As Catalonia today fights for its freedom, it should not be forgotten that the current government of Spain are the direct political heirs of Franco and that many of their ministers have personal and family connections to his rule. Rajoy, Spain’s current Prime Minister, started his political career in 1981 by joining the People’s Alliance, a party founded in 1979 and led by 7 of Franco’s ministers to carry on the Francoist legacy. The People’s Alliance became the major component in the now governing People’s Party.

That is the essential background to the extreme Spanish nationalist dislike of freedom for Catalonia, and far right nationalist moves to declare the Catalan referendum illegal.

This is a good day to think of Euan MacColl’s updating of Jamie Foyers, to remember those Scots who fought alongside the Catalans against fascism at the Battle of the Ebro.

Faur distant, faur distant, lies Foyers the brave
Nae tombstone memorial shall hallow his grave
For his bones they lie scattered on the rude soil o Spain
An young Jamie Foyers in battle wis slain

He’s gane frae the shipyaird that stauns on the Clyde
His haimmer lies idle, his tools laid aside
Tae the wide Ebro river young Foyers has gane
Tae fight by the side o the people o Spain

Thair wisnae his equal at wark or at play
He wis strang in the Union till his dying day
He wis grand at the fitbaa, at the dance he wis braw
Young Jamie Foyers wis the flouer o thaim aa

He cam hame frae the shipyaird, took aff his warkin claes
O, A mind the time weill in the lang simmer’s days
He said, “Thinknae lang, lassie, A’ll come back again”
But young Jamie Foyers in battle was slain

In the fight for Belcite, he was aye tae the fore
An he focht at Gandesa till he couldnae fight more
For he lay owre his machine gun wi a bullet in his brain
An young Jamie Foyers in battle was slain

Faur distant, faur distant, lies Foyers the brave
Nae tombstone memorial shall hallow his grave
For his bones they lie scattered on the rude soil o Spain
An young Jamie Foyers in battle was slain

When the BBC was smugly quoting the current Francoist government of Spain as the bar to Scotland’s entry into the EU, I was longing for somebody to give just a little of this historic perspective. But of course, the mainstream media never did.

As I told The Way Forward conference in Kirkcaldy today, I am submitting my application to the SNP to join their list of approved candidates. They may not want me, and then I have to find a constituency that wishes to adopt me. So the tweets tonight that I am standing as an SNP candidate are a little optimistic. I am also very keen indeed not to come in as a carpetbagger where a hardworking local activist wishes to stand – I had (and I am being very open here) thought my natural target would be Dundee West, where I lived for seven years and was elected University Rector. But a very good man I know is going to be seeking that one, so I shall not.

Ideally I would love to take on Gordon Brown, Dougie Alexander, Jim Murphy or one of the other great dinosaurs – and war criminals – and bring some truths about them, and about what the unionist parties have done to Scotland, home to the people they “represent”. I won 5% of the vote in the 2005 election standing as an Independent candidate against Jack Straw in Blackburn, a constituency with which I had no connection at all. If I can bring a 3 or 5% personal vote to add to the soaring SNP vote, all kinds of things become possible.

I was asked if I would consider standing, after my speech at today’s conference. In replying that I was applying to be accepted as a qualified candidate I was not intending to start all the hares I have started. I must say I was really touched by the enthusiasm and applause that greeted my response. In clarifying what I am thinking, I am aware I may seem very presumptuous. I should be delighted to hear from any constituency seeking a candidate; otherwise I am going to be living in Scotland and still working flat out for independence, irrespective of whether I hold any position or not.

I expect my speech today will be online shortly. My essential argument was that we should concentrate single-mindedly on the goal of independence and not be sidetracked by the Smith Commission or any other “devo-max” initiative. These were never honest or genuine and will come to nothing worthwhile. Scotland will get nothing from Westminster: we have to take power ourselves if we are to build a more just and equal society.

