Amber Rudd keeps shaking the magic ballot paper tree

At this moment the most likely outcome is an alliance between the Tory Brexit Bigots and the Protestant Brexit Bigots of the DUP. They might be able to scrape a bare majority between them. The consequence of this is going to be the most crazed sectarians in the UK driving a hard Brexit, that will result in a very real fenced border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The consequences of that could be appalling.

May still churning out nonsense by rote – said “stability” seven times in three minute speech.

That’s the first change that isn’t just swapping among opposition parties as the Tories lose the Vale of Clwyd. It’s looking good for no overall majority. Really exciting.

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Daniel Finkelstein just expressed in explicit terms what has been very obvious from the differential swings in different constituencies so far. The Conservative offer has appealed to a less educated, less cosmopolitan electorate. This is undoubtedly true. As I suspected, they have alienated much of the middle class in the process.

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BBC suggesting Amber Rudd looks like losing in Hastings. Fantastic news! My post on Amber Rudd’s strange business dealings had 360,000 viewers so I am going to claim to have helped if it come off.

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Update: Catholic Orangemen instantly into top 1000 on Amazon, many thanks.

My book The Catholic Orangemen of Togo is now available in paperback and Kindle

I have explained before that this blog does not ask for donations but is financed through book sales. If you have enjoyed or benefited from this blog, I do urge you to buy a copy of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. Here is the blurb from the book:

In this prequel to the bestselling Murder in Samarkand, Craig Murray describes how he discovered the dark heart at the centre of Tony Blair’s shiny New Labour administration shortly after its beginning, when Murray was the key witness in the Arms to Africa Affair which rocked the British political establishment. Murray makes a strong case against “liberal intervention” as he describes the use of mercenaries to obtain African mineral resources for Western financial interests. In so doing, Murray takes us on a journey into some of the darkest recesses of colonial history in Africa. As ever with Murray the story is laced with personal anecdotes, sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes both.

It was a blow to me when my publisher backed out of publishing this book after threats from mercenary commander Tim Spicer, then head of Aegis, the mercenary command which had more troops in Iraq than the British army and made billions. Spicer wished to suppress the revelations in this book about Executive Outcomes and Sandline, and their history of atrocity in Africa.

The privatisation of killing is the ultimate expression of Toryism.

After the publisher dropped the book I self-published 1,200 hardback copies, which soon sold out. I also made it available free online, where more than 100,000 people downloaded it. Spicer and his lawyers Schillings never did carry out their threat to sue.

I have now brought it out in paperback using Amazon’s self-publishing platform. I appreciate people’s objections to Amazon, but it is the most practical method for me at the moment. I do hope those who have not read The Catholic Orangemen will find it informative. It is, I believe, a massive refutation to those who hold out Sierra Leone as Blair’s “good war”. This brief talk in American University, Washington DC last year is the only one I have ever given where I basically outline the main content of The Catholic Orangemen.

If you have already read it online for free, you would do me a large favour by purchasing the paperback to help with funding my work here. You can always give it as a present!

Like Murder in Samarkand, it is very much a warts and all autobiography, and I hope is a fearlessly honest look at myself. One young lady told me she hated me already by the end of page one, and had recovered by the end of the book, but would find it easier to say why she hated me than what dissipated the feeling! I rather know what she meant.

The major theme of the book is my personal encounters with the varied legacy of colonialism in Africa, of which my stumbling upon Catholic Orangemen is an amusing if somewhat whimsical example. I do hope you enjoy it.

I hope to have Murder in Samarkand back in print by the same method in a few weeks.

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Confident of victory off the back of large numbers of murdered people changing the media agenda, a triumphalist Theresa May yesterday vowed – contrary to the Tory manifesto – to “rip up” human rights legislation.

