I have repeatedly said that Peter Oborne is the best journalist working in the UK today.

Left and right are issues of economics over which well-meaning people can legitimately have a discussion and disagreement. A much more fundamental political divide is between those who serve the establishment of the super-rich who are mulcting the people, and those who oppose them. That is a question of right and wrong, not of the best way to achieve the general good. And on that vital measure, Oborne is firmly on the side of the angels.

Oborne has an important article in the Telegraph here on Cage Prisoners. I would only add to this that I have spoken at fund-raising events for Cage before, and will without hesitation do so again.

In the UK, the Tories have edged into the lead in the latest Guardian/ICM opinion poll. While New Labour’s support for benefit cuts, government spending plans and the entire neo-con agenda means it makes no difference who is in power at Westminster, residual voter tribal loyalty to these moribund and corrupt parties remains the basic fact of “mainstream” politics, even after the voters have twigged the politicians are almost all self-serving crooks.

That is important for Scotland, as the perception of continued Tory rule at Westminster will increase the independence vote. By the Autumn it is going to be very clear the Tories are in power until 2020. But will that perception enter the public consciousness before September 18 2014? Charles Clarke, ever anxious to stab his colleagues in the back – a defining Labour trait – is doing his best to make it clear.

It is a mystery why the Observer failed to name Lord Greville Janner as the paedophile abusing boys from care homes. The facts of this particular boy’s continued molestation, and the existence of the letters to him from Janner, have been public knowledge for decades. I can only presume that Britain’s appalling libel laws, which function solely to protect the very rich from exposure of their misdeeds, are the reason for the Observer’s reticence. My own view is that the gross suppression of freedom of speech in the UK has been insufficiently considered as a major reason for the impunity which the wealthy and the powerful have enjoyed for so long.

Janner of course was for decades the leading spokesman for Zionism in this country. His response to the last major massacre of Palestinians in Gaza was to visit an Israeli settlement and blame Hamas rocket attacks. It is interesting to contrast Janner’s protection by the media with the case of David Mellor. For decades the media knew that Janner buggered boys from care homes, and did nothing about it. He remained the whole time the chosen spokesman for UK Zionism.

By contrast, David Mellor was the last British minister who ever told the truth about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. The immediate result was a tabloid campaign about Mellor’s perfectly legal, consensual and adult sex life, which destroyed Mellor’s career.

What do you think caused the extraordinarily different media treatment of the playful Mellor and the sinister child-buggerer Janner? Why is the Observer still protecting his name yesterday?

Despite the major evidence against him, there will be no prosecution of Janner because the establishment has accepted an argument that he is too senile. Interestingly enough, a man who knows a very great deal about the much more recent sex secrets of the establishment, “Lord” Edward Davenport, has just been allowed out of jail seven years early on the grounds of ill-health. I was in charge of British relations with West Africa as Deputy Head of the Equatorial Africa Department at the FCO, when the Sierra Leone Embassy was sold to Davenport, under very peculiar circumstances indeed, to become a kind of fantasy sexual pleasure palace for the upper classes.

The whole was one of the weirder things I had encountered in my life. At the time there was in effect no functioning government in Sierra Leone, and the flogging off of the extremely valuable building by the Ambassador was very obviously corrupt. Among the many strange things I was told at the time was that the purchase was funded by Freemasons to whom the building was important. I should say I have no idea if that was true or not, and took little notice at the time. I was told very firmly the FCO had no locus to intervene.

Do not worry, I am not myself going senile. The goings-on inside the former Sierra Leone Embassy after its sale link in to this topic in a number of ways, not only Davenport and Janner’s shared immunity from punishment on grounds of ill-health. But I should make plain I am not accusing Davenport personally of paedophilia or of organising it.

I received an email from a respected friend accusing me of stoking a wave of hysteria. I certainly do not wish to promote a witch hunt. But given that there has very obviously been a culture of impunity in this country for generations, under which the rich and powerful are simply let off criminal activity, a little hysteria is not harmful. Especially when ironically it has been caused by the establishment’s constant cries of paedophilia as their excuse for ever increasing state surveillance of ordinary people. Hoist with their own petard!

