The Labour Party is being remarkably coy about releasing the actual result of its Scottish accounting unit leadership election, giving only a percentage. The entirely complacent unionist media is complicit in what amounts to a deception. The stunning truth is that in a one person, one vote election among the entire membership of the Labour Party in Scotland plus trades union supporters, Dugdale won with 5,217 votes (out of a claimed electorate of 21,000, many of whom do not exist or could not be arsed to choose between two right wing numpties).
UPDATE: A second Labour figure just rang me to assure me my information – which was from a good source – is wrong. She would not give the actual figure and only said it was “higher”. I offered to take down the post and publish an accurate figure if she would give it, but this was declined.
Thank you very much Brian for bringing that trial result to our attention. If you had not done so, we would not have known as we have not been told by the BBC. They did report the arrests in September.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-29342841
I can’t find any report of the trial on their website. Surprise!
Their search facility is useless in spite of all the licence fee money that is spent on ‘digital’. Stuff about the Thames appeared when asking for ‘Thales protest trial’.
There is a report on Mondoweiss
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/08/activists-manufacturers-scottish
but Electronic Intifada only reported the arrests. ??
Please let us know Brian what sentences those who were convicted receive.
Shame on the Scottish police for the arrests and on the legal system for bringing the case and for the convictions.
Mary
19 Aug, 2015 – 5:44 pm
“Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the Labour race can already be considered a “done deal” almost a month before the winner is announced…”
………………………………………………………….
I’m very pleased at that news Mary but I don’t understand why Paddy Power is paying out now. God forbid but Jeremy could be run over by a bus before September.
RoS
החיים הוא לא יפה לפלסטינים is the Google translation of ‘Life is not beautiful for the Palestinians’ which I sometimes put up as a reminder to counteract the stupid ‘La vita è bella’ stuff.
I find it amusing that people like Jon, Clark, Technicolour and I appear to have been denounced repeatedly as “gatekeepers” (i.e. spies and traitors to Craig Murray’s blog). Jon, Clark, Technicolour (and Dreolin, btw) are sincere, good people, most of whom have been active politically in liberation politics domestically and internationally. It is despicable that they are being insulted in this way on this blog.
So, it seems that anyone with whom you disagree must be either a “troll” or a “gatekeeper”. This convenient and facile attitude precisely is the attitude I earlier was criticising, it is an attitude that typifies a certain section of the ‘radical chic’ Left in the UK and it is utterly self-defeating. It also makes for very uninteresting reading – and of course, a blog is nothing if it is not a piece of writing.
I posed a highly question to the current situation in the Middle East which now finally, after much bluff and bluster, has been answered. Yet that is deemed unacceptable, possibly not because of the question istelf but because of who asked it.
I, of course, consistently have been characterised by these posters as ‘a wily Oriental’ (“sly”, weasel” and so on). And so, now, to these people, I have become almost an ‘honourary Jew’. But at that, no doubt I will accused of “playing the race card”. Perhaps the card gets played because it is there, on the table, staring us in the face.
I do not believe that the people who fling these accusations are at all interested in any kind of real discourse, far less engaging with other people’s views, especially the views of those with whom they disagree and especially non-whites who refuse to conform to the models which they have set up for natives/subaltern groups. They seem interested only in singing in monodic concert, reinforcing pre-existing beliefs which brook no possibility of development or expansion. I suspect the reason they attempt to discredit others as “trolls” and “gatekeepers” is because at some level, the points some of those others make disturb their equanimity and so cannot be tolerated.
It will not stop me.
Whether Jeremy Corbyn or any other politician for that matter is anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, hates the Scots or English, is homophobic, misogynistic etc. is really irrelevant anyway however much we, as individuals, might happen to disagree with him. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and no matter how much society compels an individual to not express their opinion at the end of the day they’ll still have that opinion as they can’t help it. ‘Die Gedanken sind Frei’ as the old German student song of the 1848 revolutions went.