This feels to me like it could be Theresa May’s “awright! awright! awright!” moment. Most of my readers will recall the 1992 election, where Neil Kinnock finished with a rally in Sheffield at which his high octane triumphalism was viewed by many of the public as revealing a rather unpleasant character, which possibly helped engender a shock last minute swing which lost him the election.

May’s Slough meeting is very different to that Sheffield rally – for one thing May’s crowd of Tory activists was tiny, and as always that BBC video uses tight focus to hide her lack of enthusiastic support. But what it has in common with Sheffield is hubris. I strongly suspect that ditching human rights is wildly popular among the rabid racist Brexiteers who constitute her core vote. Locking up Muslims without charge and throwing away the key will appeal to them. But a great deal of the rest of the population are bright enough to work out that proposal is likely to cause more, not less, terrorism. They will view May’s performance as presumptive and alarming.

Of course, abandoning human rights would make May’s Saudi friends feel more at home when they come to London to entertain call girls in their penthouses. But I expect May’s declaration may cost the Tories several seats, not least to the Liberals in South West London.

There is one very obvious point that the mainstream media has deliberately avoided. The Tories having made Brexit central to May’s campaign, there is no minister more crucial to the election than David Davis, the Brexit Secretary. Davis is a libertarian with a long and genuinely distinguished record in opposing human rights encroachments made in the name of the War on Terror. There is no way Davis is going to go along with substantial censorship of the internet, increased surveillance powers, and detention without trial. If May pushes ahead with her draconian plans, she will need a new Brexit Secretary.

For this reason, Davis has disappeared from the Tory campaign since the focus was shifted by the mainstream media to those conveniently timed terror attacks. They were especially conveniently timed for the Saudi sponsors of terror, as a Labour government would be committed to ending arms exports to Saudi, and would not support bombing Assad forces in support of jihadists in Syria.

Why has nobody in the mainstream media pointed out that Davis will not support May’s new anti-human rights proposals? Why have they not attempted to interview him on the subject?

Mainstream media spend thousands of hours probing differences within Labour. Yet this massive disagreement on what the media themselves have described as the main issue of the election, between the two major figures of the Conservative campaign, goes completely unremarked. Media silence. We must not question our masters.

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There should already be no questioning of the inhumanity of Tory policies, given their concentration on tax cuts for the wealthy, starving the NHS and schools, and cutting benefits to those desperately in need. But the blatant and shameless attempts in the last 48 hours by Theresa May to exploit the deaths of the recent victims of terrorism for party advantage, are truly tasteless and sickening. The populist new pledge to “rip up human rights” is a further appeal to the basest instincts of society, while looking to seize the moment further to increase the powers of the state. The cycle of alienation will only be enhanced, causing more terrorism, by draconian state actions which inevitably will lead to injustice and grievance.

We have to stop the Tories. That must be the basis of any decent person’s vote. If you doubt me, just go down to a newsagent and look at the appalling front pages of today’s newspapers. The question is how to do it?

1) In Scotland, vote for the SNP. There is no constituency where an SNP vote risks letting the Tory in. There are scores of votes, especially in rural and in south central Scotland, where any switch of voters from SNP to Labour could gain the Tories enough seats to give Theresa May a working majority.

2). In England and Wales, vote for whoever is best placed to defeat the Tory. If you have a sitting non-Tory MP, lend them your support. So Lib Dems and Greens should vote Labour in Labour constituencies. That would, on current polling evidence, make almost all existing Labour seats safe. I make an exception for Birmingham Yardley where Labour voters should switch to the excellent John Hemming to get rid of the horrible Jess Phillips. In Hastings and Rye if Lib Dems vote Labour there is every chance to get rid of Amber Rudd, which is an aim every Lib Dem should support.

The Guardian have published a useful guide to some seats where tactical voting might be effective. I endorse it.

How to react to first past the post is a personal decision. But the danger of a continued Tory majority is so great that my own view is that anybody who is not hard right should, on this occasion, do what is practically most likely to mitigate it.

