I have received very many messages waiting for my take on the Alex Salmond acquittal. There is much to say and a need to take serious decisions about exactly when to reveal various crucial elements of information, because while the truth is vital, there can be a legitimate question at which moment it does most good. The most stunning information is in danger of being swamped by COVID-19 at the moment.
Secondly, you will not perhaps be surprised to hear that there has been some serious happiness in the Murray household today. This subject is best tackled stone cold sober.
It is tonight worth reflecting that people seeking to still cast aspersions are attacking the jury, who were diligent and contained nine women whom they are disparaging. Nine women on a jury drawn from No voting Edinburgh. A jury who for the last few years have been, like everybody else, indoctrinated with the rubric that it is a terrible moral wrong to doubt the word of an accuser making any sexual allegation #Ibelieveher.
I was worried that this was James Stewart of the Glen before a jury of Campbells all over again, but this jury looked carefully at the actual evidence before them, evidence that was – and still is now post verdict – in no way reflected fairly in the highly selective coverage of the mainstream media. That jury came to the only decision available to honest and sensible people.
But I want to make one thing quite clear. This is not a case where the major accusations failed because of the difficulty of proving what happened with two people alone in a room. In such cases it is often right to feel real and profound sorrow for the accuser with no means of proof. This was a case where there was very real evidence, from third party after third party, of certain accusers telling definite and deliberate lies. A case where eye witnesses stated categorically that claimed events did not happen. A case where eye witnesses testified people were not physically present when claimed. A case where witnesses testified that reports had not been made, and policies not instituted, as claimed by the prosecution.
A limited amount of evidence was also heard of some of the accusers conspiring together with others, including through a Whatsapp group created for the specific purpose, to fabricate and forward those lies. The vast bulk of evidence on this specific issue of conspiracy was excluded by the court both in pre-trial hearings and by dismissal of witnesses or evidence in the trial itself but, as Alex Salmond indicated from the court steps, will be out in due time.
It is also important to note that two thirds of the accusers – and indeed precisely those two thirds who were involved in lies, fabrications and conspiracy – were and are senior members of the SNP, very much part of the party machine, very much close to the leadership and especially involved in the non-independence related agenda that has taken over the party. With one exception, they are in highly paid party nominated jobs now with the tab picked up by the taxpayer. What we learned in the trial about careerism and self-promotion among those earning a very fat living out of the party’s current domination of Scottish politics was really very unedifying indeed.
That a party which has such a wonderful and committed membership – a membership who make me proud to be a member alongside them – should play host to a parasitic and highly paid professional elite with no discernible interest in Independence is a truly remarkable phenomenon. What we saw revealed in court was a procession of members of the political class who would just have happily have made their careers in the old corrupt Scottish Labour Party if it was still in charge. A major, major clearout is needed.
Now where did I leave my Lagavulin? For once, I feel I have deserved it.
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As Walter Scott once said “oh what a tangled we we weave when first we practise to deceive”
I wonder if the identities of the SNP and cs women who complained will begin to leak out quite soon.They must be widely known.
The main issue here is that to non-insiders it has all the hallmarks of an attempt to smear and drag into disrepute at any cost to the victim. Such an utter deficit of integrity among the participants is devastating and it must be a very sweet moment of karma to contemplate the joint hoisting by their own petards.
It isInteresting that there has been this attempt to use sexual and gender ‘values’ for the purpose of attacking a political opponent, and the relatively recent (three years?)decision to move to a more explicitly feminist policy by he SNP under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership .This, combined with the more recent determination for gender self ID policy and trans solidarity policy which has generated some considerable misgivings within the wider membership. This move has added to the sense that there is a cabal of internal cognoscenti or radical agitators within the party hierarchy whose values do notreadily coincide with the wider membership.
These policies felt rather ill considered, or not fully (sincerely) debated, as if a particularly vocal minority group seemed to want to impose their idea on the wider community. Although not an SNP member i have been aware of the rift over gender identity through SNP member acquaintances.
