A UKIP candidate has been obliged to report to the police for breaking the law on “treating” for providing sausage rolls at an event. Yet Jack Straw at elections in 2005 and 2010 held rallies for the Muslim community in Blackburn at which the Labour Party provided hundreds of voters with full sit down meals, free of charge, and Police refused to take any action – indeed they were protecting the event. This is yet another example of the political elite being above the law.

This is what I posted on this blog seven years ago:

On 24 April 2005, in an election rally in Jack Straw’s Blackburn Constituency, over one hundred Blackburn electors were given a full free meal by the Labour party, with Jack Straw present, having just made an election speech to the lucky partakers of this generosity.

Every reader involved in electoral politics will know that this is a criminal offence under the Representation of the People Act, formally known as “Treating” – the provision of free food and drink to electors in an attempt to influence their vote. Conviction leads to forfeiture of the election, banning from public office and a prison sentence of up to two years.

It is also an offence of strict liability – a candidate is liable even if it was organised by someone else on his behalf. A candidate is viewed in law as responsible for his campaign. But in this instance, Jack Straw was actually present.

There was no shortage of witnesses – protestors were ringing the hall. The police were actually providing protection for this criminal event, and showed no interest in the fact that the proceeding was illegal. Jack Straw runs Blackburn as a personal fiefdom.

I therefore went to a police station and made a formal complaint. This obliged the police to investigate, and to do them justice, the detectives of Lancashire Police did a very good job, establishing the facts of the incident. They then sent a file to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The Crown Prosecution Service returned the file to Lancashire Police, saying that the offence was “Trivial” and there would be no prosecution. As this was one of the worst examples of large scale electoral treating since it was made a criminal offence in 1832, presumably this means the CPS has decided that the law on treating has fallen into desuetude, and candidates may now provide food and drink to electors.

Or only New Labour ministers?

I have no sympathy for UKIP. But if action is taken against UKIP where none was taken against Jack Straw for an absolutely blatant example, on a far greater scale, of the same offence, then that would be sickening, and yet a further example of the fact that the law is in no sense applied equally in the UK.

The Guardian has published an open appeal to Tory and Lib Dem voters to vote Labour in Dundee West. I think that tells you all you need to know about the Red Tories and their priorities. It is also a new low in journalism even for the fanatic and increasingly desperate Severin Carrell, who is a total disgrace to his profession. The costs of publishing the Guardian ought to be counted against Marra’s election expenses: this is not journalism in any sense, merely a puff piece for a candidate.

The five million questions project was a Labour front headed by Marra and merely one of numerous fake “independent” bodies set up to provide the corporate media with disguised sources of unionist propaganda during the election campaign. It was based in the University of Dundee. It is seven years ago that I published a piece headed Dundee University – A Tool For New Labour. The hosting of the fake five million questions “research” for the Tory-friendly Labour candidate for the University seat is yet further evidence. This Labour/Dundee University scheme linked in to the Daily Record. Dundee University administration have a close relationship with this rag. When I stood for election as Rector against the administration’s candidate, fervent Unionist Andy Nicol, the University administration arranged for the Daily Record in Dundee to come out on election day with a full front cover picture of Andy Nicol and the single banner headline “I Was Born to Lead Dundee Students”.

Naturally, I beat the conniving bastards anyway.

I can today reveal from an inside university source that it was Dundee University Principal Pete Downes who fed Alistair Darling with the nonsense about loss of funding for medical research, which Darling used against Salmond in televised debate. All of which fires my determination to stand for Rector of the University again next year and put a stop to these shenanigans.

My good friend Chris Law is an excellent candidate and a truly interesting and dynamic individual with a quick, analytic brain. He is very much his own man. I am happy to say that despite Severin Carrell, Labour have as much chance of stopping Chris Law’s election as they have of turning back the River Tay.

It feels its like the referendum all over again. The STV debate had a very peculiar audience, where the Labour and Tory all join together warmly to applaud unionist points, and Jim Murphy got an enthusiastic round of applause before he even started speaking.

I wondered how on earth they got an audience so completely unrepresentative of Scottish opinion, and the answer was not hard to find. The audience has been selected “based both on current opinion polls and the last general election result.”

Not the Holyrood election, not the referendum, but an election five years ago where about 75% of the electorate voted for the Unionist parties, and where the Labour Party was polling twice as well as it is now. On top of which, STV do not reveal what relative weighting they have given to the last general election and to recent opinion polls. It certainly looks like the greatest weight was placed on the last election result.

