I publish below in full the Note we have submitted to Court today to re-establish the separate Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. Not only is the state doubling down on prosecution of pro-Palestine activists, a new National Security State Threats Bill is being fast tracked through parliament to extend the attack on free speech.

Under this bill receiving a benefit including “information” from a state entity designated as “hostile” by the Home Secretary will be a crime bringing up to 14 years in prison. So publishing casualty figures from Iranian sources, for example, will be terrorism. Publishing information about Ukrainian attacks on Russia will be illegal.

This is the relevant clause of the Bill. My emphasis:

17C Obtaining etc material benefits from a designated body
(1) A person commits an offence if—
(a) the person—
(i) obtains, accepts or retains a material benefit which is not an excluded benefit, or
(ii) obtains or accepts the provision of such a benefit to another person,
(b) the benefit is or was provided by or on behalf of a designated body, and
(c) the person knows, or having regard to other matters known to them ought reasonably to know, that the benefit is or was provided by or on behalf of a designated body.
(2) A person commits an offence if—
(a) the person agrees to accept—
(i) a material benefit which is not an excluded benefit, or
(ii) the provision of such a benefit to another person,
(b) the benefit is to be provided by or on behalf of a designated body, and
(c) the person knows, or having regard to other matters known to them ought reasonably to know, that the benefit is to be provided by or on behalf of a designated body.
(3) Material benefits may include financial benefits, anything which has the potential to result in a financial benefit, and information…

Please note there is specifically no public interest defence, no journalism defence and it is to be illegal to receive true information. It is not about the spread of disinformation, it is about the spread of information contrary to the British state narrative. Receiving information from a designated enemy of the UK is the offence, whether you publish it or not.

There in no modern precedent for this in peacetime. It is being forced through all its parliamentary stages – three readings, amendments and two Lords sittings – in a single day. I have repeatedly said that liberal democracy has collapsed. I do not need further proof.

Under the current legislation, yesterday prominent international lawyer Dan Kovalik was detained in Liverpool, his phone and laptop seized and he was questioned about his support for Palestine. Dan is a lawyer. He is entitled to lawyer/client confidentiality. His clients include the President of Colombia and other international figures. The UK is a rogue state.

In the height of irony, I was detained at John Lennon International AirPort in Liverpool, England by anti-terrorism police concerned about my opposition to the Genocide on Gaza and the war on Iran. They seized my phone, computer, fingerprints and DNA sample. More to come . . . pic.twitter.com/WOtXQLjjO2

— Dan Kovalik (@danielmkovalik) June 29, 2026

What a nice surprise to run into ⁦@CraigMurrayOrg⁩ in Beirut. Of all the gin joints in the world . . . pic.twitter.com/GHDtofXI5K

— Dan Kovalik (@danielmkovalik) February 20, 2025

The UK state is currently attempting to gaslight us with a concerted campaign of messaging about a few millions in aid to Gaza – much of which is concentrated on assisting ethnic cleansing by various medical and educational routes for people to leave Gaza. But with Labour Friends of Israel member Andy Burnham to take over as PM with former Chair of Labour Friends of Israel James Purnell as his Chief of Staff, support for the Genocide will continue unabated.

The absurd National Security (State Threats) Bill shows that attack on dissidents and free speech will continue at home too. The debanking by Lloyds of The Canary is another prong of the extraordinary destruction of civil liberty under New Labour.

So I am determined not to bow to the sisting of the Scottish judicial review and we have lodged a motion to “reclaim” or restart proceedings.

We have not yet reached the actual Scottish judicial review or had any chance to give the arguments we will use there. It is my intention that we will attack the proscription in the most fundamental way, making these points among others:

• There is an active obligation on states to do everything possible to stop a Genocide. By contrast, the UK has done everything in its power to facilitate Genocide, including protecting its supply chain.
• It is patently absurd to call a non violent direct action group a terrorist organisation
• The state should not be treated as neutral or infallible by the courts. The false narrative on Iraqi WMD, and the terrible deaths and destruction to which that narrative led, should be a warning the state can get it very wrong.
• As a former senior civil servant who was in the FCO during that period, I can testify to the pressures on civil servants and agencies to produce the evidence and policy recommendation that Ministers wish to hear
• The evidence base produced by JTAC to support the proscription recommendation was fundamentally untrue. The Filton jury proved that the Met Police and JTAC assertions of escalating violence, carrying weapons with intent to harm, did not happen as a matter of fact. The jury rejected the aggravated burglary and violent disorder.
• Only one Palestine Action activist has ever been convicted of an offence of violence, and there the jury specifically found no intent
• Lady Justice Carr in the Appeal Court judgement both relied on Sheriff McCormick’s sentencing remarks in the Thales case. But there were no convictions of violence in the Thales case. Sheriff McCormick misrepresented the evidence. Last week he the Sheriff Appeal Court in Scotland overturned his finding of anti-Israeli racism against Mick Napier of Scottish Palestine Solidarity Committee. The inaccurate and frothing remarks of one zionist Sheriff are not a basis for proscription.
• Lady Justice Carr ruled that the Home Secretary must be given “appropriate latitude” and a “wide margin of appreciation” in security cases. But the Home Secretary should not be idealised. They are a politician, and in this case a politician who is parti pris. Yvette Cooper is massively financed by the Zionist lobby. The courts should operate in the real world not in an idealised and unrealistic one.

Lady Carr’s judgement is entirely and directly predicated on the notion that in any conflict in law between the state and the citizen, special deference should always be given to the state as more noble and trustworthy. That reasoning is fundamentally flawed.

To get heard at all we have to roll back Lord Young’s extraordinary ruling that the English Court of Appeal judgement should be accepted as law in Scotland in the interests of “comity”. This overturns centuries of doctrine on the separate jurisdiction of Scotland going back to the Treaty of Union itself – though it does reflect what had in truth been the unchallenged though illegal practice of deference to England in such matters.

I live in Scotland and it is in Scotland that my human rights are being restricted, The English Court of Appeal simply has no jurisdiction over me or ability to cancel my right to a judicial review before the courts of my own jurisdiction in my own country, a review which crucially had already been granted on the merits of the case.

This is the Note we have entered in support of our Motion. Before you read it please understand that we cannot continue the case without funding. This is incredibly expensive, and we have been through months of lawfare where the UK government has continually stalled the action, increasing the costs until we have real difficulty continuing. Please speak to anyone you know who is sympathetic and has some financial ability to help. Over 1700 people have donated so far.  Donation links at the end of the page.

The Note published below addresses only the procedural question of lifting the sist and allowing the Scottish judicial review to proceed. It does not set out the full substantive case against the proscription of Palestine Action. That will be developed once the case is back before the Scottish courts. In summary, the Note argues:

• The English Court of Appeal has no jurisdiction to bind Scottish courts on matters of Scots law.
• The principle of “judicial comity” does not require Scottish courts to follow the English decision.
• The requirement under the Court of Session Rules for the “speedy determination” of judicial reviews has been ignored.
• The UK Government’s litigation strategy north and south of the border is inconsistent and designed to delay resolution.
• The proper course is for the Lord Ordinary to report the case to the Inner House so that Scotland’s highest civil court can determine the matter under Scots law.

The substantive arguments against the proscription itself — including the state’s obligation to prevent genocide, the flawed evidence base, and the improper deference shown to the Home Secretary — are set out above and will be developed fully in the restarted proceedings.

For ease of reading I have deleted many pages of footnotes from the Note.

PAPER APART FOR THE PETITIONER

1. THE PETITIONER’S MOTIONS

1.1 The petitioner moves the court:

(1) To recall the sist granted on 28 May 2026, in respect that the Court of Appeal handed
down its judgment in Ammori v SSHD (Appeal No. CA-2026-000583) on 15 June
2026 ([2026] EWCA Civ 721), and the question of onward appeal from that decision
was resolved as regards the Court of Appeal by that court refusing on 22 June 2026 the
applicant’s application made to it under CPR 52.3B (which application was opposed by
the Home Secretary) for permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court.

(2) To invite the Lord Ordinary to report the whole cause to the Inner House for a ruling
under and in terms of rule 34.1(1) of the Rules of the Court.

2. RECALL OF THE SIST

2.1 On 28 May 2026 the court sisted this cause till such time as the Court of Appeal gave its
judgment in Ammori v SSHD (Appeal No. CA-2026-000583) “and the question of onward
appeal to the UK Supreme Court being resolved”. The court also adopted a fall-back
position of the sist being lifted by effluxion of time to 27 September 2026, if the question
of onward appeal to the UK Supreme Court had not been resolved by that date.

The non-applicability of forum non conveniens considerations in the present
case

2.2 There is no dispute that the Scots law principle of forum non conveniens (which was
subsequently imported into English law 1) may apply in public law cases. But in Tehrani
v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2006] UKHL 47, 2007 SC (HL) 1 Lord
Hope noted at para 59: that
“the plea of forum non conveniens can never be sustained unless the court is satisfied
that there is some other tribunal having competent jurisdiction in which the case may
be tried more suitably for the interests of the parties and for the ends of justice.”

2.3 But for a court to be able to uphold a plea of forum non conveniens it requires (1) that the
courts of England have jurisdiction to adjudicate over the matters at issue between the
parties in Scotland and (2) there is an identity between the parties in the different
litigations. Neither of these conditions apply in this case: the English courts have no
jurisdiction to determine any matters of Scots law (including whether Palestine Action has
lawfully been proscribed as a “terrorist organisation” as a matter of Scots law); and the
petitioner in these Scottish proceedings is different from the applicant in the English
proceedings.

2.4 The UK wide proscription of Palestine Action does not in any way change the fact that
Scotland and England remain wholly distinct legal jurisdiction whose systems of criminal
law, in particular, “are as distinct from each other as if they were two foreign countries”,
as Lord Hope put it in R v Manchester Stipendiary Magistrate, Ex p Granada Television
Ltd [2001] 1 AC 300, 304G—H.

2.5 And just why in the present case it be should thought in the interests of the parties who
have sought to support Palestine in Action Scotland, and who are facing (the threat of)
prosecution in Scotland by the Lord Advocate under Scots law that there cease to be any
consideration of the merits of the challenge under Scots law to the proscription of Palestine
Action as a terrorist organisation is not explained, whether by the UK government in
seeking the sist or by the Lord Ordinary in granting it.

The decision of the EWCA in R (Liberty) v. Prime Minister and the principle of
“judicial comity”

2.6 Because there is no identity between the applicant parties in the English and Scottish
judicial reviews and because these judicial review deal with different, and non-
overlapping, issues of law (respectively: whether or not Palestine Action has lawfully been
proscribed in England and Wales under English law; and whether or not Palestine Action
has lawfully been proscribed in Scotland under Scots law) the Advocate General could not
include a plea of forum non conveniens in her Answers.

2.7 Given that there was no identity of parties and no identity of issues the Advocate General
instead referred to and relied upon before this court a “soft law” principle of “judicial
comity”, relying heavily in this regard on observations from the Court of Appeal in England
and Wales in R (Liberty) v. Prime Minister [2019] EWCA Civ 1761 [2020] 1 WLR 1193
(Lord Burnett of Maldon CJ, Sir Terence Etherton MR, Dame Victoria Sharp P).

2.8 The issue of public law which was being discussed in R (Liberty) v. Prime Minister [2019]
EWCA Civ 1761 [2020] 1 WLR 1193 wasprecisely that raised and considered by the Inner
House in Vince v. Advocate General for Scotland [2019] CSIH 51, 202 SC 90. This was
whether the court could and should positively ordain the Prime Minister to carry out his
duties under Section 1(4) of the European Union (Withdrawal) (No 2) Act 2019 to “seek to
obtain from the European Council an extension of the period under Article 50(3) of the
Treaty on European Union ending at 11.00pm on 31 October 2019 by sending to the
President of the European Council a letter in the form set out in the Schedule to this Act
requesting an extension of that period to 11.00pm on 31 January 2020 in order to debate
and pass a Bill to implement the agreement between the United Kingdom and the
European Union under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union’’.

2.9 But unlike the situation arising with the proscription of Palestine Action across the UK,
the issue of decision in Liberty/Vince had no direct implications for individuals’ civil
liberties, nor did it involve the criminalisation of conduct across the various legal system
within the UK.

2.10 By contrast, those who seek by their action in Scotland to support Palestine Action are
subject to Scots law, and would be liable to prosecution at the instance of the Lord
Advocate under Scots criminal law and procedure.

2.11 It is therefore necessary – as a matter of legal certainty – for the position in Scots law
to be authoritatively determined. As we have seen this can only be done by a Scottish court,
and not by any court sitting within the English legal system, including the UK Supreme
Court sitting in an English appeal, even where (which is not guaranteed) it has allowed
intervention from parties from other parts of the United Kingdom. This is because Article
XIX of the Acts of Union 1707 provides, as a fundamental condition of the Union between
Scotland and England that
“no Causes in Scotland be cognoscible by the Courts of Chancery, Queens-Bench,
Common-Pleas, or any other Court in Westminster-hall; and that the said Courts, or
any other of the like Nature, after the Union, shall have no Power to cognosce, review,
or alter the Acts or Sentences of the Judicatures within Scotland, or stop the Execution
of the same.”

2.12 Accordingly, no court in England and Wales has jurisdiction to pronounce orders
which purport to extend to the realm of Scotland. This extends (as Lord Mansfield –
speaking against the background of the terms of the Acts of Union of which he would have
been well aware and to which he would have been particularly sensitive, being himself a
Scot raised in Scone in Perthshire – confirmed) to the writ of habeas corpus:
“to foreign dominions, which belong to a prince who succeeds to the throne of England,
this Court has no power to send any writ of any kind. We cannot send a habeas corpus
to Scotland”

2.13 In claiming in Liberty in a judgment handed down on 22 October 2019 that it is “wrong
as a matter of principle for litigants to press for determination of issues which are already
being litigated in another jurisdiction within the United Kingdom in public law cases”, the
Court of Appeal seems to have invented or newly minted constitutional principle. This
was not a constitutional claim which appears to have been known to, or applied by, the
very same (formally Divisional) Court (Lord Burnett of Maldon CJ, Sir Terence Etherton
MR, Dame Victoria Sharp P) in its judgment handed down just six week before on 11
September 2019 in Miller v. Prime Minister [2019] EWHC 2381 (QB).