All the talk of Scotland keeping and spending its own tax revenue is illusory as the unionist parties always exclude vital revenue sources including the revenues from oil and from whisky, which are somehow “UK”. Westminster will make sure that any new settlement gives Scotland less, not more, money. The mood towards Scotland in Whitehall is entirely vindictive. In addition to which, given the UK’s record on extraordinary rendition, torture and a long succession of aggressive and illegal wars, any settlement which leaves Scotland still subject to Westminster foreign and defence policy is absolutely unacceptable and immoral.

I accept that the SNP may need to appear to participate in the Devo-Max negotiations, if only ultimately to expose the total lack of seriousness and good faith on the unionist side. However the great bulk of the Yes movement should continue to spend its vast reserve of creativity and popular energy exclusively on the goal of independence, pure and simple. This may come sooner than people think.

It is more than likely that the Tories will be back in power in Westminster after May 2015, and very possible that 2016 will see a UK vote to exit the EU. National independence is not in fact a domestic concept, but rather a status in international law. The key to being a nation state is the recognition of the large majority of other nation states. A UK EU exit may be a propitious moment to declare UDI on the basis of the right of Scots to maintain their EU citizenship, and to gain the immediate support of other EU states for so doing. We should keep our options open on the future route to independence, but it is not so distant as some think.

There was a great deal more detailed discussion on other policy issues in reply to questions, and I will try to set some of that out tomorrow. I move in to my new flat at 89/14 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh on Thursday. People are always aghast that I publish my address, but I believe that a gentleman does not hide where he lives. Besides, my enemies will certainly already know, so its best my friends know too. If you were to surmise that the address shows where my long term ambitions lie, you may not be entirely wrong!!

I was about to go into my box at the Lyceum Theatre last night when I received a text that there was a pro-independence demo on at Holyrood. So I abandoned my hosts (I did not feel quite as bad about this as I had stood for pre-theatre supper), fled the theatre and positively jogged down to parliament. I passed most of the demonstrators leaving on their way home, saltires draped over shoulders and Guido masks on top of heads. But there were still a few hundred there when I arrived, listening to unpractised speakers telling their very real stories: the independence cause continues to be a genuinely popular movement. One young demonstrator told me how proud they had been as they marched down the Royal Mile, with pedestrians homeward bound after a day’s work spontaneously stepping off the pavement to join the march, and the bars emptying. I then watched the fireworks bursting over Edinburgh.

I said a while back that if we won independence, I would move back to Scotland. Well, independence is now so inevitable I am indeed moving back, and have been flat-hunting. This is now an Edinburgh blog, and I hope from this weekend will have its Edinburgh home.

Lewes has been much in the news lately. Yesterday they were going to burn an effigy of Alex Salmond, and then didn’t. It is a conundrum why a town which genuinely retains the most radical popular political traditions in England, also is the most fervent place of practice of the reactionary art of catholic effigy burning. They vary this now by burning protestants, too. Cameron and Clegg have been done. I think my fellow Scottish Nationalists who got very upset about the potential Salmond burning were perhaps overreacting. The mistake of the members of the Lewes Waterloo Society was to fail to realise that Salmond is not merely another self-serving member of the political class; the selection was not based on race.

The tradition of burning Guy Fawkes reflects the undeniable fact that there used to be a genuine popular enthusiasm for parliament, which was seen as a bastion against Papal despotism, even long before the large majority of the population had a vote. Nowadays Parliament has become a very different kind of symbol. It symbolises an highly oppressive, authoritarian, narrow political class which shamelessly makes money at our expense, while furthering the interests of vast corporations which enforce the low wage economy and astonishing, ever growing, wealth gap.

The natural instincts of most people today lie with the man who tried to blow up parliament.

It is truly remarkable that, while the BBC and rest of the mainstream media gave hour by hour coverage of the democracy movement protests in Hong Kong, there was virtually no coverage of the violent and brutal treatment, over days, of the Occupy Democracy protest in Parliament Square in London. Nor any mention that there was far less democracy in Hong Kong under British rule than Chinese.

