The Lord Advocate’s “reference” to the UK Supreme Court on whether the Scottish Parliament has the power to instigate an Independence Referendum is carefully wrought to get the answer “No”.

From the opening pleading on whether the Supreme Court should hear the petition at all – which Lord advocate Bain founds solely on the argument that Independence and the UK Parliament are “reserved matters” to Westminster, therefore she is entitled to make the reference –

Bain continually shoots the pro-Referendum argument in the foot. If you believe that Sturgeon and her Lord Advocate are genuinely acting with the intention of gaining Independence, then you must believe Bain is the worst lawyer in the world.

Alternatively she is a middling clever lawyer who has set out deliberately to fail. This could not be clearer than in the course her argument takes next. The reference to the Supreme Court arises, she states, because the Lord Advocate has to certify a Bill as within the competence of the Scottish Parliament, not relating to a reserved matter. Bain states “she would be unlikely to have the necessary degree of confidence that the Bill does not relate to a reserved matter”.

Given that she has stated at para 8 that this is about a reserved matter and that is why the Supreme Court has competence to hear the reference, it is hardly surprising that she does not have confidence that this is not a reserved matter.

But as an exercise in pointing the Supreme Court towards refusal, para 22 could hardly have been bettered. Bain here plainly said that she cannot certify the Referendum Bill as within the competence of the Scottish Parliament as she does not have confidence in the Scottish Goverment’s case – the very case she is supposed to be making out here.

It did not have to be formulated that way. Rather than stating that Bain does not have “the necessary degree of confidence that the Bill does not relate to a reserved matter to “clear” the Bill”, she could have written something neutral along the lines of “Given the serious implications of a potential Independence referendum, the Lord Advocate considered it proper to defer the decision to the highest authority.”

But Bain does not do that. Instead she gratuitously tells the Supreme Court that:

a) In her opinion the Referendum Bill cannot be certified as within the Scottish Parliament’s competence

and – pay attention this is crucial

b) Should the Supreme Court refuse to give a reference or say it is up to the Lord Advocate, she is going to refuse to certify the Bill

I have said that Bain could have put the question neutrally, and not told the Supreme Court her position that the Bill cannot be certified. Of course a Lord Advocate – and a First Minister – who actually believed in Independence would not have referred the matter to London at all. They would have certified the Bill as competent and left it to the unionists to challenge through the courts.

Instead we have this charade of pleading to London for Scotland’s right to decide, while grovelling at the same time and stating that in their personal opinion, we do not have the right to decide.

My personal experience of Scotland’s top lawyers – which has been both profound and incredibly costly – is that the Scottish legal profession is the most deferential, self-serving and utterly cowed by the Establishment in all of Europe. The Scottish legal profession has united behind Bain in sycophantic applause of her “even-handed” approach in setting out “both sides of the argument” – even though in so doing she has made plain which side she favours, and it is not the Independence side.

But the Lord Advocate is not supposed to be even-handed. She is supposed to argue the Scottish Government’s case. That is why she is called the Lord Advocate and not the Lord Judge*. Bain is a minister in the Scottish Government. That is an affront to the separation of powers, but it makes plain she speaks and argues for the Scottish Government of which she is a member.

When the then Lord Advocate intervened against Martin Keatings in the Keatings case (cited by Bain) on precisely the same issue now referred to the Supreme Court, the Lord Advocate was not even-handed. The Lord Advocate did not set out both sides.

In the Keatings case, the Lord Advocate put strongly the Scottish Government position, which was that Martin Keatings is but a peasant with no standing, and that whether a referendum without Westminster approval would be legal is of no concern to the likes of Keatings and the common scum, but is a question the putting of which before a court is solely under the authority of the mighty Nicola Sturgeon.

I have paraphrased the Lord Advocate’s argument in the Keatings case there slightly, but that is not in the least an unfair characterisation.

The judges in that case followed the Lord Advocate – and it is worth noting that the Scottish Government through the Lord Advocate and the Westminster government through the Advocate General combined to put down Keatings’ impudent assertion that the people of Scotland had an interest. As Bain puts it at para 29 “The Lord President’s discussion [judgment] largely reflected the the submissions made on behalf of both the Advocate General and the Lord Advocate.”