So we have a stitch-up where Nicola is responding to an audience completely unrepresentative of Scottish opinion today, and where unionism, Labour and the Lib Dems are all vastly over-represented. Do not think this is accidental.

I spent a few hours with Julian today in the Ecuador Embassy. It was the first time I had seen him since moving back to Scotland, so it was good to catch up and a great deal to talk about.

We had some good ideas for future projects, on which you will be seeing more as things develop. You will be pleased to hear that Julian himself is optimistic and very sharp, with sense of humour surviving, although obviously this close confinement, with no access to fresh air and exercise whatsoever, is becoming very wearing. It seems to me impossible to argue that the response to Julian is not disproportionate, especially the ludicrous waste of money paying so many policemen to stand around doing nothing 24 hours a day. How would it hurt the British government to agree to a protocol for daily exercise? Their position is vindictive and inhumane in the extreme.

I had not realised that Julian had so much Scottish ancestry or quite so recently. After independence, he will definitely be entitled to a Scottish passport!

The Guardian reports that today Blair “did not pretend to be Miliband’s biggest fan, and he was notably more enthusiastic about Jim Murphy, the Blairite whom he described as the “great new leader of the Scottish Labour party”.”

How the right wing shill Murphy – a man well to the right of Thatcher on both economic and foreign policy – came to be chosen as Scottish labour leader will be a fascinating chapter in historians’ discussions on the strange death of that party.

I gatecrashed Murphy’s acceptance speech on becoming leader, at Surgeons Hall in Edinburgh, a few months ago. I discovered that his entire audience were paid apparatchiks of the Labour Party. I interviewed several as a journalist (I am an NUJ member – and none recognised me). Of the eleven I spoke to, not a single one had ever heard of the Henry Jackson Society. Which says something about the level of political education of Labour functionaries.

It also explains how we came to the remarkable situation that the result from Eastwood on May 7 will be awaited with much more anxiety in CIA HQ in Virginia and Mossad HQ in Tel Aviv, than it will anywhere in Scotland. That says something very remarkable about what has happened to the Labour Party.

I see that in “journalists” questioning Blair, nobody asked the obvious question, which is who was paying for this particular speech. Hitachi, my guess. He was asked why he is not sharing a platform with Miliband in this election. The answer is of course that not even Miliband is quite that stupid.

It is peculiar timing for the unionist rag The Scotsman, to declare it had solved the mystery of Willie McRae’s death – just when security service tasking on the SNP returns to the levels of 1975-86.

The Scotsman claims that the police had first removed the vehicle and then replaced it, and this explains the mystery of why the gun was so far from the car after McRae’s remarkable two shot “suicide”. For me, that adds just another level of improbability to so very many. How, inside a car, you shoot yourself in the head in such a way that the gun falls out of the window, seems problematic. The car was crashed over a burn; how you order that with the suicide is peculiar.

The case is a notorious one in Scotland. There was never any indication of McRae having suicidal tendencies. He was driving to a destination – his cottage – where he was expected and he had phoned ahead for the fires to be lit. A briefcase of documents went missing from his car. Several retired policemen have affirmed he was under police and security service surveillance, which since his death the authorities refuse to comment on. He was not only a leading member of the SNP, but an effective anti-nuclear activist. All that I already knew – what was new to me was that he had also been investigating a senior paedophile ring. It is tempting to put that together with his having been ADC to Louis Mountbatten, but I confess that is mere speculation.

Establishment lackeys have been trying to ridicule my assertion that the SNP is a major security service target. Many know they are lying, and deliberately are trying to distract. But for those who are actually naïve, is it not extraordinary that anytime anybody mentions anything the security services do, it is dismissed as “conspiracy theory”. GCHQ, MI5, MI6 and SO15 employ over 50,000 people between them. What do you actually think they do all day?

A gentleman in a dark trenchcoat has just handed me this minute. I am not going to check the veracity of its contents at all, but I am rather going immediately to publish it.

Mr Carlton-Browne,

I had a phone call from that Peruvian Johnny. No idea what he was saying, some kind of foreigner talk apparently. Anyway it turned out that young Olga the cleaner could speak the language so she translated for me. She is a marvel, Olga. She even takes copies home of everything for me so that if I lose something she’ll have another copy safe and sound.

