The Telegraph has a pro-union piece by William Dalrymple. The byline says his ancestor signed the Act of Union; it fails to mention he organised the Massacre of Glencoe.

David Folkerts-Landau, Chief Economist of Deutsche Bank, who has claimed that Scotland would have a “Great Depression” if independent, has a second home he bought for US $11.6 million dollars. His first home is in London – where he would have been well-placed to notice that Deutsche Bank was at the very heart of the LIBOR interest rate fixing scandal. Naturally neither Folkerts-Landau (he and his wife are friends of the Camerons) nor any other senior banker was jailed for that long term criminal illegality.

Folkerts-Landau must, you might assume, have great powers of economic prediction to have accumulated a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars from banking salary and bonuses. Yet he failed to notice that Deutsche Bank was running up 92 billion dollars of US sub-prime mortgage junk that would be written off in the actual great crash, in which Deutsche Bank was again in the centre. Why a man who failed to notice that his own work was contributing to an actual great depression, should be taken seriously in ridiculous prognostications of a new one, is rather beyond me.

It is interesting that Folkerts-Landau states that Winston Churchill’s return to the gold standard was a major cause of the great depression. From the German Deutsche bank, that dismissed its Jewish directors in 1933 and denounced Jewish employees, and received expropriated Jewish assets through direct cooperation with Hitler, this criticism of Winston Churchill might be thought culturally insensitive.

Folkerts-Landau is just another example of the super-rich who realise that the people-based movement for Scottish independence is currently the most potent threat to the neo-con hegemony that has resulted in the destruction of social-democratic society and the massive gap between the super-rich and real people. If you look at the other boards on which sit members of the board of Deutsche Bank, it reads like a catalogue of corporate dominance:

Coca Cola
Pepsi Cola
Microsoft
Accenture
IBM
Bayer
Daimler
EON Energy
Thyssen
XL Group
Alliance Trust
Bilfinger
BMW

That is an illustration of the fact that mega corporations are not really competitive, but part of an interlinked web of capital interests all sharing directors. Those interests have bombarded Scotland with apocalyptic threats the last few days. There will be a great depression, major businesses will leave, energy bills will go up, interest rates will go up, oil will run out, shopping bills will go up, call charges will go up, terrorists will run round unimpeded, Russia will invade. These nonsensical claims have been hammered home relentlessly in perhaps the most concentrated stream of mainstream media propaganda in history.

The extraordinary resilience of the Scottish people, in face of these ludicrous levels of threat and intimidation from “authority figures” like Folkerts-Landau, is something of which I am very, very proud.

No declaration of interest from Rusbridger in Guardian pro-union editorial over Benshie estate he stands to inherit through his wife, daughter of Lord Mackie.

Standard Life’s Far Right Board needs exposing:

Keith Skeoch, Executive Director of Standard Life, is on the Board of Reform Scotland, the neo-conservative lobby group which wants to abolish the minimum wage, privatize the NHS and pensions, and still further restrict trade unions.

It is difficult for Tories openly to campaign against Scottish Independence as everyone in Scotland hates them, so they do it with their corporate hats on. This is most of the board of Standard Life:

Garry Grimstone, Chairman, “lead non-executive” at the Ministry of Defence, London

Keith Skeoch, Executive Director, right wing political lobbyist

Crawford Gillies, Non Executive Director, Chairman of Control Risk Group, of London, the “security consultancy” of choice for ex MI5 and MI6 officers

Noel Harwerth, non-executive Director, Director of “London First” – [Honestly, I am not making this up]

David Nish – Chief Executive, Member of the “UK Strategy Committee” of “TheCity UK”. “TheCity UK” being a body of the City of London.

John Paynter, non-executive Director, was vice chairman of JP Morgan Cazenove until the 2008 crash

Amazing that lot oppose independence, huh?

Standard Life also threatened to leave at the time of the devolution referendum and gave out No campaign materials to staff. “Leave” of course is a relative concept – the above bunch just pop up from London from time to time to check on how the serfs are doing.

I published this information on 27 February when they last tried to influence the independence debate. Standard Life is again trying today to influence the referendum campaign by a press release claiming it will move key departments to London in the event of independence, enthusiastically amplified by the BBC, Guardian and all the other reactionary media.

