Given that the absolute maximum share of the UK vote Labour might conceivably get is 36%, it is extraordinarily arrogant for Miliband to insist on the right to impose his full manifesto. Tactically, of course, he is trying to panic Scottish voters into supporting Labour lest they lose the chance to have him as PM. I can see no reason why this would suddenly become more successful than it has been so far.

Unionists have plainly twigged that next time we have a referendum, they will lose, even if it was next week. The near hysterical focus of unionists on not allowing another referendum, almost to the exclusion of all other argument, is very heartening. Independence is not only inevitable, it will be with us even sooner than the unionists fear.

Vessels have the right of freedom of navigation through straits, on “innocent passage” under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. As it sounds, that amounts to a right to pass straight through on normal business. Territorial waters do not affect innocent passage. The coastal state has the right to establish sea lanes for maritime safety purposes.

So whether the Marshall Islands flagged Maersk Tigris was in Iranian territorial waters is not relevant to its right to pass through. If, as Iranian sources have indicated, it really was impounded for commercial debt, then that would have to be in territorial waters. But for that the crew could not be detained, and the debt would have to be immediately stated and the ship released if paid. Iran is not acting as though this really is for debt.

The Maersk Tigris is however a good example of why the shipping industry is an absolute disgrace. It is flagged in a country with which neither the vessel nor its owners have any connection. It is owned by Maersk, leased to a renting company in Berlin, and then rented back by Maersk. The purpose of the flagging arrangements is to avoid proper safety, crew qualification, wage and trade union regulations which go with a genuine state flag. The leasing is an international tax fiddle. For reasons nothing to do with Iran or the US, I have no sympathy with the owners or insurers.

I rather expect the Iranians are lying about the commercial debt. Iran and the US are playing a pointless, massively expensive hawkish game in the Gulf. At least the Iranians have the excuse that they live there.

Just as Iran should not have stopped the passage of the Maersk Tigris, so the US Navy had no right at all recently to threaten Iranian cargo ships which may or may not have been on the way to Yemen. Even if those ships had entered Yemeni waters, the US would only have had the right to intervene if asked to do so by the government of Yemen. While that government is a Saudi and US puppet, they are not keen for all their people to know that. Giving permission for invisible blasts from the sky is much more deniable than for huge warships.

I was sorry for the two American hostages who were killdied in a drone strike, but sickened that given all the hundreds of innocent women and children he has murdered in drone strikes, Obama finally got all sackcloth and ashes over two American men.

A classic example of BBC mock balance on the news tonight as James Cook devoted apparently equal time to Douglas Alexander and Mhairi Black in Renfrewshire East.

Of Mhairi we were told by Cook that her opponents say that her youth shows, and that she carries fighting talk too far. Well, of Douglas his opponents say that he is a war criminal, and that he stabbed his sister in the back. That was not mentioned.

Whereas the “equal time” allowed the SNP candidate included BBC commentary giving direct personal criticism of her, there was no critical note in the Alexander side of the coverage. An interesting example of how the state propaganda system works.

Students of irony may enjoy this one.

The only time in the entire last parliament where the Lib Dems actually stood up to the Tories and whipped their MPs to vote in the opposite direction, was not to protect the poor and needy from vicious cuts. It was to protect their own jobs. They voted down the Boundary Commission proposals to amend constituency boundaries to account for population shifts and make them more equal sized, and to cut Westminster from 650 troughing MPs to 600.

A general cut of 8.5% in the number of MPs was not the only problem for the gravy train Lib Dems, who were particularly concerned that they could suffer a net extra loss of half a dozen seats from boundary changes in rural constituencies with small populations. There was no hint of principle in their decision, merely a desire to keep their snouts in the trough.

The wonderful irony is, their arses will now very possibly be booted from their ministerial limousines by their own actions. Because the large majority of over-small population constituencies are in the centre of declining post-industrial cities, the beneficiaries of the Lib Dems action will be mostly the Labour Party and secondly the SNP.

Indeed if the total number of votes cast in the UK for Tories plus Lib Dems is equal to the total number of votes cast in the UK for Labour plus Scot Nats (which is more or less what the polls are showing), then Labour plus the Scot Nats will win approximately 35 more seats than the rival bloc for the same total votes, entirely because of the Lib Dem veto on the Boundary Commission proposals.