For Labour voters to vote to damage the SNP with the effect of electing Tories would be self harm. Lib Dem voters should find May’s attitude to human rights and to Brexit anathema. I am asking more Lib Dems to vote tactically, to support sitting Labour MPs, than any other group. This one time, the value of halting May outweighs the existentialist act of declaring personal allegiance. In the smaller number of constituencies where I am asking Lab voters to support Lib Dems, the same applies.

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I have been a political activist my entire life, though not always necessarily in the party sense. I have been deeply interested in every Westminster election since 1974, campaigned hard in many of them and indeed stood for parliament myself twice, markedly unsuccessfully. But I do not think I have ever been so emotionally invested in any election so much as this one. I really care about this.

Why is that? It is not connected with Scottish Independence, because I am entirely confident we shall get that shortly, whatever happens on Thursday. No, it is more that I care deeply about what is happening in England and Wales. I was born there, and am after all half English.

But England is no longer the country I grew up in. It has become nasty and intolerant, turning its back on the world, of which the deeply harmful decision to leave the EU is but a symptom. Racism has become commonplace. It should not be forgotten that Enoch Powell was marginalised politically for his views on immigration, but he would be comfortably within the Tory mainstream today.

Britain has turned its back on the United Nations. Ministers claim openly that consent of the Security Council for military intervention is no longer needed, because Russia can veto – ignoring the scores of vetoes exercised by the UK and US, especially on behalf of Israel. The judgement of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is simply brushed aside as Britain did not like it, when historically we have pressed other countries to follow the rulings in hundreds of cases. It has also become a major aim of government to leave the jurisdiction of the excellent European Court of Justice, which Britain led the way in founding. Britain is effectively repudiating the very concept of international law.

Added to this extreme xenophobia and loss of identification with the whole world of mankind who are not “us”, we have the abandonment of empathy and social solidarity at home. Government spending plans will reduce state spending over the next three years to below 35% of GNP. Which would be the lowest in the EU, except we will no longer be in the EU. Yet as our NHS shivers as it is starved of cash, as schools tout for funds from parents, as the disabled and dying are denied benefits unless they haul themselves into work, the country still spends £220 billion on Trident missiles to stoke a collective militarist ego.

The massive cost of Trident is best illustrated by this figure. At constant 2016 values, the total net UK contribution to the EU budget over 44 years 1973-2017 was £157 billion. Compared to £225 billion to renew Trident. That is a measure of how irrational the UK has become.

Wealth inequality has grown to astounding levels. An entire generation of young people are going to spend their lives paying rent to make the landlord class still more wealthy. The generation which got their education for free – Thatcher’s children – have forced those coming after to pay, pulling up the ladder behind themselves.

Finally, we have massive state surveillance, and an extraordinarily biased state propaganda machine and mainstream media, not just during the election, but all day and every day. This morning, on BBC Radio 4 a dreadful person named Andrew O’Hagan was allowed a ten minute unquestioned diatribe on the need for government to employ “battalions of thousands of people” to scrutinise and censor the entire internet. Amber Rudd was saying something similar shortly afterwards. And as I pointed out, the essentials of the Tory manifesto are extraordinarily similar to the BNP manifesto of 2005.

So continued Tory rule represents a political direction which appals me. This government is far to the right of Thatcher. The battles of the 1980’s represented a fight for survival of industrial communities, but this has a still more desperate feel. It is a fight for the very concept of public sector provision.

In Scotland we have the SNP to defend the values of basic communal decency. Now in England we have Jeremy Corbyn, a man alongside whom I have spoken and who gives the first real chance in a generation to voters in England and Wales to reject neo-liberalism.

This is why this election matters more than any other. The ultra-wealthy elite had succeeded in diverting the popular discontent at the wealth gap and falling standards of living for many, into xenophobia. Immigrants have successfully been scapegoated. The establishment have kept people sufficiently ill-educated, and sufficiently misled by the mainstream media, for this ploy to work.

