimes assisted by the UK government. The United States has been claiming that Venezuela agrees to this arrangement. That is not true. Or it is true in the sense that a hostage held at gunpoint agrees to stay put, rather than get a bullet through the skull.

The Venezuelan government simply has no physical ability to prevent the United States Navy from seizing oil tankers.

Nor is it true that the Venezuelan government gave the United States information on non-Vitol and -Trafigura tankers and requested their interception. Obviously the United States could get the information on “rogue” tankers from Vitol and Trafigura.

Trafigura have featured in my writing for decades as the archetypal extremely corrupt Western corporation. Their record for deliberate pollution and corruption in Africa is appalling, including in Angola and Ivory Coast. They have frequently been involved in CIA schemes for regime change.

How Vitol and Trafigura came to be the beneficiaries of a duopoly, and what backhanders that may have involved, is another question. In fact this is the one area of domestic pressure that has forced a step back from Trump, and last Friday it was announced that the arrangement will be expanded to include more companies.

It is worth noting that the system has not just been invented for Venezuela. It is almost identical to the system imposed on Iraq after its destruction by the United States and its allies, with payments for Iraqi oil made to the USA and a percentage of them returned to the Iraqi government.

The difference is that the Iraqi revenues were paid to the US Treasury, whereas the Venezuelan funds are going to a Qatar account under Trump’s personal control, removed from the reach of Congress. At its most charitable reading, it gives him a massive slush fund to pursue policy outside the United States legal framework. It is like Iran-Contra on a massive scale.

To reiterate: none of this sales arrangement has been agreed by Rodríguez and none of it is contained in the new Venezuelan hydrocarbon legislation on concessions and royalties. There are two separate things being widely conflated.

The line that Delcy Rodríguez agrees both to the kidnap of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia, and to the hijacking of Venezuelan oil sales and revenues, has been deliberately spread by the US and its acolytes, despite Delcy Rodríguez’s furious denials.

If Rodríguez really was Trump’s placed woman, then boasting about it would fatally undermine her within Venezuela and bring about her downfall – which obviously would be entirely counterproductive were there any truth in the claim.

So why is this rumour being spread? Well the obvious reason is precisely to undermine Rodríguez and destabilise the government of Venezuela.

But perhaps a more important factor is Trump’s obsessive need to claim victory. He gathered a massive military force off the coast of Venezuela, and stood in danger of mockery as the Grand Old Duke of York if he simply sailed it away again.

The seizure of Maduro has in fact changed nothing in policy terms within Venezuela, but it has provided a spectacular operation for Trump to claim as a victory. In truth, as a demonstration of the capabilities of the United States’ offensive military technology, it was indeed technically impressive.

For the removal of Maduro to be portrayed as a triumph, Trump has to claim that Rodríguez is solidly pro-USA, even though this is plainly not true. It is merely a part of the parade of triumph that is an essential component both of Trump’s ego and of the bombastic Trump method.

What now happens to Maduro and Cilia is, on this reading, not really relevant. The entirely false narrative of the non-existent Cartel de los Soles has already been abandoned as part of the prosecution. In the USA’s misnamed “justice” system, they have a variety of witness accusations from diverse figures prepared to sign nonsense against Maduro as part of a plea bargain agreement. These include rococo Trump-pleasing standouts such as testimony that Maduro was involved in fixing the 2020 US Presidential election on behalf of Biden.

My prediction is that Trump will “pardon” Maduro before the prosecution gets too silly, and present that as another part of his triumph. But who can predict a madman?

That is precisely the conundrum now facing Delcy Rodríguez. She is dealing with two imponderable equations.

The first was already difficult enough. Historians and ideologues will debate for centuries whether Chavismo could have succeeded economically with its full-on socialist programme, had the Western world not determined to destroy it with crippling sanctions.

What is I think beyond dispute is that the sanctions were so crippling that they caused considerable public hardship, and massive inflation. At the same time, the very fact that Venezuela is not highly dictatorial and both Chavez and Maduro broadly allowed debate, free opposition political parties and media, and the operation of Western-funded NGOs, meant that the Venezuelan population were continually bombarded with Western propaganda which blamed the problems caused by sanctions on the Bolivarian Revolution.

This eroded support for the socialist project, which though still intact, has crumbled at the edges. The Bolivarian government has been obliged to try to mitigate the effects of the sanctions which stole the government’s own capital, and to seek the removal of some sanctions, by the opening up of more space for capitalist investment and operation in the economy, notably but by no means only in the oil sector.

In other words the government has been forced to concede some ground to the West by inching along the spectrum from socialist to social democratic, while attempting to maintain the massive social gains of the Chavez revolution.

This is an exercise in which Nicolás Maduro himself was fully engaged. I believe that both Maduro and Rodríguez have the intention of inching back from social democracy towards socialism over time, once pressures have eased. Theirs is a game of strategy, not of tactics.

To this already extremely sensitive calculation is added the extraordinary factor of Trump. His willingness to simply kill innocent people, to shatter international law, and to impose his will by exploiting massive United States military advantage over a small country, changed all the rules of the game.

The pressure to make changes faster to appease somebody who is plainly mentally unstable, the difficulty of understanding his limits and true goals, is an excruciating experience when the lives and deaths of Venezuelans are in your hands. Trump’s incredible bombast, his wild claims that Venezuelan land and oil is stolen from the USA, are not contained within the realm of normal diplomatic negotiation.

Delcy Rodríguez is not so much walking a tightrope, as navigating an Indiana Jones tunnel full of traps.

One thing that Trump has in fact got right is his contention that Machado does not have the public support to rule. This seems to me indisputable, and an attempt to impose her would result in civil war. This of course in itself undermines the contention that Machado’s team massively won the 2024 election.

Meanwhile life in Venezuela goes on for ordinary people. I had the great pleasure to attend a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra on Sunday. It was very accomplished, and the auditorium was full. The programme was entirely of Venezuelan composers, and I had never heard any of the music before. The opening symphonic poem by Juan Bautista Plaza would stand alongside the European repertoire without blushing.

I make no apologies for bringing little slices of ordinary life to you, because the picture we have been given of Venezuela is so strangely and massively distorted, it requires multiple points of correction.

Chavez instituted a programme of musical education for working-class children that became the envy of the classical music world, known simply as La Sistema. Much more heart-rending examples of Western sanctions might be found, involving medical provision. But as an example of the cruel absurdity of the sanctions regime, the youth orchestra of Venezuela has difficulties getting hold of simple consumables – strings, reeds, plectra – because of sanctions.

In bringing violin strings to a child I should be committing a crime in the United States of America. Let that be a testament to the absurdity of using sanctions to crush human spirit.

I am very aware I have not left Caracas yet and of the limitations of my experience so far. But I am already struck by the great advantage of being here over commentators in the West who I see daily, even when well-intentioned, getting it all wrong. The mainstream media of course produce a fake narrative entirely as a matter of policy.

I am delighted to say that today our new videographer and editor are starting and we will be able to bring you video content. I also hope today to conclude rent of an office/studio space.

We now have a Venezuela reporting crowdfunder. I have simply edited the Lebanese GoFundMe crowdfunder, because that took many weeks to be approved and I don’t want to go through all that again. So its starting baseline is the £35,000 we raised and spent in Lebanon.

I do very much appreciate that I have been simultaneously crowdfunding to fight the UK government in the Scottish courts over the proscription of Palestine Action. We fight forces that have unlimited funds. We can only succeed if we spread the load. 98% of those who read my articles never contribute financially. This would be a good moment to change that. It is just the simple baseline subscriptions to my blog that have got me to Venezuela, and that remains the foundation for all my work.

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