In Lewes, I once spoke to a flourishing political society which claims a direct descent from one founded by Thomas Paine himself- a vivid reminder to us in Scotland that there is a native radical tradition in Southern England, deep underground and waiting to be rediscovered. Lewes also has as its MP Norman Baker, one of the most decent men in politics, who recently resigned as a junior minister over the government’s entirely illogical “war on drugs” – illogical not least because of the drug habits of so many MPs. My current host, Hugh Kerr, when an MEP once made a speech in the European Parliament where he pointed out that many members were voting against drug liberalisation with whom he had personally participated in drug taking. An example of the excessive honesty that led to Hugh being forced out of the Labour Party.

Norman Baker was the subject of many vicious pieces in the mainstream media following his resignation. The crime of daring to think outside the box on drugs, and even worse crime of disagreeing with right wing nutjob and media darling Theresa May, meant that Baker had to be thoroughly monstored. But the most disgraceful and cowardly of all these attacks came from the Guardian of state stooge Alan Rusbridger. This is simply an appalling piece of journalism.

I have met Norman Baker a couple of times, and had a very entertaining conversation with him about Murder in Samarkand on Lewes railway station. The subject of UFO’s never came up. Indeed, if you google “Norman Baker, UFO” you get hundreds of media stories, all of them put out following Baker’s resignation and very evidently put about by Theresa May, for whom the Guardian is but a sounding board. In fact Norman Baker did once suggest in parliament that UFO cases deserved proper official investigation, which seems a perfectly rational view – and as the British government has, over decades, amassed thousands of files on UFO sightings, a view clearly widely held.

Baker’s other great sin is to believe David Kelly was murdered. Well, I think it is very probable indeed that David Kelly was murdered, and so, I suspect, do a very large percentage of the population. If the establishment is truly so confident that David Kelly was not murdered, it is remarkable that they refuse to have an inquest and allow a jury to decide the question in the normal way.

Norman Baker’s true crime was not to be a fully paid up member of the political class. He had never been a special adviser or political assistant. he had some hinterland, other interests, and did not confine his thinking within the tiny sphere of neo-con orthodoxy beyond which the corporate media will declare you a nutter. Politicians must all look the same, and Theresa May and Nigel Farage are now the only acceptable templates.

I was told by a member of the Metropolitan Police Operation Lydd team that they believe there are grounds to prosecute Jack Straw, but that the Crown Prosecution Service will bury it. That was over two years ago when I gave my own sworn evidence to the investigation.

That cover-up by the CPS is now underway – and it is extremely unsubtle. The mainstream media barely reported that the first file has been passed to the CPS on Operation Lydd. You would think that a massive police investigation into criminal activity by Jack Straw and Sir Mark Allen, among others, would merit more of a splash, but not in our corporate controlled media. The timing was auspicious because, in the parallel civil case, the Court of Appeal has rejected the Government’s defence of “National Security” to prevent the case from even being heard. This after Jack Straw and Sir Mark Allen arranged the kidnap and deportation to torture in Libya of Mr Belhadj, his pregnant wife and children – only one of hundreds of such crimes in which the British state was deeply involved.

Infamously, the British Embassy in Washington had been lobbying the US authorities relentlessly to prevent the publication of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on extraordinary rendition, specifically on the grounds that this would weaken Jack Straw’s defence. That defence rests on the grounds that details of kidnap and torture would annoy the United States and thus damage Britain’s security interests. As a blanket license for state involvement in torture, it only takes a second’s thought to realise how astonishingly dangerous that doctrine is. The High Court swallowed it. Thank God, the Court of Appeal did not.

So the Courts having ruled against Jack Straw, there are now two lines of defence between Straw and Sir Mark Allen, and a long spell in the pokey. The first is that the Government is appealing to the Supreme Court in London to have the case kicked out once again on “National Security” grounds. The second line of defence is the Crown Prosecution Service.

I can give you very substantial evidence that a cover-up is in progress within the CPS. Astonishingly the Lydd file has been passed within the CPS not to the serious crime division, but to the Counter-Terrorism Division. Yet terrorism is not the alleged crime here. The crimes are Gross Misconduct in Public Office, Conspiracy to Torture, Conspiracy to Kidnap and Abduct. We might relate them rhetorically to terrorism, but they are not that legally.