2.14 In Miller – despite the fact that the Scottish proceedings of challenging the prorogation
of Parliament had already been raised and determined at first instance in Cherry v.
Advocate General for Scotland [2019] CSOH 70, 2020 SC 13, and this decision of the Lord
Ordinary was already known to be on appeal to the Inner House, before the English court
even heard argument – Lord Burnett of Maldon CJ, Sir Terence Etherton MR, Dame
Victoria Sharp P sitting as a Divisional Court did not – whether on grounds of judicial
comity or forum non conveniens – decline to hear the case, and allow the Scottish litigation
to take its course. Instead, they decided to hear the case as a matter of English law and
hand down its judgment, noting as follows (at paras 1-2):
“1. …. The main issue we have to decide is whether the decision of the Prime Minister
to seek the prorogation of Parliament is justiciable (is capable of challenge) in Her
Majesty’s courts or whether it is an exclusively political matter.
We heard argument on Thursday 5 September and the following morning gave our
decision. We concluded that the decision of the Prime Minister was not justiciable. It
is not a matter for the courts.
In formal terms we granted permission to apply for judicial review but dismissed the
claim. We acceded to an application that any appeal from our order could leap-frog to
the Supreme Court pursuant to section 12(3A)(c) of the Administration of Justice Act
1969 should leave to appeal be granted.
“2. Parallel proceedings were progressing in Scotland. They had been issued long
before the order to prorogue Parliament had been made in the context of a growing
concern that the Prime Minister might secure prorogation either side of the date
appointed by statute for the departure of the United Kingdom from the European
Union, currently 31 October 2019. Their focus changed following the prorogation
order.
On Wednesday 4 September Lord Doherty sitting in the Outer House of the Court of
Session dismissed the claim. He too concluded that this was not a matter for the courts.
An appeal is proceeding in the Inner House of the Court of Session. We have had the
advantage of reading Lord Doherty’s judgment.”

2.15 In sum, the discussion, observations and decision of the EWCA in R (Liberty) v. Prime
Minister concerning the principle of “judicial comity” is simply not a reliable guide to how
that concept might be applied within the context of the UK constitution, and in particular
as regards parallel litigations being pursued occurring at the same time north and south of
the border. It should be treated with extreme caution. To quote the Advocate General’s
own words in relation to Cherry and Miller litigations concerning the prorogation of
Parliament:
“Those cases arose during an exceptional period on matters of critical and immediate
national importance and must be viewed in that context.”

2.16 Precisely the same (if not more so) can be said of the Vince and Liberty litigations. The
Liberty decision is in any event readily distinguishable from the present proceedings. It
does not establish any general approach to be followed by this court. It certainly does not
give an authoritative or accurate account of the principle of judicial comity, certainly as it
might be prayed in aid within the UK.

The decision of the UKSC in Jwanczuk

2.17 Instead, the more authoritative and most recent discussion of that principle of judicial
comity in the decision of the UK Supreme Court in R (Jwanczuk) v Secretary of State for
Work and Pensions [2025] UKSC 42 [2026] AC 699. As the UK Supreme Court notes in
its judgment (at para 61 – emphasis added):
“[A]s a matter of practice based on comity and good sense, rather than on legal rules
of precedent, decisions of any of the appellate courts of England and Wales, Northern
Ireland or Scotland will be treated as having persuasive authority when a similar legal
point arises in one of the other jurisdictions. The weight which is attached to them will
generally depend, in the first place, on how convincing the reasoning is found to be.
Where practical problems are liable to result if the earlier decision is not followed,
those will also be a relevant consideration. …. The question which arises in this appeal
is whether greater weight should be given to a decision, and if so, how much weight,
where it concerns the interpretation or application of a statutory provision which
applies in more than one jurisdiction, or where, as in the present appeal, distinct but
identical statutory provisions apply in different jurisdictions”.

2.18 The UKSC Jwanczuk decision was handed down on 20 November 2025. It therefore
postdated both the Court of Appeal in Liberty and the order of 16 May 2025 of
Chamberlain J in R (Juliette Poynter and others) v the Secretary of State for Work and
Pensions to stay an English JR pending a decision (then at avizandum) of the Lord
Ordinary, Lady Hood, in Fanning v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2025]
CSOH 50, 2025 SLT 787. Jwanczuk was therefore a UKSC decision in a case to which
the UK Government was a party and it had been decided well before the sist hearing.

2.19 The Advocate General appears to have referred this court, very much in passing, only
to paragraph 100 of the Jwanczuk UKSC decision. This is where the UK Supreme Court
observed that “pragmatic good sense, is generally for the appellate courts of the United
Kingdom to treat each other’s decisions on the interpretation of legislation with great
respect, since it is undesirable that there should be conflicting decisions on the
construction of provisions which are intended to apply in the same way in more than one
jurisdiction”.

2.20 But it is clear from the Jwanczuk UKSC decision read as a whole that these remarks
in paragraph 100 were never intended to be read in isolation. They are immediately
followed paragraph 101 where the UK Supreme Court in Jwanczuk states unequivocally
that “however, appellate courts should not regard themselves as being under an obligation
to follow decisions which they consider to be wrong. They do not require to identify some
other compelling reason for departing from a wrong decision. They do not have to identify
exceptional circumstances. It is better that they should explain clearly why they consider
the decision to be incorrect, give what they consider to be the correct decision, and grant
leave to appeal to this court so that the difference of views can be resolved without undue
delay”.

2.21 Because this court appears not to have been referred fully to the UKSC decision in
Jwanczuk as a whole there is a danger that this court made its decision to grant the
Advocate General’s motion per incuriam inadvertently misdirecting itself in law (notably
in the court’s observation that “where the identical matter extending to Scotland has been
argued and determined by a competent court in the UK, it is contrary to the principle of
comity for this court to seek to re-litigate that issue”). That would appear to be an
allusion to what was said in paragraphs 28-29 in R (Liberty) v. Prime Minister [2019]
EWCA Civ 1761 [2020] 1 WLR 1193. But what is said there is not consistent with what the
UK Supreme Court overall says in Jwanczuk.

2.22 The decision of the UK Supreme Court in Jwanczuk, a case in which the UK
Government (of which she is a member) was a party, was clearly central to the question of
the weight that should be afforded in the present case to this claimed principle of judicial
comity. In their jointly authored judgment in Jwanczuk the UK Supreme Court held that
the Court of Appeal of England and Wales (Underhill, Elisabeth Laing and Falk LJJ in
[2023] EWCA Civ 1156 [2024] KB 275) had misunderstood and misapplied the principle
of judicial comity when the Court of Appeal dismissed the Secretary of State’s appeal.
Arguably too judges of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in in R (Liberty) v. Prime
Minister [2019] EWCA Civ 1761 [2020] 1 WLR 1193 also failed properly to understand,
expound and apply the principle of judicial comity in that case.

2.23 The Court of Appeal of England and Wales in Jwanczuk wrongly thought that the
principle of judicial comity across the UK required the English courts to follow the decision
of the Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland in O’Donnell v Department for Communities
[2020] NICA 36 [2021] NI 490. Despite the judges of the Court of Appeal of England
and Wales holding and expressing some doubts about the correctness of that NICA
decision, the English court held that the NICA interpretation was to be followed in England
and Wales, because the EWCA judges were unable to say that the NICA decision was
“clearly wrong” or that there were other “compelling reasons” to depart from it.

2.24 In their jointly authored opinion in Jwanczuk Lord Reed and Lady Simler instead
confirmed (at § 92) that
“a decision of an appellate court in one part of the United Kingdom on the decision of
an appellate court in a different part of the United Kingdom is not a matter governed
by the law of precedent”
and (at § 94) that in the different jurisdictions of the United Kingdom, in relation to
“legislation which applies across the United Kingdom (or Great Britain, as the case may
be) … it is even more important that statutory provisions should be interpreted
correctly than that they should be interpreted consistently”.
Their judgment further noted (at §§ 66, 67, 98, 101, 102) that
“66. … [C]onsiderations of comity and practicality strongly encourage the adoption of
a common approach, but the Scottish and English courts will nevertheless diverge
where they are unable to accept the correctness of each other’s decisions. The adoption
of this approach has not caused practical problems in the administration of the
criminal law …
67. … When it comes to questions of civil law, any differences between the approaches
adopted by the intermediate appellate courts to legislation which applies across the
United Kingdom can normally be resolved by an appeal to the Supreme Court. Indeed,
the resolution of such differences is one of the justifications for the Supreme Court’s
existence. […]
98. … It cannot any longer be assumed that similarly worded legislation enacted in
different parts of the United Kingdom should necessarily be treated in the same way.
There are different legislative and executive bodies, which may be acting for different
reasons, and on the basis of different background material.
Issues of justification under the Human Rights Act 1998, in particular, generally
depend on judgements about legislative choices made in the light of conditions in the
jurisdiction to which the legislation applies, and the constitutional arrangements in
place in that jurisdiction. […]
100. … [I]t appears to us that the best approach, as a matter of pragmatic good sense,
is generally for the appellate courts of the United Kingdom to treat each other’s
decisions on the interpretation of legislation with great respect, since it is undesirable
that there should be conflicting decisions on the construction of provisions which are
intended to apply in the same way in more than one jurisdiction. As we have indicated,
it may be appropriate to attach particular weight to another court’s view of the
meaning of statutory language where it is difficult to say with any confidence that one
interpretation is correct and another is wrong. Somewhat less weight may attach to
another court’s interpretation of a similar but different provision.
101 However, appellate courts should not regard themselves as being under an
obligation to follow decisions which they consider to be wrong. They do not require
to identify some other compelling reason for departing from a wrong decision. They
do not have to identify exceptional circumstances.
It is better that they should explain clearly why they consider the decision to be
incorrect, give what they consider to be the correct decision, and grant leave to appeal
to this court so that the difference of views can be resolved without undue delay”
(emphasis added).

2.25 What may properly be drawn from the UKSC decision in Jwanczuk is that it is
fundamentally important for the proper functioning of the multi-jurisdictional
constitutional polity of the United Kingdom that the primary appellate courts within each
of those jurisdictions are confident in their ability and constitutional duty to make their
own decisions – independently of what other appellate courts may have decided – on what
is the correct interpretation in and for their particular territorial jurisdiction, even of
statutory provisions which are common across the UK. They must not consider themselves
to be bound by the decisions made in another jurisdiction.

2.26 In Marshall v. Caulfield [2004] EWCA Civ 422 [2004] ICR 1502 (in a decision upheld
by the UKSC in Jwanczuk) the late Laws LJ, made the point that even where the
substantive statutory law is identical north and south of the border even first instance
courts and tribunals are not bound by decisions of the Scottish courts (whether the Inner
House or indeed in employment the Employment Appeal Tribunal when sitting as a
Scottish court north of the border). He stated (at §§ 32-33):
“Now, statutory provisions which give dominion to courts in one jurisdiction
(international or otherwise) over courts in another are apt, here at least, to father
constitutional tensions.
But it is at least clear, and here is the point on this part of the case, that it would be a
constitutional solecism of some magnitude to suggest that by force of the common law
of precedent any court of England and Wales is in the strict sense bound by decisions
of any court whose jurisdiction runs in Scotland only or—most assuredly—vice versa.
Comity and practicality are another thing altogether. They exert a wholly legitimate
pressure. Mr Hogarth’s argument on this part of the case is thus in my judgment
mistaken. The EAT here was not obliged by law to follow the Court of Session. And
this court certainly is not”.

2.27 The fact that Scotland and England remain different legal systems, means that the
decision of the courts in England are of comparative law interest only and in no sense
constitute any form of binding authority on Scottish courts, no matter how low in the
hierarchy of courts the Scottish court or tribunal might be, or high within the English legal
system the English court decision at issue might be. Indeed as Lord Neuberger observed
in Willers v Joyce and another (No 2) [2016] UKSC 44 [2018] AC 843 at paragraph 22:
“22. …. The traditional view in Scotland has been that, subject to some possible
exceptions, judgments of the House of Lords in English appeals are at most highly
persuasive rather than strictly binding”.

2.28 And this position has, of course, been statutorily reaffirmed by the Westminster
Parliament in relation to decision of the UK Supreme Court when it provides in Section 41
of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, so far as relevant, as follows
“41. Relation to other courts etc
(1) Nothing in this Part [3 concerning the UK Supreme Court] is to affect the
distinctions between the separate legal systems of the parts of the United Kingdom.
(2) A decision of the [UK] Supreme Court on appeal from a court of any part of the
United Kingdom, other than a decision on a devolution matter, is to be regarded as the
decision of a court of that part of the United Kingdom.”
“Speedy determination” as the “key principle” in judicial review procedure in
Scotland

2.29 Further and in any event, the court appears to have granted the Advocate General’s
motion for a sist in these judicial review proceedings on the understanding that “a sist of
proceedings, whether on an agreed or opposed basis, is a regular feature of litigation”,
without having been referred to the relevant Rules of Court set out in Chapter 58 which
contain the principles which are applicable specifically to judicial review applications, as a
distinct form of recourse to the courts in public law matters.

2.30 Rule of Court 58.11(2) specifies that
“when permission is granted, the Lord Ordinary must make such orders for further
procedure as are appropriate for the speedy determination of the petition” (emphasis
added).