Well, here is an opposing press release, from me. If anybody thinks that an Independent Scotland will be a place where major strategic companies can still be controlled by swivel-eyed right wing ideologues, they may get a very nasty shock from the people of Scotland.

“It’s not often you see me and Gordon Brown in complete agreement” says Cameron.
Voting to invade Iraq?
Voting to Bomb Libya?
Bailing out the fatcat bankers with 60,000 pounds from every family in the UK?
Supporting Trident missiles?
Opposing curbs on bankers bonuses?
Supporting the security state?
Supporting the Private Finance Initiative?
Supporting “Private Provision of Services” in the NHS?
Supporting deregulation of the financial services industry?
Supporting cuts in corporation tax?
Supporting privatisation of railways and utilities?
Supporting arms sales to Saudi Arabia?

etc. etc. etc.

Get rid of the Red Tories and the Blue Tories. Vote for independence.

Like many men, I shed tears very seldom and hide myself away when I do. But I had salt water on my keypad when I read this brilliant piece of writing from Wee Ginger Dug this morning.

Paul Kavanagh has been an essential node in the vast and sprawling social media network which has outwitted, out-thought and out-communicated the mainstream in the Scottish independence referendum. The Wee Ginger Dug’s particular contribution has been not just clarity of thought and a canine nose for bullshit, but beauty of expression.

The deftness of touch, wit and penetrating humour of today’s piece is inspired. But what is so great about it, is the spirit that can achieve these heights of writing, when Paul has so recently suffered the heartfelt loss of his partner Andy. Paul’s account of Andy’s death was itself very evocative; but it his unquenchable spirit today that made me cry.

Cameron, Miliband and Clegg. Just typing the names is depressing. As part of their long matured and carefully prepared campaign plan (founded 9 September 2014) they are coming together to Scotland tomorrow to campaign. In a brilliant twist, they will all come on the same day but not appear together. This will prevent the public from noticing that they all represent precisely the same interests.

Nobody in Scotland feels the slightest warmth towards these people, except for those paid hacks whose income depends upon their feeling such warmth (and there are too many of those, but still only a few hundred). One thing I can guarantee is that this rush of “superstars” will not meet my challenge of seeing 300 Better Together supporters in the same place.

The truth is of course, that if the range of potential political policy alignments lay on a two dimensional scale from 1 to 100, then Cameron, Clegg and Miliband occupy the range from 82 to 84. They offer no actual policy choice to voters.

They all support austerity budgets
They all support benefit cuts
They all support tuition fees
They all support Trident missiles
They all support continued NHS privatisation
They all support bank bail-outs
They all support detention without trial for “terrorist suspects”
They all support more bombings in Iraq (and are planning to launch British raids there before 18 September to ramp up jingoism – you read it here first)
They all oppose rail nationalisation
They all oppose free prescriptions
They all oppose free personal care
They all oppose rent controls
They all oppose bankers bonus cuts
They all oppose legalisation of cannabis

The areas on which the three amigos differ are infinitesimal and contrived. They actually represent the same paymasters and vested interests.

It is hilarious that after a campaign of hammering away at the fact that nobody can guarantee every last detail of what will happen in a an independent Scotland, the Three Amigos are now trying to convince us we should vote No in exchange for some powers, which nobody has the slightest idea what they will be, except they will not include Scotland being allocated any of its oil revenue.

Meantime Gordon Brown, the man whose banking liberalisation almost crashed the world, and who then gave 60,000 pounds from every family in Britain straight to the bankers as a gift, is undertaking another invited audience only tour of Scotland. He has secured a commitment to debate new powers after a No vote; a debate in which Brown has opposed powers for Scotland his entire political career. The Brown suggestions consist of an increased right to vary income tax, but only upwards, and with extra revenue balanced by cuts in the amount of Scotland’s own revenue which London hands back to Edinburgh. Scotland might also be able to vary slightly the rate of housing benefit and attendance allowance (only).

The idea that the popular exuberance at taking sovereignty back into the people, can be swept away by the three amigos and Brown’s “offer”, is ludicrous. Nevertheless the BBC, Guardian and other paid unionist hacks are pushing this unpalatable mess down the throats of voters in the hope something might work. It won’t.