I am a member of the green party and s similar feeling has arise there that one has no option but to follow the leadership view. if gender is raised within the facebook ‘green’ forum it generates a great deal of venomous commentary mainly among trans sympathisers condemning others as ‘Terfs’ with antediluvian conservative attitudes which is not a proper or considered recognition of the diverse and comp[lex views.It feels like ‘my way or the highway’
The approach of the complainants was also interesting for its coinciding with the Weinstein trial and the ‘me too’ movement, expressing widespread, mainly female, dissent with the legacy of patriarchy.There is not much doubt that there is a shift in attitude towards the kinds of predatory, highly sexualised behaviour of men that became much more common in the sixties, seventies and eighties and which replace a rather oppressive view of sexuality inherited from Victorian times and the first half of the 20th century. The trial attempted to cast Alex Salmond’s behaviour towards women as akin to that of Weinstein- a kind of ‘Weinstein’ “mini-me”-using his political power (as opposed to Weinstein’s financial /career building power to obtain sexual favours) .The judgement of the jury was very pragmatic, in that it seems to suggest that flirtation and perhaps the mildly sexual innuendo that often accompanies personal, and even working relationships is so commonplace that it is absurd to bring this into a court setting. Patrirchical dominance of men within many facets of life, and multiple discourses (but particularly political) is clearly a source of grievance for many women who believe that male sexual behaviour is one of many ways in which female equality and achievement is suppressed.
These are very important issues and I would say that I deplore some of the underlying assumptions that lead to exploitation of certain groups and the devaluing of their roles it is important to be able to clearly understand the differences between obviously predatory and exploittive behaviour and the inevitable buzz or frisson of sexuality that can energise and promote productive relationships.
This is exactly what happened to the Labour Party in the early 1980s: Labour was until then a fairly broad church with plenty having economic views not far from wet Tories. All that changed when the Militant Tendency, the Benn/Heffer etc coalition decided to try and radicalise. They did, in fact, get slaughtered in 1983 (although the Falklands war meant that Maggie would have probably have won even against Denis Healey).
It may also have happened again in the Labour Party with Momentum: an apparently big membership but a narrow church maybe the reason they did not win elections, not to mention a Brexit policy in 2020 that was so out of tune with voter sentiment across the UK as to be laughable.
Professional politicians often forget that the views of membership and supporters have to reign supreme, for long term support to be stable.
I doubt more than 5% of men would vote for any party pushing radical feminism, transgender extremism and generalised trashing of men. 0% would be a healthy number….
It is the same with women: how many of them would vote for a ass-spanking, tit-grabbing misogynist w**ker who thought all women should stay at home and simply be a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom? Zero, I hope……
That undemocratic, self-defeating Brexit policy was pushed hardest by the Labour Right — Blair, Watson and Co, people who share Conservative economic and foreign policy views.
If Labour had supported Brexit to keep hold of xenophobic votes in the North of England, how would they have prevented much of their middle class voter and membership base switching to the LibDems?
Well they’ll have an arch-Remainer centrist leading them shortly so the proto-lib dem cohort should finally be happy. Where it leaves Labour electorally is easy to predict.
N
You got your forecast result of the trial wrong. In fact you don’t get much right at all.
There you go again dehumanising people whom you don’t agree with. Why are you so full of hate? The bile is pouring out of you. Get a grip as such division is not good at all.
One of the oddest things about Brexit was Corbyn’s policy shift. He was an is a Brexiter. All he had to do was stick to his guns. Probably he wouldn’t be PM, but he would have saved a lot of seats. It’s one of these political mysteries which, I suspect, is solved by considering coercion and blackmail. The idiots in his party set the policy, got slaughtered, and blamed Corbyn. They won’t be in power for 3 parliaments. And it all could have been avoided. Curious.
All this gender nonsense on the left has left my looking for a party to support. Many men are like me in this regard, which the London brigade appear not to realise. Even curiouser.
Possibly but I suspect Corbyn was never going to be allowed to win. Had he gone all out for Brexit, the establishment would have ‘made sure’ the Lib Dems split the vote in London and other Remain cities.
The reason Corbyn lost was quite simply that the British establishment and the American military-industrial complex wouldn’t tolerate a pacifist, socialist as Prime Minister so he had to be stopped, through media lies and smears worthy of a dictatorship and, quite possibly the postal ballots in marginal Labour and Tory seats being faked.
And what timing for that election in December – just before Brexit and the coronavirus panic! Imagine if Labour and the SNP had refused to back the election and where we might be now. Not with a faux-Mussolini issuing orders that people should stay at home over a virus that is no more serious than flu – all for his bosses in Washington to cover up their crimes in China,Iran and Italy – but something much more representative of moderate British opinion.
The virus is certainly more serious than flu, because it is more highly infectious, so that the numbers with it rapidly multiply exponentially. It is new, so no-one has immunity. It’s more likely to lead to the need for hospital admission and and intensive care than flu, and quickly overwhelms healthcare systems and hospitals, as happened in Wuhan, is happening in Italy and Spain, and will soon be happening here, as the government is acting so slowly.