2.31 “Speedy determination” is the key principle for judicial review procedure.4 The aim is
“to focus the issues so that the court can reach a decision upon them, in the interests of
sound administration and in the public interest, as soon as possible”5 (emphasis added).

2.32 The only express mention of the possibility of the court pronouncing a sist within the
context of Chapter 58 judicial review procedure is within the context of the pre-permission
procedure for intimation, service and advertisement of the petition, the lodging of answers
and relevant documents, and notification of intention to contest. Rule 58.4(5)(h) allows
that the court might sist the cause for legal aid, but only, per Rule of Court 58.4(4), after
having “regard to the need for the speedy determination of the petition” (emphasis
added).

2.33 Rule 58.12(2) again specifies that “at the procedural hearing the Lord Ordinary may
make such order for further procedure as is appropriate for the speedy determination of
the petition and in particular may make any of the orders listed in rule 58.11(2)” (emphasis
added).

2.34 Yet Rule of Court 58.11(2) does not list the sisting of the cause as being a possible option
in terms of the court’s procedure in judicial review application where permission has been
granted.

2.35 In this, the judicial review rules are to be contrasted with various Rules of Court
applying to procedures other than judicial review, where express provision is made
regarding the possibility of the court pronouncing a sist.

Where was the legal foundation in the Rules of Court for the court pronouncing
the sist of 28 May 2026?

2.36 Against the general principle of statutorily construction that expressio unius est
exclusio alterius it is unclear just what was the legal basis upon which the Advocate
General for Scotland relied as giving this court the power to pronounce a sist in these post-
permission judicial review proceedings, given that the possibility of pronouncing a sist is
not listed among the particular orders which may be pronounced by the court in relation
to the speedy determination of a judicial review petition once permission has been granted
for it to process,7 and there is nothing in the Rules of Court applicable to judicial review
procedure which would allow for it.

2.37 The Advocate General therefore has this further question to answer in these
proceedings: why, when seeking a sist of these post-permission judicial review
proceedings, did the Advocate General fail to identify to the court any specific Rule of Court
on which she relied as the source of a power to sist and made no reference to principle of
“speedy determination” which applies to the procedure to be adopted in judicial review
application, both before (per Rule of Court 58.4(4)) and after permission has been granted
(Rules of Court 58.11(2) and 58.12(2))?
Sist is ex facie not conducive to “the speedy determination” of the judicial review
petition.

2.38 Whatever the presumed legal basis upon which the sist was founded and pronounced,
it clear that ex facie the 28 May 2026 order for sist does not constitute “an order for further
procedure which is “appropriate for the speedy determination of the petition.”
The court’s past interlocutors to be construed and applied consistently with the
requirement for “speedy determination” of this judicial review petition.

2.39 What this means is that – in the event of any ambiguity in the wording of the
interlocutor pronouncing the sist – the court is obliged under and in term of Rule of Court
58.11(2) to adopt and apply any possible interpretation of that order which shortens the
period of the sist, over any alternative reading which might lengthen it. This is an
application of the general rule of construction in favour of validity.

2.40 Any alternative reading (even if a possible reading) which would result in the sist being
in place for a longer rather than a shorter period cannot – consistently with the court’s
duty to ensure the speedy determination of this petition for judicial review – be adopted
by the court.

2.41 A final resolution of this issue as to whether or not this decision is going to be
considered by the UK Supreme Court would have been if the Court of Appeal had given its
permission to appeal against its decision (such as was done by it in Benkharbouche v.
Embassy of the Republic of Sudan [2017] UKSC 62 [2019] AC 777 granting the Secretary
of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs’ application to it for PTA to the UKSC8).
We would then all know, for certain, that the case was going to the UK Supreme Court for
its consideration and determination.

2.42 But that is not what has happened in this case. Instead, it is common ground that the
Court of Appeal summarily refused on the papers filed on Monday 22 June 2026, the
applicant’s application for permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court. As far as the
Court of Appeal is concerned the question of appeal to the UKSC has resolved by it. So
what we can say is that the Court of Appeal is now functus.

2.43 As we have noted, in order to have been properly and lawfully pronounced by the
court, the court’s interlocutor of 28 May 2026 imposing a sist has to be read in a manner
which is compatible with the principle of speedy determination of this judicial review
application.

2.44 It is wholly compatible with the wording of the court’s interlocutor of 28 May 2026 –
and one which is consistent with the speedy determination requirement – for the court to
find that on the fact of this case the sist conditions have been purified and therefore the
sist has fallen.

2.45 This is because the Court of Appeal duly gave its judgment in Ammori v SSHD on 15
June 2026 [2026] EWCA Civ 721 and one week later, on 22 June 2026, duly resolved, as
far as it is concerned, the question of onward appeal from this judgment to the UK
Supreme Court by refusing such permission to appeal.

2.46 It is presumed that the Advocate General will say that an alternative reading of the
court’s interlocutor is to be preferred, which involves the procedure in this judicial review
being paused until and the question of whether or not there was going to be onward appeal
to the UK Supreme Court has been resolved by the UK Supreme Court.

2.47 It is open to the “disappointed would-be appellant” in the English proceedings within
28 days of the Court of Appeal’s refusal to make an application direct to the UK Supreme
Court for its permission to appeal against the Court of Appeal judgment. And the UK
Supreme Court typically takes 6 to 8 months – and sometimes as much as a year – before
giving its decision on whether or not to grant such permission to appeal. These are
significant delays.

2.48 This would not be compatible with the “speedy determination” principle and is
therefore not a reading of the interlocutor one which it is open to the court to prefer over
the petitioner’s reading of it.
The UK Government’s position before the courts north and south of the border
is incompatible with the requirements of “speedy determination”

2.49 In any event, one may question the Advocate General as to what the UK Government’s
true position on this matter of the need for speedy determination of these Scottish
proceeding.

2.50 The litigation strategy from the UK Government as represented by the Advocate
General to date in these Scottish proceedings has appeared to be one of “kicking the can
down the road”, as far as the court will allow it. But that is simply not compatible with the
“speedy determination” principle which applies in these Scottish judicial review
proceedings.

2.51 The UK Government appears to want to treat these judicial review proceedings as if
they were a commercial litigation. It is submitted that its adopted litigation strategy runs
contrary to its constitutional responsibility of seeking clarity and a final authoritative
ruling from the courts on the crucial issue of public law, constitutional law and Convention
rights raised by these applications. The approach taken by the UK Government both in
the English proceedings (and in the Scottish proceedings) to date is frankly impossible to
reconcile with the (now canonical) observations of Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe
(dissenting on the result) in Belize Alliance of Conservation v Department of Environment
[2004] UKPC 6 [2004] Env. LR 38 at para 86 that
“it is now clear that proceedings for judicial review should not be conducted in the
same manner as hard-fought commercial litigation.
A respondent authority owes a duty to the court to cooperate and to make candid
disclosure, by way of affidavit, of the relevant facts and (so far as they are not apparent
from contemporaneous documents which have been disclosed) the reasoning behind
the decision challenged in the judicial review” (emphasis added).

2.52 In the English judicial review proceedings south of the border the UK Government has
to date adopted an approach of alternatively seeking to impede delay the English judicial
review proceeding or demanding the expedition on the part of the applicant (for example
in seeking PTA from the EWCA) as it suits their litigation strategy. Thus:
– the UK Government first of all opposed permission being granted to the applicant in
the English proceedings: R (Ammori) v. Home Department [2025] EWHC 2013
(Admin) (per Chamberlain J. judgment handed down on 30 July 2025)
– the UK Government then unsuccessfully appealed against the grant of permission to
take the judicial review: R (Ammori) v. Home Department [2025] EWCA Civ 1311
[2026] WLR 1000 (per Lady Carr CJ, Lewis LJ, and Edis LJ judgment handed down
on 17 October 2025.
– the UK Government lost in the substantive hearing of the judicial review application
before the Divisional Court: R (Ammori) v. Home Department [2026] EWHC 292
(Admin) [2026] HRLR 9 (per Dame Victoria Sharp President of the King’s Bench
Division, Swift J and Steyn J handed down on 13 February 2026.
– the UK Government then sought and obtained an expedited hearing of its appeal to the
Court of Appeal with hearing dates between 28 to 30 April 2026.
– as noted above some 6 week later, on 15 June 2026 a 5 judge Court of Appeal (Lady
Carr CJ, Sir Geoffrey Vos MR, Edis LJ Vice President of the Criminal Division of the
Court of Appeal, Lewis LJ and Whipple LJ handed down its decision upholding the Uk
Government appeal.
– once the EWCA judgment was handed down the UK Government then immediately
filed a motion with the Court of Appeal requiring that the applicant apply to that court
for permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court by 22 June 2026 (i.e. just seven
days of that court’s substantive decision upholding the UK Government appeal
– an application for permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court was duly put before
the Court of Appeal by the applicant on 22 June 2026. But the UK Government then
opposed the grant of permission, which was then refused by the Court of Appeal.

2.53 Had the concern of the UK Government truly been for there to be a final authoritative
decision applicable across the UK on the lawfulness of the proscription of Palestine Action
it would have supported the applicant’s PTA application. As we have seen from what
happened in Benkharbouche v. Embassy of the Republic of Sudan [2017] UKSC 62 [2019]
AC 777 Such support from the UK Government would have rendered it far more likely that
the Court of Appeal would grant permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court.
Inconsistency in the UK Government’s position depending on whether facing
courts north and south of the border

2.54 Given its decision to oppose PTA before the Court of Appeal it may reasonably be
anticipated (for the sake of consistency if nothing else) that the UK Government will also
oppose any application for PTA made by the applicant direct to the UK Supreme Court.

2.55 The Advocate General can and should be asked by the court to confirm to it just what
the UK Government’s position is on this matter.

2.56 But it all rather looks as if the UK Government in the English proceedings is seeking
to delay (and indeed bring an end to this case at the level of the Court of Appeal decision
without further consideration by the UK Supreme Court.

2.57 The underlying claim and thrust of the position of the UK Government north and
south of the border is in fact contradictory and impossible to reconcile.

2.58 In the Scottish proceedings, the UK Government position as represented by the
Advocate General has been that the present proceedings should really be paused, until the
UK Supreme Court has given permission to appeal and then it can authoritatively
determine for the whole of the UK the legal issues raised by these challenges..

2.59 But in the English proceedings, the UK Government is actively seeking to stop the case
going on to the UK Supreme Court.

2.60 Such opportunistic “cakeism” being demonstrated by the UK Government depending
on which side of the border it is being called to account, is not a position which this court
should tolerate or permit to continue.

Conclusion on first part of the motion
2.61 The petitioner therefore renews the first part of his motion and moves this court, for
all the reason set out above, formally to lift the sist which was imposed on these
proceedings on 28 May 2026.

3. FURTHER PROCEDURE – REPORT TO THE INNER HOUSE

3.1 The Advocate General appears to be proceeding on the basis or assumption that if the UK
Supreme Court on an appeal from the Court of Appeal of England and Wales upholds the
lawfulness under English law of its proscription as a terrorist organisation in England and
Wales, this this ruling will apply equally to and for Scotland (and to and for Northern
Ireland).

3.2 And if the UK Supreme Court says that Palestine Action cannot properly be proscribed
under English law then – on the Advocate General’s analysis at least – it must follow it
cannot have been properly proscribed under Scots law or under Northern Irish law, again
on the assumption there are no principles specific to English law, Scots law or Northern
Irish law that might allow for a different approach on this issue to be taken across the
internal national jurisdictions of the UK.

3.3 But as we have seen from the UKSC decision in Jwanczuk that is to approach matters from
completely the wrong way round. What Jwanczuk tells is that the courts in each of the
jurisdictions of the UK have to reach their decision independently of how courts in other
UK jurisdictions have reached them.

3.4 One of the central planks offered by the Home Secretary in justification of her decision to
proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was an incident in Scotland in June
2022. In her written statement to the House of Commons made on 23 June 2025 (over 3
years after the Glasgow incident) she said this of it:
“During Palestine Action’s attack against the Thales defence factory in Glasgow in
2022, the group caused over a million pounds worth of damage including to parts
essential to submarines.
The Sheriff, in passing custodial sentences for the attackers’ violent crimes, spoke of
the panic among staff who feared for their safety as pyrotechnics and smoke bombs
were thrown in the area where they were evacuating.
He further recorded the extent of damage to legitimate business activities which
included ‘matters of nationwide security’ and disputed the groups’ claims its actions
were non-violent.”

3.5 But it is important to bear in mind that in the English proceedings no challenge is made to
the Home Secretary’s statement made in justification for the order at issue that what
occurred during a protest incident at Thales SA, in Glasgow on 1 June 2022 constituted
acts of terrorism on the basis that they involved the use or threat of action which was said
to “serious damage” to, and only to property and was “designed to influence a government
to advance a political, religious or ideological cause” such as to fall within the ambit of
section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

3.6 Because the Claimant’s application for permission for judicial review on this was refused
in the Administrative Court below (see R (Ammori) v Home Secretary [2025] EWHC 2013
(Admin) at [77]-[80]), the retrospective characterisation of what is said to have happened
in Glasgow on 1 June 2022 at Thales SA as “terrorism” is not a matter which can be
disputed in the English proceedings. Indeed the Court of Appeal (in its judgment at para
150) relies heavily on what it understands from the sentencing sheriff’s reported remarks
as happened in Glasgow on 1 June 2022 in support of its finding in favour of the lawfulness
of the Home Secretary proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

3.7 This is a matter which can however usefully and properly be examined in the present
Scottish proceedings. A court in Scotland is in far better position to understand and
situate the circumstances of the June 2022 protest action at Thales SA in Glasgow in
respect of which the five individuals charged all pled guilty to charges of breach of the
peace. Two of these five also pled guilty to “damaging property” in gluing their hands to
the edge of the roof. And one of the five, in addition, pled guilty to behaving in a threatening
or abusive manner when police arrive to de-bond her hands from the roof when she was
obstructive and required to be restrained using leg restraints. The first four accused were
sentenced by the Sheriff to serve a total of 12 months incarceration and the fifth who
resisted arrest received a total sentence of 14 months imprisonment.