Anyway, apparently this Peruvian chap had been in Scotland and met up with Alex Salmond, who used to be some sort of local official. He thought that I would like to know that Salmond said he wasn’t big on canapes and despite his name didn’t like smoked salmon. Rather wry that, I thought.

He went on to say that Salmond said he had enormous respect for Nigel Farage, who was very macho, and he would be delighted to see a UKIP government in power after the general election, preferably in coalition with Pegida. Salmond added “thank God nobody knows about this, or they would lynch me. Of course I haven’t told anybody, but I feel perfectly safe revealing it at random to a passing Peruvian I just met.”

The Peruvian chap said before he hung off that of course he was telling me as everybody knows that all foreign ambassadors must by protocol give details of all their transactions to their host governments and that anybody who denied this was a dirty liar, particularly smart-arsed ex-diplomats from Edinburgh. He also added clearly that nobody at all should believe him if he himself denied these conversations had ever taken place.

I thanked him very much for this information. This is a very proper and official government memo, oh yes. It even has acronyms – we shall have to tell R2D2 and SPECTRE before the meeting in Rio about climate change because we are all genuine government people doing important government business, oh yes.

I shan’t put my name on this as it is all jolly secret. If anyone catches us out, just say Olga got lost in translation.

The Foreign Office has denied the existence of any such memo as that allegedly leaked to the Daily Telegraph, which has now published the full text. Reading it, I can say for sure it is not an FCO memo. That has led some to assume this means it is a Scottish Office memo. But there is a problem here.

Firstly, if the Scottish Office – or any other government department – made a record of a conversation with the French Consul-General, they would undoubtedly have copied it to the FCO. Particularly as the FCO is mentioned and a number of overseas visits and an international negotiation are discussed. If this were a genuine minute, the FCO would undoubtedly have a copy. If the FCO denies it exists, that means there was no such memo made in the Scottish Office and distributed in the ordinary channels.

Secondly, as I stated, the media’s claim that it was a protocol requirement for the French Embassy to report such conversations to the FCO was a complete fabrication. Not only is there no such requirement, it would be contrary to normal diplomatic practice. That is even more true with the Scottish Office. It is unthinkable that the French Consul-General would report those kind of confidential comments from Nicola Sturgeon to the Scottish Office.

If Embassies reported everything people told them to their host governments, nobody would tell the embassy anything. Indeed this episode has already damaged the French Embassy, because it casts a slur upon the discretion and confidentiality which is essential to operate as a diplomat. It may well be that driving a wedge between the SNP and the French Embassy was part of what the security services sought to achieve.

It damages the French Embassy, it damages the SNP, and it damages Miliband by repeating the meme about his being weak and unfit. Those would all seem good results to the security services. Only Miliband has been stupid enough to go along with it.

It seems to me the overwhelming probability is that this document, whether it purports to be a FCO or Scottish Office document, was originated by the Security Services, possibly with the active collusion of someone in the Scottish Office, or equally possibly without their knowledge. Whatever it purported to be, it never entered the normal civil service distribution systems, as the FCO would have a copy, and it would have raised alarm bells all over the place as seriously weird and improbable. It is in that sense a fake, even if it were physically produced inside the Scottish Office. Its purpose was to be leaked to the media and influence the election.

The fake FCO memo has MI5 written all over it. This is the worst example of British security services influencing an election campaign since the Zinoviev letter.

For those whose history is a bit shaky:

The Zinoviev letter – one of the greatest British political scandals of this century – was forged by a MI6 agent’s source and almost certainly leaked by MI6 or MI5 officers to the Conservative Party, according to an official report published today.[4 Feb 1999]
New light on the scandal which triggered the fall of the first Labour government in 1924 is shed in a study by Gill Bennett, chief historian at the Foreign Office, commissioned by Robin Cook

Ever since Treasury Permanent Secretary Nicholas MacPherson stated that civil service impartiality rules do not apply in the case of Scottish independence, I have been warning the SNP that we are going to be the target of active subversion by the UK and US security services. We are seen as a danger to the British state and thus a legitimate target. I spelled this out in my talk to the Edinburgh SNP Club on 6 March, of which more below.