So that doctors will have to decide which emergencies can get treatment and which are left to die alone at home.
Younger people with no health conditions are dying too.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/health-care-workers-world-covid-19_n_5e7b343dc5b620022ab3c832?ri18n=true
Read (the editor of top medical journal The Lancet) Richard Horton’s twitter feed for an assessment of the scale of the problem and how badly our nurses and doctors are being provided with the protection they need.
https://twitter.com/richardhorton1
With respect enquirer your huff post piece mentions nothing about young people dying. It says nothing about the ages of the health care workers and the only one is does was a 73 year old retiree. Like any winter seasonal virus you will always find the odd younger death due to viral overload but are very much the exception
We are told in scotland deaths are low due to being a month behind the rest of europe. So why are we getting quoted several thousand dead if lockdown works….as we are being told symptoms can take a week to manifest. Or that south korea had no lockdown whatsoever yet got on top of it. At the root is probably poorly provisioned healthcare systemscstripped to bone which is probably why germany has coped best.
Supporting Brexit, in other words Powellite xenophobia, wouldn’t have gone down well with the millions of non-white voters who mainly vote Labour either.
Agreed that mentioning transsexuals a large number of times in the manifesto was totally idiotic. So was promising a million climate change jobs. Those types of thing are what I’d cite as indicators of derangement, not the Brexit policy.
The dominoes are tumbling.
Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta admits that the test for COVID-19 is ineffective. Many of those diagnosed with the virus are probably ill from other causes – seasonal flu anyone? By the way, average annual death rate worldwide from seasonal flu is 2.5 million But nobody’s interested in talking about seasonal flu, unless the authorities ramp it up as super flu, as they did several years ago when health centres closed with notices at the entrance saying something along the lines of, “If you have a cough, cold, runny nose, sore throat, headache, blah, blah, blah … you probably have super flu. Do not attend the surgery. Phone in and we will offer you appropriate advice.” That’s how they inflated the figures for flu that winter. Every silly bugger who phoned in to complain of a runny nose, etc., was recorded as another case of super flu.
UK government announced on their official website that it no longer considered COVID-19 to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID). Posted to site on March 23. Decision taken on March 19.
Deepgreenpuddock
I agree with you that there has been a lot of mystery in this case because many facts have been withheld because of possible contempt of court. Tomorrow is another day and no doubt very soon the mists will evaporate and all be revealed.
What an excellent posting. My problem is that we have a virus causing havoc throughout mankind, with the promise of more to come. The ice is melting and the sea is rising. We have the impending Brexit situation which will wreak havoc on the UK and Scottish economy as well as having to deal with the effects of the post-virus economy. In other words, jobs and the economy/prosperity/growth/recession/depression/Trump …these are the words which we should be concentrating on. I, and I’m sure most others, do not give a damn about ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminism and other faux issues which use verbal gymnastics that make some morons, with a chip on their shoulder, use repeatedly because they think they are intelligent. I am pleased that most folks have woken up and are smelling the coffee. The reality check has happened. Let’s concentrate on real issues.
As you suggest but do not state, political careerists/SPADS, are whores. They are perfectly happy to work for any party. And that in itself, is not necessarily bad, as long as they don’t get carried away with their own importance. Dominic Cummings is the prime example here.
If anything I must say I am really surprised that they made such a botched job coming up with those accusations. If you want to frame someone the least you can do it to construct an air-tight case.
I’m not in the least bit surprised to see the level of incompetence shown by these ‘witnesses’
This is what happens when people are promoted beyond their capabilities. just because they adhere to some ‘philosophy’ such as believing that men are women if they say they are.
Yes, Patrick. Men are women if they say they are. How absurd is that. I am an alien because I say I am and I should make sure all mainstream political parties not only recognise that, but indulge in fawning over me whilst trashing people with other views as ‘alienphobes’.
Much has been claimed to indicate a faith in the Scottish Judicial System following Salmonds acquittal after this clearly political trial.
There can be no faith in the Scottish Judicial System until the political decision to fit up Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan who was found guilty by Scottish Judges of the murders in 1988 when a PanAm flight was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie in Scotland. Unlike Salmond it was done without a jury being present.
The Scottish criminal cases review commission has recently referred the case to the appeal court because it “believes that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred” aka a stitch up of the accused…_
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/will-we-finally-discover-the-truth-about-lockerbie
A rare positive event in recent past. Thanks for comprehensive report, I feel glad that I could support it, however modestly. Seems that Sturgeon clique will have some trouble — from the article in The Guardian.