The incredible truth is that the file has been passed not to the Division which deals with the crimes allegedly committed by the perpetrators, Messrs Straw, Allen et al. It has rather been passed to the Divison which deals with the crime falsely alleged against the VICTIM of the case, Mr Belhadj. That simple fact tells you all you need to know about the attitude of the CPS to Operation Lydd.

In fact, the Counter-Terrorism Division of CPS works on a daily basis with public servants and security service functionaries who are themselves deeply implicated in the crimes being uncovered by Operation Lydd. A cover-up is certain.

The British Establishment really does stink.

Footnote: I phoned the CPS Press Office to give them a chance to respond. I got through to a spokesperson and left details and my number. They have not come back to me.

Israeli economics minister Naftali Bennett has claimed of Binyamin Netanyahu that “The prime minister is not a private person but the leader of the Jewish state and the whole Jewish world.” Really? Netanyahu is the leader of all the Jews in London, or California, or Ethiopia, who may never have set foot in his state?

This extraordinary remark by Bennett lays bare the fundamental flaw in the very concept of Israel. It is not a modern state, defined as a territory and comprising all the various citizens of whatever descent who live within it. It is rather a vicious racist construct, defined absolutely by race, refusing territorial limits, and with an aggressive theocratic overlay that claims tribal superiority over the entire rest of the world.

Here is a picture of the New Zealand cricket team. In the last twelve months, New Zealand cricket teams have fielded payers including Hamish Rutherford, Peter Fulton, Colin Munro, Dean Brownlie, Ross Taylor, Rob Nicol, Corey Anderson, Grant Elliott, Jimmy Neesham, Kyle Mills, Adam Milne and Mark Craig, not to mention the McCullum brothers. But if I told you that Alex Salmond was the leader of all Scots around the world, including the Black Caps, you would quite rightly call me a nutter.

We would not tolerate the level of racism in any other country that we tolerate from Israel. There was a huge outcry against Labour MP Paul Flynn who dared question whether it was sensible to send a strongly professed Zionist Jew as British ambassador to Israel, but when the Israeli government itself proclaim the political leadership of all Jews all over the world, it is a logical impossibility not to ask the question.

I wish nothing but good to all people, including all Jewish people, but by their increasingly hardline racialist approach, their unceasing encroachment on Palestinian land and their rigorous adoption of all the racist mechanisms of an apartheid state internally, I feat that the window of opportunity for a peaceful future for those Jewish people living in what is currently Israel is closing fast.

It must be universally proclaimed: there is not a single racial group in the whole world from whom worldwide racial claims of political allegiance, or an internal racially based legislative order, are acceptable. Bennett’s remarks are beyond the limit of civilised political discourse.

Opium production in Afghanistan has increased by 4,000% since the start of the US/UK/Others occupation. 4,000%. Really. For the first time, this year production of processed opium exceeded 7,500 tons. This industrial manufacture would be impossible without the active participation both of the puppet government we installed, and the command structures of our intelligence services. The Karzai and Dostum families, alongside other of our clients, have become terribly wealthy. Secret funds of intelligence services have swelled.

Opium production amounts to a staggering 60% of Afghanistan’s GDP. Yet we have that pompous fool Jon Simpson on the BBC opining what a great success our occupation was, how Afghanistan is transformed.

The UK spent 37 billion pounds of money we do not have on the occupation of Afghanistan, when our health service is creaking and hungry children are reliant on foodbanks. That 37 billion is a drastic underestimate – it is based on “marginal costing”, the extra cost of operating the troops and equipment in Afghanistan compared to the cost of keeping them on Salisbury Plain. The fact you would not need this massive offensive army and all that equipment, were you not conducting worldwide simultaneous invasions, is not taken into account at all. The true cost of the Afghan occupation is many times higher than 37 billion.

Bear that in mind when you see Cameron posturing about a routine EU subscription cost of 1.7 billion. There are unlimited funds for attacking and occupying Johnny Foreigner, but money spent on co-operation with other nations is an absurd waste. A view to be reinforced by increasing racist rhetoric about being “swamped” by the Eastern Europeans who are now adding so much to our economy and our culture.