It’s convoluted, but delicious irony once you get your head round it. What an arse Clegg is.

Gordon Brown and wee Dougie Alexander once bestrode the world, bombing much of it. Now these mighty egos are confined within Elderslie Village Hall.

The problem is, the average member of the population does not have a high opinion of the dynamic duo. So it is essential that they are kept away from average people, and instead paraded only before vetted audiences of Labour activists. There are not very many of those; so the venues are tiny, with a small number of carefully bunched people holding silly placards, photographed by a compliant media only from carefully prepared angles.

Now I plunge happily into politically incorrect ground. As normal people have abandoned it and Labour has come down to the core of its core support, it is truly striking how remarkably ugly its hardcore activists are. I don’t mean that in any metaphorical sense. I mean that they are an aesthetic disaster. It is not a product of poverty, as the core support are all well employed as research assistants or doing pretendy youth work jobs for Labour councils. Other parties do not have such challenging physiognomy. It is very seldom you can look at a room and say Gordon Brown is one of the best looking people there. Perhaps Blair’s crimes have been written on the faces of all the complicit.

Douglas Alexander not only facilitated the use of Diego Garcia for torture and extraordinary rendition, in an act of extreme hypocrisy the evil little shit also declared a “marine conservation area” around it. In the 1960’s Britain forcibly deported the entire population of the islands to make way for the US Air Base. Faced with a continual political and legal fight for them to return, Alexander sought to make it impossible with his “marine conservation area”. There is nobody who better represents Scottish Labour’s loss of its soul than Alexander. If Mhairi beats him I shall be extremely happy.

Full on neo-con philosophy underpinned Miliband’s “speech” to the Royal Institute of International Affairs yesterday. Miliband acknowledged that our bombing of Libya back to the stone age was the root cause of the boat people crisis.

But Miliband was not admitting that the Guernica style massacre was wrong – he voted for it. No, he was going the full Henry Jackson and arguing that what had been needed was neo-colonial occupation of Libya in order to reform its institutions – precisely as had been done in Iraq. And we all know how that went.

This is a blow to those who believed that Miliband was different from Blair, Brown, Murphy and his brother. In fact, the entire “speech” could have been written by the Henry Jackson Society. It bemoans the decline of the authority of international institutions like the UN and International Court of Justice, but states that this is because they had failed – and failed in particular to back western military intervention everywhere. Miliband argues that the solution is for individual states to take unilateral armed action abroad, but bemoans that this is more difficult because of cuts in western defence budgets. He wants increased defence spending to fund increased military intervention abroad. He does not acknowledge that it is precisely unilateral western military action in attacking other states which has destroyed the authority of the UN in the first place.

The “speech” is in fact a series of slogans, loosely connected. Both the content and the style say a huge amount about the depths to which our civic society has sunk. The prospect of this intellectual midget and neo-con lickspittle becoming Prime Minister is frankly appalling.

The RIIA, better known as Chatham House, does not normally hear lectures written by somebody incapable of constructing a paragraph of more than ten words. It would give me great pleasure if you would be so kind just to glance at the lecture I gave to Chatham House eleven years ago. Of course it is on a much more specific subject than Miliband’s neo-con declaration of faith, but I still feel I come rather well out of the contrast.

Rather like those Soviet parade photos where the nomenklatura got airbrushed out after execution, all trace of my lecture has disappeared from the Chatham House website.

We are directly responsible for the disasters in the Mediterranean. The bombing of Libya into failed state status is now coming back to haunt us. The ludicrous idea, propounded by Blair, Robert Cooper and the Henry Jackson Society, that you could improve dictatorial states by massive bombing campaigns that targeted their basic infrastructure, is now a total bust. Sadly so are Iraq and Libya, to the permanent detriment of many millions of people. We caused both the Islamic State and the Mediterranean boat disasters, and we caused them with bombs.

But the lack of any effective policing is only part of the problem. What makes people so desperate that they are prepared to give all of the small amount they own, to ruthless gangs, in exchange for a dreadful sea crossing with a one in ten chance of drowning? Most of the refugees are sub-Saharan African. We only see the European end of the saga, not the terrible conditions on the cross Saharan journeys that they start with.