The FCO “memo” reporting that Nicola Sturgeon would rather have a Tory government, is a remarkable document. Firstly, its provenance is very strange. It has been leaked ostensibly by the FCO to the Telegraph. According to the Guardian:

“The leaked document was drafted by a Whitehall official after Coffinier called the FCO, as protocol requires, to pass on a confidential account of several of the ambassador’s meetings in Edinburgh, which included a meeting with Alistair Carmichael, the Scottish secretary.”

The extraordinary thing is, this is just a lie. As someone who worked in the FCO for over twenty years and was an Ambassador myself, I can assure you there is absolutely no protocol requirement on the French Ambassador to give the FCO the content of the meetings she, her Consul-General or anybody else from the French Embassy held in Edinburgh. That claim is absolute nonsense.

Look at it from the Embassy’s point of view. If you repeated everything Nicola Sturgeon told you to the FCO, do you not think she would shortly stop telling you anything at all interesting? That is why diplomats absolutely do not retail such conversations to their host governments.

The second quite extraordinary thing is that both sides of the alleged conversation categorically deny it was said. Nicola Sturgeon denies she said it and the French Embassy deny she said it. So we have a leaked account of a conversation which all the participants say is untrue, yet the unionist media all feel this evidently untrue account is worth splashing as their lead story? The collusion of security services and corporate media is terrifying.

Timing is all. I was wondering how the security services would react to the seemingly unstoppable SNP momentum, following Nicola Sturgeon’s brilliant performance in the leaders’ debate. When I gave that talk to the SNP club, I warned that, as the main threat to the British state, we would suffer the full panoply of dirty tricks from MI5 and CIA. This would include increased penetration, communication interception, agent provocateur activities, forgeries and eventually might include false flag violence blamed on nationalists.

We are at a crisis in our constitutional history. I believe the momentum towards a Scottish exit from the UK is unstoppable. The British state is seeking to appear on the surface to agree to give Scots a free and democratic choice, while using every dirty trick to subvert that choice. Those tricks range from complete control of state and corporate media to the darker arts of the security services.

As I also stated to the SNP club, the USA has decided it is in their interest for the Unionists to prevail, not least so Scotland remains a base for the American controlled Trident missiles the UK taxpayer so obligingly funds. A large part of the CIA’s existence has been and is dedicated to covert activity to keep the forms of government it wants in power in the world. It does not want the SNP.

That the attempt to destabilise Nicola Sturgeon originates with the UK government and the Telegraph should give everyone pause. It is very obviously a security service effort. How otherwise is an account which the French Embassy says is completely false, contained in an official memo to be leaked?

This episode raises very serious questions. But they are not questions about Nicola Sturgeon. They are questions about the subversion of democracy by the security services, and the willing complicity of the corporate media.

Three months ago, I published this: “I remain hopeful that Iran will realise that there is a huge opportunity here. If Iran tactically backs down on its nuclear programme in the current circumstances, that will not be a defeat for Iran but a defeat for the neo-cons.”

That is precisely what has happened. My own Western diplomatic source with access to the talks, has told me today that he estimates 96% of the movement since December has been on the Iranian side, and only 4% on the international side. At the end, the Iranians took everyone by surprise by agreeing to take 2,000 more centrifuges out of use than anybody ever thought they would.

The Iranians have played a blinder by conceding. When Netanyahu had stripped off his thin cloak of international respectability and revealed himself to the world as an arrant racist warmonger, and Israel enjoys less popular support in the West than ever, Iran reveals itself as sensible, moderate and forward thinking in terms of its international relationships.

What is more, Iran has embarrassed and isolated its enemies. The enemies of this deal stand starkly displayed as the Saudi Arabian Royals, Israeli Zionists and United States Zionists – and a more evil combination it is difficult to imagine.

I remain strongly opposed to theocracy. Iran’s human rights record remains very poor and its treatment of gays utterly unacceptable. But by making plain that it is telling the truth in denying it is pursuing a nuclear arsenal, it is making a step in the right direction. If the West shows good faith – which I do not take for granted – and lifts sanctions, then we will see further development in Iran that I hope may produce improvement in democracy, society and human rights. But for now Iran has played a blinder.

If the congressional Zionists do manage to stymie Obama on this one, that will harm the US more than Iran as it will leave Israel and the US alone in sanctioning Iran, and almost certainly a situation where the US is sanctioning EU companies for trading perfectly legally with Iran after the EU lifts sanctions. The EU lifting of sanctions will not be conditional on the US lifting sanctions.That will drive a wedge between the EU and US. So this is a win/win situation for the world whatever Congress does.