The impunity if still there. Where are the scores of bankers going to jail for involvement in Libor-fixing, or the dozens of other illegal scams they have run? It is an accepted thing that, once you are inside the golden circle, a blind eye is turned to a great deal. They all support each other. Whoever replaces Dame Lady Queen Sloshed-Butler, it won’t be one of us, it will be one of them.

I am an anti-militarist. But I believe violence in defence can be justified. The Israeli mass killings by bombing in Gaza are absolutely unjustified. I also oppose the random and ineffective rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel. But when Israeli ground troops actually move into Gaza, it is my sincere hope that the Palestinians kill as many as are necessary to stop them. That is justified, legal and necessary.

This is Lord George Murray, painted in 1745. He is wearing a kilt.

This is the piper of Clan Grant in 1714. He is too.

Tartan type designs go back thousands of years among Celtic tribes, becoming more complex over time as technique developed. The kilt evolved from the belted plaid. Kilting – the sewing in of the pleats rather than gathering them under the belt – was an obvious convenience for people who could afford a separate blanket and apparel. Lord George’s 1745 costume is certainly kilted. The appearance of the small kilt – cutting off the piece over the back and shoulders – came in from about 1700.

Yet generations of Scots had it drummed into them that the kilt is not real at all, it is an entirely phoney Victorian invention dreamed up by the Prince Regent and Walter Scott. This denial of their own culture comes out viscerally, as in the reaction to the uniforms for the Commonwealth Games. Take Kevin McKenna in the Guardian:

“The modern kilt is a fey and ridiculous representation of the robust Highland dress in which the Jacobites went into battle against the Hanoverians”.

That is simply not true. Here is a light article on the kilt I wrote for the Independent a few years ago. If you look at the comments underneath, people simply spluttered and asserted the same denigrations they had been told. Scottish culture never existed. Bagpipes and kilts were Victorian inventions for shortbread packets.

Does it matter? Well, yes. It matters because it is a small part of a long term mis-education of a people about their own history and culture. It is of a piece with the absolutely untrue, but widely held belief, that there were more Scots on the English than Scottish side at Culloden (the real ratio was over 4 Jacobite Scots to every Hanoverian Scot in the battle), that the Jacobites were Catholic (less than 25%), that Charles Edward Stuart believed in the Divine Right of Kings (he explicitly did not). Most pernicious of all has been the airbrushing from history of the avowed aim of Scottish independence of the large majority of both the leaders and followers of the 45, including Lord George Murray.

I do not want you to misunderstand me. I have no yen for the Stewarts – my concern is how to get rid of the monarchy. But the generations of denigration of Scotland’s history, its reshaping to suit a Unionist agenda where the backwards and benighted Scots were brought in to the political and economic glories of the Union and British Empire, underlies so many of the attitudes to Scottish Independence today. Every culture has a right to reference its roots and history without ridicule – and the denial of the authenticity of genuine popular cultural heritage is a particularly pernicious form of ridicule, especially when it is built on lies drummed home in schoolrooms over centuries.

The overruling of a European Court judgement to assert individual privacy, and the anti-democratic rushing of emergency legislation through parliament where no emergency exists, are the antithesis of liberalism. So of course is the jettisoning of all the Lib Dem manifesto pledges on civil liberties.

It is not news that Nick Clegg has become the poster boy for a politics utterly devoid of principle, organised purely around the desire of individual politicians for wealth and power. But even with all that background, I found Clegg’s enthusiastic ratcheting up of the fear factor over the “need” to protect us from virtually non-existent threats, utterly reprehensible.