3.8 Much was made by the Home Secretary and by the courts in England and Wales that the
sheriff mentioned in his remarks the setting off of “pyrotechnics including smoke bombs”
at the start of what turned out to be a day long occupation of the premises. The sheriff
noted in his sentencing that “in one criminal justice social work report it is said that ‘the
offence is non-violent in nature and was planned as well as intended to cause disruption’”.
He then comments in passing that “throwing pyrotechnics into areas where people are
being evacuated could hardly be described as non-violent”.

3.9 But the reality is that fireworks are not firearms. The throwing of smoke bombs was
charged as and only as “breach of the peace”. None of the individual was charged with any
form of terrorism offences. The justification for the Home Secretary to found on the
circumstances of this case as a primary basis for the proscription in Scotland, as well as
the rest of the UK, of Palestine Action can therefore usefully be considered and determined
by the courts in Scotland in the present proceedings.

3.10 The UK Supreme Court indeed welcomes the opportunity of being able to hear at the
same appeals from the decisions of the (intermediate) appellate courts in relation to
legislation which applies across the United Kingdom. The resolution of any differences in
approach as between the Scottish and English intermediate appellate court is indeed said
in Jwanczuk one of the justifications for the UK Supreme Court’s existence.

3.11 What hearing appeals from Scotland and from England together means is that the UK
Supreme Court to get the benefit of the views of experienced appellate judges from both
sides of the border: see for example: R (Cart) v. Upper Tribunal [2011] UKSC 28/Eba v.
Advocate General for Scotland [2011] UKSC 29; and Cherry v. Advocate General for
Scotland/Miller v. Prime Minister [2019] UKSC

3.12 This course of hearing Scottish and English appeal together ensures, too, that a final
authoritative ruling can be handed down by the UK Supreme Court which unequivocally
applies to both sides of the border and thereby enhances and achieves the legal certainty
required to ensure compatibility with and respect for the Convention rights of all those
many individuals, north and south of the border, affected (including in relation to its
chilling effect) by the decision of the Home Secretary to list Palestine Action as a proscribed
terrorist organisation.

3.13 Against that background it is clear that the proper course to be followed in this case is
for the Lord Ordinary to report this case to the Inner House.

3.14 Accordingly, once the sist has been lifted in accordance with the first part of this
motion, the petitioner moves that the court – acting under and in terms of Rule of Court

34.1(1) – report the cause as a whole to the Inner House for its ruling on the substance of
this judicial review challenge.

3.15 Rule of Court 34.3(2) provides that “[t]he decision of the Inner House on a report to it
under rule 34.1(1) shall be final”: qv Davidson v. Scottish Ministers (No 3): incidental
application re Leave to appeal to House of Lords, 2005 1 SC (HL) 1 at §13.

3.16 This means that any decision of the Inner House, on the court’s Chapter 34 report to
it, is habile to be appealed to the UK Supreme Court (see subsection 40(2)(a) of the Court
of Session Act 1988), provided that the necessary permission to appeal has been granted
by the appropriate court (subsections 40(1) and/or 40(3) of the Court of Session Act 1988).

3.17 The petitioner submits that, instead of considering the petition and answers at a
substantive hearing and reaching his own determination on it, the option of reporting the
case to the Inner House is the most appropriate procedure to be adopted by the court in
all the circumstances of this case.

3.18 If this proposed course of action is followed then it will at least allow the possibility of:
the Inner House making a decision on the Scottish challenge; and then for the UK Supreme
Court to have the benefit of the decision of two appellate courts, respectively determining
under Scots law and separately under English law, the lawfulness of the proscription of
Palestine Action. The UK Supreme Court will then be able to determine this matter finally
and most importantly authoritatively both in and for Scotland, and in and for England and
Wales.

3.19 Any suggested alternative course which may be anticipated from the Advocate General
on behalf of the UK Government – for example that the present proceedings remain sisted
pending the determination by the UK Supreme Court of any appeal against the decision of
the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, leaving the petitioner with the possibility simply
of applying to intervene in any English appeal in the UK Supreme Court – would be wholly
unsatisfactory for at least the following reasons, among others:
(1) Any resulting decision of the UK Supreme Court in a solely English appeal would not
be binding as a matter of precedent in and for Scotland
(2) The UK Supreme Court might choose to deny outright any application for the
petitioners to intervene
(3) Even if the UK Supreme Court allowed the possibility for an intervention by the
petitioner, that court might determine that it will allow limited intervention only on
particular aspects or arguments, rather than the full range of the argument which the
petitioner might wish to present
(4) Any arguments which the UK Supreme Court might allow to be heard from the
petitioner, would be considered and determined against a background of there being
no independent Scottish court consideration of these arguments.
(5) It is particularly important for the UK Supreme Court to hear the views of the Scottish
courts because one of the main justifications on which the Court of Appeal of England
and Wales relied upon in deciding that Palestine Action was engaging in and
advocating for terrorism is a decision and sentencing remarks of a sheriff in a
criminal case at Glasgow Sheriff Court and how the Scottish authorities (the police
the Crown and the sheriff) dealt with it (Ammori, [2026] EWCA Civ 721 paras 53,
150). Therefore, it is crucial that there is a complete and full understanding of the full
details and circumstances of that decision (and all other Scotland related decisions),
which only the Inner House can bring.

3.20 Accordingly the petitioner renews the second part of his motion and once more invites
the Lord Ordinary to report the whole cause to the Inner House for a ruling under and in
terms of rule 34.1(1) of the Rules of the Court.

4. CONCLUSION

4.1 The petitioner in the present proceedings – and the applicant in the English proceedings –
hold the common position that the UK Supreme Court should be afforded the last and
authoritative word on the lawfulness under Scots law and under English law of the
proscription of Palestine Action in Scotland and separately in England and Wales.

4.2 This aim can only be achieved by the court following the course of action which the
petitioner urges on the court.

4.3 The UK Government’s position by contrast seems to be one of impeding or delaying the
final authoritative resolution of these matters, whether in Scotland or in England and
Wales. That course should not be permitted it by this court.

4.4 In all these circumstances the petitioner renews his motion as enrolled and moves the
court to grant both parts of that motion.

AIDAN O’NEILL KC

We desperately need more money to continue this legal case. Each stage of hearing like this costs over £30,000 and the eventual judicial review will cost much more.

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The provisional surrender document signed by Donald Trump appeared to represent a triumph for Iran and indeed for the world; but neither the USA nor Israel has the slightest sense of honour and they cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith.

Iran knows this – after all, the USA twice attacked Iran actually during peace negotiations, on each occasion killing key Iranian negotiators.

To understand the American position, it is important to realise two key points:

• Greater Israel is an absolute priority
• Opening the Strait of Hormuz is not a US priority

While the US/Israeli alliance were defeated in their attempt to impose regime change on Iran, and indeed have consolidated the popular support of the Iranian government, they have succeeded in expanding Greater Israel. Israel has ethnically cleared and devastated a vast swathe of Southern Lebanon, expanding its military footprint, and notably attempting to repeat its ploy from November 2024 of pushing forward its armour under cover of ceasefire.

Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon has been a major negotiating point for the Iranian government and is a key – indeed the very first – point of the Iran/USA MOU. But in an extraordinary coup aimed at negating that deal, the USA has signed a deal with Israel and its puppet Aoun regime in Lebanon which seeks to legitimise Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon through the agreement of the “Lebanese government”.

This is an astonishing development. I did not think I could have a lower opinion of the appalling bloated traitor “General” “President” Aoun but not even I – nor I think any commentator – believed he would make such a deal with Israel. The plan is that the Americans, Israelis and Lebanese Army will act together to forcibly eliminate Hezbollah, and only after that is certified – by the Israelis – will the Israelis withdraw from Southern Lebanon.

Here are the operative paragraphs. Note that they carefully do not say in terms that Israel will actually leave Lebanon.

“3. …The Government of Israel and the Government of Lebanon commit to a reciprocal, sequenced process, with clear conditions, whereby the LAF will restore effective sovereign authority over all Lebanese territory, pending the verified disarmament of non-state armed groups and dismantlement of associated infrastructure, enabling the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to progressively redeploy out of the Lebanese territory.”

“5 . …The Government of Israel underscores that the termination of this threat, through the disarmament and dismantlement of such groups in all of Lebanon and additional security arrangements to be agreed upon between the two countries, will eliminate any future need for IDF military action or presence in Lebanon.”

This is plainly completely incompatible with the USA/Iran MOU, which states as Point 1:

“The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.”

Of course, everybody knows that Israel will never withdraw voluntarily, any more than they withdrew from the Golan Heights. Annexation is plainly the goal and expansion of Greater Israel at least to the Litani River and probably further.

It is important to realise that this is not only Aoun seeking the annihilation of the Shia population of Southern Lebanon; he is also betraying his own community. Aoun is himself a Southern Lebanese Christian, and Israel has been destroying the homes, churches, hospitals and families of Southern Lebanese Christians with as much glee as they attack Muslims.

The agreement names two “pilot zones” where the combined Israeli and Lebanese Army forces will eliminate Hezbollah, followed by Israeli withdrawal from those zones. But these are zones which Israel is not currently occupying – they are areas where Israel was defeated in fighting by Hezbollah and which have been since subject to relentless Israeli bombardment.

So Aoun has agreed to support militarily an IDF advance further into Lebanon, against an agreement that Israel will be able to withdraw once these key Hezbollah redoubts have been destroyed. Even if Aoun were stupid enough to believe the Israelis will withdraw after the operation, this is a level of treachery it is difficult to comprehend.

Greater Israel is not a concept. It is a reality being created before our very eyes.

Israel now occupies 70% of Gaza and plainly the entire “Board of Peace” mechanism is nothing but smoke and mirrors, pure fraud. It has zero effect on the continued tightening of the Gaza concentration camp into an ever-shrinking area. Israeli settlements in the West Bank expand daily and every night the skies are red with Palestinian homes and crops burning. In East Jerusalem Palestinians are continually evicted and replaced by fresh European or American arrivals. In Syria, Israel is building permanent fortifications and its armour creeps forward field by field, with the full cooperation of “President” al-Jolani.

Iran was able to resist the combined military might of the USA and Israel. That is cause for celebration. But do not allow it to blind your eyes to the continued hard reality of the expansion of Greater Israel.

There is no gain for the US in the US/Iran Memorandum of Understanding which the US did not already possess before starting the war. It is therefore very possible, and in many senses valid, to read it as the formalisation of US defeat: a surrender document. Which is why you should be sceptical about US commitment to the terms.

The Strait of Hormuz was fully open before the US started the war. Allowing the flow of oil to resume has become a short-term US priority due to high domestic retail prices and pending elections, but the MOU envisages more Iranian control – and potentially fees – in the Strait than existed before the war.

There is no indication of restrictions on the Iranian nuclear programme that were not already available in the peaceful negotiations. Crucially there are no limitations on Iran’s vital ballistic missile production. The proposed relaxation of sanctions and release of frozen assets is a triumph for Iran and long overdue, and the $300 billion in dollars in reparations, from unspecified sources, is stunning.

So stunning of course that anyone with their head screwed on will realise there is no long term American intention to keep faith with the deal.

Trump is not stupid. There are many ways of characterising his kind of cunning, but it is not stupidity. He was not, as the prevailing narrative seeks to state, the only person in the World who did not realise the Strait of Hormuz would be closed by the war. The USA is quite happy to see the Strait of Hormuz closed, or permanently made more difficult and expensive to transit.

The key to understanding Trump’s position is his famous love of tariffs. Trump is a mercantilist. For many years the world worked on the general basis of accepting the economics of Adam Smith – that freedom of trade promoted universal, reciprocal wealth creation. That was the founding basis of the World Trade organisation, and is the internal philosophy of big trading blocs like the EU.

Trump rejects this and returns to the philosophy that other nations are all competitors, not potential partners, and that success lies not only in increasing your own production, but in damaging your rivals’ production – which ultimately will increase domestic production further. Trump rejects the basic premise of free trade.

The long prevailing belief in the beneficial effects of free trade historically was, as logic demands, accompanied by the demand for freedom of navigation.

Sweeping away tariffs goes hand in hand with sweeping away the controls on shipping which carry the goods. Before the rise of liberal economics, almost all states had practised mercantilism, with controls on shipping being a major source of state revenue. The magnificence of Kronborg Castle in Helsingør, in which Hamlet is set, was constructed entirely from revenues from tolls on ships exiting the Baltic by passing the strait it overlooks, for example. Mercantilism not only sought to control passage but to dictate which country’s ships were allowed to trade.

Freedom of navigation was initially enforced ultimately by the British, and later the American, Navy. States attempting to enforce customary passage fees, for example in the Malaccan Strait, were classified as “pirates” and freedom of navigation became a routine justification for imperialist aggression and/or colonial occupation. Freedom of navigation eventually became customary international law, ultimately codified in the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea.

The simple truth is this: in openly abandoning the principle of free trade, the Trump regime has also abandoned the logically linked principle of freedom of navigation. This is evident not just in their indifference to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It is evident in the naval blockades of Cuba and Venezuela and above all in the worldwide blockade of Russian hydrocarbon deliveries, including the effective end of free passage through the Strait of Dover, and a de facto naval blockade of the Arctic passages.

Following the shale boom, the United States is a net hydrocarbon exporter. The USA balance of trade benefits from high hydrocarbon prices. Trump is doing everything he can to increase US hydrocarbon production by slashing environmental and other controls. This is a core Trump policy.

The USA does not import hydrocarbons through the Strait of Hormuz. That fact is key to Trump’s thinking.