The great question is whether the anti-establishment mood in the country has been irretrievably captured by populist xenophobia masking the intentions of the neo-liberals, or whether a return to an older tradition of genuine social radicalism under Corbyn can halt this trend. So on both sides of the equation this election is pivotal. Britain will become a nasty, uncaring, closed country to an extent I would never have believed possible. Or it will adopt policies of communal solidarity and public provision which I had almost lost hope people would have a chance to vote for again.

This is not any election. This one matters more than ever. This time, we should all really care.

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We cannot know what will happen on Thursday. There are huge differentials in opinion polls. We now know that the pollsters’ samples, demographically weighted to reflect the population in terms of age, geographical spread, and past voting intention, return very similar results. What differs is the extent to which they apply the additional filter of judging likelihood to vote, not by people’s declaration on this point, but by historic records reflecting the fact turnout is much higher among the elderly. That in itself has thrown a spotlight on the massive age differential in voting. The Tories are extremely dependent on pensioners. It is precisely the same age group that supported Brexit and opposed Independence.

There has been some drop in Tory support among the elderly in the election, but only in line with the drop in the general population. The abandonment of the triple lock, the dementia tax and the end of winter fuel allowance have not particularly dented the loyalty of the Tory grey army.

So if younger people want to stop the Tories, they have to get themselves to the polling booth at all costs. As for campaigning, almost certainly more effective than attending rallies or sticking leaflets through strangers’ doors, would be to sit down and have a real heart to hear with elderly family members and acquaintances.

A quick disclaimer. I realise there are a lot of wonderful people of pension age who are not Tories. I am not attacking the elderly, I am stating a plain and undisputed fact about voting breakdown by age.

It is also the case that there has been a very definite trend away from the Tories for the last month, and there is little evidence to suggest that has stopped. So today’s polls are not how opinion will stand on voting day.

But this election has been a great victory already, whatever the result.

Firstly, a genuine alternative has been put to the electorate in England and Wales for the first time in a generation. And Jeremy Corbyn has proved beyond doubt that left wing policies are popular. Refusal to endorse nuclear weapons, aggressive foreign policy, privatisation and austerity are indeed popular. With New Labour triangulating themselves right into the neoliberal establishment consensus, English and Welsh voters had no opportunity to express a radical view since 1983.

The careerist Blairites who had taken over the Labour Party argued that it would be electoral suicide not to adopt all the Tory policies. NHS privatisation, utility privatisation, PFI, benefit cuts, Trident, attacks on foreign countries; these are what the public want, said the Blairites.

Corbyn is now proving that was a lie.

Indeed, of all the opinion poll findings which give results such as strong public support for renationalisation of the railways, that which drives the stake deepest into the hearts of the Blairites and Tories alike is the YouGov poll on foreign policy. People are not stupid, and by a two to one majority people believe that our wars abroad cause terrorism here. That is why the furious Tory attack, that to explain is to support, bounced off.

A clear majority of people oppose our recent wars in Muslim lands.

It is precisely those of Corbyn’s views which the entire mainstream media, the Tories and the Blairites consider unacceptable, and which fall well outside the Overton window, which are popular. That explains why the attacks do not work. The victory of this election is that those popular views have been expressed widely, after years of being banished methodically from the airwaves.

If May wins, she will almost certainly not have the huge landslide she expected. Her honeymoon period is well and truly over and she now has a very negative public image. That is going to get worse as we are heading into a Brexit recession and a house price crash. I agree with every word of this extremely important article from Will Hutton. May’s support is almost entirely from hard Brexiteers who are going to crash the economy to satisfy their racism. That will quickly appear a very bad idea.

A May government with a small majority, possibly dependent on Ulster Unionists, running a disastrous policy and becoming ever more unpopular, is the best outcome the Conservatives have left in terms of retaining power. All the media’s horses and all the media’s men are not going to be able to put together again the ludicrous image they had constructed of Theresa May as a great leader, which fell apart at the very first public scrutiny.