Just read the Ruth Wishart article (guardian) about the trial and its effects. I wont waste words on this feeble, po-faced evasion of the heart of the issues raised by the trial result.
thanks to level heided scoats jury,this should never huv goan tae trial.
Given that Salmond has probably had all his communications and important meetings tapped or bugged for the last 30 years its strange that nothing was used against him prior to the 2014 referendum.
Anyway,on the basis of the evidence im glad he was acquitted.As his QC stated there was a real stink about the whole process.
Well done Craig.
I agree but Indy-ref may already have been in the bag, care of IDOX. I believe their model is as yet unappreciated by most. With combined election data mining and election management, they have a unique means and opportunity to surgically alter any vote, for whichever side is required to win.
And it would appear they have not given up. Accusations in London now.
Your Excellency,
A sniggeringly surprising outcome. Now police should arrest the conspirators in their skivvies during the early hours and also invite TV.
Have them in the cells for a few days while lawyers faff about for bail. The leather on those Jimmy Choo shoes, probably bought with salaries/expenses from the state, will get really scratched in a concrete cell.
As we’ll all be virus victims soon, the Scottish scuffers ought to get a move on.
lol.
Wonderfully snidey stuff, Mr Ambassador.
Phil
Enjoy your Lagavulin Craig, you deserve it. Your reporting on both the Alex Salmond trial and on the Julian Assange trial has been a refreshing antidote to the usual guff from the MSM.
@Rhys Jaggar – March 24, 2020 at 16:43
The Falklands factor I’ve always thought a bit of unconvincing hindsight. The SDP and the massive and I mean massive hype the media built around it, from the very beginning when it really was just nothing was by far the greater factor. From the gang of four, Rodgers, Owen, Williams and someone else utterly forgettable, it came to include almost forty prior Labour MPs, most of whom got slaughtered in the ’83 election. What might today be called the Atlanticist or Blairite wing who wormed their way back in to the Labour party under that treacherous worm Kinnock, who’d it’s claimed had been working for the US Embassy since at least 1970, reporting to them (for cash presumably, or other reasons, pecadilloes) the internal goings-on of the Labour Party and CND and any other tit-bits he could sell. The SDP was I think still was The factor which gave MT her great, record actually 144 majority, when outside of the Home Counties, she was simply despised country-wide. Splitting the anti-Tory vote. No-one but flag-waving died-in the-wool Tories gave a toss about the Falklands, only domestic issues mattered, unemployment, vast industrial concerns closing down every day and dogged pursuit of frankly insane economic policies in the face of a mountain of evidence they had already failed terribly, that it was economic suicide to write-off every single penny and pound of post-ww2 industrial investment, private and the greater part public, which could not be hived off on the cheap to the Tories city mates, and the exodus of investment capital into what were thought more lucrative overseas investments, utilising near slave labour and with a cavalier attitude to environmental consequences. The Falklands factor claims are just not convincing, and it becomes more credible that as well as the SDP factor, that election might have been stolen by other means which will never be publicly aired. Just as the state went into full Stop-Corbyn mode, they had done to Stop Michael Foot.
You are on the right track. Rhys is particularly wrong about the effect of the Militant tendency, which was the last and the mildest in a series of neo-trotskyist entry groups. Trotskyism was endemic in the Labour Party for decades, it gave the opposition to the right wing NATO and Union bosses point and focus. It was part of the democracy in the party and it was not until that democracy-always tenuous- was effectively eroded that New Labour, a clone of the Clinton Democrats, could survive the contempt of the membership. It did so by becoming a machine for careerists and trough guzzlers.
Galloway, at RT has an interesting piece on Salmond and this case. Talking of New Labour he has this to say:
“..the rubric that ‘victims’ must ‘be believed’ – an innovation in England of the then-Sir Keir Starmer QC the Director of Public Prosecutions, shortly to be revealed as the new leader of the opposition Labour Party – was already mortally wounded by the Carl Beech affair….”
You want to look at how Militant was ousting more moderate Labour members from local constituencies. They were not interested in a broad church, they were interested in revolution…….
But everyone is entitled to their opinions.
My opinions are not my personal views, they are my views on how I saw things at the time from a distance.
As I voted for Roy Jenkins in Hillhead when I lived there, you can see that we probably hold differing views about things lol.