In this mercantilist view, closure of the Strait has two benefits for the USA.

• It disadvantages rival hydrocarbon suppliers
• It disadvantages rival industrial competitors in Europe and Asia who do get hydrocarbons through Hormuz.

This is exactly the same logic behind the destruction of Nord Stream 2. The same mercantilist system also explains the effective seizure through naval blockade and control of Venezuela’s oil production, and the blockade of Russian hydrocarbons through sanctions and the “shadow fleet” propaganda disguising another naval blockade.

The UK’s recent actions in the Dover strait indicate that the West, not just the United States has surrendered the principle of freedom of navigation in straits.

Trump believes, as he has repeatedly stated in public, that domestic fuel prices in the USA are a blip and will equalise as the USA increases its domestic fuel production and Venezuelan fuel production. However this was not happening in time for the mid-term elections which is why reopening the Strait of Hormuz became a temporary priority that occasioned the ceasefire and MOU with Iran.

None of this implies good faith negotiation or a real prospect for a lasting peace.

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

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I was genuinely surprised by the Starmer regime’s refusal to state that the Israeli boarding of the Global Sumud flotilla on the High Seas was illegal. I did not realise it was because the UK was planning to undertake similar illegal seizure itself.

The Gaza Flotilla seizure was illegal: while for obvious reasons freedom of navigation had been the undisputed basis of UK maritime policy for centuries. The UK is a set of islands whose population is dependent on food imports to stay alive. Freedom of navigation is a core strategic interest of the UK. The relevant provisions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea were very heavily UK driven, including on passage through straits.

Abandoning the primacy of freedom of navigation is absolutely a radical policy departure for the UK – driven, like so many other changes to traditional British legal positions, by the Starmer regime’s extreme support for Israel.

It is not generally understood how profound a change this is. Even the Tory government of David Cameron, with William Hague as Foreign Secretary, had opposed the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and particularly Israeli seizure of vessels on the High Seas. William Hague stated in 2010 to the House of Commons of the boarding of the Mavi Marmara:

We are seriously concerned about the seizure of British nationals in international waters,

This is a long-term British legal position now directly repudiated by Starmer, Lammy and Cooper.

I had not realised that not only was the UK now supporting the campaigns of illegal blockade and seizure of vessels being openly pursued by Israel and by Trump, but Starmer was actually intending to abandon freedom of navigation and join the Trump/Netanyahu doctrine.

That is what the UK has now done by its seizure of the Smyrtos as it had passed through the Straits of Dover en route to Sikka in India.

The Dover Strait is a strait. The clue is in the name. The UK has absolutely no right to close it to Russian shipping. This is in Article 39 of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea:

Transit of international straits “shall not be impeded” is pretty plain. This is the applicable legal regime for both the Strait of Dover and the Strait of Hormuz. Obviously in time of war different considerations apply, and commercial shipping of belligerent states – and to and from belligerent states – becomes a legitimate target. Iran is fully justified in also treating states permitting attacks launched from their territory as belligerent states.

If hostilities end, this Article 39 regime should apply again in the Strait of Hormuz.

It is worth a footnote to say that Iran had, until the recent illegal aggression by Israel and the United States, always strictly observed the international law on straits even though Iran did not sign the Convention and actually had entered a formal reservation on passage through straits. Even during the war, Iran had attempted, in extremely difficult circumstances, to establish a system for passage of genuinely neutral vessels.

It is astonishing that at this moment, when navigation of the Strait of Hormuz is arguably the single most live question in all of international politics, the UK has decided to abandon the principle of free transit through straits.

It takes hypocrisy to an entire new level – it truly beggars belief – that the day after closing the Dover Strait to Russian shipping, Starmer issued a joint statement with Germany, France and Italy insisting on “Freedom of Navigation” in the strait of Hormuz.

Even if you don’t care about international law and believe that Trumpian realpolitik is better, to act against freedom of navigation now would seem an unwise decision. The UK is now copying actions like the United States naval blockades of Cuba and Venezuela, and the Israeli genocidal blockade of Gaza. These are gross violations of the Law of the Sea.

UK Government minister Lisa Nandy was on television news last night as the government pumped out militaristic propaganda. The Royal Navy’s action in boarding and capturing an entirely unarmed and peaceful merchant vessel was portrayed as an act of Nelsonian brilliance. Nandy justified the seizure on the grounds that Russia’s oil sales pay for its war with Ukraine, and that the UK was enforcing sanctions against Russia.

Neither provides an atom of legal justification for seizing the vessel. The UK is not at war with Russia. Ukraine is, and the Ukrainian navy would have been entitled to seize the vessel. For reasons of cheap popularity and to increase the massive amounts of public money swirling around the corruption honeypot of military spending, UK ministers seem determined to move us to the brink of war with Russia. But we are still not at war, and the UK accordingly has no right to seize peaceful and innocent Russian bound, owned or flagged commercial vessels.

The UK is legally entitled to put whatever sanctions it wishes on Russia. But it can only enforce those within its legitimate jurisdiction. A foreign vessel, even when engaged in innocent passage or transit passage through a UK strait or other territorial waters, is not under UK jurisdiction. The Smyrtos was in fact in international waters south of the UK when seized.

In fact this attempt to enforce Western sanctions in areas where Western powers have no jurisdiction is a classic example of the current aggressive resurgence of imperialism, where the “rules-based order” – meaning rules imposed by the imperialists – replaces international law.

Nandy also stated that the Smyrtos was a member of the “Russian shadow fleet”. This is a term that the Starmer regime and their client mainstream and corporate media have relied upon repeatedly to demonise the Russian owned or directed merchant fleet.

Russia sells oil to countries like India and China perfectly lawfully. That this oil is carried in ships bearing flags other than Russian is perfectly normal.

Nil or close to nil of those ships carrying hydrocarbons to and from the UK are UK registered and flagged.

It has been a sad truth of international shipping for many decades that commercial vessels bear flags of convenience, and that jurisdictions compete to offer the very lowest standards of crew salary and welfare regulations, officer and crew training, vehicle condition, and maritime safety and inspection regimes.

Most of the registries of well-known international flag of convenience states such as Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, do not really exist in the sense of being government departments of those countries, as they should be. They are private companies with almost no real-world footprint, which pay a fee to the government to operate the registry, and collect the fees from the shipowners registering. The register is just names in a laptop – and very often that laptop is in London.

UK colonies often have substantial such fake registries. The UK is a strong opponent of the International Transport Workers Federation, which has struggled against this system to improve mariners’ rights.

The system evolved for wealthy shipowners to avoid all maritime safety, environmental and welfare regulation, and the UK and other Western countries which pander to the needs of the ultra-wealthy have always been complicit. The incredible hypocrisy of Western states pointing fingers at Russia for running “Flags of convenience” is breathtaking.

The West has spent decades building and profiting from the global flags-of-convenience system. Russia is simply using the same system that Western companies created and still dominate.

Incidentally the MOD’s own propaganda footage, shown by all UK mainstream media yesterday, proves that the Smyrtos is a modern, clean, well-equipped and comfortable vessel and all the propaganda about an ancient rustbucket is completely untrue.

I have finally managed to pin down the alleged legal basis of the seizure of the Smyrtos, and it is that the vessel was stateless and thus subject to boarding under Article 110 of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea.

The UK is claiming that the Smyrtos fell foul of Article 110.1 (d) that it was “without nationality”.

We will inspect that claim more closely in a moment. But, assuming it for a moment to be true, note that you only have a right to visit and inspect on the High Seas a ship that is without nationality. Article 110 absolutely does not confer any right to seize a ship on the High Seas not found on inspection to be in unlawful activity. The UK has seized the Smyrtos, brought it into UK territorial waters and then claimed it is under UK jurisdiction.

Nowhere is that allowed in the Convention.

Now let us look at the claim that the Smyrtos is without nationality. This is an astonishing story which the media will not tell you.

When the Smyrtos set sail from Russia it was flying the Cameroonian flag, and on the Cameroonian register. That is not in doubt.

While the ship was on its voyage, on 10 June Cameroon withdrew its registration. It did so because the EU and UK threatened to halt development aid to Cameroon unless they removed Russian vessels from their shipping register.

So the UK blackmailed Cameroon into deregistering the ship. Then, before the ship could reach a friendly port, the UK boarded it because it had been deregistered.

Now doubtless there are chortling people in the UK security and military industries self-congratulating themselves over how clever they are. But while this may be a clever ruse de guerre, it is hardly a ruse de paix. It is not going to survive scrutiny by an international court. An unexpected change of registration, forced upon the owners, is very difficult to complete instantly, but doubtless one was in train and perhaps finished. The UK actions are patently – and deliberately – unreasonable.

Politicians seek to drum up cheap popularity by stupid jingoism. Starmer has won a cheap headline. The world inches closer to the next world war. The UK loses yet more legitimacy in the eyes of the wider world.

Meantime Trump claims as a great victory a possible return of the Strait of Hormuz to the open status it enjoyed before he started an illegal war in the interests of Israel.

Freedom of navigation was a principle worth defending. It has been abandoned in favour of a return to the rule of the seas by those with the strongest navies. Fortunately Putin is neither as war hungry nor as politically desperate as Starmer. However Russia will now be obliged to send at least a frigate to keep the Strait of Dover open. The drums of war beat ever closer.

Craig Murray is a former Head of Maritime Section of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He is a former Alternate Head of the UK Delegation at the UN Preparatory Commission for the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

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

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Venezuela GoFundMe

Just a quick note to say that I am very aware that lately I have been rather bitter, which is not good for anybody, especially me. The disappointments and state outrages have been no worse than usual; my frustration at my poor health, and the subsequent constraint of my ability to fight back, has rather soured my mood.

My twitter posts have been unpleasantly acerbic. Last Sunday on the Crispin Flintoff Show I gave a rant aimed at the soft zionist English Palestine Solidarity Committee, which I immediately regretted as over the top – not wrong in substance, but lacking kindness and tolerance.

The good news is I am aware of this and think I can overcome it.

It has been a very embittering time. The Genocide in Gaza is entering a new phase, and despite the radical shift in international public opinion, those in charge of states – and not only Western states – still show no genuine intention to stop it. The Palestinians have been written off already by those in power over us, erased as a factor. Israel is now simply repeating the Gaza playbook in South Lebanon. I know the villages and towns they are destroying and in many cases have been a guest of the people there. The killing and the destruction of a profound and ancient civilisation is heartbreaking.

I am deeply shocked by the cancellation of the Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. Until I entered the courtroom on Wednesday 27th, I was not worried.

Well, that is not quite true – I started to worry two days earlier when I found that although the permission hearing had been in Court No 1 and livestreamed, this much more substantive hearing would be tucked in Court No 6 and would not be livestreamed. Why was it being hidden?

I still find it hard to accept that the judge Lord Young who, in January, ruled in ringing terms that a Scot resident in Scotland, whose liberties were infringed in Scotland, was entitled to the jurisdiction of a Scottish court, has now ruled starkly that Scotland must accept the decision of the English Court of Appeal in the interests of “comity”.

It would be interesting if there were a clue somewhere that Scottish judges are subject to England. Here is a picture of Lord Young Scott (who is modelling the standard issue uniform):

Interestingly this costume is subject to one of those beloved British lies, which is a straightforward fabrication but which you will find in every publication on the subject.

The lie is that the St George’s crosses, adopted in these Scottish legal robes in Victorian times, were a stylised representation of previous fastenings or rosettes in those positions, and are not St George’s crosses at all.

The problem is there exist many dozens of portraits of Scottish judges in robes before this costume was adopted, and not one portrait, anywhere, shows anything that remotely could be fastenings or rosettes in these positions which later became stylised St George’s crosses.

The official explanation of why senior Scottish judges wear the English flag is simply and completely untrue.

A previous Lord Young in the 1890’s refused to wear the costume with St George’s crosses, which was a scandal at the time.

Let us return to our current Palestine Action case. In January Lord Young ruled this:

I am satisfied that it is appropriate to grant permission for this judicial review to proceed in Scotland notwithstanding the existence of English proceedings which are at a more advanced stage. As a matter of principle, a petitioner who has standing and whose petition sets out arguments of sufficient merit to satisfy s27B(2)(b) of the 1988 Act should not be refused permission because of the existence of parallel proceedings in another UK jurisdiction. The petitioner claims that his legal rights have been illegally circumscribed by the 2025 Order.
He is entitled to look to the courts of his place of residence for a determination of that complaint. The cases of Cherry v Advocate General 2020 SC 37 and R (Miller) v Prime Minister [2019] EWHC 2381 support the petitioner’s argument that there is nothing inherently objectionable with proceedings on the same issue progressing through different jurisdictions within the UK at the same time.

How can the same judge in the same case four months later then rule this, which is the precise opposite?:

In the current proceedings, the legal costs which will be incurred from now until the substantive hearing towards the end of June will increase exponentially. We know that a decision of the [English] Court of Appeal will have been issued prior to the substantive hearing. While that judgment may, or may not, be the final word on this issue, the judgments handed down by the Court of Appeal will be highly significant. It is
almost inevitable that the final decision on the legality of the 2025 Order will be made either by the English Court of Appeal, or by the Supreme Court on a further appeal in Ammori. The petitioner’s challenge to the 2025 Order in these proceedings is likely to be resolved, one way or the other, by the final decision in Ammori. It is said that a sist brings the petitioner’s right to have his claim determined to a practical end. But Ammori will resolve the issue he wants determined

The judge’s volte face was obvious in the courtroom literally in the first five minutes. His mind was not changed in the courtroom; it had been changed for him before we ever got to say a word.

His decision is to “sist” or postpone our case until after the English Court of Appeal case (and any appeal to the Supreme Court) – which means to close down our case permanently. I was informed by our advocates that because this is a “procedural” decision to kill our case administratively – thus avoiding an actual decision on whether the proscription of Palestine Action was legal – there is no chance of appeal.