There will be no security anywhere if the world does not address the terrible scourge of African poverty and under-development. That is a huge subject on which I have written extensively and worked much of my life, and I do not wish to open it here. But what it does show is the utter stupidity – inhumanity yes, but also stupidity – of UKIP in thinking that cutting development aid will increase the economic security of the UK.

Lord Carlile is amazingly unobservant. An excellent article in today’s Observer by Jay Rayner gives details of the establishment cover-up of Janner’s long continued child rapes. The silence of the Vaz draws most attention. But let us think about Alex Carlile.

Rayner states “The establishment, in the shape of his fellow MPs, men such as Labour’s Keith Vaz, Tory David Ashby and the then Lib Dem MP now Lord Carlile, closed ranks.” In the 1991 House of Commons debate deploring accusations against Janner, Carlile played a prominent part, describing Janner as a man of “integrity” and “determination”. Carlile should have known Janner fairly well. They were both MPs, both QCs, both members of Friends of Israel, both patrons of UK lawyers for Israel. The appear still to both be patrons of the Friends of Israel Educational Foundation. They were regulars on the same parliamentary committees dealing with legal affairs. They were both to leave the Commons at the same time and both to join the Lords only slightly apart.

Still, Carlile’s stalwart defence of his friend is understandable. You can’t expect him to have picked up on Janner’s secret life. Nor that of Cyril Smith. Carlile shared a small Commons office with Cyril Smith for many years. Oh dear. He really isn’t good at noticing things, is he?

Carlile’s mistress and eventual wife was a senior legal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Cosy world, Westminster, it it not?

Carlile went on to be a stunningly illiberal “Independent” Reviewer of anti-terror legislation, where he demonstrated his independence by agreeing to absolutely everything the security services told him. 42 day detention with no charge? No problem. In fact there was no period of detention without charge posited so extreme that Carlile did not support it. Secret courts hearing intelligence evidence the defence were not allowed to see? Fine by Carlile. Control orders? Great. He is a fantastic bastion, protecting the public, is Carlile.

Even better, of course, at protecting his associates.

Nicola Sturgeon is to be congratulated for refusing to back off from the goal of independence, and the right of the Scottish people to self-determination, under pressure from Andrew Marr today.

The truth is that the SNP’s potential for a stunning electoral result in Scotland is based on our success in holding together the Yes coalition under the SNP umbrella. All of the recent Scottish opinion polls put the SNP vote in precisely the same range as recent opinion polls on Scottish independence, up from September 2014. Given the very low polling for other pro-independence parties, it is beyond any doubt a myth that there is a significant vote for the SNP which does not want independence but is voting SNP to ensure Devo-Max. There is simply no evidence of that. The opinion polls show the opposite, and anecdotal evidence from canvassers shows the SNP vote overwhelmingly an independence vote.

In fact, I suspect that the SNP will get less unionist votes in this election than ever before. In Dundee East, which I know extremely well, there is no point denying that historically the SNP benefited from Tory tactical voters wanting to keep Labour out. That is no longer happening, due to the polarising effect of the referendum. Dundee East SNP voters are now all committed nationalists.

In fact what we are now seeing, quite openly, is the Unionist parties advocating tactical voting between Red, Orange and Blue Tories against the SNP throughout Scotland and even Labour Party activists in places canvassing for the Tories. This is of a piece with the Labour tactic of pitching its austerity policies to southern English Tory voters: Miliband’s message today is that he will be the Tories’ champion.

All the SNP have to do is continue to hold together the overwhelming bulk of the Yes coalition and, due to FPTP, we can sweep much of Scotland. That is why Nicola’s stance today was not only right in principle, but wise in preventing seepage to the Scottish Greens. That does not make FPTP a better system. And we should not allow the media to build up expectations of the SNP taking every seat, so they can claim Murphy has triumphed if he hangs on to a dozen.

But one thing we should say, loud and clear. An SNP vote is always a vote for independence, and it is absolutely a myth that there is now any significant swathe of unionist SNP voters out there.

The SNP vote is an independence vote, end of.