In setting out the “even-handed” arguments for and against the competence of the Bill, Bain devotes most space to an exhaustive series of quotes to show that it was the specific intention of Westminster in passing the Scotland Act that the Scottish Parliament could not choose to hold a referendum on Independence.

The sole argument on which Bain founds the case for a referendum being competent, is that the referendum would have no effect. It would not be “self-executing”, and the ultimate political result of such a referendum cannot be easily foreseen by the courts. Bain is stating that Westminster could simply choose to ignore a “Yes” vote in a Scottish parliament initiated referendum, and that it would just be a “consultative exercise” for the Scottish government to determine popular opinion.

That really is how the Lord Advocate for the Scottish Government frames the “positive” case for the referendum.

Self-Determination – the Elephant in the Room

The most important point of all is that Bain makes no argument that Scotland has the inherent right to act unilaterally on the principle of self-determination. She argues purely from UK domestic law and makes no argument from international law whatsoever.

Bain in fact clearly points that she does not believe Scotland has any rights in international law. She dredges up and gives in full this highly obscure quote from Lord Slynn in a House of Lords committee:

“For my part, I would accept that there was an international treaty between
England and Scotland (as it has often been so called in the past), but since
neither state has existed as such since 1707 there is no party to the treaty which
could enforce it.”

The non-existence of Scotland appears to be accepted by Bain. That the same non-existence criterion could have been applied to every colony before it regained independence appears not to trouble these people.

Yet there appears, from time to time through the enshrouding mists of Bain’s argument, an entirely disjointed reference to Scotlands right of self-determination, simply asserted, contradicting her major arguments but ignored in them, as though a mantra with no meaning. Peculiarly, the strongest statement of Scotland’s self-determination referenced by Bain is a quote from Margaret Thatcher:

The right to self-determination emerges again in Bain’s conclusion. Here she makes her view crystal clear, that self-determination is part of the “political context” and not a legal matter, it has no legal effect.

This explains why Bain nowhere mentions self-determination as a legal argument justifying Scotland’s right to hold a referendum.

But this is spectacularly wrong. Self-determination of peoples is a fundamental legal right, and there is a huge amount of treaty and case law around it.

The UN Charter itself embodies “the self-determination of peoples” in Article 1 (ii).

The Helsinki Final Act – to which the UK is a signatory – is explicit at Article VIII on how secession should be treated, and is vital here because it relates specifically to the European context. It states:

“By virtue of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of
peoples, all peoples always have the right, in full freedom, to determine,
when and as they wish, their internal and external political status.”

“To determine when and as they wish”. That could not be clearer. The UK is a signatory. It would be impossible to be more relevant to the question of whether Scotland has the right to hold a referendum. Why has Bain not coupled the right to self-determination with the UN Charter and the Helsinki Final Act in her reference to the Supreme Court?

It is not because the UK Supreme Court cannot consider international law in this context. It most certainly can, and indeed is bound to. The Supreme Court of Canada, in re Secession of Quebec, devoted more than half its judgment to the right of secession as a matter of international law, after considering the case in domestic law.

Like the London Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada is a residual agent of English monarchical imperialism and so, headed by a corrupt alcoholic “guided” by MI6, it found against Quebec (as London will find against Scotland). But that the question of Quebec secession was very much a matter of international law was plainly acknowledged by the Canadian Supreme Court.

The Independence of a state is primarily, indeed exclusively, a matter of the status of that state (or non-state) in international law. It is a question of its relationship to other states and multilateral organisations. To ignore this international law aspect, as Bain does, is ludicrous. It renders self-determination, which should be her strongest legal argument, entirely nugatory.

The Independence of a country is not a matter of domestic law it is a matter of international law. The right of the Scottish Parliament to declare Independence may not be restricted by UK domestic law or by purported limitations on the powers of the Scottish Parliament. The legal position is set out very clearly here:

5.5 Consistent with this general approach, international law has not treated the legality of
the act of secession under the internal law of the predecessor State as determining the effect
of that act on the international plane. In most cases of secession, of course, the predecessor
State‟s law will not have been complied with: that is true almost as a matter of definition.