Now tell me Labour or Westminster can be trusted with Scotland’s interests. This is the answer to the frenzied pledges from London, as the entire UK Establishment and mainstream media faces humiliation on 18 September.

YouGov stood to have its reputation shattered if it continued to put out polls showing ten point leads for No, when Yes is very obviously headed for a majority.

Those massive YouGov leads for No were all part of the Unionist tactic of making independence appear both uniquely impossible to Scotland, as opposed to any other small nation state you can name, and an unattainable dream. Too poor, too wee, too stupid and politically isolated. YouGov are known in the trade as “You Can Have Any Result You Pay For Gov”. For months, James Kelly on the Scot Goes Pop blog has brilliantly analysed the methodologies they employed to give those large No leads – asking prior leading questions, a large preponderance of Labour voters in their panel, and the “Kellner Correction” – an assumption that lies or faulty memory about how people last voted, would penalise Labour unless corrected for statistically. The result was YouGov polls that were great reading for the No camp, but made no sense whatsever to anybody who had talked to voters.

My own view is that there has not been an extraordinary 12 point swing in a fortnight, as illustrated by YouGov’s last two polls. What there has been is a continuing stead swing and a realisation in YouGov that, having helped the No campaign for over a year by trying to make a Yes vote seem hopeless, to be over 12% out on this vital vote might damage YouGov’s share price fatally. So they have had to start publishing something close to the truth.

As I have been reporting, the truth has been very obvious to people on the ground for weeks. And the truth is not only that independence is coming, but that the entire political class, BBC and mainstream media has been rejected, and a new form of popular power, based on community democracy and social media, has taken over.

I received an invite from the National Library of Scotland to a post-referendum debrief at 9am on 19 September. Anybody sober at 9am on 19 September (unless having medical excuse) is not part of the New Scotland. But more crucially, the panel includes Henry McLeish and Michael Moore – and they want people to pay 35 pounds to listen to their words of wisdom.

They really haven’t got it yet. Nobody will ever care what Moore and McLeish and their like have to say again, and the kind of democracy we will have will not involve paying substantial sums to hear pearls of wisdom drop from troughers on a pedestal. Nor will members of the old political establishment have a future in that career. It was a good tactic for Alex Salmond to say that Darling and Carmichael will be on the negotiating team: the people will not allow it to happen.

There is at last some understanding that Yes will win: the penny has not yet dropped that this is a revolutionary moment, not a polite constitutional shuffle.

I am available again for Yes meetings on 15, 16 and 17 September. Invitations welcome through the contact button above. Happy to go anywhere I can do good. My St Andrews speech a week ago has now had 75,000 views on Youtube.

It is symptomatic of the way this campaign has gone that I can find nothing online from the No camp which has had one fifth as many views, with the solitary exception of the PatronisngBTWoman video, which has massive views from people making fun of it.

Miliband was in Blantyre yesterday where his every bodily function was breathlessly reported by Severin Carrell in the Guardian – but even the Guardian could not pretend his audience in the “Labour stronghold” amounted to more than “dozens”. I am told it was under fifty. Better Together support on the ground has simply evaporated. What they rely on is that the massive output of mainstream media and the authority of the Westminster parties will have sufficient impact on their key demographics – pensioners, and housewives in a 1950’s sense – to shore up a residual no vote of the easily scared. My challenge to people to identify any Better Together gathering of more than 300 has been met with resounding silence.

Television has been wall to wall Miliband lately, and the BBC in Scotland seem to have simply abandoned their obligation to give equal broadcast time and treatment to both sides. Presumably many of the New Labour hacks who control Pacific Quay realise that their behaviour has made a Yes win a career threatening situation for them, so at this stage they see nothing to lose.

If independence is achieved it will be down to a popular movement and not to any politician. Indeed, if one person has to be singled out, I would say the Rev Stuart Campbell has made the most decisive individual contribution in the campaign. If Social media has beaten the mainstream media, the central rock around which millions of flowers have bloomed has been the Wings over Scotland website. This has a significantly larger daily readership than any newspaper in Scotland. The Wee Blue Book I found everywhere, including copies already available in pretty well every pub I entered, as I toured the East Coast. Over 400,000 downloads of the PDF have been made and 250,000 copies centrally printed, as well as a number of private initiatives which had already obtained professional printings from the PDF. Conservatively, there are over half a million hard copies out there, as well as all the reads online. In a population of 5.2 million, that is a major impact.