Miliband promises tougher immigration controls than Tories, after his promise of triple lock guaranteed austerity. How much more right wing can Labour get? Having alienated the Scottish people, are Labour now trying to alienate everybody outside London and Surrey? It seems Labour policy is made by a focus group of hedge fund managers infiltrated by Farage.

In my diplomatic career I refused three UK honours:
LVO (Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order)
OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire)
CVO (Commander of the Royal Victorian Order)

On two occasions the Queen personally handed me presents instead. One was a silver armada dish, and one a letter rack made by Viscount Linley. I donated the latter to an auction for Julian Assange’s defence fund. The silver armada dish must be packed away somewhere. If I can dig it out, I shall auction it to raise funds for the SNP! Impeccable provenance.

I turned down the honours because I am a republican and believer in Scottish independence, and explained that to the Queen on one occasion when she asked. To be fair, she was perfectly fine with that.

I was thinking about honours in contemplating:
Lord Janner
Lord Brittan
Sir Peter Hayman
Sir Cyril Smith
Sir Jimmy Savile

That list could be expanded by a great many. I cannot help but think I made the right decision.

Yet another election is about to be held under the UK’s dreadfully insecure postal ballot system, which an English judge who presides over electoral fraud cases has said “would disgrace a banana republic”.

In a single case, Judge Mawrey had come across postal ballot fraud being committed in 14 different ways. There have in fact been many convictions for postal ballot fraud. Some of these are of Labour councillors in Blackburn, where I personally came across a boarded up empty flat containing fifteen registered postal voters, and we chased Labour councillors from street to street as they collected bagfuls of uncompleted postal ballots. In that election, won by Jack Straw, at 37% Blackburn had the highest percentage of ballots cast by post in the UK. There have been numerous convictions for postal ballot fraud throughout the UK, but that is the tip of the iceberg and most of the time, they get away with it.

The system was introduced by Blair and I have no doubt that party advantage was in mind. There have been Tory convictions for postal ballot fraud in Birmingham, but Labour have been by far the biggest beneficiaries. To the extent that I had been puzzled why on earth the Condem coalition had not repealed this awful legislation. The answer is, of course, that they are willing to sacrifice a little ground in the fake battle between red tories and blue tories, in order to retain the postal ballot against the necessity of large scale vote rigging in the effort to keep Scotland under Westminster rule.

Party political activists know this next point to be true, but it is almost unbelievable. There is an electoral commission regulation which specifically facilitates postal ballot fraud. Postal ballots must be physically mixed in with other ballots before counting, so that it is impossible to tell if the postal ballot result differs markedly from the voting in person result. I can quite understand why they must be counted at the same time as other ballots, but physically mixed in?

The 800,000 postal ballots registered in Scotland are one major reason why we cannot be complacent about the opinion polls. This is wide open to fraud. Multiple voting or voting by non-existent “ghost” voters, or people living elsewhere, is perfectly possible at the ballot box but much more difficult and time consuming and much more open to detection.

The rationale for the abandonment of the classic secret polling booth ballot as the basic method of voting, was that postal voting would increase voter turnout. In fact, voter turnout has steadily fallen since its introduction. I predict in England – where there is no realistic prospect of change from the old trougher tory parties – it will fall again. In Scotland, where there is a vision of real change, turnout will be up. But if anybody thinks the British state is going to let Scotland move closer to independence without fighting dirty, they are extremely naïve.

In future, there should be a return to the principle that normally your vote should be cast in person at the secret ballot. To get off your arse to vote is not too much to ask for maintaining democracy. Postal votes should again be provided only to those who have medical certification that they are unable to attend the polling station, or evidence of living abroad. I favour tax certificates from a foreign country as the norm for the latter.

The Lord President of Scotland’s judges, Lord Gill, has made a complete fool of himself by leading British judges in a walk-out from the Commonwealth Law Conference. The action is in protest against Julian Assange’s participation by video-link in a panel discussion on surveillance and the role of the security services.

The walk-out happened after Julian’s talk, not before it, which rather gives the impression that what Lord Gill and his fellow judges objected to was the content of Assange’s talk, rather than the fact of it. Assange stated among other points that nationalists were right to believe that MI5 were active against them in the referendum campaign.