5.6 Nor is compliance with the law of the predecessor State a condition for the declaration
of independence to be recognised by third States, if other conditions for recognition are
fulfilled. The conditions do not include compliance with the internal legal requirements of
the predecessor State. Otherwise the international legality of a secession would be
predetermined by the very system of internal law called in question by the circumstances in
which the secession is occurring.

5.7 For the same reason, the constitutional authority of the seceding entity to proclaim
independence within the predecessor State is not determinative as a matter of international
law. In most if not all cases, provincial or regional authorities will lack the constitutional
authority to secede. The act of secession is not thereby excluded. Moreover, representative
institutions may legitimately act, and seek to reflect the views of their constituents, beyond
the scope of already conferred power.

That is a commendably concise and accurate description of the legal position. Of major relevance, it is the legal opinion of the Government of the United Kingdom, as submitted to the International Court of Justice in the Kosovo case. The International Court of Justice endorsed this view, so it is both established law and follows from the stated legal opinion of the British Government that the Scottish Government has the right to declare Independence without the agreement or permission of London and completely irrespective of the London Supreme Court.

I have continually explained on this site that the legality of a Declaration of Independence is in no sense determined by the law of the metropolitan state, but is purely a matter of recognition by other countries and thus acceptance into the United Nations. The UK Government set this out plainly in response to a question from a judge in the Kosovo case:

2. As the United Kingdom stated in oral argument, international law contains no
prohibition against declarations of independence as such. 1 Whether a declaration of
independence leads to the creation of a new State by separation or secession depends
not on the fact of the declaration but on subsequent developments, notably recognition
by other States. As a general matter, an act not prohibited by international law needs
no authorization. This position holds with respect to States. It holds also with respect
to acts of individuals or groups, for international law prohibits conduct of non-State
entities only exceptionally and where expressly indicated.

It is particularly important to note that in its Kosovo opinion, the International Court of Justice plainly overturned the Supreme Court of Canada’s argument in Quebec that the right to territorial integrity trumps the right to self-determination. That is vital for the right of secession for Scotland.

80. Several participants in the proceedings before the Court have contended that a
prohibition of unilateral declarations of independence is implicit in the principle
of territorial integrity.
The Court recalls that the principle of territorial integrity is an important part of
the international legal order and is enshrined in the Charter
of the United Nations, in particular in Article 2, paragraph 4, which provides that:
“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from
the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with
the Purposes of the United Nations.”
In General Assembly resolution 2625 (XXV), entitled “Declaration on
Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and
Co-operation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the
United Nations”, which reflects customary international law (Military and
Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States
of America), Merits, Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 1986, pp. 101-103,
paras. 191-193), the General Assembly reiterated “[t]he principle that
States shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use
of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any
State”. This resolution then enumerated various obligations incumbent
upon States to refrain from violating the territorial integrity of other sovereign States.
In the same vein, the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference
on Security and Co-operation in Europe of 1 August 1975 (the Helsinki
Conference) stipulated that “[t]he participating States will respect the territorial
integrity of each of the participating States” (Art. IV). Thus, the
scope of the principle of territorial integrity is confined to the sphere of
relations between States.

81. Several participants have invoked resolutions of the Security
Council condemning particular declarations of independence: see, inter
alia, Security Council resolutions 216 (1965) and 217 (1965), concerning
Southern Rhodesia; Security Council resolution 541 (1983), concerning
northern Cyprus; and Security Council resolution 787 (1992), concerning
the Republika Srpska.
The Court notes, however, that in all of those instances the Security
Council was making a determination as regards the concrete situation
existing at the time that those declarations of independence were made;
the illegality attached to the declarations of independence thus stemmed
not from the unilateral character of these declarations as such, but from
the fact that they were, or would have been, connected with the unlawful
use of force or other egregious violations of norms of general international law,
in particular those of a peremptory character (jus cogens).
In the context of Kosovo, the Security Council has never taken this
position. The exceptional character of the resolutions enumerated above
appears to the Court to confirm that no general prohibition against unilateral
declarations of independence may be inferred from the practice of the
Security Council.

The key conclusion of the International Court of Justice is

84. For the reasons already given, the Court considers that general
international law contains no applicable prohibition of declarations
of independence.