Galloway talking out of his silly hat again. The instruction that in the first instance the victim should be believed was first issued by the Metropolitan Police in 2002, six years before Starmer became DPS, and was subsequently taken up by other police forces.
James Cormack @10.22 on the 24th hits the nail on the head about what has gone wrong with the SNP.
Once a party of vision, of principled politics, they now inhabit the ground of micro minority interest that not only do not reflect the wishes of the general populace, but actually cause offence to the majority of the voting public.
But this may change. I am too an SNP supporter and I see change coming. People put their trust in the SNP and that trust needs to be repaid. Not by a commitment to self gender assignment, the right for trans men to use ladies loos, but by by solid policies that lift the common lot of the people and the economy.
In the early years Salmond’s governments delivered free prescriptions, fee free university education, the removal of hospital parking, the commitment to building our way out of recession through the delivery of infrastructure and more.
We need more of this, and not woke micro minority policies that no one wants. We are in the midst of a crisis just now. Many will die. The social, human and economic impacts will be huge. But we can emerge out of it and when we do, we want a party and a movement who will put the interests of the people at the heart of every policy agenda and not the trite acceptance of what Bojo and his chums want.
Well said Mr Cormack for saying what so many of us think.
Personally I suspect that a party that starts wibbling about gender nonsense has run out of things to do, or is simply unwilling to do them. I will actively vote against any party that has a platform of self gender reassignment, and weird unisex toilets. We’ve gone through our entire world history without either, safe to say we’ll be ok.
Truth is, this gender stuff is only of interest to a vanishingly small percentile of the population. And as you say, actively offends many others. Trans kids? I really don’t think so.
“I will actively vote against any party that has a platform of self gender reassignment, and weird unisex toilets. We’ve gone through our entire world history without either, safe to say we’ll be ok. ”
Actually, from what I have read, gender segregated toilets are a relatively recent development in the history of human defecation. Moreover, on any planes which I have travelled on, the toilets seem to be segregated by class, not by gender…
As such, I have no particular issues with unisex toilets. The same is not true for some of the other nonsense which arises in heated gender debates.
One small point: segregated by wealth, not class. Some of the wealthy have no class. Watch the celebrity nonsense on TV and you will see.
Just asked on WGD forum if there has been any comment from Sturgeon on the Salmond acquittal. Has there been any comment from her or her office the SNP party leadership. Silence speaks volumes. It is not the words that are spoken but those that are not.
I was in a brief discussion the other day over how much, post crisis, a degree of sleight of hand might characterise the relaxation of Boris’s emergency powers regarding Scotland. My friend used the phrase “state of exception”, relating it to the Italian political philosopher GIORGIO AGAMBEN, of whom I had not heard. Checking out Giorgio Agamben since, I have been struck by a few resonances. Besides the pressing matter of emergency powers, Agamben’s term “homo sacer” surely brings to mind the plight of Julian Assange. Even a dismally unsettling whiff of it appears in today’s Times regarding possible English Court proceedings against Alex Salmond (may it not be so).
Agamben sees a parallel enigmatic relationship with the law for both “sovereign” and the (no-man’s land) “homo sacer” (cf Gaelic “fògrach”). Here are a few excerpts from a synopsis of Giorgio Agamben’s thought by Nasrullah Mambrol (2018):
“In his more recent work, State of Exception (2005), Agamben says that the one is sovereign who can determine the state of exception. The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign, like homo sacer, is both ‘outside and inside the juridical order’. […] The sovereign must, first of all, decide when a state of exception exists and, second, decide upon strategies – including the suspension of normal legal processes – to deal with it. These include, above all, calling a state of emergency.
“[…] Here then is the worry behind the paradox of sovereignty: the risk that a sovereign might resort to violence in an irresponsible way. Agamben points, for example, to the suspension of law (including the suspension of the Geneva conventions on the conduct of war) in the ‘war on terrorism’ with respect to those interned by America at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. There, prisoners have no legal identity and recall the plight of stateless people between the wars referred to by Hannah Arendt (1951). Agamben also cites the arbitrary policies involving the suspension of the law being employed to deal with asylum seekers. Increasingly, asylum seekers are purposely processed and their claims assessed outside the boundaries of any state, in international territory. They thus have no legal status and thus cannot appeal to any authority if their human rights are violated. They are non-persons.