The Assange talk proved extremely popular with lawyers and judges from all over the Commonwealth. In fact it had to be shifted to a larger room to accommodate them all. So it seems Lord Gill’s disinterest in the concept of freedom of speech is not widely shared in the Commonwealth.

What Gill and his Scottish and English colleagues could have done – and I presume actually did – was to boycott the Assange panel and simply attend other panels on at the same time. What they have now done is to boycott all the panels happening after the Assange talk is gone, at some of which some of the boycotters were due to be talking or chairing, as an attempt to mess up the conference as some childish kind of spiteful revenge.

The members of the English Supreme Court who took part in this action have demonstrated their extreme prejudice against Assange – who has exercised his right in law to claim political asylum and who has never been charged with anything.

Julian has today told me that he is concerned that their action is also prejudicial to the cases currently before the Swedish Supreme Court and the UN Committee on Arbitrary Detention. Quite why the English and Scottish judges were moved to this peculiar display of prejudice is not immediately clear; I suspect they were pushed. Lord Gill is an interesting example of the self-made lackey. If you always promote the interests of the Establishment, even a man of talent but humble origins can get to the top, provided he is an entirely unscrupulous character.

STOP PRESS

In an effort to make Lord Gill and the judges look less like asses, it is being assiduously put about that they did not know Julian was going to speak before his appearance, and he unexpectedly appeared at the session. That this is a blatant lie is easily proved. Julian’s appearance was at short notice – a week. His name was in the conference programme, and the event was announced in the Scottish Legal press the day before it happened. Everyone at the conference knew Assange was appearing, that is why the room had to be changed for a larger one.

That our judges are not just asses but lying asses ought to be the source of some concern. Where is Lallands Peat Worrier when you need him?

Adam Werritty’s friend and long term contact, the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, accompanied Greville Janner to visit a kindergarten in Israel in 2012, which was named in Janner’s honour. I wonder if the government of Israel will now change the name?

The irony of naming a kindergarten after Janner is extraordinary. But is it not strange that in 2012, when Janner’s activities had been known to the authorities for decades, Matthew Gould was accompanying him to a kindergarten of all places? Is the Foreign Office really that dense? It is also not normal for an Ambassador to accompany an opposition Lord around in this way.

I could not help but be struck by the link below the last linked piece, to an article by Greville Janner entitled “My Friend Michael Jackson“.

From the DPP’s Statement Today:

•In relation to the allegations investigated in Operation Enamel, the CPS considers that the evidential test was passed on the basis that the evidence is sufficient to have warranted charging and prosecuting Lord Janner in relation to the particular charges listed below; these relate to nine individuals:
•14 indecent assaults on a male under 16 between 1969 and 1988
•2 indecent assaults between 1984 and 1988
•4 counts of buggery of a male under 16 between 1972 and 1987
•2 counts of buggery between 1977 and 1988.

•In relation to the other three previous investigations, the CPS also now considers that the evidential test was passed. It follows that the CPS judges that mistakes were made in the decision making at the time by both the Leicestershire police in 2002 and the CPS in 1991 and 2007. Lord Janner should have been prosecuted in relation to those complaints.

It is, to say the least, interesting that the DPP states that police were unable to interview Janner on medical grounds after searching his offices in March 2014. Yet eight months later the Labour Peer was still able to attend the House of Lords and claim his £300 a day expenses.

How many more protected villains are still sat in the House of Lords – or Commons?

I am going to repeat this from my last post, as the implications are so appalling that nobody seems to want to face up to them. Some of these boys must still be alive: the Holocaust Educational Trust – Chairman, Greville Janner – should make a real effort to find them and ask what happened.

Given Janner’s later preying on boys from care homes, I cannot read this without a shudder. In publishing it, I in no way intend to demean the dreadful suffering of the child survivors of the Holocaust. It appears that Janner may have been preying on the most vulnerable of children for his own purposes, and there could have been a sick motive to his concern:

I was taken up to the Kinderheim, to the Children’s Home, where there were some sixty orphan children, most of whose lives had been saved by monasteries, by being out in the woods or by miracles in each case and they all spoke Yiddish and I didn’t speak Yiddish and it was very difficult to talk to them but we knew some of the same songs so we sang together in Hebrew they knew and I knew the songs and then one of them said to me the first Yiddish words I’ve ever learnt , he said “Gavreal”, which is Greville in Hebrew and (he) called me “Gavreal spishtie ping pong, ping pong” and he pushed back and forwards as though he was holding a ping pong bat so my first words in Yiddish were “ping pong” and I played Ping Pong with them and they taught me a few words of Yiddish and I found it such a moving experience that for the next eighteen months I went back to them every weekend.