I am really not happy to let the sleekit Lord Young get away with this and I have instructed the legal team to appeal against the sist. Even if leave to appeal is denied, I think we have to register protest and at least try to resist – the decision takes Scotland backward from the Cherry/Miller case where separate judicial reviews did proceed in Scotland and England over the prorogation of Parliament.

Cherry/Miller was a breakthrough against centuries of Scotland accepting the decision of English courts which have no jurisdiction here.

What is particularly unjust is that Lord Young stated that the reason for his ruling is that the Scottish judicial review had not started yet, whereas the decision of the English Court of Appeal is imminent.

This is infuriating because the Scottish judicial review was scheduled for March. It has been repeatedly – and deliberately – postponed by the Starmer regime by the repeated introduction of “secret intelligence” which has resulted in a number of “closed sessions” with the judge and the security services. We have no access to those sessions, we are never told what “intelligence” was given to the judge, and our interests are “represented” by government-approved barristers who are strictly banned from communicating with us.

It is this UK security service ploy which Lord Young allowed to delay the Scottish judicial review for months. Then something still more suspicious happened.

Last week’s hearing was originally scheduled for early May. It was then postponed for three weeks at the request of the Advocate General, a minister in the Starmer regime, who stated she wished to attend in person and that 27 May was her earliest available date. We protested, but Lord Young postponed the hearing to accommodate her.

During that postponement, the English Court of Appeal announced 15 June as the date they will give their decision in the Ammori case. The existence of that fixed date is now the peg on which Lord Young hung his ending of our case.

But here is the thing: it was really unusual of the Court of Appeal to announce a month in advance the date on which they will give their decision in Ammori. Why would they do that? If they have completed their work, why not give the judgement now? If they have not completed their work, why tie themselves to an entirely artificial deadline?

The English Court of Appeal actually asked the lawyers in Ammori about progress in the Scottish case during that appeal in England. They were very well aware of where we stood.

Was their date for judgement announced so far in advance in order to give Lord Young ammunition to torpedo the Scottish case? That seems to me extremely likely.

We need money to prepare an appeal, and in any event we need money because costs were awarded against us last week (pegged at 50% of the government’s costs). As lawfare is the government’s preferred method, I expect these costs will be substantial.

If we fail to appeal the sist, we may have a route to intervene when the English case gets to the Supreme Court. But unless that gives us a right to be heard (as opposed to just put in a written submission which will be ignored) I am not very attracted by this.

Given the major constitutional implications of Young’s rulings for the operation of the devolution settlement and the autonomy of Scottish legal system, the lack of any interest in the case by the Scottish government or by the SNP as a party – or the Greens or any other political party – has been a further deep disappointment to me.

The potential result of Lord Young’s ruling is that all the work we put into preparation for the Scottish judicial review which had been granted – hundreds of hours of work and tens of thousands of pounds of cost – is wasted. I am very conscious that this is your money from donations. It weighs on me.

One point we wished to raise at judicial review was the fact that the Home Office consulted nobody in Scotland about the proscription – they did not consult the Scottish Government, Police Scotland or the Scottish Counter Terrorism Strategy Board (CONTEST), let alone anybody in Scottish civil society. But they did consult the Israeli Embassy in London.

When I was taken so ill in Venezuela, family was of course uppermost in my mind, but something else was bothering me a great deal. If anything happened to me, the Scottish judicial review would fall. I am the petitioner and the legal team tell me I can neither be replaced nor can a judicial review case be run by my estate. No new petition can be raised by anyone else as it is now time-barred.

So I have to keep going.

Another thing that has greatly disappointed me at the moment is NHS Scotland. I did not have a routine pacemaker implant in Venezuela; it was undertaken as a part of an emergency procedure. I was kept in hospital for a week, and under close observation for another, before I was passed fit to fly. The Venezuelan cardiologist told me that it was essential I see a Scottish cardiologist immediately on return, and that my pacemaker be checked for attachment and function after six weeks.

Arriving home, my GP was excellent and saw me immediately. He sent an URGENT referral to cardiology at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

For a fortnight I was in daily expectation of being called in. Nothing happened. On a Friday I then phoned the Royal Infirmary and was put through to “cardiology waiting list”. After listening to music for 25 minutes, someone answered the phone. He was in a different department, and said the phone had been diverted to his extension. The person who did cardiology appointments was off work till Tuesday. He could not help me.

I called on that Tuesday but nobody answered the extension at all. I tried again the following Friday. After one half-hour wait listening to music, I hung up, dialled the switchboard and said this was not acceptable. The lady told me that the person who did cardiology waiting lists was off work until 1 June.

I found and phoned an NHS Lothian complaints number, and explained the situation. They logged a complaint and said somebody would phone me within 24 hours.

Nobody did.

On 1 June I called again and listened to music. After 20 minutes I took a screenshot to start documenting this.

Then after 35 minutes somebody actually answered. They again stated the person who did cardiology appointments was still off work and the phone had been diverted to them. I said that it was crazy that the entire system was failing because one non-medical member of staff was off work.

They agreed with me but said it was not their fault and they had to handle hundreds of calls. I commiserated.

While I was having that conversation, a letter arrived digitally from NHS Lothian on my phone. It said my referral would be assessed by clinicians, and I would then be added to the waiting list (I already waited almost a month). The letter included a link to see the current waiting times. If it was deemed urgent, waiting time would be another eight weeks. If not urgent, it would be fifteen weeks.

After a month of trying I have not had so much as an ECG. I am getting odd pangs and twinges, sometimes in series, from the pacemaker but have no idea if this is normal or not. I am continually exhausted and find concentration very difficult. The function-and-attachment test after six weeks is now overdue.

I therefore felt obliged, against my principles, to book a private cardiologist appointment. This is deeply disappointing politically, and also very expensive. Seeing the consultant is £250 – an ECG, ultrasound, X Ray and pacemaker monitoring (all of which the Venezuelan cardiologist says should be done) is each charged as extra. So north of £1,000 in all.

I must confess, I had not understood how dysfunctional the NHS had become. I am told if you actually have a heart attack it is still good; but I would hope we could provide healthcare before the point of death. It is being hollowed out, piecemeal-privatised and viewed as an asset to be stripped for profit.

The frustration of ill health has only grown. My health issues are right now preventing me from attending the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, an event I had been looking forward to. I had also planned to visit Iran in July. I want to get to Cuba. And I long to get back to Lebanon. It is essential to see realities on the ground, speak directly with people shaping events, and report the truth to you in ways that I cannot do from a house in Edinburgh. My body is not currently up to supporting the intellectual fight, and that’s a real downer.

In going through all the things that are getting me down, I would add the Murrell/Sturgeon saga. When Murrell first went off to Saughton jail on remand, I was gleeful. Murrell was at the centre of Sturgeon’s plot to organise her close associates to make false complaints against Alex Salmond. Sturgeon and Murrell’s corrupt influence over the Lord Advocate and the Crown Office were central to having both Alex and me prosecuted and having me jailed.

Having tried at the time to warn everybody of Sturgeon and Murrell’s highly criminal machinations to have Alex Salmond framed, obviously I feel in part vindicated by the public acceptance that Murrell is indeed a criminal. But one of the ways I realised I had become unpleasantly embittered, is that I found I was posting tweets rejoicing at Murrell being sent to jail, and hoping he had my old cell in Saughton.

I don’t really think that.

Scotland’s antiquated jail system is a disgrace to any modern society. The conditions are inhumane and some aspects are positively Victorian – I still have backache from sleeping on a steel slab mitigated only by a slither of ancient foam rubber “mattress” which had completely lost all resistance. I don’t believe anyone should be subjected to deliberate physical suffering.

I should be better than crowing at Murrell’s imprisonment.

On the other hand, it is deeply frustrating to see Sturgeon getting away with it entirely and even playing the victim card, reaching effortlessly for the gender politics in which she has always wrapped her grasping psychopathy. It is precisely the same corrupt hold over the Crown Office, which got me jailed, that enabled Sturgeon to escape prosecution.

Still more troubling to me is the incredible cult following which still worships Sturgeon and refuses to believe she did anything wrong. I am not terribly worried that they cannot see she is implicated in embezzling funds to boost her lifestyle. I am worried they cannot acknowledge her systematically having blocked proper scrutiny of the SNP’s accounts.

But what really fills me with despair is that Sturgeon’s followers cannot acknowledge that she betrayed Scottish Independence; she never did anything to further it nor had the slightest intention of doing anything to further it.

The Union was close to toppling when Brexit was implemented against the wishes of a very large majority of Scots (my opinion on the EU is immaterial here). Sturgeon simply ignored that opportunity for action. She also went to the Supreme Court in London and argued a case on Scotland’s right to a referendum on Independence which was certain to fail, because it was grounded in UK constitutional law and not in international law. The UK Supreme Court would always rule in favour of the supremacy of the Westminster Parliament.

Sturgeon piled obstacles in the way of Independence and never once articulated a coherent plan to achieve it.

John Swinney adopts precisely the same stance. We now have sustained majorities in public opinion for Independence, but a Scottish government not prepared to take any risk to reach for it. Meanwhile, blind loyalty to the governing party in Scotland prevents any radical action. The frustration is that loyalty is caused by an urgent desire for Independence and the deluded belief that the SNP intends to achieve it.

The hero worship of Sturgeon that is so much in evidence is a large part of the problem: Scottish Independence has been driven into a cul de sac. The infuriating thing is that these cult members ought to be those with whom I am most politically aligned: but they hate me because I do not join in their idolisation of She Who Must Be Obeyed.

So this has been, and is, a difficult period for me personally. The political outlook is grim, and I am increasingly worried about my own condition. Also from the Crispin Flintoff Show, this extract of me talking about Sturgeon reinforces my concern. Something is wrong cognitively. My natural fluency is gone in this interview and I appear unable to finish a sentence or maintain a coherent line of thought.

This is all very depressing. The world is dominated by bad people who control advanced mechanisms of power. But there is no fulfilment in resignation, no honour in standing down in a battle against institutionalised evil. The only joy lies in resistance.

Please contribute if you can to the costs of the Palestine Action legal case, but do not contribute if it causes you difficulty. If you know people who are able to afford to help and likely to be sympathetic, please do contact them and ask their assistance. We are trying to keep a lot of very good people out of prison.

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/

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The proscription of Palestine Action was sold to MPs and the media on the basis of a deliberate campaign of lies, fronted by Yvette Cooper, then Home Secretary, and Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan police. Both have deep commitment to Israel. Cooper is owned by the Israel lobby.

What is worse, they then attempted to reinforce these lies by fitting up young activists with false charges and corrupting all principles of justice in an effort to obtain false convictions. This was brought home to me most forcefully in examining thousands of pages of documents released to me by the Home Office as disclosure in the Scottish judicial review of the legality of the proscription of Palestine Action.

I am not allowed to reveal these thousands of pages to you, even though they have already been redacted, with large sections blacked out, and in some instances gisted, or given in precis, removing “sensitive” information.

But I shall reveal one single paragraph of one single document because I think it is overwhelmingly in the public interest to do so. It is an essential illustration of the appalling behaviour which our Israeli-controlled Establishment has been exhibiting throughout this attack on Palestine Action – an organisation which, I would remind you, is trying to prevent the provision of arms to a genocide.

That screenshot paragraph is from the Proscription Advisory Group, prepared by the Counter Terrorism Police, recommending proscription. It is part of a narrative they seek to build of an “escalating pattern of violence”. The claim is in essence that Palestine Action has moved from violence against property to violence against people.

The problem is, it is not true.

In the Filton trial the attempts to convict activists of violence against people – the aggravated burglary and violent disorder charges – all failed before a jury. There were twelve charges between aggravated burglary and violent disorder – and twelve acquittals. In the other incident referenced in the above paragraph – the Sandwich action – the charges of personal violence have all quietly been dropped.

So let us go through the extremely alarming list of serious charges involving violence that were given in that essential paragraph, from the internal Home Office documents arguing for proscription. And let us mark up the actual truth.

• Aggravated Burglary – no convictions
• Violent Disorder – no convictions
• Administering a Noxious Substance – no convictions
• Threats to Kill – no convictions
• Actual Bodily Harm – no convictions
• Grievous Bodily Harm – no convictions
• Participating in Activities of an Organised Crime Group – no convictions

The only footnote to this is that there is one single conviction of GBH, but the jury specifically found not guilty of intent, in relation to the melee that developed at Filton after the security guards attacked the activists.

This is an astonishing, lengthy list of fabrication – offences in which the jury found as a matter of fact against the Crown. Non-existent offences were listed by the Police to recommend the proscription.

The proscription was based on an entire litany of offences which never happened.

But much worse than this is the attempt to enforce convictions under false pretences in the Filton trial. The catalogue of how this was done is well known now.

Judge Johnson ruled that the defendants were not permitted to refer to their motives. He ruled that the jury may not be informed of their absolute right to acquit. He attempted to have the leading defence barrister, Rajiv Menon KC, prosecuted for contempt of court for informing the jury of their rights. He ruled that terms including “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” may not be used in court. He ordered that the notebooks and other writings of the accused be redacted to withhold from the jury any information related to Elbit’s supply of weapons to Israel. He enforced the concealment from the jury of the nature of the weapons and equipment that had been damaged. He granted anonymity to senior Elbit staff and admitted their evidence without the defence being able to cross-examine. He ruled that the trial had not been prejudiced by the Secretary of State and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police stating the offences as fact throughout national media. He allowed the release to the media of highly edited and selective prosecution video footage during the trial which gave a false impression of events. He permitted the admission of Metropolitan Police video evidence which they had given over to Elbit’s sole custody for an entire year. He ruled that the jury must not be told of his stated intention to consider adding terrorist aggravation to any convictions – which adds 150% to time served in jail.