At his press conference with Cameron, Clegg actually quoted the non-existent “liquid bomb plot to bring down multiple planes” as the reason these powers were needed. He even made a direct claim that telephone intercepts had been instrumental in “foiling” the “liquid bomb plot”. That is utterly untrue. The three men eventually convicted had indeed been under judge approved surveillance for a year. In that year, they made no reference to a plan to bring down airplanes, because there was no such plan. The only “evidence” of a plan to bring down multiple airplanes came from a Pakistani torture chamber. There never was a single liquid bomb. 90% of those arrested in the investigation were released without charge or found not guilty.

The three found guilty had done little more than boast and fantasise about being jihadis. That is not to say they were nice people. They may even have done some harm, though if Clegg were in any sense a Liberal he would not be supportive of imprisoning people in case they one day do some harm. But they had never made a liquid bomb or made a plan to bring down multiple airlines.

The point is, that while any ordinary member of the public could be forgiven for believing in the Liquid Bomb Plot, given all the lies of the mainstream media, Clegg has to be aware that he is spreading deliberate lies and propaganda to justify this “emergency legislation”.

Still more ludicrous was the failure to address the elephant in the room – Snowden’s revelation that the NSA and GCHQ indulge in vast mass surveillance, of the communications of millions of people in the UK, with absolutely no regard for the legal framework anyway.

In the last few weeks there has been a concerted effort to ratchet up the fear of the extremely remote possibility of a terrorist attack. We have seen, as first lead on the news bulletins and front page headlines, the jailing of two young men for “terrorism” for fighting in Syria, when there was no evidence of any kind that they had any intention of committing any violence in the UK. We have the absolute nonsense of the mobile phone in airports charade. We had days of the ludicrous argument that ISIS success in Iraq will cause terrorist attacks in the UK. Now we have the urgent need for this “emergency legislation”.

Why is the fear ratchet being screwed right up just now? What is this leading up to?

Burnes was to live a great deal of his life camped in tents, and it is important to have an idea of what these camps looked like. British officers generally had large, individual tents. These would normally be taken on by bearers and pitched a day’s march ahead, ready for the officers’ arrival in the evening. Their escort and servants would have numerous tents around them. The camp would be very diffuse, as men of differing castes could not share a tent together or cook their food together. The campfires were therefore numerous and small. Horses and baggage animals would be pegged or coralled just on the margin of the camp.

The kind of tent which Burnes slept in would have been large and complex. It would have had both an inner and an outer tent; valets and bodyguards were sometimes allowed to sleep in the space between. At the entrance and ventilation points would be hung additional cloth screens called tatties, which were kept soaked in hot weather to provide cooling through evaporation. In very hot weather the British normally sunk a pit under the tent. The floor was covered with rich carpet.

Burnes has not left a description of any of his tents, but a contemporary traveller in India, Charles Hugel, had a tent with poles 25 feet high – the size of a British telegraph pole. The outer roof alone of Hugel’s tent weighed 600 lbs, and the fabric needed 6 horses to carry it.1

Hugel was not an army officer, but military tents appear also to have been very large. William Hough wrote that when a Regiment’s tents were brought down by a storm, sleeping officers were in danger of being killed by falling tent poles – which indicates that, like Hugel’s, these were very substantial. There are numerous references throughout this period to the marches of armies being delayed by heavy rain, because when wet the tents were simply too heavy to be lifted by the draught animals.

I give this detail because my own mental picture of Burnes in his tent and camp had been quite wrong.

One reason my book on BUrnes still is not finished is that I am absolutely fascinated by the detail. The above is riveting compared to some of the sections I have written on how Burnes had to account for his expenses. But I love to learn the process. I fear that the number of people who are as interested as me by this, or by how precisely a letter got from Montrose to Dera Ghazi Khan in 1837 and how the revenue was split, is very small. Actually I struggle to explain why this degree of authenticity is so important to me. It is not that I have not written screeds on the broad sweep of imperial expansion and its drivers. I have. I just have a constant urge to recreate a realistic sense of how it was to live in the world I am describing.

Maybe I need to do novels?