I also list again the positions which Lord Janner still holds according to the parliamentary website.

Vice President – The Association for Jewish Youth
Vice President – The Jewish Leadership Council
President – The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women
Advisory Board – Community Security Trust
Vice President – The World Jewish Congress
Chairman – The Holocaust Educational Trust
Director – The United Jewish Israel Appeal

All of these bodies need to remove Janner from any position he holds – not allow him to gracefully resign. And they need to issue statements repudiating him, as most definitely does the Board of Deputies of British Jews, of which Janner was Chairman for a decade while he was committing these offences.

The Jewish institutions in the UK are acting precisely like the Catholic Church of twenty years ago on this issue. Where is the openness? Where is the angst? Where is the admission? Above all, where is the apology?

The Director of Public Prosecutions has decided that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute serial paedophile Greville Janner, for many years the leader of the Zionist lobby in the UK. I presume that his convenient senility is the reason for non-prosecution.

But the facts of Janner’s activities in Leicester care homes have been known for decades, and there was overwhelming evidence in one particular case. The failure of the state to act against Janner when he was a Labour MP and Chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is another example of the disgraceful impunity of the powerful in this country. In a pattern that has become familiar to us, police investigating the case were in 1989 warned off by their superiors.

Given Janner’s later preying on boys from care homes, I cannot read this without a shudder. In publishing it, I in no way intend to demean the dreadful suffering of the child survivors of the Holocaust. It appears that Janner may have been preying on the most vulnerable of children for his own purposes, and there could have been a sick motive to his concern:

I was taken up to the Kinderheim, to the Children’s Home, where there were some sixty orphan children, most of whose lives had been saved by monasteries, by being out in the woods or by miracles in each case and they all spoke Yiddish and I didn’t speak Yiddish and it was very difficult to talk to them but we knew some of the same songs so we sang together in Hebrew they knew and I knew the songs and then one of them said to me the first Yiddish words I’ve ever learnt , he said “Gavreal”, which is Greville in Hebrew and (he) called me “Gavreal spishtie ping pong, ping pong” and he pushed back and forwards as though he was holding a ping pong bat so my first words in Yiddish were “ping pong” and I played Ping Pong with them and they taught me a few words of Yiddish and I found it such a moving experience that for the next eighteen months I went back to them every weekend.

My emphasis. Indeed I wonder if this is where it all started for Janner?

Janner is on “leave of absence” from the House of Lords. But according to the parliamentary website, he still retains the following positions, and it appears that not one of these organisations has repudiated him:

Vice President – The Association for Jewish Youth
Vice President – The Jewish Leadership Council
President – The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women
Advisory Board – Community Security Trust
Vice President – The World Jewish Congress
Chairman – The Holocaust Educational Trust
Director – The United Jewish Israel Appeal

It is wildly inappropriate, in particular, for the Association for Jewish Youth and the Community Security Trust not to formally dissociate themselves from Janner, and I call on all these organisations to make a statement. The silence is deafening.

Julian Assange has asserted that MI5 are active against Scottish nationalists, as the independence movement is seen as a threat to the UK. Happily, Julian being Julian there is now some traction for this in the corporate media. When I posted on it last week I received nothing from the corporate media except dismissal and abuse over twitter.

I think it is worth repeating some of that twitter abuse for the benefit of anybody who has not fully appreciated the vitriol felt across the entire unionist media establishment towards anybody who queries the narrative they are paid to peddle.