His role as a politician is not to represent himself but the will of the people. He is a public servant and as long as he doesn’t let his own predilections interfere with the job he is voted in to do then why not just accept him for what he is. If I call a plumber to fix a leak in my kitchen I don’t care whether she is a Tory, Neo-Nazi, Communist, Anarchist, Labour or even a member of the SNP;) All I care about is whether or not they can do the job that I chose them for and fix the leak. Corbyn, Cameron, Kendall, whoever at the end of the day are public servants; they are voted in and paid by the electorate to serve our interests – not their own.
What do we as a society expect? Some perfect superhero or some Jesus/Messiah figure? Why can’t we just accept that the person we hire may or may not have faults and likes and dislikes as the rest of us do? As long as their faults or prejudices (depending on your opinion) are out in the open then what is there to fear? Please don’t think I’m trying to excuse holocaust denial in anyway – because I’m not. It’s just that you don’t have to like someone to hire them to do a job. As long as we, the electorate, are able to control him as the puppet that any political leader should be then who cares whether he turns up to work dressed in suit and tie, SS uniform – or even as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz?
Suhayl
Don’t be dismayed – all that has happened is that some people on here have dropped their mask.
Apologising for the Iraq war (by Corbyn) would be a huge embarrassment to the Labour Party [ITV News 22:00 20/08/2015]
Fuck you Michael Jermey (Director of ITV News) – What do we know about him Mary Thanks.
http://www.itv.com/news/2015-08-20/corbyn-labour-will-apologise-for-iraq-war-if-i-become-leader/
Becky Cohen
20/08/2015 9:47pm
You seem to be arguing that it doesn’t matter whether the electorate votes in David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Colin Jordan or Cilla Black as long as they can represent the will of the people.
The trouble is that the will of the people isn’t homogenous. Different people want different things, and that generally arises from class interest. Also, it seems unlikely that faults or prejudices will be set out in the open for the very good reason that they may be electorally unpopular.
Kind regards,
John
From the Counter-Culture. http://internationaltimes.it/labour-leadership-battle/
Is the weasel ways of yours Saadi! You have been dogging me with your fucking stupid questions, based on your assumptions and every time you come up with your “thank you” crap! Stuff your thanks where sun don’t shine. You are an empath, your actions speak louder than your rhetorical discourse.
Don’t you dare to go around and denounce people for denouncing you, remember your own statement;
Extend the same principles for others to make up their own minds, and draw their own conclusions.
Blow that smoke up someone’s butt that is not reading this blog! You are now using the same trick as the supremacist vermin; as and when they are backed into a corner! You are sucking up and siding with the zionist vermin for your own reasons and then blaming others for observing thus, in your own weasel way! Wiley? You are so fucking obvious that even a blind and deaf bastard can see where you are coming from, so don’t pay yourself compliments!
Restating the point yet again there can be no place for any zionist supremacist vermin in any civilised society or any civilised debate, therefore your proposition of discourse is a none starter.
Needless to point out that, you have taken up the wounded bird trick;
Make your mind up! Either you are what you are or you have some kind of an internal conflict that you ought to deal with at a personal level, and stop fucking blaming the world from without! Stop coming your weasel ways of “I am coloured” shit!
You have been caught with your pants around your ankles and the reaction of the blog clearly is indicative of that, so stop pissing all over the place to put out the fire that you deliberately set out to start in the way of fighting the good keyboard war!
Your support from the known supremacist vermin collaborators and mercenaries pretty much sums up your corner.
You do that yourself pretty well, there is no need for anyone to try discrediting you, and fuck me, you say; “It will not stop me” as the Afrikaans were sent down the shitter of history, the zionist vermin will be dispatched alongside in the same shitter in time, so best for you to start looking to find another bunch of sociopaths to support, seeing as you are so unstoppable!
Mary i had a look, same as yirself…Only that 5 were convited, and five innocent.