“[…] A passage – frequently paraphrased by Agamben, from Emile Beneveniste’s Indo-European Language and Society (1973), explains exactly what is at stake: ‘A man who is called *sacer* is stained with a real pollution which puts him outside human society: contact with him must be shunned. If someone kills him, this does not count as homicide’. […] Agamben invokes the old German term ‘ban’ to describe this situation. He who is banned by the law is not simply set outside the law, but is ‘abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order.’ Thus, the law both posits the sovereign and makes the sovereign the one who is also outside the law. This is the paradox of sovereignty.”
https://literariness.org/2018/03/07/key-theories-of-giorgio-agamben/
Note by Giorgio Agamben about meeting Julian Assange a year ago (April 2019) –
Original Italian –
https://tinyurl.com/rvpplch
English translation –
https://tinyurl.com/y2ceu8lq
I’m pleased you got the just result that you wanted. A few years ago I saw you in a pub at the top of the Royal Mile and later on the North Bridge and you looked miserable. It’s hard caring about issues and injustices that you have little control over.
So I’m going to buy Sikunder Burnes for my Kindle as my way of saying thank you.
Interesting this comes from Germany – they have 157 deaths from Coronavirus over 3 weeks in a nation of 80 million or so. Why so different from Italy and Spain?
O/T but very serious
There has been a very sinister turn in the national lock-down scam
Four days before the UK was put on lock-down and we were all put under house arrest, businesses closed and wealth transferred. HMG DOWNGRADED the Convid-19 threat level because its mortality rate was too low
“Status of COVID-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.”
SARS remains on the HCID list although it has not been reported since 2004
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
We have all been had
I was at work today.
The governments actions clearly don’t affect you then.
Not so far.
I’m certainly not under house arrest.
I have an appointment on thursday at.pur GP surgey, an ingrown toenail party. Shall ask the doctor what he thinks why this should be. Maybe he knows about it, maybe not.
Maybe a national strike is what we need. Could not get a signal all night for RT.
Have you been drinking?
No just a fat finger syndrome dearest.
Have you?
Yes, I’m going to be a grandfather for the second time.
Sensible to have it treated. I suffered a few toenail infections as a boy, and had a couple of painful operations. In the old days before antibiotics, people sometimes lost feet or legs when gangrene set in.
No infection should be neglected.
Minor op just been cancelled. Pity I wanted it get over and done with it.
Possibly?
But ” had ” for what reason?
There is always a reason for the Rich and those who work for the Rich to do these things.
Including the necessary Falklands War as far as Thatcher was concerned as she was tumbling in the polls.
The sinking of the Belgrano was the trigger for war as the revenge factor from The Argentinians was used as an excuse to fight dirty.
Fortunately the duff old French Exocet Missiles hit targets but failed to go off.
Otherwise history may have been different.
As I say -there is always a reason why these opportunities are taken.
I don’t know myself but a theory of mine is that this is a Bail Out of the Financial sector that was promised would never happen again.
9 Trillion Dollars pitched into the Overnight Lending markets in the US within 6 months according to some indicates to me that the Corona Virus Opportunity is being taken.
Some cynics think it’s all orchestrated.
I couldn’t possibly comment.
To pass the Coronavirus Bill probably: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-01/0122/20122.pdf
I’ve only skimmed through it but here’s one small example even without sweeping new powers of arrest and indemnity: combined with changes to the Mental Capacity (Amendment) Act 2019, a single ‘clinical practitioner’ may authorise any person over the age of sixteen to be involuntarily and indefinitely detained and in certain circumstances denied access to relatives with no judicial process and no probability of conviction for wrongfully doing so, except to acknowledge clinical error. Sounds far fetched but I’ve actually witnessed most of this occur using a Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards order (DOLs) under the Mental Capacity Act, 2005.
This other strange aspect of the Bill should ring alarms: https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/22/coronavirus-bill-slashes-safeguards-in-death-registration/
And Section 75 of the unamended bill, dealing with expiry, contains the ‘sunset’ clause, then 2 years amended to 6 months but also exempts large parts of the Bill from expiry, signing them into law permanently. At 350 pages, it was not hastily prepared and clearly predates the current emergency.
Too early to say that I think, however you are right to be suspicious.
Today some news sites are telling us “Comparing UK and Italy is ‘not useful'”
Perhaps, however I would suggest comparing Germany and Italy might be useful.
Everything is being classed as covid 19 despite there being not actual test for it. The only test at moment is for antibodies and immune system response. It appears there is more than one virus doing the rounds at moment….covid 19 being the mild one and a different one being the more dangerous. There is no doubt there was a seasonal flu outbreak as well in italy that has contributed to the death toll. Doctors in lombardy said that from the start that they had a flu outbreak too.