There is an irony here because one of the major reasons for the EU contribution recalculation was the UK government’s decision to include, for the first time, an estimate for illegal trade – in drugs and prostitution – in UK GDP figures, thus producing a spurious blip in economic growth. Prostitution alone was estimated at 6.5 billion pounds, which makes it one of our major industries, while the drugs figure was still higher and represented a direct contribution to UK GDP from the result of our Afghan occupation.

So it was all worthwhile after all! Those soldiers did not die in vain! When you add to that, the fact that the prostitution figure itself is boosted by the many unfortunates, mostly women, who enter the trade to fund a heroin habit, you have a perfect circle of serendipity.

Who can possibly claim that UK policy is unplanned and immoral?

This speech was delivered despite one of the greatest hangovers in the entire history of the universe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERWrcBR1Wd0

I am rather proud of it. Even more proud of the extraordinary continuing vibrancy of the independence movement.

Blogging will resume very shortly. As several of you have noticed, there has been a great deal of technical work and stress testing done on the blog the past few days. This is almost complete: there may be something of a change in appearance shortly.

It is ten years since I ended my FCO career by going on the Today programme and blowing the whistle on CIA/MI6 complicity in torture. It was on my 46th birthday, and I was in my second year as an Ambassador and my seventh as a top Whitehall civil servant, a member of the Senior Civil Service.

Looking back now, what is most striking are the blatant lies by the FCO that they were not obtaining intelligence from torture. As the BBC reported:

In one he claimed MI6 had used information passed on to it by the CIA but originally obtained in Uzbek torture cells – something strongly denied by the Foreign Office.

I do not think there is a single person in public life or social media nowadays who would not accept that the FCO were simply lying. Jack Straw was blatantly to lie about it to parliament. But ten years ago the public and media knew much less than they know now. Nobody outside secret circles had ever heard the words extraordinary rendition. It was a year later – May 2005 – before the New York Times revealed the CIA was sending people to Uzbekistan to be tortured, precisely as I had stated.

It sounds incredible, but in October 2004 many people believed it was Craig Murray who was a liar, not Jack Straw. Again I do not think there is a single individual today who does not understand that Jack Straw was lying through his teeth. But back in 2004 life was hard for me.

After going on the Today programme I went on the run, in fear for my life. I am not paranoid, remember David Kelly. I first stayed with my old friend Andy Myles in Edinburgh, then I think Chief Executive of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. He was phoned the next morning by the FCO. When he denied knowledge of my whereabouts, they not only said they knew I was staying with him, they said which bedroom I was sleeping in. Ten years ago today I was hiding in Aviemore in the house of my old friend Dominic.

That was the start of a decade as a dissident where I have devoted my life to exposing, and trying to counter, the evil of the neo-conservative policy pursued by our political class at the behest of the corporations who fund them. I have suffered a huge loss in money, status and most of the other normal aspirations. But what I have gained is invaluable. I have respect and love, while Blair and Straw will forever be despised.

I hope I don’t pretend to have expertise on everything. On fracking I have none. My entirely amateur views on the subject are that the major risk appears to be pollution of aquifers. The UK seems too seismically stable for earthquakes or volcanoes to be a serious concern. I am not terribly worried about the local environmental consequences of the installations – human activity of all kinds detracts from the natural environment in a sense. This spot was doubtless a great deal more pleasing aesthetically before Dundee was built upon it. But then Dundee has a great deal more human utility.

It is also plain to me that humans are going to have to burn fossil fuels for a while yet, despite the very obvious fact that we also need to put much more energy and resource into developing renewable alternatives.

So I am not opposed to fracking in principle, which I know will upset some people. But nor can I understand the hurry. Fracking is being undertaken on a very large scale in the United States and elsewhere. Onshore fracking is not actually a new technology at all, but its widespread use is new. Given concerns especially about the effects on underground water supplies, why don’t we just wait for thirty years and see how it turns out elsewhere? That should give time for a good accumulation of evidence.

The hydrocarbons are not going anywhere – they will still be there in thirty years time and I predict will be a good deal more valuable. So my entirely unprofound, non-fundamentalist and dully pragmatic view on fracking is that there should be a thirty year moratorium. Then we can think about it.