If Corbyn comes to power, he will almost certainly have to be supported by the SNP, who I am proud to say have an even more radical platform than Labour, including scrapping Trident and reversing all benefit cuts. How many Blairites would defect to the Tories rather than support a Corbyn government with SNP support is an interesting question. But remember, most Blairites would sell their mother for a ministerial limousine. Corbyn’s position against the Blairites has been immeasurably strengthened by this campaign, and win or lose, his party leadership is safe if he wants to keep it. If John Woodcock etc. wanted to take themselves off to form a second Tory Party that would be no bad thing at all.

Of course I want to see May defeated and out of office, because Tory policies actually kill people. But I will not be too disappointed by a pyrrhic Tory victory.

A renewed Tory government will quickly become extremely unpopular as it flails in Brexit negotiations. It will be more right wing and authoritarian than ever, because those are May’s instincts when in trouble. As a Scottish nationalist, I have no doubt at all that the clarity of the choice between a hard right Brexit led Tory government, and Independence, can have only one result. Whether May or Corbyn is in No.10, I am confident this is the last Westminster election I shall have to endure.

If May sneaks back, Corbyn can continue with the work of recasting the Labour Party on popular and radical lines. Most importantly, boundary changes will give the chance for reselections to ditch a large portion of the Blairite rump. Still better would be a change of rules for mandatory reselection, where again the SNP shows Labour the way. And by next time Corbyn must face down the disgustingly blinkered and selfish attitude of the GMB, who love getting fat pay packets for working on weapons of mass destruction, and Corbyn must get a policy on Trident which he can defend without twisting himself in knots – again following the SNP.

If May gets back in, her government will collapse by 2020. Even a “defeat” on Thursday would not be the end, but just the start of a new dawn for popular radical politics,

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1) From 2010 to 2017 Corporation Tax in the UK reduced drastically from 28% to 19%

The UK now has notably lower corporate tax rates than most other large developed countries

On top of which HMRC has a particularly accommodating attitude to corporate tax avoidance.

2) But the corporations have not put any of the cash from this massive tax cut into investment

3) Rather all of the corporation tax giveaway has gone straight into the pockets of the rich, through massive executive pay increases and shareholder dividend increases.

I am sorry I could not find a more up to date version than 2015 of that chart, but it has got no better, and it illustrates well how since 2010 the corporation tax rate cuts in the UK – the green line – have resulted in a ludicrous explosion of dividends to earnings compared to international norms.

So the Tory corporation cuts have done nothing to help the wider economy at all, but simply lined the personal pockets of the already rich. It has almost no effect in stimulating the wider economy, and to reverse the cuts in corporation tax to pay for public sector investment is both prudent and likely to be effective in boosting economic growth.

In this hustings clip, independent candidate for Hastings and Rye Nicholas Wilson is linking the Manchester bombing to Tory support for arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Home Secretary Amber Rudd can be clearly seen writing a note, passing it to the chairman and speaking to him. He then immediately intervenes to stop Wilson speaking and takes the microphone from him.

I don’t have the name of the chairman who looks like a corrupt, overfed, complacent, Tory, Church of England vicar straight out of Trollope. But as soon as I get his name, I will publish it.

UPDATE

What is happening to the understanding of democracy in this country? I just got a call saying the Residents’ Committee of the apartment block where I live were instructing me to remove the SNP poster from my balcony (It is a small A3 poster). My reply was extremely rude, I am afraid, and I have now put up a second poster.

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I expect some criticism for saying this. But allowing terrorism to disrupt our democratic processes incentivises terrorists. Personal attention seeking, and the idea that their self-sacrifice will have an impact on the world, is part of the deranged psychology that motivates suicide bombers. To suspend the election campaign again following another dreadful terrorist attack, actually will boost the prestige of the act in the eyes of their supporters and potential future terrorists. If we react in this way, we are promoting the chances of a wave of such attacks every time we have an election.