When we close down BBC Scotland and create a new citizen based, cheaper and more arts-oriented organisation in its place, let’s put Stuart Campbell in charge. Some state-funded drama and arts output seems to me commendable. State funding of pap entertainment is not needed – the private sector can do that perfectly well. State funding of “journalism” which investigates nothing and never challenges the establishment must be stopped.

The Guardian’s Michael White is a revolting liar. He writes today in The Guardian:

Why so few “no thanks” posters or union flags? “Because we don’t want our windows smashed or tyres slashed,” some no voters reply.

That is a plain lie, Michael White. No “No voters” said that to you. You made it up. Nor has there been a single instance reported of any No voter having their windows or car trashed.

White also retails a story that a woman allegedly told him on hearsay about somebody else who was “seized by the throat” on canvassing because of their English accent. Well I have lived more than eight years of my adult life in Scotland and never once had any adverse reaction of any kind to my very English accent, including while canvassing in some very deprived areas. This incident is also an invention.

White has always been revolting, his constant snide support for Tony Blair and his wars, covered by that horrible false bonhommie, is repulsive. But the move into straightforward lies disguised as reportage to please his New Labour masters (and their creature Rusbridger) cannot be allowed to pass. Michael White is a disgrace to the profession of journalism.

In the past dozen years, the armed forces of NATO countries, whether operating under the NATO banner or in related ad-hoc coalitions, have killed many hundreds of thousands of people. Of those hundreds of thousands of people, only a few hundred at most ever had any connection to any attack on a NATO country.

Whatever modern NATO has become, a defensive alliance it is not; that fact is beyond rational dispute.

It is also the case that the situation in countries where NATO has been most active in killing people, including Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan, has deteriorated. It has deteriorated politically, economically, militarily and socially. The notion that NATO member states could bomb the world into good was only ever believed by crazed and fanatical people like Tony Blair and Jim Murphy of the Henry Jackson Society. It really should not have needed empirical investigation to prove it was wrong, but it has been tried, and has been proved wrong.

The NATO states as a group have also embarked on remarkably similar reductions in the civil liberties of their own populations during this period. NATO to me is symbolised by the fact that its Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as Danish Prime Minister blatantly lied to the Danish parliament about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. When Major Frank Grevil released material that proved Rasmussen was lying, it was Grevil who was jailed for three years. In the United States, no CIA operative has been prosecuted for their widespread campaign of torture, but John Kiriakou is in jail for revealing it.

NATO’s attempt to be global arbiter and enforcer has been disastrous at all levels. Its plan to redeem itself by bombing the Caliphate in Iraq and Syria is a further sign of madness. Except of course that it will guarantee some blowback against Western targets, and that will “justify” further bombings, and yet more profit for the arms manufacturers. On that level, it is very clever and cynical. NATO provides power to the elite and money to the wealthy.

But what of Putin’s Russia, I hear you say? I am no fan of Putin – I think he is a nasty, dangerous little dictator. But little is the operative word.

Russia is not a great power. Its GDP is 10% of the GDP of the EU. Its economy is the same size as Italy’s. The capabilities of Russia’s armed forces are massively exaggerated by the security industry, including the security services, and by arms manufacturers. The entire area of Eastern Ukraine which Russia is disputing has a GDP smaller than the city of Dundee.

Russia is only any kind of “military threat” because of its nuclear arsenal. The way forward to peace is active international nuclear disarmament – and the existence of NATO is the greatest obstacle to that. The idea that almost the entire developed world needs to encircle and contain Russia with massive military threat, is as sensible as the idea that it needs to encircle the UK or France – both of which have substantially larger and more diversified economies than Russia and much larger and more technologically advanced arms industries.

NATO is by far the largest danger to world peace. It should be dissolved as a matter of urgency.

The great Orange March in Edinburgh will be the only occasion on which the No side have managed to gather more than 300 people in one place in the entire campaign.