The FCO claim that records of extraordinary rendition flights to Diego Garcia were destroyed by water damage is an insult to all our intelligence. The FCO is refusing to say where the records were at the time, or what else was damaged in the (presumed) flood. This is of a piece with, but much more serious than, the “accidental” shredding of all Tony Blair’s parliamentary expenses claims. It is not that they expect us to believe them – they just don’t care. They have the power, and we don’t.

Just as much an insult to our intelligence is the new scheme of security measures at airports. These are all to do with maintaining the fear levels that keep the population compliant, and nothing to do with aviation security. If you have some kind of bomb inside an electronic device, you need a power source to trigger it. The last thing a bomber wants is a flat battery.

It is over twenty years now since I went on a MI6/SAS hosted course at “the Fort” near Gosport. One of the things we were shown and had explained to us, was a laptop which had been converted into a very effective bomb incorporating a slim sheet of semtex. That laptop could switch on and work absolutely normally. The laptop battery was the power source for the detonator.

Explosives detectors at airports would today pick up the semtex. That a mobile phone with no power source could be a bomb, in a way not immediately spotted by x-ray or explosives detector, is a nonsense. If you want to cause real damage on a plane, buy two one litre bottles of 50% strength premium vodka in duty free and set fire to them. You would be surprised at the extreme heat that can produce in a confined space.

The BBC has … started its news broadcast as usual from Ashkelon in Israel, highlighting rocket attacks on Israel. There is no mention on the BBC – there has never been any mention on the BBC, or anywhere in the Western mainstream media – that for at least 4,000 years Ashkelon was an Arab town, until in 1948 the entire, Arab population of 12,000 was driven out by armed force, many being massacred. Doubtless some older inhabitants of Gaza are refugees whose home is Ashkelon.

Israel is exercising its right of self-defence in precisely the same sense that Hitler was exercising the right of self-defence in Normandy in 1944 – ie not at all. Why the world puts up with this blatant ethnic cleansing and prolonged, agonizing genocide of the Palestinian people, I have no idea. It is not just about bombs and rockets and deaths now. It is about the shepherds being pushed out of their village in 2012 as part of the same process as the massacre of Ashkelon in 1948, all a process of genocide of the Palestinians in which Obama, Clinton, Cameron and Hague, as two whole generations of western politicians before them, are actively complicit.

I blogged this on 21 November 2012. Today every single BBC News bulletin leads with precisely the same trick, from precisely the same stolen Arab village. There is evidently a BBC policy to bias coverage of massacre in Gaza by basing it in the stolen town of Ashkelon. Every single BBC news programme is led by a report of the terror of people in Ashkelon at the rocket attacks which have killed and maimed – precisely nobody. There is then a brief “balancing” mention of the continual bombing of Gaza, which sometimes does and sometimes does not mention that at least 25 people have been killed, and hundreds maimed. Of the five reports I have seen, not one has mentioned that many of the Palestinian dead are women and children (although I once saw it on the strapline underneath). Rather the BBC says that “the Israeli government states it is targeting militants and weapons factories”.

The time given to the attacks on Palestine is abut 25% of that given to the rocket attacks on Israel. The coverage is also very different – we see human interest coverage of Israelis hiding from rockets in cafes. There is nothing remotely similar of the Palestinians under infinitely more deadly attack. There was one showing of funeral footage from Gaza, not of any of the women or children killed but of someone the BBC told us was simply a “militant”.

It is so blatant it is absolutely sickening. There are decent people I know in the BBC. Why do they put up with this?

I shall again be running the bar – the Whistleblower’s Arms – at the Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival from 22 to 24 August at Cardross, Port of Menteith.

I find this festival, which is very much a lifestyle event and features mostly new talent, an extremely life-affirming experience. Last year it brought me back from a very dark place. Some of this blogs most active commenters and helpers have been among the volunteers over the last couple of years, keeping the event going. Personally for me the festival is necessarily centred around Williams Bros and Thistly Cross, but there is a tremendous variety of music:

The event is very family friendly, and also an amazing place to meet new friends. It does not have any specific political orientation, but I might fairly say that the vibe is very much in line with the kind of unconstrained intellectual space promoted on this blog. On top of which Cardross is an extraordinarily beautiful place. The variety of local food on site, ranging from vegan to game, is one of the things I really enjoyed. It is a not for profit event and nobody gets a salary.