If this doesn’t shake any residual belief in media impartiality, nothing will:

“Craig Murray is mad shocker.” James Bloodworth, The Independent
“Zooooooooooooooomer” Euan Mccolm, The Scotsman
“Craig Murray is obviously an MI5 plant. WAKE UP PEOPLE.” Kevin Schofield, The Sun
“Makes the X files look like Panorama” Rob Corp, BBC
“Cybernat bullying is an MI5 false flag operations, says former British Ambassador. Many Nats believe this stuff.” Iain Martin, the Daily Telegraph
“If you must tweet links to Craig Murray’s MI5 guff, take the SNP twibbon off your profile. That party rejected him as a candidate and rightly so.” Stephen Daisley, STV
“The comments under Craig Murray’s latest rant are really something.” Ross McCafferty, Daily Record

Is it not strange that such a broad spectrum of the mainstream media react with instant vitriol to the very notion that the security services are active against the Scottish independence movement, when we know for certain that environmental campaign groups have been heavily penetrated by agents and agents provocateurs? When such tactics have been used against the Irish Republican movement for decades? When our intelligence services were up to their ears in torture and extraordinary rendition and repeatedly lied about it? When Edward Snowden has revealed the massive scale of surveillance by GCHQ?

In the days when the corporate media had a monopoly on the dissemination of information, simply shouting “conspiracy theorist”, “tinfoil hat” and “lizards” at somebody, excluding them from corporate media access, would be enough essentially to prevent anybody from reaching the public with information. But that no longer works in the age of new media, and especially it doesn’t work in Scotland after the referendum experience.

The fact that my comments on MI5 dirty tricks were so instantly and so unanimously rubbished by the corporate media are more likely to make people realise there must be something to hide. None of the so-called “journalists” I have quoted above has ever tackled the fact that I blew the whistle on torture and extraordinary rendition, and that the government and security services lied about it then, with the support of establishment journalists. In fact I challenge all the named journalists above to say what they think about the sanctioning of intelligence from torture by Blair and Straw, and whether I was truthful in my whistleblowing. Perhaps some of you might be able to contact them to point out the challenge.

For the avoidance of doubt, let me spell this out. I have certain knowledge from an inside source that disruption of separatist activity in Scotland now features in MI5 tasking. The “tasking” of the security services – and that is what it is officially called – is a very formal written exercise conducted by the Joint Intelligence Committee on an annual basis, though it is possible (but very difficult) to insert new tasks in-year.

I have personally taken part – often – in Cabinet Office meetings of JIC sub-committees determining tasking, though in my case more for MI6 than MI5. It is a system I know very well. None of the “journalists” abusing me above has ever sat on a JIC committee. None of them actually know anything about it. None has contacted me to ask me why I have stated there is an MI5 anti-SNP operation. It is so much easier to collect your pay packet, quaff another Merlot and drunkenly catcall “zoooomer!”

“J K Rowling’s always been batshit insane, this is nothing new”.
“Why are people just surprised about J K Rowling now – she has been this mental for years.”
“The, I presume, mentally ill, J K Rowling”
“J K Rowling should get F back to England”
“Don’t feel too bad for that lunatic J K Rowling” – followed by a sexual reference to her partner.

The newspapers would be full of stories tomorrow about this dreadful cyber-abuse. But that will not happen because all those tweets were about me, and all sent within the last twenty minutes, from identifiable unionist tweeters, some well known. Substitute Craig Murray for J K Rowling and they are verbatim. Just do a twitter search on craig murray and see for yourself.

I have never much been into Twitter. When I post here it is automatically tweeted, that is all. It is only today I realised how much you can see of twitter conversations and the interesting links between people. I had not realised that the execrable Carl Gardner, former very junior government lawyer and anti-Assange campaigner, has such warm links with anti-Muslim pro-torture campaigner Douglas Murray of the Henry Jackson Society, Vice President Jim Murphy. And how very interesting to see Blair MacDougall, Ross McTernan, Allan Massie, Euan Mccolm and numerous others from Scotland’s corporate media, all tweeting each other about how absolutely ridiculous it is to believe that the UK state would ever be involved in anything nefarious.

The same people were, of course, tweeting each other euphorically about how fantastically Jim Murphy had demolished Nicola Sturgeon in the leaders’ debates. It subsequently turned out nobody in the country saw it the same way as their smug little gang. I fear they will find the same is true now. Indeed, in the two hours since I posted, over twice as many people have already read about the false flag schemes, as the entire membership of Scottish Labour. That is more than the circulation of the Scotsman. There’s a thought.