It is worth reading the comments section on my December article, and seeing just how many commenters could not see that taking a step back would bring a victory to Iran, and that the Ahmadinejad policy of macho confrontation was deeply unintelligent. Sometimes you win by stepping back and watching your assailant blunder over.

If you thought that Nicola Sturgeon repeatedly mentioned the waste of money – 100 billion pounds – on updating the Trident nuclear missile system, during the leaders’ debate, plainly you need to be committed to a state mental institution. It is unthinkable that Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons should ever be questioned on British mainstream media.

It is so unthinkable, that IT NEVER HAPPENED. Not one British mainstream media report of the debate mentions Trident missiles or nuclear weapons. A Google news search on trident missiles or on nuclear weapons throws up zero references to the leaders’ debate or Nicola Sturgeon in British mainstream media today. Not one of the broadcasters’ highlight packages repeated Nicola’s outrage at the country’s throwing away money on weapons of mass destruction when so many children are living in poverty.

The media manage to report the many polls and commentators that say she won the debate, while suppressing what she actually said.

So there is nothing to see here. Go back to sleep. IT NEVER HAPPENED. YOU IMAGINED IT. IT NEVER HAPPENED.

Seriously, is that not really, really sickening and deeply, deeply scary?

In 90 minutes of BBC coverage and analysis of the leaders’ debate on the BBC News channel, the single Scottish commentator the BBC have had on that channel – and he has appeared three different times – is the ludicrous Torcuil Crichton of the Labour Party (and Daily Record), introduced by the BBC as though he were an independent commentator. Without being challenged by anybody, Crichton has again and again been allowed to expound the ridiculous argument that Cameron benefited from Nicola Surgeon’s strong performance because it weakened David Miliband.

This is ludicrous because of course it makes no difference to the balance of the House of Commons from a Tory point of view whether the Scottish MPs facing them are Labour or SNP. Three times Crichton has been on, making his invalid point, with nobody making the obvious response – or indeed any response. Three times – separate times, they are not repeats – he has been allowed to make a jibe about the SNP promising “a land of milk and honey”, as his Labour Party dismissal of anti-austerity economics. Again, without reply.

The BBC is an utter disgrace in the way it covers Scotland. My personal view is that post independence we don’t need state propaganda in news or current affairs, and should simply sack everybody in the BBC news and current affairs departments in Scotland, without compensation.

On the debate, without detracting in any way from Nicola Sturgeon’s excellent performance, I think the personalisation of it is wrong and that what the polls are reflecting is a strong desire right across the UK to support anti-austerity policies and no nuclear weapons. Sadly this is probably the last time even the possibility of such policy options will be allowed a significant hearing on mainstream media in England for the next five years.

It is fantastic to hear austerity economics being challenged before a huge audience, who don’t normally get to hear it. Miliband, Cameron and Clegg arguing like they have never heard of Keynes – rather wish Nicola would mention him which might help frame the debate for some viewers. Farage one trick pony blaming foreigners for everything, very nasty and sinister.

When did anybody last see nuclear weapons directly challenged on mainstream TV?

The state of Palestine today becomes a member of the International Criminal Court. This has a practical significance beyond the additional political pressure it piles on Israel. It means that in future Israelis will be liable to the jurisdiction of the court for crimes committed on Palestinian territory, despite Israel’s refusal to sign up to the court along with that other international rogue state, the United States of America.

In the case of the murders on the Mavi Marmara, the Court ruled that the scale of the incident did not reach the bar required for the Court’s jurisdiction – that it does not try war crimes which are individual acts. However it will be impossible to argue that at the next mass Israeli killing in Gaza, or even at the next large scale seizure of territory for Israeli settlements.

One of the many disgraces of neo-con government in the UK is the existence of legislation passed by the UK parliament specifically to allow Israeli war criminals to visit the UK without fear of arrest. That however will be overridden by Britain’s obligation to detain and hand over persons indicted by the International Criminal Court. Today’s apparently small step could change the atmosphere for the arrogant Israeli elite in a fundamental way. They will no longer be able to massacre hundreds of Palestinian women and children whenever they feel it boosts their cause, without some concern about personal consequences.

With the prospect of a deal bringing Iran back into the international community also appearing bright, we can be allowed a rare moment of optimism.