Tickets are not expensive by festival standards, and certainly cheaper than a weekend break in a hotel. But there is also the alternative of working your passage – the festival still needs plenty of volunteers.

I am genuinely looking forward to it enormously. Hope to see you there.

We could have built 120,000 new homes, desperately needed. Instead we spent the money on a bloody big ship. To what purpose? An aircraft carrier is of no use to defend the British Isles – land based planes can do that much better. It is to enable our armed forces to operate elsewhere, far from here. In other words, it is not for defence, it is for attack. It was ordered in the Blairite era of enthusiastic invasion of other countries.

Look what that left us. The Middle East in turmoil, half the world hates us, a wrecked economy. Oh and a bloody great ship. Thanks for that.

Not only could 6.2 billion pounds have built 120,000 social housing units around the country, but doing that would have created 200,000 more jobs, and helped cool the housing bubble, as well as giving families nice places to live.

Next time a disabled person has their benefits cut, we can say “Aah, but look, we’ve got a really good boat!”

According to staff at the Dewar’s Centre in Perth – capacity 1,000 – the attendance at David Cameron’s “Rally for the Union” today was just 220. Even the ultra-Tory Dundee Courier only claimed 300.

That the Prime Minister of the UK cannot fill a hall, at least to not embarrassingly empty, at an event billed as a “rally” to “save” his country, at which he stated that to lose the referendum would “break his heart”, is astonishing.

Even more astonishing is the body language of his supporters. Look at the faces behind him in this BBC video. Have you ever seen a body of people look less enthusiastic about anything? Had they been instructed that they must at all costs look sullen and unpleasant? What on earth can be the explanation?

An independent Kurdistan is a difficult sell because it is supported by such horrible people – Benjamin Netanyahu and every far right Republican in the US you can think of. Tony Blair is probably holding back on his endorsement until offered a huge consultancy fee or preferential access to “commercial opportunities” in the country.

Nevertheless, I supported self-determination for the Kurdish people long before the Western attacks on Iraq and I still do so now. That is support for a Kurdistan uniting the Kurdish lands of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Western Iran.

(The exception is the isolated Kurdish population of North East Iran, who are geographically far separated from the other Kurdish lands. The North East Iranian Kurdish community were deported there by the Shah in the early nineteenth century to form a barrier against Turkmen incursion).

The history of discrimination and abuse suffered by the Kurdish people is best known as it applies to Turkey, but in fact has been true in all four countries both recently and historically. The independence of Iraqi Kurdistan would almost certainly increase pan-Kurdish sentiment. This would be an undeserved difficulty for the current Turkish government, which has done a great deal more than its military backed predecessors to reduce discrimination and persecution. Neither Iran nor Syria would ever peacefully accept the loss of Kurdish lands.

The neo-con dream is to create a pro-American little state out of Iraqi Kurdistan that provides American bases, oil contracts and pro-Israeli support in the Middle East. There is no doubt that both the current degree of Iraqi Kurdish autonomy and the new push for an independence referendum are American inspired. But the neo-cons are not nearly as clever as they think they are, and have started processes which they have no hope of controlling. I very much hope to see an independent Kurdistan, and I hope to see it grow. Once established I expect to see Kurdistan in short order kick out the Americans and declare support for the Palestinians.

There is another persecuted people in the region who are distantly related to the Kurds. The subjugation and persecution of the Baloch is a direct result of the British invasion of Kelat in 1839. I also hope to see a free Baluchistan, combining both the Pakistani and Iranian colonised Baloch lands.

There never was a liquid bomb plot. It was proven in court not to exist. It was a fabrication of the minds governing a Pakistani torture chamber.