I spoke to a really uplifting Perth for Independence meeting yesterday – over 300 people, more than attended Cameron’s “Rally to Save the Union” in the same city during the campaign. There is no sense of defeat at all in the Yes campaign and it retains its spine-tingling energy intact.

Many interesting contributions including – a continuing feature of this campaign – several first time speakers, and more female than male. In my own talk I said that anyone who voted No because they believed “The Vow” was stupid beyond belief. Scotland will never be given by Westminster its revenues from oil and whisky, and any devolution settlement based on Scotland keeping and spending its own taxation but excluding taxation from oil and whisky, would undoubtedly be arranged by Westminster to result in a net cut in public spending in Scotland.

I have in any case not the slightest interest in any arrangement which does not give Scotland control of its own foreign and defence policies, and leaves us still as participants in continual aggressive war, torture and extraordinary rendition.

It remains my view that Scotland’s innate dislike of the astonishing wealth gap of British society, the rise of UKIP and the shift to the right of the Westminster parties, the danger of leaving the EU and European Convention on Human Rights (and thus expulsion from the Council of Europe), all contribute to a political, cultural and social divergence which make independence inevitable. It is coming in a much shorter timescale than people realise.

It is lead news in every outlet of the mainstream media today that there is a massive increase in terrorism – as everyone can plainly see from all the bodies littering our streets.

I can also tell you that there is a massive increase in the threat of deadly asteroids about to hit Britain and destroy us all. My unimpeachable evidence for the existence of this massive asteroid threat is my own anti-asteroid activity. I and my dedicated team have visited 268 sites this year where we thought an asteroid was about to strike. That represents a 40% increase on our activity last year and therefore the media can say a 40% increase in the asteroid threat.

Thankfully due to the brilliance and never-ceasing vigilance of my anti-asteroid team the world has been saved. We can continue to do this if given a further 15% budget increase to 32 billion pounds and the right to arrest anyone anytime who looks a bit dusky, and take Theresa May to pose in their home.

There will also be a new crime of denying that asteroids are dangerous or looking at videos and pictures of asteroids. Anybody found guilty of looking at asteroids in other countries will be found guilty of treason and hung drawn and quartered.

Tomorrow is my birthday and campaigning has taken me to Dundee away from family and friends. If anybody wishes to buy me a birthday pint or chaser, I shall be in Mennies of the Perth Rd tomorrow from 7pm.

Please read and consider very carefully this brilliant dissection of the BBC’s propaganda blitz on Syria, at the time when the security establishment were trying to propel us into war against Assad, before they decided it was just as profitable to have a war against Assad’s enemies. For the security establishment and arms industry, any dream will do.

I do not agree with every single point made, but I do think every single point is worth considering and agree with a lot of it. My own opinion is that there was a genuine attack, but that the coverage of it was deliberately enhanced and exaggerated to a very large degree. The smoking gun remains the two versions of the soundtrack of Dr Hallam’s “live” interview. The failure to acknowledge that the “charity” featured is directly linked to one of the fighting rebel factions is less spectacular than some of the other possible fabrications, but in itself an appalling dereliction of journalistic integrity.

It is vital to remember the context. This massive propaganda broadcast, entitled “Saving Syria’s Children”, was put out by the BBC just before the crucial vote by the Commons on the government’s request to go to war with Syria, in order to “save Syrian civilians”.

Please do read the main page and I do urge you to follow all the links through because this is very, very important. Particularly in Scotland, millions of people have awoken to the fact that the BBC is purely an organ of state propaganda. The important next step is to acknowledge that the BBC’s dishonesty extends well beyond the subject of Scottish Independence.

It is amusing that Polly Toynbee attacks Russell Brand on the grounds there is a real difference between Labour and the Conservatives, on the day Ed Balls argues immigrants must be kept out by amending the EU treaties – in the same paper!

I have never been a great fan of Russell Brand’s media persona, and for a revolutionary to be shacked up with Jemima Khan’s millions is perhaps some kind of extended exercise in post-modern irony as performance art. But Brand’s perception that the neo-con political parties are all the same is absolutely correct, and his is almost the only voice the media will broadcast saying it. When I have been saying precisely the same thing for a decade it is not news. News, apparently, lies not in what is said, but whether or not it is a celebrity who says it.