I abhor and condemn last night’s attack and am dreadfully sorry for all victims, dead and injured, and for their family and friends. But it would serve the memory of the dead better if we reacted by continuing calmly with our democracy, and showed that their killers cannot win, cannot affect us.

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UPDATE: Livestream from Independence Live added.

I am heading out now to Glasgow for today’s demonstration for Scottish Independence. I am hoping to speak at the rally, but am not quite sure at the moment if I will get to do that. If not, I shall just be one of the crowd, tramping along. If you recognise me, do say hello.

Over 20,000 people have indicated on Facebook that they are going, but I fully expect the BBC to ignore the event. They will be far too busy wandering around Glasgow, desperately searching for Tory voters they can vox pop.

Use of vox pops in this election has been deeply disturbing. They are a device under which the broadcasters can slip in views of the “ordinary man” which they might otherwise need to challenge. Just this morning Radio 4 Today had somebody calling Jeremy Corbyn a “communist” without contradiction. Last night Channel 4 News did a vox pop in Mansfield in which seven out of nine people interviewed were switching their vote from Labour to Tory. When I was in Merthyr Tydfil last week I was given an eye witness account of a Sky News team going around the town centre literally for an entire working day and finding only two people who were switching from Labour to Tory. Those two people were broadcast as the entire Merthyr Tydfil vox pop.

It is not only the broadcast media. The mainstream media do it too. Rabid unionist propagandist Severin Carrell of the Guardian managed to do a vox pop around Glasgow East constituency which did not find a single SNP voter (the SNP will probably get over 50% in Glasgow East) but did find Tories (they will definitely get under 15%).

The point of such vox pops is of course to convince voters that people like themselves are thinking a certain way, and perhaps they ought to follow. It also introduces further pro-Tory slant which does not count against one party’s equal time selection. What we know already from the opinion polls is that the vox pops the media have given us are massively unrepresentative of the population.

I have never yet spoken at any demonstration or event for Independence without some well-meaning people contacting me to warn me against the group organising the march. My view is that I will turn up pretty well anywhere and speak to anyone in support of Independence. I am not sure if I will get to speak today, and I have seen no indication of who the other speakers are. But I shall be there. I am getting so overweight lately I can bulk out the crowd quite a bit!

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Good finish by Corbyn on tuition fees. But overall not a clear win for either, with a peculiarly lacklustre audience. Probably better for May as she exceeded expectations by not positively falling on her arse.

Corbyn finally showing some real passion in responding to a particularly Neanderthal Tory. Dimbleby steps in to undercut him.

Nuclear destruction, IRA, anti-Semitism, Diane Abbott, Brexit – every dull Tory attack line been trotted out. Audience seem half asleep.

Corbyn being helped by some really nasty arrogant Tories being allowed questions on keeping people’s wages down.

Audience Adam thinks that firing a nuclear weapon would preserve his safety. No Adam you would be dust very quickly after that. Without a huge diminution in intelligence evidently.

Dimbleby “I may come back to education and the economy”… but let’s get on to the firing nuclear weapons Tory attack meme. More important obviously.

Corbyn should reference the continual vilification of Diana Abbott as a gross example of racism.

BBC kick off with Corbyn on Brexit followed by coalition with SNP – BBC exactly following Tory attack agenda.

May got out of that without major damage. Unsympathetic and flinty to nurses and slipped into prepared rhetoric on education, but less stilted than usual.

May getting through this OK, aided by the BBC having selected audience critics who are mostly unusually inarticulate.

May told a blatant lie about Diane Abbott wanting to remove terrorists from DNA databases. I don’t think this kind of slur really helps her.

May stuttering and stumbling horribly as she lies about whether her manifesto changed over social care policy

For Theresa May the BBC immediately steer the subject straight on to the Tories’ preferred subject of Brexit.