It is only a week ago that, as the terrorist industry sought to terrify us with the idea that jihadists from Syria would attack the UK, I wrote that:

“The patent absence of any genuine Islamic terrorism in the UK to fight is an obvious threat to the funding of this huge industry. Hence the current hype about the threat from Birmingham school governors or British residents fighting in Iraq and Syria. We have the usual propagandists for this threat thrust upon the airwaves again – Frank “Goebbels” Gardner and even the utterly discredited “Quilliam Foundation” who have been back on the BBC. At the moment they are peddling the utterly untrue line that 9% of those who travel from the UK to participate in fighting abroad, on return get involved in terrorist activity in the UK. Frank Gardner has been repeating this ad nauseam”

Now the terror industry has moved to ramp up this entirely false fear with worldwide headlines about a new threat of bombs on planes. The BBC and Sky both link this to the great “liquid bomb plot” of 2006. Everybody remembers that massive story that dominated the headlines for weeks. It was described by the British security services as “Bigger than 9/11”. Today BBC News described it as a “plot to bring down seven airliners simultaneously”.

22 people were arrested in Stasi style raids conducted on their hones at 2.30am. These included a 22 year old woman with a young baby. The Home Office proudly proclaimed that the Home Secretary, Dr John Reid, had been awake all night and personally directed those raids on sleeping families with children.

You may recall that the tabloids – directed by Rebekah Brooks and Coulson – ran front page stories about the evil Islamic mother and the liquid explosive in her baby bottles. These evil Muslims are so heartless they are prepared to blow up their own babies!! John Howard, Australian Prime Minister, said “That would be an appalling reflection on the lack of humanity of that child’s parents.”

Except it was all untrue. The chemical traces the police claimed to have found on the baby bottles proved to be Sodium Dichloroisocyanurate, normal baby bottle sterilising solution, from Boots. The woman was found not guilty on all charges. Neither the tabloids, the police, nor Dr John Reid and John Howard have ever apologised. Of the 22 people arrested in those darkest night raids, only eight were ever charged – fourteen were released without charge, there being no evidence against them. Of the eight who were charged, five were found not guilty. Three were convicted as terrorists – but there was nothing in their plans about blowing up aircraft. I am not personally convinced of the safety of their convictions anyway. They may have been unpleasant fantasists, but not much else. These three certainly had no practical plan or method to bring down seven aircraft, despite the BBC repeating that lie continually at the moment. The recent death of Gerard Conlon reminds us all of the horrifying willingness of English juries to convict the demonised other, be they Irish Catholics or Muslims.

This is what I blogged just three days after the story broke. Everything I wrote here proved to be true:

“None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year – like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes – which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.

The gentleman being “interrogated” had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.”

Despite the fact I was right and the entire mainstream media was wrong, I was directly attacked by highly paid alcoholic warmonger Nick Cohen in the Observer as a “conspiracy theorist”.

The famous “liquid bomb plot” was used by both the UK and US governments to drive through yet more anti-civil liberties legislation, despite the fact that the plot did not actually exist and the technology of home made portable and easily deployable binary liquid explosives is a myth.

The mass hysteria whipped up by the mainstream media and appalling neo-con politicians over the “liquid bomb plot” did a huge amount to boost the massive budgets of the terrorist industry. The media never carried the news of the non-existence of the plot, so there was never any downward pressure on those budgets as a result. The patent lack of Islamic terrorism in the West is becoming a threat to those budgets now. But, Hell! The liquid bomb myth worked last time, didn’t it? Why not use it again?

That the BBC can recycle as fact the “liquid bomb plot to blow up seven airlines” is sickening enough. But then they did something that was so jaw-dropping as to be unbelievable, even given the total lack of ethics at the BBC. To make sure the “fear” really sunk in, they showed a “reconstruction” of the liquid bomb plot. A section of aircraft fuselage was mounted on the ground, and then an explosion blew out a big hole in it. Text labelled it “reconstruction” underneath.

How can you have a “reconstruction” of something which never happened, and was shown in court not to have happened? I should love to believe that this BBC ploy is so ludicrous it did not work; but I have a sad feeling that 90% of people probably believe the “liquid bomb plot” did exist, as Tony Blair, George Bush, John Reid, John Howard and the entire media told them it existed, and nobody has ever told them it did not.