I have long been both troubled and astonished that the case of Scottish Independence appears the only instance in history where the claim to Independence has never been advanced by the relevant political leadership as a right in international law. Rather this right is deliberately ignored or even disparaged, as Bain does with her quote that Scotland’s rights in international law vanished with the state in 1707.

Part of this may be explained by parochialism. The Scottish legal profession is horribly inbred – Lord Advocate Bain’s husband was on the bench which sent me to jail for journalism exposing corruption in the Scottish legal system. Part of it is due to a myopic outlook – the SNP depends heavily on UK constitutional lawyers like Professor Aileen McHarg who are obsessed with the minutiae of domestic legislation and care nothing for international law.

I suspect the biggest problem is lack of self-confidence and the Scottish cringe.

Permission for Independence will never come from London. Bain’s submission to the Supreme Court is designed to fail. If you believe we need permission from London at all, plainly you do not believe in Scotland’s right to self-determination.

Scotland will only ever achieve Independence by acting on the International Court of Justice’s ruling that domestic legislation of the state being seceded from cannot constrain the right to self-determination of a people. Of course Independence will be illegal in UK law. The London Establishment won’t willingly relinquish Scotland’s resources. If you kowtow to them, you don’t actually believe in Scottish Independence.
————

*Though there is nothing less even-handed than a Scottish judge

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Nobody can accuse the authors of the Forde report of having a low opinion of themselves. Its lofty tone reflects profound disdain for the views and actions of mere mortals, and it utters judgments with an air of deep profundity. This is amusing as it is banal in the extreme.

The Forde Report is, peculiarly, a Report into a Report. The Forde panel’s terms of reference were simply to discover who commissioned the “Leaked Report”, and why, who leaked the “Leaked Report”, and whether the “allegations” in the “Leaked Report” were true.

It is often the case in official, or at least officious, documents that a simple bit of terminology betrays the entire mindset. The “Leaked Report” discovered a great many things, all of which the Forde Report finds to be essentially, and in detail, true. Yet the findings of the “Leaked Report” are described right from the terms of reference and throughout in the Forde exercise as “allegations”, while the findings of the Forde Report are, of course, “findings”.

This is a form of dishonest declension: I make findings, you make allegations.

Forde pulls well over a hundred pages of linguistic tricks to try to hide his basic “finding”, that the “allegations” of the “Leaked Report” are both accurate and fairly and honestly reached. Yet he can’t quite obscure it. He continually bangs on about the authors of the “Leaked Report” being “young and inexperienced”, as though that somehow detracts from the fact they wrote the truth. Forde is left to rest upon the very shaky ground that their truth was only a “factional” truth, so somehow doesn’t count.

There is an extended section where Forde traces the history of the party apparatus, how Labour HQ staff came to be dominated by a self-perpetuating clique of Blairites, and how this resulted in their seeking to subvert Jeremy Corbyn after the latter’s election by the new mass membership franchise. This is all good and accurate.

Forde then attempts to maintain “balance” and treat all “factions” as equally authoritative and morally valid. That is the great failing of his report, and can be described in one sentence: Forde denies democracy.

At no stage does the Forde report accept that Corbyn’s election by the mass membership gave him a democratic mandate that the paid HQ staff were obliged to follow. Rather Forde sees the HQ staff as guardians of a Blairite tradition that had an entirely equal right to determine events within the Labour Party, despite its leadership candidates being overwhelmingly rejected – several times – by the membership.

Forde’s entire report is undermined by this false equivalence – the notion that both “factions” were equally responsible for the problems, and deserved equal weight and consideration. This approach is well represented in this paragraph:

Forde throughout treats the Blairites’ attempts to cause Corbyn (LOTO = Leader of the Opposition) to fail as in some sense legitimate because they believed they were pursuing the Greater Good. Corbyn’s mandate from leadership elections is viewed by Forde only as one factor in a series of power balances; his view of the Labour Party is essentially anti-democratic.

It is worth noting that the Forde report found unequivocally that the appalling evidence of the “Leaked Report” was entirely genuine and not presented unfairly out of context (though the Forde panel says the authors of the published messages should have been given a right of reply).