The average turnout for David Cameron’s big speeches of the campaign in Glasgow and Perth was under 200 people. On my own recent speaking tour we substantially beat that in Dundee and equalled it in the small town of Insch! Not to mention the 70,000 people who have watched my St Andrews speech online. Gordon Brown’s speaking tours have been strictly ticket only – and a fair number of the invited have declined the opportunity.

Search online as much as you like. There are no substantial No gatherings of any kind, no No flash mobs or mass canvasses. There is no speech for the No campaign that has a fifth of 70,000 views online.

But they do have the Orange Order and their grand March in Edinburgh on the 13 September. This parade of knuckle dragging Neanderthals, many of them off the ferry from Northern Ireland, is the only show of popular enthusiasm for the Union ever to be mustered by Better Together. Unfortunately it is illegal.

As I posted on 11 August, this proposed Orange March is plainly in contravention of the Public Order Act 1936, which bans any demonstrations in uniform for a political object.

Section 1 (i)

Subject as hereinafter provided, any person
who in any public place or at any public meeting wears
uniform signifying his association with any political
organisation or with, the promotion of any political
object shall be guilty of an offence :

Normally, the Orange Order in Scotland are allowed to march on the (dubious) grounds that their object is cultural not political. But on this occasion they are marching as a registered participant with the Electoral Commission in the Referendum campaign, and with the avowed object of promoting a No vote. There is therefore no doubt whatsoever that the march is political and, if in uniform, illegal. Orange Order sources confirm they will be marching in uniform.

The march can be carried out in uniform with the consent of the Chief Constable and the Secretary of State for Scotland. But an assiduous reader of this blog has received confirmation from the Scottish Government that the Orange Order do not have this permission:

Dear xxxx
Thank you for your email. Following a search of our records I can advise that the Scottish Government has neither received nor granted an application from Police Scotland under the Public Order Act 1936 to permit the wearing of political uniforms by members of the Orange Order. As I stated in my previous email, I am unable to provide legal advice interpreting whether or not the Act applies in this situation.
Yours sincerely
Mathew West
Police Powers Unit
Safer Communities Division
Scottish Government

What is at question here is not whether it ought to be illegal to march in uniform for political objects. The fact is that plainly it is illegal. The law is not moribund – it was applied for example against Irish republicans in London in the 1980s.

The real question is whether the law is applied impartially to all, or are those who have the support of the Establishment allowed to break the law flagrantly and massively?

Delighted that the popular upsurge in Scotland has been reflected in the polls and the mainstream media have started to notice it is happening. There is no doubt that unless the No campaign can find a game-changer (and a curiously untraceable person throwing an egg at Jim Murphy isn’t it), then the people of Scotland are going to seize their chance to escape from neo-con domination and create their own society.

But I also have no doubt the establishment are not going to accept this lightly. They are not simply going to let Scotland’s people walk away with Scotland’s resources. They have yet to make serious use of their most frequent instrument of population control – the “War on Terror”.

The scene has already been set. Cameron has already told parliament that ISIS, or the Caliphate as it calls itself (I always think it is better to call people what they call themselves, rather than some made-up name) poses a major and imminent threat to the UK. Jack Straw is back on Radio 4 saying that Britain must bomb Iraq, as though the very cause of the Caliphate was not the last time he invaded Iraq. Saudi Arabia, which funded and still funds the Caliphate, is giving warnings to the security services of planned attacks in the UK.

The truth is that everybody who has ever carried out an actual Islamic terror attack in the UK (of which there have been very few indeed) has stated that they did so because of British bombings and invasions of Muslim countries – a fact which is very plainly true. The notion that the way to stop this is to bomb or invade Muslim countries is quite incredible.

I fear that we will shortly see arrests of young Muslims in Glasgow and Edinburgh. We will be told they were planning to detonate a dirty nuclear bomb in George Square, or convert the Scott Monument into a giant ballistic missile using fertiliser and Irn Bru. We will be told that only the UK security services have saved Scotland from destruction. The media hype will be on a par with the liquid bomb plot. Like the liquid bomb plot, when it turns out to have been non-existent the media will not tell you that. Anyway the referendum will be over by the time the story is debunked.

In truth, of course, an independent Scotland which does not invade other countries will be a safer place than the continually aggressive and murderous United Kingdom.