There is a huge amount of dancing on eggshells going on today in the media about the dossier on paedophile activity with which Leon Brittan came in contact in the 1980s. It is pretty plain there is a subtext here.

A number of people have contacted me for some years over the Elm Guest House paedophile ring. Frankly I did not particularly believe it, or thought it was exaggerated. But I confess my eyes have been opened by the Jimmy Savile, Cyril Smith and Rolf Harris affairs and the extent of complicity and even protection which they received from the establishment.

I have blogged before that, in the Savile case, as his behaviour was apparently compulsive and constant, I found it hard to believe it was not known in the very senior societal circles in which he spent so much of his time. I am convinced that perception was right.

Savile is not linked in to the Elm House paedophile ring, as far as I know, but Cyril Smith is. So were the then head of the Royal Protection Unit and of Special Branch. That to me raises all sorts of queries about whether they were not just participating themselves but protecting someone very senior indeed. I have been convinced that it is true that social workers interviewing child victims were indeed threatened with guns by Special Branch to drop it, and that paperwork has been confiscated and destroyed.

On Cyril Smith, Channel 4 Dispatches on 12 September 2013 reported that:

‘Speaking for the first time, former CID officer Jack Tasker tells the programme that Special Branch officers arrived at his office, told him to halt his investigations and demanded that the file be handed over to them,.“They made it quite clear that anything that was kept by us would bring repercussions if we didn’t hand it over; that as far as we are concerned, the inquiry is finished … you will take no more inquiries into Cyril Smith

Compare that to what happened to child protection officer Chris Fay in his Elm House investigation, as reported in the Express:

Mr Fay, 67, of south London, said: “It became very dangerous. People seem to forget that Special Branch could do what they liked, they were a law unto themselves.

“At one point they had me up against a wall by my throat with a gun at my head telling me in no uncertain terms that I was to back away if I knew what was good for me.

“A colleague of mine had the same treatment, as did a number of the volunteers. Victims who were actually abused at Elm House were also physically stopped from coming to speak to us at the NAYPIC office in north London.

“I witnessed Special Branch officers manhandling them and turning them away with a warning to keep their mouths shut. It was blatant, it was open, they were acting like gangsters.

In both Rochdale and in North London, Special Branch intervened to block the appropriate authorities on the ground from investigating what was a genuine paedophile scandal. I can see no other possible explanation than that the scandal involved figures a great deal more senior than Cyril Smith. From the Elm Guest House we have a pointer who some of those people were.

I really don’t want to blog any more about this, and I recommend you to have a search online. That involves trawling around some of the less pleasant parts of the internet, and I have seen material that is horribly anti-Semitic and anti-gay. But after years of dismissing the stories, on the grounds that they are promulgated by unpleasant people, in unpleasant newspapers, or cannot be true, I realise I was wrong.

I had an impeccable source that Obama’s anti-Scottish statement was orchestrated not only with him, but with the BBC who planted the question. I have no doubt it is true. I want to take this further with the Electoral Commission and the BBC Trust, but to do that I need confirmation of my whistleblower’s account.

On 6 June I therefore contacted No. 10 through their official website and asked whether any government official or adviser had previously briefed the journalist who asked Obama the question on independence. On 10 June I received the reply:

“Your message has been forwarded to the appropriate Government Department so that they may reply to your concerns directly.”

Another three weeks later, still there has been no contact from the “appropriate government Department”. I therefore went back to the Prime Minister’s Office to complain about the lack of a reply.

Answer came there none.

Derek Bateman has posted the reply to the BBC’s curt rejection of the academic study documenting its extreme bias in the Scottish Independence referendum debate. It is lengthy but well worth reading.