Not voting is a perfectly reasonable choice. I would prefer that people voted Green, or independent, or SNP in Scotland or Plaid Cymru in Wales. But Brand’s option of not voting is also valid – the entire system of corporations, media and politicians is designed to block real change.

Polly Toynbee is a very rich woman compared to the rest of us, with a great deal of inherited wealth and a Guardian salary well into six figures, for writing a constant stream of tribal pro-Labour drivel. She quotes with approval John Lydon’s observation:

it’s clear, if you’ve got a pile of money in the bank, you vote for people with piles of money in the bank

Which is absolutely true, and why Polly Toynbee votes Labour. Another irony which flies over the head of the humourless old moneybag-toting harridan.

Toynbee is delighted to discover that the rambling Lydon is not really a revolutionary. The rest of the world had known it was only a money-spinning pose for forty years, and he is pretty right wing.
Extraordinary that Toynbee points out the strangeness of treating Russell Brand as a political guru, and then sets up John Lydon instead. The silly old bat really, really doesn’t get irony, does she? Or is Polly Toynbee in fact herself some kind of monumental performance art installation, designed on every level to project the futility and hypocrisy of New Labour?

No other blog can do this 🙂

There is a one minute cut in the middle. This may have been an accident, but it excludes the bit where I say that the Labour Party in Dundee was telling people not to vote Independence or the SNP would let all the black people in. If this was cut deliberately as it repeats a racist comment, I think that is a mistake. To fight racism you need to face it squarely, and the extreme shame of Labour should be exposed as widely in possible.

The TV debates for the Westminster election will offer you a dazzling range of neo-con policies from right wing to very right wing. Conservative, Labour, Liberal or UKIP, any flavour of corporate neo-con control that you like. It is a kind of weird speed dating circle between Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage.

If it had been UKIP with thousands of supporters on George Square yesterday, does anybody doubt the rally would have received much more coverage. The decision about the election debates could not offer starker proof of my thesis that UKIP is an antibody produced by the establishment in response to voter disillusion with the lack of real policy difference between mainstream parties. Protest is to be diverted into a right wing channel that really offers no difference at all.

The fact that UKIP and the Lib Dems are to participate in the electoral debates, whereas the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP – all of which offer genuine alternatives to the neo-con narrative – are not, is indefensible. The SNP will win more MPs than the Liberal Democrats and the Greens will have more votes. UKIP have just won their first ever elected MP – which means they have finally caught up with the Greens. Given equal media access, I expect the Green vote would exceed the UKIP vote too – which is precisely the outcome the broadcasters are desperate to avoid.

The voters must not be shown that other choices, other visions, other policies are possible. You can choose any neo-con you wish.

Here is Naomi Wolf speaking yesterday in Glasgow.

According to Statcounter, so far at least 1,956 people have watched the youtube of my own speech from this website alone – yet the Youtube webcounter is currently showing 288. Can anyone explain this?

With thanks to Node, this is the transcript of my speech:

Thank you very much. It’s great to be here. It’s fantastic to be following Pat. What a speech. You know, we had Jim Murphy and Dougie Alexander saying that Nationalists are all violent and intimidating, whereas actually we’re sitting down to Pat, talking about medieval history and Noam Chomsky.

We have not lost. We are still here and we are still fighting for independence, and we have built with 1.6 million people the biggest social movement in Scottish history, and it’s going forward.

Two weeks before the vote, the Financial Times published that for the first time ever in the United Kingdom, there were now one hundred billionaires, and the Financial Times seemed to be proud of that. It is a disgrace that there are one hundred billionaires in the country where we have food banks because children are going hungry. We are here because we want to create a country which has no hungry children and no billionaires.