That is an astonishing list of nefarious actions by Judge Johnson. Read it again. Many people will surely conclude, it is Judge Johnson who should be in jail.

Despite all of Johnson’s attempts to rig the trial, despite the state trying the defendants twice when it failed to achieve convictions the first time, the Crown failed to attain its convictions on Aggravated Burglary, Violent Disorder and GBH with Intent.

But my God, they tried. How they tried!

Yvette Cooper specifically relied on the specific police litany of lies in her article for the Observer to promote the proscription, where she wrote:

Palestine Action has claimed responsibility for – and promoted on its website – attacks that have seen those allegedly involved subsequently charged with violent disorder, grievous bodily harm with intent, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and aggravated burglary. Charges that include, in the assessment of the independent Crown Prosecution Service, a terrorism connection.

The “independent” Crown Prosecution Service is of course a joke, the independence of both the prosecutor and of judges like Johnson being a polite fiction of the British Establishment. The executive does not issue direct orders to judges like Johnson nor to the Director of Public Prosecutions. They don’t have to issue direct orders. Those people are only in their positions because they know what is expected of them.

The one thing they cannot reliably control is a jury, however much they may try to manipulate the information available to them. The charges in the Filton trial of aggravated burglary (which means going equipped with a weapon intending to use it against a person), of violent disorder and of GBH with Intent were always massive, politically motivated overcharging.

They were never likely to be got through a jury – given the total lack of evidence for them – no matter how much Judge Johnson attempted to manipulate the trial.

Yvette Cooper was prepared to disregard legal advice that her article would prejudice the trial, safe in the knowledge that Johnson would only ever bring contempt of court charges against the defence and not against the State.

Our hearing in the Scottish Court of Session tomorrow will hear our motion that the proscription in Scotland should be suspended pending the Scottish judicial review, because in the meantime hundreds of people are having their civil liberties restricted and facing possible arrest, and scores are facing charges for terrorist offences merely for exercising their right of free speech.

The UK government is opposing with a counter motion to sist (postpone) the entire Scottish judicial review until all English proceedings are concluded, including a probable eventual Supreme Court decision. Their key argument is that it is constitutionally undesirable for English and Scottish courts to reach opposing decisions in a matter of “national security”.

That Scottish courts should respect English decisions they present not as colonialism, but as “Comity”.

They state that the constitutional argument is so important that the Advocate General herself, Catherine Smith KC, will represent the UK government in person. Indeed this hearing was delayed by two weeks to fit her diary.

Their argument is of course disingenuous. They are not seeking to postpone the Scottish hearing, they are seeking to stop it altogether. If it is constitutionally unacceptable to reach a different decision from the English court, then what would be the point of a Scottish judicial review at any stage?

Furthermore they are entirely illogical because the status quo is that the government has lost to Palestine Action in England at the High Court. It is the government which is appealing there. So if they really believed in “comity” they would drop the government case in Scotland to achieve the same position as England!

Most of the argument we have submitted to court consists of analysis of the effects of the proscription and the impact of suspending it.

The government by contrast have not addressed the proscription at all. They are depending entirely on the constitutional argument that the court should not be hearing the case. But these exact arguments were already dismissed by the court at the permission stage. They do not become any more compelling just because a UK government minister is stating them.

Why is the government so confident it will win on the constitutional point and does not need to address the proscription?

I fear the appearance of the minister is evidence of an Establishment stitch-up. My hackles rise particularly at the remarkable fact that, while the permission hearing was livestreamed and in Court No 1, this much more important hearing is not being livestreamed and is relegated to court No 6, with a much smaller public gallery. If the case is, as the government itself states, of such constitutional importance that the minister must appear in person, why is it being hidden from the public gaze?

Unfortunately I can’t think of any answers to that question which are not deeply troubling.

We desperately need more money to continue this legal case. Each stage of hearing like this costs about £30,000 and the eventual judicial review will cost much more.

Again please contribute if you can but do not contribute if it causes you difficulty. If you know people who are able to afford to help and likely to be sympathetic, please do contact them and ask their assistance. We are trying to keep a lot of very good people out of prison.

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The furore around the election of Dr Manivannan to the Scottish Parliament is deeply troubling. There is no argument whatsoever that they were eligible to stand for election. The law was changed specifically in order for those on temporary visas to be able to stand in Scottish parliamentary elections.

I confess I am not sure that is altogether a good idea. I can see arguments both ways. There are far too many people amongst our neighbours who have to manage their lives through the Home Office’s discriminatory, hostile and prohibitively expensive immigration application systems. It is good to see such people given a voice.

On the other hand, there is a reasonable expectation of legislators having a fixed stake in the country for which they legislate.

I suspect like most people, the question had never even occurred to me until the current furore over Dr Manivannan and I have to give it some thought.

But whatever view one takes on what the law ought to be, the law as it stands is clear. Dr Manivannan was eligible, stood, and was duly elected.

That Scotland has subsequently been rocked by shrill calls for Dr Manivannan to be deported by the immigration authorities, I therefore find appalling. It is not only a denial of democracy, it is without doubt motivated by the most basic hatred and bigotry, both racist and anti-trans. To see such sentiments so openly espoused in Scotland I find deeply disturbing.

Almost amusing is the argument that, while it was perfectly legal for Dr Manivannan to stand for election, it is illegal for them to be elected.

This argument was first adopted by the radical anti-trans campaigning group For Women Scotland. This group was founded in order to oppose self-ID for trans people. 99% of its output is anti-trans rights argument. They would, however, have us believe that their objection to Dr Manivannan is nothing to do with their being trans, but a longstanding, though hitherto silent, interest in the minutiae of immigration legislation.

The practical reality is straightforward. The Scottish elections happened to fall just after Dr Manivannan completed their PhD.

There is the usual short gap between finishing the thesis and the formal end of the academic year. They are therefore still on their student visa.

They are in the process of applying for the next graduate visa. This would be the position whether or not they had been elected.

A new visa will be needed. It seems highly improbable that the Home Office would refuse one.

A seat in the Scottish Parliament is hardly unrelated to a PhD in Political Science. Quite apart from that, the democratic mandate ought to carry considerable weight.

I know Reform UK has coarsened political discourse across the UK. But to hear gleeful demands for an elected immigrant to be thrown out is dispiriting. Some of these voices even come from within the Scottish independence movement.

I also find the extreme anti-trans positions being put forward in relation to this case downright depressing. The Workers Party of Britain simply tweeted “Trans women are men”, while their lead candidate for Edinburgh argued directly that gender dysphoria is a mental illness and mentally ill people should be banned from parliament.

I have frequently complained that the gender identity question is dominated by such extreme and unreasonable positions. The complete denial of the validity of any trans people is an extreme position. It also rolls back 40 years of broad societal acceptance.

I first met Jan Morris in the 1980s, and have known several other trans people since. For decades, there was little open intolerance. I can’t recall anybody ever suggesting Jan Morris should not use women’s bathrooms – least of all the feminist movement of those times.

Feminism then was about breaking down sexual barriers, not erecting them.

The extraordinary attempt of the US-originated movement to erect differing gender identities into a compulsory and strange ideology transformed the situation. Attempting to introduce compelled speech is not something I support – I try to use people’s preferred pronouns out of politeness, for example, but it is not a matter for the state. The purpose of a pronoun is to specify an individual, not to signal political correctness.

The issue of self-ID led to a real political fracture. Personally I favour treating people as they wish to be treated, which favours self-ID. That is polite, tolerant and kind. But most people find the idea of people self-identifying themselves into women’s elite sports, or reserved women’s positions on boards, to be not obviously desirable.

Personally, I have always specifically opposed the idea that those who have used violence, including but not only sexual violence, against women should be able to self-identify into women’s prisons. That seems to me a blindingly practical exclusion.

The problem is the pro-trans lobby is equally dominated by extremists. They argue that any restriction on the ability of the individual to immediately self-identify is unacceptable, and any restriction on their being treated as their gender of choice is discrimination.

The problem with this position is that it assumes nobody ever lies. The problems for the trans movement has been caused by their inability to accept the existence of fake trans people. You cannot deny by ideology the existence of human criminal behaviour.

In practice, there are a number of men who pretend to be trans, but are not really trans, in order to gain access to women in various situations. I took the position that these were extremely rare and wrongly used to introduce smears against trans people as criminal into the debate.

But then, a succession of shocking cases in Scotland made me realise that my initial views had given insufficient weight to the need for protection of women from fake trans people.

I have had arguments with trans advocates who simply refuse to accept that such people exist. The cases of Isla Bryson, Serenity Francis Johnston, Katie Dolatowski and Alexandra Stewart are notorious and they do exist. They cannot simply be wished away.

They are certainly not representative of trans people in any way, but the debate could helpfully be shifted from the deliberate confusion of trans people with sexual perverts, if only the trans lobby would recognise that men falsely pretending to be trans do actually exist and this needs to be guarded against.

My own position is that anybody guilty of a sexual or violent offence should lose their right to change gender. I believe changing gender should be a right, but some rights are normally lost when you commit a serious crime. It seems to me that is the coherent basis for policy.

However I also believe that nobody should have their rights circumscribed before they have committed any crime, and the mantra of “you can’t tell which man is a rapist” is deeply wrong. It is as offensive and dangerous as racial or other profiling.

The “gender-critical” faction in Scotland have, as usual, reacted to my defending Dr Manivannan on social media by accusing me of adopting all kinds of positions I have never held – like allowing convicted rapists to self-identify into women’s prison, supporting medical intervention in children, or trans women boxers to compete in the Olympics.

Neither side of the debate seems able to comprehend for a moment that people of good will might be trying, in good faith, to find compromises to balance rights so that trans people may lead full and happy lives while hard-won feminine rights – and safety – might not be endangered by faux opportunists.

But it is difficult to explain anything when everybody is screaming at you.

Here is a truth. Scottish people are not stupid. It is extremely well known by now that the Scottish Greens have a very strong line indeed on supporting trans rights and gender self- ID. The Scottish Greens regard my own position outlined above as extremely reactionary. They are fully signed up to the ideology of gender fluidity and its compulsory acceptance.

In the last two Scottish parliamentary elections, alternative pro-Independence parties have stood, noisily, on the very specific and openly stated position that “Trans women are men” and that they oppose trans rights. Most notably Alba in 2021, but also the Independence for Scotland Party and the Workers’ Party of Britain. Famous Independent candidates like Fergus Ewing and Ash Regan also made this a major plank of their platforms.

The party I stood for, Alliance to Liberate Scotland, while having no formal position on the issue, featured mostly candidates who are vocally anti-trans.

Next to nobody voted for them.

A lot of people voted Green.

All of the pro-Independence parties which adopted extreme anti-trans positions got derisory votes, fractions of one per cent. The Greens got many times as many votes. That is how democracy works.

Nicola Sturgeon derailed the SNP when she shifted its emphasis from Independence to identity politics. There is no doubt she shifted the emphasis on purpose. The toxicity of the trans issue in Scottish politics is her legacy – she approached it in the most abrasive and divisive way possible, and used it to force out of her party those not loyal to her. The single most important cause of hatred towards trans people in Scotland is Nicola Sturgeon.

None of which was the fault of Dr Manivannan, but they are the current lightning rod for the resultant hatred. Which is entirely unfair.

It is par for the course that the Tories and Reform are attacking Dr Manivannan. Bigotry is what they do. But for alleged socialists and Independence supporters to join in is deeply dispiriting,

Dr Manivannan has done nothing wrong and is by all accounts a very pleasant and gentle soul. They were elected. Please stop the hate. This member of the Scottish parliament, elected by the Scottish people, must be defended against any attack from the London-based UK Home Office.

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While the Court of Appeal has now stopped the High Court contempt of court action against Rajiv Menon KC for defending his client, this is purely on procedural grounds. They ruled that Judge Johnson had to go via the Attorney General to the High Court, not direct. It is now referred back to Johnson who can use the Attorney General route.

Given that Johnson is a vicious authoritarian, a former lawyer for the security services who did everything possible to rig the Filton trial against the defendants, and that the Attorney General “Lord” Helmer is a vicious pro-genocidal zionist who was Israel’s go-to lawyer on war crimes charges in the UK, this contempt of court action may well not be over.

In addition to barring the use of the terms genocide or ethnic cleansing at trial, barring the defence of necessity to stop war crimes, barring the defendants from explaining the motive of their actions, and barring the jury from being informed of their absolute legal right to acquit, Judge Johnson also barred the jury from being told that he intended to add the terrorism aggravation on sentencing.

This is incredibly important. The norm is in England that you serve 40% of a jail sentence in prison and 60% on parole. If the terrorism aggravation is applied, you serve 100% in jail. So it is the difference between two years in prison and five years in prison. This was hidden from the jury.

A terrorism aggravation will also lead to debanking, severe travel restrictions and very probably loss of career.

The Filton action against the Elbit weapons factory preceded the proscription of Palestine Action, but a judge can add a terrorism aggravation to any offence. (You may recall that in Scotland a young woman is facing charges of “dangerous driving aggravated by terrorism” for an action against the Leonardo weapons factory).

Violence against property can be construed as terrorism in the UK if the objective is to influence government. Extraordinarily, Judge Johnson has indicated that he believes that the actions against the Israeli weapons factories may be intended to influence the policy of the government of Israel. He will announce his final decision at sentencing but he has already told the court (but not the jury) that is his thinking.

The activists have already spent 16 months in jail on remand. In any precedent for a first time criminal damage conviction, including the sentences of Palestine Action and climate activists, they would be extremely unlikely to be given sentences of more than three years in jail. With the standard 40% tariff, that means they would not have further prison time but some remaining time on parole.

Therefore Judge Johnson’s decision to keep them in prison pending sentencing next month appears to indicate he is intending to impose abnormally long sentences and the terrorist aggravation.