A couple of days ago, posting the video of Peter Cook’s wonderful satire of the judge summing up the Thorpe trial (which performace was itself a twenty year on reprise) I calculated that, to a student today, the reference was as distant as a joke about an event in 1938 was to me as a student. Yet I remember, vividly, the detail of Norman Scott crying as he bit the pillow and poor Rinka getting shot. That made me think I am very old indeed.

This was reinforced by reading a review of the current Monty Python Live revival. Again, to me as a student, the Goons seemed ancient history, so irrelevant and distant that I found older people’s nostalgia for them a part of the gulf between me and their different world. Well, to today’s students, Monty Python is two decades more removed than the Goons were from me.

I got into Monty Python a couple of episodes in to the first series, as word got round the school. There was something slightly illicit about it. There was a divide between those who could watch it and those whose parents refused to have it on (families only had one TV in those days). I seem to recall – and it may be a false memory – that it was even quite difficult to find, subject to strange time changes in the schedule, but I may just be building on a recollection of one night’s disappointment.

I wrote above that it made me think I am old, quite deliberately. I don’t feel old at all. Emotionally, I don’t feel significantly different to how I felt at eighteen – despite an extraordinary collection of life experience, I feel love and compassion in just as consuming a way as I did as a teen. I certainly don’t feel a great deal wiser, and I don’t seem to have become more cautious, and certainly not more right wing. But I make absolutely no effort to be young, What I have not done is adapt my tastes – I do not try to be trendy, (and that word perhaps is itself dating).

When I see my reflection, I always have a moment of disconnect as to who that heavy, fat, lined person is. I wonder how I got trapped in here. It is not that I am in denial about how old I am or how I look. I don’t have a different image of my physical self in my head. It is just that I can’t imagine that stolid and respectable person being moved or wracked by the emotional storms inside me or the radical thoughts on society. Than I realise I must misjudge others, daily, on the basis of their appearance.

An “independent” all-party commission set up by a lobby group funded by NATO, the FCO and Qatar, consisting of eight of the most right wing establishment figures in the universe, supports keeping Trident. The joint chairmen were “Lord” Browne of the Labour Party, “Sir” Malcolm Rifkind of the Tory Party and “Sir” Menzies Campbell of the Lib Dems. Over three years of deliberation, the Commission did not have, or consider, one single original thought not approved by the Westminster Establishment, and demonstrated that there is no difference at all between the three neo-conservative parties.

Why “Establishment figures endorse status quo” is news beats me. The only news is that the estrangement of ordinary people from the moribund political establishment means nobody cares what these old troughers and sycophants think. In Scotland the referendum has given an impetus to a popular will to take back the power kidnaped by an unrepresentative political class. These old fogeys may need to have the power (with American permission) to kill billions of their human beings, in order to feel potent and important. But if they want to keep these appalling devices, they are going to have to look for somewhere new to keep them. The Pool of London?

We do not know who kidnapped and murdered the three children in Palestine. These murders are terrible and need to be investigated. You cannot investigate a murder with bombs and tanks. Tony Blair’s immediate bandwagon-jumping and rush to blame Hamas is typical of a man who has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands through his urge to fix the facts around the policy.

Six Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in the past three weeks. That did not get lead headlines in the mainstream media. I should note in fairness that the BBC World News at 9.00 am this morning did mention it, but on standard form that will quickly get censored out of future bulletins.

I don’t recall Tony Blair rushing out press releases as a result if the deaths of those Palestinian children. How exactly does Blair believe his ghoulish publicity seeking on the back of this terrible tragedy is helping anything, except perhaps his long term money-making potential?

I doubt that Hamas killed the children. It would make no sense given its strategy of joining a unified Palestinian leadership and entering the diplomatic dialogue. It must be possible that the children were murdered by a Palestinian individual or group outraged by the recent killings of Palestinian children. It also must be possible that they were killed by an Israeli individual or group eager to undermine the Palestinian unity process and promote the settlement agenda.

All deaths are tragic, and the deaths of younger people always feel more tragic still. Parents are mourning in Israel and Palestine. The answer is not to create more mourning parents and shattered children. All violence in Palestine must be condemned unequivocally.