It is worth reminding us – as Forde discreetly does not – what some of those messages actually said. Here are two senior members of Labour HQ staff hoping that Labour would lose Manchester Gorton to the Lib Dems

27/02/2017, 16:53 – Patrick Heneghan: Just had discussion at strategy meeting We will meet Steve and Andy next Monday – we are looking at all 3 in May but select in Gorton within 4 weeks Katy will speak to you/Iain
27/02/2017, 16:53 – Patrick Heneghan: From karie
27/02/2017, 16:54 – Patrick Heneghan: They didn’t include us in the discussion.
27/02/2017, 16:54 – Patrick Heneghan: Well let’s hope the lib dems can do it….113

Here are two senior members of Labour HQ staff hoping that Labour would decline in the opinion polls following a Corbyn speech pointing out that Western invasions in the Middle East cause terrorism at home:

Jo Greening 09:12: and I shall tell you why it is a peak and the polling was done after the Manchester attack so with a bit of luck this speech will show a clear polling decline and we shall all be able to point to how disgusting they truly are
(now obviously we know it was never real – but that isnt the point in politics!)
Francis Grove-White 09:13: Yeah I’m sure that’s right
Francis Grove-White 09:16: My fears are that: a) the speech won’t go down as badly as it deserves to thanks to the large groundswell of ill-informed opposition to all western interventions. And b) they will use that poll to claim they were on course to win and then Manchester happened. And whether or not JC goes, lots of the membership will buy that argument. Like after the referendum when they distorted the polling and claimed we had overtaken the Tories before the “coup” happpened
Jo Greening 09:17: if this speech gets cut through – as I think it may – it will harden normal people against us definitely in the face of a terror attack normal people do not blame foreign intervention they blame immigration whats more – all they will hear is we dont want to respond strongly we want peace with ISIS it all plays into a bigger picture of how they see corbyn so I have a feeling this will cut through you are right on the second point it has to be up to the MPs though to demonstrate how toxic he is on the doorstep throughout but that this speech particularly was toxic and Manchester had happened when that poll was in the field on the supporters I personally think we are going to do very badly in deed and I think it will shock a lot of them how badly we do including JC so everyone has to be ready when he is in shock it has to be clean and brutal and not involve the party at all in my opinion those crazy people who now make up our membership never want us to win in anycase they are communists and green supporters even if Manchester hadnt happened and we got smashed they would have never changed their minds
Francis Grove-White 09:23: Yeah that’s true

Senior Labour HQ staff member Jo Greening is here actually hoping that the general public blames immigrants, rather than Blair’s invasion of Iraq, for terrorist attacks. Let that sink in.

If you had not already done so, read my analysis of the “Leaked Report” here.

In the classical Establishment reaction to release of damning material, the Forde Panel are much more concerned about who leaked it than what it says (cf Assange). Forde sees this desire to damage Labour under Corbyn by its own senior staff as simply factionalism in which both sides are guilty.

However no evidence is produced anywhere of Corbyn supporters hoping that Labour will decline in the polls or will lose by-elections to the Lib Dems.

To be fair to the Forde panel, they did not pretend that utterly deplorable behaviour by the Blairite senior staff did not happen. Occasionally they are forthright:

The problem is that they did not allow the undeniable evidence, nor their accurate description of it, to affect their ultimate conclusion that it was all equally the fault of all sides; a conclusion which can only have been pre-determined.

It is also not the Forde Panel’s fault that the mainstream media completely failed to publish anything approaching a fair summation of the Forde Report, as described by the ever brilliant Peter Oborne.

One of the most stunning of the Forde Panel’s findings appears to have gone almost completely unreported – that Labour HQ staff conducted a systematic exercise to disenfranchise Corbyn supporters in the leadership elections. Here the Forde Report is unequivocal.

It is important to take fully on board what is being said here. It is not that in a ballot validation exercise, staff were biased in using it to remove Corbyn supporters. It is that the entire ballot validation exercise was initiated in the first place with the purpose of removing Corbyn supporters.

Again, let that sink in. Is that not a peculiar “finding” to go unhighlighted?