Two of the six defendants were completely acquitted. Three were acquitted on all counts, except the most minor one of criminal damage. But for this Johnson can sentence them to ten years in prison, and use the terrorism aggravation to remove the possibility of parole.

This is astonishing for two reasons:

Firstly, the notion that those damaging Israeli weapons did so in the hope of changing Netanyahu’s mind about destroying Gaza – as opposed to destroying some of his weapons supply – is plainly nonsensical.

The second is that if they were trying to change Netanyahu’s mind, they were trying to influence him against committing Genocide.

Which only a hardwired zionist nutter like Judge Johnson can consider a bad thing.

The legal fight against the proscription of Palestine Action continues. We are back in court on 27 May in Edinburgh with a motion to suspend the proscription in Scotland. We urgently need funds to take on the power and unlimited resources of the state.

I am afraid these proceedings are horribly expensive to keep the legal battle going. Again please contribute if you can but do not contribute if it causes you difficulty. If you know people who are able to afford to help and likely to be sympathetic, please do contact them and ask their assistance. We are trying to keep a lot of very good people out of prison.

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/

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Unquestioning Zionism has for decades been the entry ticket to the British political and media Establishment. Anybody who was not a fully certified and compliant zionist would find their career limited – as Jeremy Corbyn, Alan Duncan, Robin Cook and David Mellor all found. Most others, of course, were never allowed to progress that far.

In the media there are any number of examples – Antoinette Lattouf, Emily Wilder, Katie Halper, Gabriele Nunziante and Sangita Myska just from the top of my head. Lack of enthusiasm for Israel is career-destroying.

One consequence is that now, as the UK political system retches to try and vomit up a new Prime Minister, every single one of the contenders – Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting – has a long history of nailed-on, certified zionism and relationship with both Israel and Labour Friends of Israel, and is a long-term recipient of zionist lobby cash.

The media have spent the last several days since the local elections studiously ignoring the fact that support for Genocide is a key factor in alienating the Labour Party’s traditional voting base – or when they do mention it, relating it only to Muslim voters. One thing we know for certain is that any probable new Prime Minister is not going to change Britain’s support for the genocidal zionist entity.

Zionism has long poisoned the central nervous system of the UK body politic. For many years, due to their media control, this system worked seamlessly. The media portrayed a benign image of Israel as a bastion of liberal democratic values under siege from corrupt and barbaric Arab peoples. The Genocide of Palestinians, which has been in progress almost 80 years, proceeded at a pace and by methods which rigorous media control made it possible to convince Western audiences was not really happening at all.

When a kickback against Genocide came on October 7th 2023, media gatekeeping made the declaration of condemnation of Hamas a ritual which had to be observed to ensure purity before you were permitted to express anything else at all. The media united around false atrocity stories of the events of October 7th. Then they united around false Israeli narratives in which every Gazan hospital, clinic, school, public utility and eventually home was a secret Hamas missile base.

At this point, something broke. There was a spectacular burst in public opinion. From being a lulling, soothing narrative of European civilisational superiority, the zionist propaganda was revealed as obvious lies in the service of the very worst atrocities man could do to man (and child).

The media covered up the horrors and the Israeli government raced to stem the flow of images out of Gaza by murdering every journalist there, but public belief in the zionist narrative was fatally damaged.

The result of that was western zionist governments became scared of their own populations. In virtually every western state, extreme authoritarian measures were adopted to limit free speech and punish pro-Palestinian protest. This was followed by attempts to reinforce the exclusion from public life of non-zionists by a new wave of accusations of anti-semitism, reinforced by waves of false flag or agent provocateur organised “anti-semitic incidents”.

Incidentally the Hasbara invented “Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya” so-called terrorist group – actually an Israeli-operated Telegram account – was first “revealed” to the Western public by Joe Truzman of Israeli Washington front organisation the Foundation for Defending Democracy (FDD). Nick Stewart of FDD has subsequently been added to the Witkoff-Kushner negotiating team with Iran and flew to Islamabad with them.

The Iranians have entirely sensibly refused to engage with this group as simply representing Israel.

That is where we are now, with extraordinary developments like the effort to jail and debar Rajiv Menon KC for contempt of court for what I had called the greatest legal speech I ever read, and the charging of thousands of peaceful citizens under terrorism laws for supporting Palestine Action.

Those are but horrible symptoms of a wider malaise – and the fundamental shift is that the majority of the population, and above all of younger people, now realise that they are governed by a political and media class which acts in service of a zionist project which is truly evil.

The billionaire class was already allied with the far right. As the appalling fall in living standards of ordinary people since the 2008 banking crisis has been caused by the massive and artificially wrought concentration of wealth which followed, the efforts to divert attention from the hoarders of wealth instead to scapegoat immigrants have entailed massive financial and corporate media backing for racist politicians.

This now synchs neatly with their need for support for zionism. Zionism has found support through an easy alliance with the rampant Islamophobia that underpins much of the anti-migrant sentiment in the UK and rest of the Western world.

Israel’s core support now does not feel the need to hide the fact that Israel was always a deeply racist project. Israel’s core supporters now glory in racist Genocide, as the Tommy Robinson march this weekend will demonstrate and as the Israeli flags at Reform rallies show.

Israel flags at a Reform party leader’s speech is literally all you need to see.

Anyone telling you Refrom will save Britain is a fraud. pic.twitter.com/31PfCl91B9

— Adam (@adamemedia1) May 11, 2026

On last week’s election coverage on all UK TV channels, every single time a Green representative came on they were immediately pushed to criticise Zack Polanski’s comments on the Golders Green incident – where a certified lunatic stabbed two Jewish men after stabbing a Muslim man. I was sad – and somewhat shocked – to hear every single Green party representative head immediately for the Jeremy Corbyn tactic of abject apology and condemnation of “anti-semitism”.

Only Jenny Jones then pushed back against the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.

The exclusion of non-zionists is still in force within the political and media class. It will remain in force until we change the political and media class.

Personally, the disconnect between the revulsion of the large majority of people of the western world at the Genocide in Gaza, and the people’s complete lack of political power to stop their uniparty political leaderships from supporting Genocide, has fundamentally changed my view of politics. I now fully accept that the change the western world needs is revolutionary, not incremental.

The problem is those of the exploited classes who have reached breaking point, have so far been easily diverted down the track of racism and away from their true enemies. I fear that is a tactic not likely to fail soon.

We continue to fight with what weapons we have to hand. On 27 May at the Court of Session in Edinburgh we will continue our legal battle against the proscription of Palestine Action.

The 27 May hearing will be on our motion to suspend the proscription in Scotland pending the Scottish judicial review. Decent, caring people are still being dragged through the Scottish courts on potentially life-changing terrorism charges merely for expressing their support for Palestine Action’s attempts to stop Genocide. Many have been dragged to court again and again as their cases are continually put off, while the legal establishment havers over the proscription.

The Crown Office refuses to drop prosecutions and Police Scotland refuses to say it will not arrest people. Nobody has any certainty as to whether the law is being enforced or not. Arrests and prosecutions appear entirely at executive whim – the very definition of arbitrary government. We seek to end this uncertainty.

The UK government is bringing a counter motion to sist (suspend) the judicial review pending the conclusion of the English proceedings – a straight Unionist argument that these things should be decided in London for the whole of the UK.

I do hope you will come to the court in Edinburgh on 27 May, both to witness the proceedings and to demonstrate outside and show that public revulsion at Genocide is not going away, and is only increased by Israel’s illegal attacks on Iran and Lebanon.

I am afraid these proceedings are horribly expensive to keep the legal battle going. Again please contribute if you can but do not contribute if it causes you difficulty. If you know people who are able to afford to help and likely to be sympathetic, please do contact them and ask their assistance. We are trying to keep a lot of very good people out of prison.

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We get so trapped inside the logic of the UK’s crazy electoral systems we often do not see what is really happening. Two thirds of active voters, voted against Starmer’s Labour at the last general election. He was always highly unpopular.

Just as Starmer’s landslide victory in the 2024 general election was based on only 33.7% of votes cast, as Reform fractured the right-wing vote across First Past the Post (FPTP) constituencies, so the SNP in Scotland stand to sweep to victory in tomorrow’s parliamentary elections under the D’Hondt system on an extremely similar percentage.

The D’Hondt system is modified FPTP. It consists of two parts. One part is simple, unadulterated FPTP. You elect a member of the Scottish parliament in a constituency, exactly as in a standard UK parliamentary election.

Then there is a second part. Constituencies are grouped into regions. You then have a second ballot paper to elect regional MSPs. On the second paper, you vote not for a person but for a party. As in the constituency vote, the regional vote is a simple X. The constituency MSPs won by a particular party in a region are discounted, and then the regional MSPs are divided between the parties on a basis broadly proportionate to that vote.

So if a party wins all or most of the constituency MSPs in the region, it is unlikely to get any regional candidates, unless it is polling at over 50%.

This is exactly what happened to the SNP in the 2021 Holyrood elections. It swept the constituencies, so 1.1 million regional list votes brought it only two regional list seats. By comparison, minority parties were able to pick up individual regional list seats with as few as 17,000 votes in a region.

This is definitely going to happen again. The SNP is only polling at 33% but will sweep almost all the constituencies, because the Tories, Reform and Labour are each polling between 16 and 20%. The parliament has 73 constituency seats and 56 regional seats.

But Tories, Reform and Labour could each pick up hatfuls of regional list seats because the SNP regional list votes will be discounted by the constituency seats they have won.

The D’Hondt system can be gamed, very easily. If SNP voters were all to cast their regional list seats for a different pro-Independence party, the unionist parties could be virtually eliminated from the Scottish parliament.

There is an argument this is “cheating”. Well it isn’t, because it is within the rules. The UK has rotten electoral systems. That usually assists us to get terrible governments, like the Starmer regime. If we can play the system to some good for once – and we can, perfectly legally – let us do so.

Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to persuade SNP voters to do this. They are very loyal to their party. The tragedy of this is that they view casting “both votes SNP” as a declaration of support for Scottish Independence.

Why this is tragedy is that the SNP’s careerist leadership has only a performative commitment to Independence. They know it is Independence support that gets them elected, so they remember it around elections. Their policy is to ask London for permission to hold another Independence referendum, through what is called a Section 30 process.

The problem is that everybody knows that Starmer, and all the other UK parties, will refuse a Scottish referendum. When that happens, the SNP’s John Swinney and his clique will huff and puff a little, then go back to enjoying their “ministerial” limousines and salaries, and forget Independence until the next election in 2031.

This has been happening for over a decade. The tragedy is the SNP voters who still remain do not see an alternative.

As I said, we get so trapped by these electoral systems that we do not notice what is really happening in politics. What is really happening in Scotland – the biggest single voter movement in decades – is the disconnection between Independence support and SNP support.

Independence support is, across the large majority of opinion polls in the last year, steady around 52%, with polls falling within the margin of error of that figure.

By contrast SNP support is only around 34%, with polls falling within the margin of error of that figure.

There is a profound, long-term gap of 18% between Independence support and SNP support.

Over one third of Independence supporters do not vote SNP.

Where is that Independence support going?

Well, it is with other political parties. Most significantly with Labour, with over 25% of Labour voters regularly showing in polls as supporting Independence. The figure for Reform appears to be at least as high. There is also Independence support for the Green Party, which is significant in D’Hondt.

But unfortunately a great many of the third of Independence supporters who do not vote SNP have given up. They won’t vote at all in the elections. They will just sit on their hands.

The significant tactical voting under D’Hondt is from SNP to Scottish Green. The fifth or so of SNP voters who have worked out that their regional vote is wasted if they cast it for the SNP, mainly intend to vote Scottish Green on the regional list. Indeed, this is the only thing that puts the Scottish Greens into Holyrood.

SNP voters tend to do this because the Scottish Greens have been in coalition with the SNP. But I believe this to be mistaken.

The Scottish Greens are only very lightly committed to Independence. It is point 27 in their 38 point manifesto – and their Scottish Deputy Leader has already stated that the moratorium on hydrocarbon projects is more important to them than Independence in forming a government. They have not ruled out joining a unionist coalition.

I have much time for the Greens in England. The Scottish Greens are an entirely separate party and frankly (remember all politics is personal) are dominated by some extremely weird and unpleasant people who should be nowhere near political power.

Scottish politics desperately need shaking up. That is why I am standing as a candidate for the Alliance to Liberate Scotland, an eight-week-old political party which has one single policy: Scottish Independence. We do not accept a London veto and believe the Scottish people should act immediately on their right of self-determination.

You cannot believe both that Scots are a people with the right of self-determination under the UN charter, and that London should have a veto. The UK Establishment will never voluntarily give up Scotland’s magnificent resources. If we want Independence, we must take it.

That is why I urge people to vote to put real radical firebrands into the Scottish parliament, like myself, Tommy Sheridan, Eva Comrie and many others. You can vote for the Alliance to Liberate Scotland in many constituencies, and on all regional lists.

Now, unfortunately I suffered heart problems and was hospitalised at the start of this election, and was unable to campaign. Had I been well, even a result equivalent to my 2005 Blackburn General Election vote (5%) would have probably seen me elected on the regional list and my 2024 vote (18%) would have seen me not just elected but bringing in at least one other regional MSP with me.

But illness means there has been not one speech, not one hustings, not one interview, not one door knocked, not one leaflet delivered beyond the single Election Communication.

But I have not pulled out because I think it is essential to give people the chance to vote for Scottish Independence if they wish to do so – and genuinely vote for somebody who actually intends to do something about it.

I hope you cherish every vote you give to the Alliance to Liberate Scotland as much as we will cherish your trust. Just do the honest thing with your vote.

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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 jurors 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.

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/

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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.

———————————

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.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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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.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

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Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
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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.

———————————

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 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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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.

Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

PayPal address for one-off donations: [email protected]

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

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MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
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Bank address NatWest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

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