P.s. are you able to travel, i have an all expenses paid trip to France ( lourdes n such ) it’s a group hereabouts that take unwell people every year.
Dave
Cheers for the video earlier… superb work, i have see a few of those takes…and after having been out Beyond the Ocean to Barrafest ( isle of Barra, Outer Hebrides ).. this is my fav –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlQyRERCs7k
I was going to spend some time penning responses both to Ba’al Zevul & Suhayl Saadi, but sorry chaps, I’ve just got home & really just don’t have the will-power right now to force myself to unpack all the surreal delusions contained in both your recent posts; perhaps later I will be able to raise up some motivation, but for now iro of the “Israeli Apartheid Debate”, I’m rather just post this Haaretz cut & paste (as the link seems to play-up);
“It’s time to admit it. Israeli policy is what it is: Apartheid
I used to be one of those people who took issue with the label of apartheid as applied to Israel. Not anymore.
By Bradley Burston | Aug. 17, 2015 | 2:23 PM | 113
What I’m about to write will not come easily for me.
I used to be one of those people who took issue with the label of apartheid as applied to Israel. I was one of those people who could be counted on to argue that, while the country’s settlement and occupation policies were anti-democratic and brutal and slow-dose suicidal, the word apartheid did not apply.
I’m not one of those people any more. Not after the last few weeks.
Not after terrorists firebombed a West Bank Palestinian home, annihilating a family, murdering an 18-month-old boy and his father, burning his mother over 90 percent of her body – only to have Israel’s government rule the family ineligible for the financial support and compensation automatically granted Israeli victims of terrorism, settlers included.
I can’t pretend anymore. Not after Israel’s Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, explicitly declaring stone-throwing to be terrorism, drove the passage of a bill holding stone-throwers liable to up to 20 years in prison.
The law did not specify that it targeted only Palestinian stone-throwers. It didn’t have to.
Just one week later, pro-settlement Jews hurled rocks, furniture, and bottles of urine at Israeli soldiers and police at a West Bank settlement, and in response, Benjamin Netanyahu immediately rewarded the Jewish stone-throwers with a pledge to build hundreds of new settlement homes.
This is what has become of the rule of law. Two sets of books. One for Us, and one to throw at Them. Apartheid.
We are what we have created. We are what we do, and the injury we do in a thousand ways to millions of others. We are what we turn a blind eye to. Our Israel is what it has become: Apartheid.
There was a time when I drew a distinction between Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies and this country I have loved so long.
No more. Every single day we wake to yet another outrage.
I used to be a person who wanted to believe that there were moral and democratic limits – or, failing that, pragmatic constraints – to how low the prime minister was willing to go, how far he was willing to bend to the proud proponents of apartheid, in order to bolster his power.
Not any more. Not after Danny Danon.
Not when the prime minister’s choice to represent all of us, all of Israel at the United Nations, is a man who proposed legislation to annex the West Bank, effectively creating Bantustans for Palestinians who would live there stateless, deprived of basic human rights.
The man who will represent all of us at the United Nations, the man who will speak to the Third World on our behalf, is the same man who called African asylum seekers in Israel “a national plague.”
The man who will represent all of us at the United Nations is the same politician who proposed legislation aimed at crippling left-leaning NGOs which come to the aid of Palestinian civilians and oppose the institution of occupation, while giving the government a green light to keep financially supporting right-wing NGOs suspected of channeling funds to support violence by pro-settlement Jews.
What does apartheid mean, in Israeli terms?
Apartheid means fundamentalist clergy spearheading the deepening of segregation, inequality, supremacism, and subjugation.
Apartheid means Likud lawmaker and former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter calling Sunday for separate, segregated roads and highways for Jews and Arabs in the West Bank.
Apartheid means hundreds of attacks by settlers targeting Palestinian property, livelihoods, and lives, without convictions, charges, or even suspects. Apartheid means uncounted Palestinians jailed without trial, shot dead without trial, shot dead in the back while fleeing and without just cause.