Mark:
So the Italian health care system isn’t really on its knees due to the contagion. Oh, thank goodness.
Misinformation and half-truths do not lives save. Fucking idiots like you will undoubtedly be scoffing at the food charities ‘pretending’ to dish out food to the most vulnerable stuck in their homes. Laughing at the health professionals ‘risking’ their lives and living in isolation, there you are scoffing and pointing the finger at people in masks. Everything HAS to be seen through the lens of conspiracy, not humanity, in your ill conceived view. Check your head, its been poisoned by ‘over think’.
reading the guardian, you’d think he had been convicted of all the charges: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/23/salmonds-victory-in-court-leaves-questions-over-role-of-snp
More power to their elbow. Should the English case go ahead, AS’s legal team will be able to turn round and point to all this stuff and say “Our client has no chance of a fair trial…”
I’ve no doubt Alex and his team has an archive of all the nasty, biased newspaper coverage, both so-called news and so-called commentary.
Not to mention two verdicts in Alex’s favour already – one in a civil court, one in a criminal court – which suggest, at the least, a conspiracy against him.. Another prosecution, especially by a compromised police service like the Met, whose history of investigating these cases is somewhat colourful, could be seen to have crossed the line into persecution.
The new Carrell and Brooks idea is that Salmond is nasty and vindictive, and planning his revenge. (Umm, that’s Johnson surely?).
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/24/alex-salmond-allies-say-he-plans-to-sue-the-scottish-government
People who make false allegations are beneath contempt.
But in this case it would appear that it was not an individual, nor even a local conspiracy of political feminists, nor even a deployment of agents from GCHQ against Scottish Nationalism.
No. It appears to be part of the celebrity Weinstein MSM that tries to dictate who Prince Harry can marry, who is famous, who gets good publicity, who gets their reputation trashed.
In fact it is a gross perversion of the rules of public interest journalism that whatever makes money from voyeur rustic sensationalism = the national interest..
Multi- billionaire press barons/ esses are imho not in the same category of beneath contempt as greedy people who sell themselves to political interest groups. The press has it’s own particularly nasty agenda, to subvert the rules of human society, no less. To try to break down the bonds of social etiquette is on a level of those who start wars deliberately like Blair-Bush and Cameron-Obama, with the sole purpose of incapacitating human decency.
In short, imho there is a vast difference between those who sell themselves to vested interests for cash and those whose motivation is criminal pathology, people who light fires, people who relax in watching wars ignited, blast-furnace and destroy all in their paths. These type of people are not beneath contempt. But curiously enough most of them inhabit and are protected by the highest level of government.
That is the enormity of the task. How to destroy the psychopaths in power.
I am listening…..any ideas?
Douglass
Hmm. sarcasm? shame the bastards into submission?
A supporter of Sturgeon tells the Guardian “Is this going to bring the first minister down? No, it’s not. I don’t see that they’ve got a mechanism to do that. It’s not great, but we will get through this.”
Ha! Talk about planting your colours on the moral high ground. Sturgeon will remain in post ’cause there isn’t the MECHANISM to depose her. Nicola and Peter will dig in and collect the riches ’cause there’s nothing in the rules to stop them.
IMPORTANT
As we are getting a police lock down in the UK
Here is something you will not be told on the BBC , SKY . ITV or Newspapers
COVID-19 has not been considered highly infectious in the UK due to low death rate since 19th March 2020
This information needs to passed onto the UK public
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid
Status of COVID-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.
The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.
The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.
When you look at the diseases such as Monkeypox and SARS which do classify as HCIDs and which have a 10%+ mortality rate that’s not really much comfort. The UK mortality rate from COVID 19 is, I believe, around 1%, ten times more than seasonal ‘flu but still well below Italy’s rate of 7%.
I keep hearing how more lethal this is than flu…but if italy lost 25000 to the flu last year…and this ends up pegging at say 15000 with what appears to be covid 19(but could be misdiagnosed flu) how can anyone say it is more lethal. The death toll does not match that assertion. We’re told this covid 19 is more infectious than flu..and more people get it….so if less die how is it more lethal ?
Its so sad. The lefty Scots want independence so that they can get on with creating their own small and beautiful Marxist state paradise on earth. But what happens? The scumbags who always arrive to bugger it all up
Incoming. Prepare for developments………
“Famous Spanish jurist Baltasar Garzon has been admitted to a hospital in Madrid after testing positive for #Covid19. He has provided legal counsel to WikiLeaks publisher #JulianAssange, among other things.”
https://twitter.com/LaFleurDelSur/status/1242597678527188992
Didn’t Craig have some sort of suspicions of this person or was it some other Spanish person assisting J Assange?