The reaction to the referendum result has been for politics at the Westminster level to move still further to the right. We have seen Ukip make advances in the last few days and when you see Ukip campaign on the ground, their strategy, their entire propaganda, is purely based on racism, and it is appalling that they are getting elected in England in bye-elections, and the response to that at Westminster has been to say that everybody should move further to the right and onto the same ground. We’ve got the Labour party saying they’re going to be tougher on immigration, everybody striving to be more racist than the next person. I was in Dundee campaigning and I was told by an old lady she’d been told do not vote for Independence because the SNP will let all the black people in, and that was the Labour party who were saying that.

We have got to recover the moral ground. We have got to build an ethical country, a country we can be proud of – in its politics, in its multi-culturalism, in its inclusion, in its social provision for those more needy, we have got to change.

I’m not interested anyway, frankly, in a few more powers for the Scottish parliament. For me it makes no difference at all if they can change income tax a penny this way, a penny that way, if they’re still sending our children to fight and die in illegal wars.

We have to move towards a future, a future of independence. I don’t just have hope, I have certainty that we’re going to get there, and next time as we campaign as a country, it goes forward, we’re going for full and true independence.

We are saying “No to Trident“, but we are also saying “No to Nato“. We are also saying “No to the pound sterling,” we’ll have our own currency. And we are saying “No to the queen“, we don’t need her. And I’ll tell you this, when the queen was purring down the telephone to David Cameron, that was not purring, that was the death rattle of the monarchy in Scotland.

We are moving forward. We are going to win, and we are going to be a free and independent nation. Thank you.

As regulars here know, my forte is the one hour talk. You can’t develop an argument in five minutes. But my basic thinking, which I tried to get across to people, is that the Tory leaning SNP supporters of Broughty Ferry and their ilk voted No anyway. A genuine argument for the Scotland we want, promoted with real passion, is more appropriate now than Independence Lite, or the “don’t worry nothing will change” approach.

No Nato, No Pound Sterling, No Monarch should be the motto.

That was not purring – that was the death rattle of the monarchy in Scotland.

I was rather proud of that one. A fantastic day in George Square yesterday. I am grateful to whoever in the crowd took this video.

I do not know whether the organisers were taking any closer video or if it will appear. The sound quality was actually rather poor in the square itself. If you went further back than this, you could not hear the speakers at all.

There were 8,000 in the Square most of the time, but attendance over the seven hour period was much higher than that. I met a great many people, particularly in the pub last night, who had missed my speech because they had either left before it or arrived after it. But the atmosphere throughout the day was electric and extremely positive.

I am wondering whether a permanent occupation camp in George Square – right through to Independence – might be a useful initiative. I am looking for somewhere to live in Scotland anyway….

In Heywood and Middleton, a classic Labour northern English seat, UKIP and the Tories combined got 51% of the vote. In Clacton – a deprived coastal area – the Conservatives and UKIP got 83% of the vote.

It is not that Labour and the Lib Dems offer an alternative that is in any significant way less devoted to corporate interests and serving the economic needs of the super-rich. The large majority of voters, and especially those who do not bother to vote, have by now worked out that the difference in their lives is negligible if they have a different member of the political class with his or her nose in the trough at their expense.

But everybody who has seen an actual UKIP campaign knows that their grassroots appeal is simply racist – they promote the idea that it is not the billionaires and ultra-wealthy who are sucking the resources from society, but rather the poor of a different colour. The Conservatives are striving, particularly through rampant Islamophobia, to compete for the atavistic vote.

UKIP is an antibody produced by the political establishment and their paymasters, to counter public disillusion with a dreadful and worsening unequal society. UKIP’s task is to divert public anger away from their exploiters towards specific groups of the poor. It does so very effectively. UKIP’s success yesterday will lead to a race among the mainstream parties to scapegoat vulnerable social groups – immigrants, benefit claimants, unemployed – and to compete in external xenophobia. The next government of the United Kingdom will be right wing to a degree which would have seemed unthinkable for the majority of my life.

Many thanks to everybody who sent me advice, texts and illustrations on reformatting The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. Apologies I was unwell again so could not respond for a couple of days – and more than 100 emails were received, including several from people who have done substantial work. It will take me some time to work through. I will send individual replies but please be patient. I am however feeling very much better now and seem to have my energy back!

I am going to speak at the Hope Over Fear rally at George Square, Glasgow on Sunday.