Apartheid means Israeli officials using the army, police, military courts, and draconian administrative detentions, not only to head off terrorism, but to curtail nearly every avenue of non-violent protest available to Palestinians.
Late last month, over the explicit protest of the head of the Israeli Medical Association and human rights groups combatting torture, Israel enacted the government’s “Law to Prevent Harm Caused by Hunger Strikes.” The law allows force-feeding of prisoners, even if the prisoner refuses, if the striker’s life is deemed in danger.
Netanyahu’s Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who pushed hard for passage of the bill, has called hunger strikes by Palestinian security prisoners jailed for months without charge or trial “a new type of suicide terrorist attack through which they will threaten the State of Israel”.
Only under a system as warped as apartheid, does a government need to label and treat non-violence as terrorism.
Years ago, in apartheid South Africa, Jews who loved their country and hated its policies, took courageous roles in defeating with non-violence a regime of racism and denial of human rights.
May we in Israel follow their example.”
Corbyn’s speech in Dundee last week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhIOsAHYFzk
Kurdistan has continued with Barzani’s leadership for another 2 years without resorting to elections and the Islamic parties who apply a whiff of Islamic perfume to his party abstained in a vote to limit his powers.
Under this government, which benefits from millions of dollars of oil revenues sold illegally from Islamic State, only the Peshmerga who are fighting Islamic State get paid regularly. All other employees of the government get paid one month’s salary once in three months.
Nice work if you can get it.
“Fuck you Michael Jermey (Director of ITV News) – What do we know about him Mary Thanks.”
Typical Police State mentality – someone says something you disagree with so, so set the dogs on them to dig up the dirt.
They seem interested only in singing in monodic concert, reinforcing pre-existing beliefs which brook no possibility of development or expansion. I suspect the reason they attempt to discredit others as “trolls” and “gatekeepers” is because at some level, the points some of those others make disturb their equanimity and so cannot be tolerated.
What you said, Suhayl. You’re ok by me, if that’s any comfort to you. Keep on truckin’.
Resident Dissident,
Just for clarity. You DO support Corbyn’s contact with Hamas which had peaceful aims? Yes?
Just for lulz-
http://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-squeezes-the-baltics-1440026019
Mr. Putin is a canny and cynical strategist who looks for weakness and then exploits it. NATO’s nonresponse to the Kohver kidnapping will encourage more such Russian provocations.
I doubt if Jermey had much input to the piece – it seems to be a Press Association hack who wrote it. Also, the piece has been updated today, and if it did, now contains no reference to the embarrassment of Labour. Which would in any case be true. Corbyn also gets right of reply to a misinterpretation of his words – don’t know if that’s part of the update –
Jeremy Corbyn believes the violent ideology of Isis is a vicious, repugnant force that has to be stopped – where Jeremy Corbyn talks about the need for a political solution and compromise he means not with Isis but against Isis, working across the region and beyond to choke off supplies that help fund and arm them and working with neighbouring states in the region to come to common solutions.
– Corbyn spokeswoman
The problem with giving interviews to RT is that the editing can, shall we say, favour another narrative altogether.
This from the inimitable Evening Harold:
http://eveningharold.com/2015/08/20/corbyn-has-links-to-deranged-warmonger-claims-tony-blair-2/
Damning….
Lord Morris of Aberavon is extremely critical of the Chilcot delay:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3205383/Chilcot-lost-control-says-Blair-s-ex-law-chief-Former-Attorney-General-blames-chairman-letting-inquiry-drag-attacks-feebleness-cross-examination-witnesses.html
Whenever I have asked questions in the House of Lords about the inquiry, I have been greeted by stonewalling and a refusal to provide information.
Why? Is someone running scared that Chilcot’s fundamental fraudulence may be exposed?