Not good.
@ramblingidiot – March 25, 2020 at 09:26
no that’s wrong, the lefty Scots want normality, a Nordic model, socialist state, planned mixed private and public enterprises, thinking of the long-term, not short-term gross profits for a very few, they want upward mobility for the successful, for innovators, for the hard-working, not the casino model economy where the banker takes all, the rest perpetual wage and debt-slaves. The Marxists, like George Galloway are also frothing Britnats, they don’t want a successful Scotland unless they can also, they claim, have the same in the rest of the UK too. They want Scotland to suffer and continue to suffer, because there is no viable way out for England and Wales, unless the people there demand it and they don’t they have Stockholm Syndrome, they think it must always be as it has been. Scotland has kept England afloat, the champagne corks popping in the City this last half-century, while it peopel remained slumped in misery and poverty. We, left, right and centre in Scotland want an end to that and Independence is the only game in town for achieving it. Our example, and our help we’ll willingly, gladly give to the neighbouring nations, our kin, in England, Wales, all parts of Ireland too can help them, give them hope as well practical help. Marxists want continued misery for all as according to Marx’s bonkers, quite ludicruos theories they slavishly adhere to as if it was a religion and they budding autocrats, the people disempowered sheep, cattle who must bear their suffering it must intensify, until the moment, according to the theory, worldwide revolution breaks out. It’s long overdue, by Marx’s timetable, not only is the train not coming, the station has been demolished, the tracks lifted, the rolling-stock cut-up, long may they wait, meanwhile there’s a handy bus outside, but they won’t take it, unless they’re put in charge, which is all Marxism and the extreme left has ever been about, power for a self-chosen elite, meet the new bosses, every bit as much bastards, probably more so than the old bosses.
There can not be Indeyref2 untill the virus has run through our lands.
Ian Blackford has claimed.
“the lefty Scots want normality, a Nordic model, socialist state, planned mixed private and public enterprises, thinking of the long-term, not short-term gross profits for a very few, they want upward mobility for the successful, for innovators, for the hard-working, not the casino model economy where the banker takes all, the rest perpetual wage and debt-slaves”
I was gifted a book by a friend who had similar views to your own. I confess, I haven’t read it, but I’ve just picked it out of my bookcase and I’m going to give it a go:
COMMON WEAL: A BOOK OF IDEAS
‘This is not a case where the major accusations failed because of the difficulty of proving what happened with two people alone in a room.’
That’s misleading and plain wrong Craig. That was the entire basis of the defense cases over the two most serious charges.
Nelson
I think you are the one who is misleading and plain wrong.
That’s misleading and plain wrong Craig. That was the entire basis of the defense cases over the two most serious charges…
Actually, the entire basis of the “defense” (CIA shill or just rubbish at spelling?) against the most serious charge was that the non-victim was never there in the first place – an assertion that was borne out by a witness who was also an old friend of the non-victim.
Apart from that, good post.
Stonky
Why can Nelson not just stay perched on his column.
He should have never been on a column, he was crap compared to Sir Thomas Cochran.
@ nevermind March 25, 2020 at 17:36
tell that to the pigeons! They give him their ‘blessings’ daily.
For some reason “Nelson” always seems to disappear every time I make him look stupid.
I think maybe he turns his blind eye and then he can’t see stuff any more.
If ‘The Alphabet Sisters’ were so keen to get rid of Alex Salmond
do you think it’s possible that there was some ‘jiggery pokery’ during the 2017 election when Alex Salmond lost his seat?
I started to have doubts about Nicola Sturgeon during the Mark MacDonald case. I’m wondering now if the case against Mark MacDonald may have been instigated by ‘The Alphabet Sisters’
Was there an ‘Alphabet Sister’ hoping to get Mark MacDonald’s seat?
Then there’s Derek MacKay!
I’d like to leave a two part comment; firstly the 9 women in the jury, I have heard it said that one woman knows when another woman is a liar, seems to be true. Secondly several years ago in branch meeting before the start in a quiet conversation, I said to fellow member and my wife, that I would welcome any or all those from the Labour party who wanted to join us as long as they leave their clieques and divisions at the door. I now think they brought them all in and managed to get some converts into the bargain. Not all or even most who joined but they ones determined to cause upsets and get their way or no way managed to get there.