The same people, of course, told you I was lying when I blew the whistle on torture and extraordinary rendition in 2004. The security services and the British Government would never do such a thing, they said. I was insane, they said.

Everybody now knows that I was telling the truth about torture and extraordinary rendition, and the Labour Government and the establishment shills were the liars. I am telling the truth again now and they are lying again now.

I warned that the security services will turn to false flag events to discredit the SNP. I said this in my talk to Edinburgh SNP Club on 6 March, and repeated it on this blog last week. Well, it is starting.

The reporting specifically blames nationalists. There is something delightfully old fashioned about MI5. Is spraying Q for Quisling not rather an obscure reference to today’s generation?

[UPDATE: I had not taken on board that the racist comments made allegedly by an unidentified SNP supporter to Faisal Islam of Sky News occurred in the same town on the same day. That indicates to me a coordinated security service plan was in progress, and gives some idea how they are operating, probably in a mobile team. That two such improbable and unusual “nationalist outrages” should occur the same day and the same place confounds belief.]

A sweeping SNP victory on May 7 is considered enough of a threat to the United Kingdom for the security services to use up some assets. Long term sleepers within the SNP will now be activated, so expect to find one or two such events traced to apparent bona fide SNP members.

More importantly, a major thrust will be agent provocateur activity. Security service agents within the SNP will be trying to initiate and to egg on (yes, that is a deliberate and relevant Jim Murphy reference, think about it) impressionable members to vandalism or violence. Be very, very wary of such people and do not be tempted.

There are, 100% for certain, MI5 agents online posing as “cybernats” who will be quoted in the media saying outlandishly unpleasant and threatening things. We will also see more incidents like the Murphy eggs or the complete set-up of the “mob” jostling Miliband in the St James Centre, which by chance I witnessed.

The ridiculous “violent nationalist” meme worked well for the unionists in the referendum campaign, and influenced some older voters who trust the BBC and corporate media. So they will play it again for all it is worth. The worry is of course that some manufactured incident will go wrong and somebody will get hurt. The still bigger worry is that, as the security services get increasingly desperate as polling day approaches, they will manufacture a false flag incident in which people deliberately get hurt.

The best defence against that is for ordinary people to be wise to how the real world works. Social media is key. Tweet, facebook, blog, instagram or whatever else you can do to spread this.

The BBC is now joining in the propaganda for tactical voting against the SNP, quoting an Andrew Skinner from United Against Separation as saying: “They won’t say it publicly, but be it a Labour or a Tory area they are happy to vote the other way to keep the SNP out.” Err, you just did say it publicly, Mr Skinner, and thank you for the confirmation that the Red and Blue Tories are all in it together.

It is hardly a coincidence that the BBC did this piece to promote unionist tactical voting centred on Dundee West, just after the Guardian did exactly the same thing , not only promoting Labour/Tory tactical voting, but about the same constituency. The unionist media really are absolutely determined to try to keep my friend Chris Law out, aren’t they? No chance.

Tactical voting is not all on the unionist side. Tommy Sheridan, Carolyn Leckie and Pat Kane are among the diverse figures, not SNP members, who have called on supporters of independence to vote SNP in this FPTP election. All of those are much more substantial figures than Andrew Skinner. Yet strangely the BBC and Guardian have felt no urge to interview any of them, or discuss pro-independence tactical voting. The shameless bias of the unionist media appears to have no limits.

Michael Fallon’s comments on Miliband and Trident this week also brought a welcome reminder that the Red/Blue Tories are no different, as the Labour Party hastened to affirm their love for weapons of mass destruction and their earnest desire to spend unlimited sums on ever greater potential to destroy mankind. Thanks for the clarification.

I should however like to see clarification from the SNP. Labour and Tory can of course combine to vote Trident replacement through. If that happens with Labour in office, the SNP should make plain that would mean the withdrawal of support for that government. For the SNP to allow Labour to push Trident through with Tory support, and then the SNP revert to supporting the Labour government in office, would be a betrayal of the Scottish people. To me, there has not been absolute clarity in our response on this issue. It must be given.