Here’s Ba’al, I’ve saved you the trouble;
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nato-underwrites-the-stability-of-the-eu-corbyns-idea-to-take-the-uk-out-of-it-would-be-disastrous-10464310.html
Reading the comments is much more worthwhile, and to quote one, “For one moment I thought I was reading the Guardian!!” 😀
Just for lulz-reminds me of Konstantin Yaroshenko or Viktor Bout abducted in a sting operation from Thailand, brought him to US and sentenced for 25 years in prison for allegedly selling weapons to people who potentially could harm USA (they were FBI undercover agents). Is this virtue triumphing over vice or a dose of one’s own medicine?
Tim @19th: 10.07..
The “Jonthan Powell” figure who talks to Hamas has to be someone who has Netanyahu’s total trust, or the thing won’t work.
The only negotiators who have Netanyahu’s total trust* are those who regard Hamas as a proscribed terrorist organisation and don’t talk to it. Netanyahu is still denying any involvement with Blair’s recent sessions with Hamas, which will go nowhere in any case.
“The thing” cannot work, under any circumstances whatever.
Judge for yourself here-
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/meshaal-turns-town-blair-offer-460063918
Rather confirms what I was suggesting earlier as regards the motives and likely outcome of this one.
*if anyone at all does. Bibi’s as paranoid as they come.
I see Macky has posted again.
“Mr Goss instead of making a list of “traitors names” don’t you think that such occasions could be used as a healing and peace process?”
I hope nobody on here thinks I’m making a list of traitors’ names. 🙂
Yes it would be a much more productive initiative. My only problem with the idea is the difficulty in selling it to Kiev, who I presume are making the traitor list. Some of them may have relatives in Crimea. Others may recall holidays they had there as youngsters, before Ukraine became another failed state. I just hope that Merkel and Hollande can drum some sense into the great tub of chocolate lard.
🙂
The above comment of mine was in response to RoS nearly two days ago. Just as I was about to send it one of the gas men dug his spade through my cable and no internet or phone since. 🙂
reminds me of Konstantin Yaroshenko or Viktor Bout abducted in a sting operation from Thailand, brought him to US and sentenced for 25 years in prison for allegedly selling weapons to people who potentially could harm USA (they were FBI undercover agents
The cases are a little different, Mark. Kohver was simply a spook doing his job, and as the trial was conducted in closed court, we know little else about the charges.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/19/russia-jails-estonian-police-officer-allegedly-abducted-border-eston-kohver
Your Russian chum Bout was a known illegal arms trader, got a trial in front of a Federal jury, and has lost his appeal before the Second US Circuit court, on four charges of conspiracy:
Jurors convicted Bout of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers and other citizens by having agreed to sell arms to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informants who had been posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The U.S. government has designated FARC as a foreign terrorist organization.
Bout was also found guilty of conspiring to acquire and export anti-aircraft missiles, and provide material support to a terrorist organization.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/27/us-usa-crime-bout-idUSBRE98Q0PG20130927
And here it gets interesting:
http://mic.com/articles/52525/edward-snowden-might-be-traded-for-arms-dealer-viktor-bout-why-the-u-s–russia-trade-makes-sense
Little bit of a conflict of ideologies here. Would you like the spotless Bout returned to his grieving relatives in exchange for Snowdon being banged up for the rest of his natural?
Is it a coincidence that the presumed disinformation hack who wrote this is another Blair?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11815362/We-stood-by-while-others-carved-up-Syria.html
Postimees.ee ( the morning after the Kohver arrest ) had lots of details about the charges, including a written apology that he made, but all this soon disappeared ,[ like the OSCE monitors who wrote the reports about who fired the first salvoes in the Saakashvili Georgian war ]
I personally, from reading the Estonian media over the last few years, feel that he might have been ‘entrapped’ across the border – rather than ‘kidnapped’ but that’s a subtlety lost in the pro/contra propaganda war