Forde found that the Blairites at HQ had indeed set up a separate operation at Ergon House in the 2017 general election to covertly channel funds and resources away from other seats to assist the defence of sitting, specifically selected Blairite MPs.

In an election in which Labour made gains, campaigns in Tory marginals were handicapped by lack of funds which had secretly been hived off to sitting Blairite MP’s. That is the long and short of it.

The Forde panel thinks it “unlikely” this significantly impacted the result of the election. They also claim to have seen no evidence the Blairite HQ staff were deliberately not winning the election (evidently in the space of twenty pages of report having forgotten the meaning of the Whatsapp messages above).

So that is apparently alright then. Just factionalism on both sides.

For me, the greatest hole in the report is its complete failure to tackle the actual issue of anti-semitism. The original report contained some appalling examples of real anti-semitism. There is no doubt it exists in society and must be actively challenged. But while noting the weaponisation of anti-semitism accusations for factional purposes, Forde has nothing to say on the fundamental issue.

Which is this. Does support for the rights of the Palestinians and criticism of the human rights record and settlement policies of the state of Israel amount to anti-semitism? With Starmer clearly set on an affirmative answer, perhaps Forde and his panel felt it unhelpful to address the question. But without at least noting it, there is a gaping hole in the report.

About a third of the mass membership that Corbyn brought into the Labour Party has now left. Starmer, having lied his way through his leadership election, has now positioned the party very squarely back as Blairite and Tory Lite. There is therefore a very real argument that the Forde Report simply does not matter.

On the surface, it is all over for the prospect of any left wing challenge to rampant neo-liberalism, at least arising from the Labour Party. However the consequences of unchecked wealth inequality, destruction of worker and popular rights, environmental destruction and of violent neo-Imperialism abroad, are likely to strike the general population with ferocity this winter. I am not sure people are prepared for the level of calamity that is unfurling.

The lessons of what was done to Corbyn – and to Bernie Sanders – may yet need to be understood in the not too distant future. We have never stood more in need of radical change.

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Away from the Tory Babel over who will be the top “world-leading” sociopath, I spent the last two evenings in the company of decent people. John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian’s father and brother, were in Glasgow and Edinburgh for the screening of “Ithaka”, the documentary that follows the fight by Julian Assange’s family to have him freed. I was moderating the Q & A.

The odd pub may also have been visited.

Ithaka is heart-rending, and it has an important message in rehumanising Julian after over a decade of concerted (I use that word advisedly) propaganda aimed at dehumanising him. The sheer baseness of the extraordinary lies told by the mainstream media about his personal hygiene – leaving toilets unflushed and even smearing Embassy walls with excrement – is something straight out of Goebbels’ playbook.

The cold calculation behind Assange’s treatment in his last months in the Embassy, when he was denied access to wash and shave, in order to produce the apparent monster for the photos of his arrest, is a true example of evil unfolding.

Two days before his expulsion I telephoned the Embassy and spoke to the First Secretary (a call I recorded). I explained that if, as we understood, Julian were no longer welcome, they only had to say so and he would leave voluntarily to the police station. Instead we had that calculated piece of theatre.

Presentation aside, it also enabled them to retain all of Julian’s possessions, including all his legal papers covered by client-attorney privilege relating to his defence. As we heard in the extradition hearing, all of those papers were taken to Quito and then given to the CIA. This was admitted by counsel for the US government who claimed that “Chinese walls” – a direct quote – within the US government prevented the CIA from passing any of that information to the Justice Department, who are running the case.

If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. But the fact is that it is the US Government who is applying for extradition and the US Government has stolen the legal papers of the other party in the case. In any other case this would lead to the case being kicked out immediately.

If you add that together with the fact that the extradition treaty specifically bars political extradition, that the US government’s key witness is a convicted fraudster and paedophile who was paid for his evidence (which he has since denounced), and that no journalist in the US has ever been charged with Espionage before, you begin to start to understand the depth of state depravity that has kept Julian in the UK’s strongest security prison for four birthdays.

I found this curious. Mike Pompeo, former US Secretary of State, who oversaw the plot to kidnap or potentially assassinate Julian in the Ecuadorean Embassy, called on Priti Patel on 30 June, just after she signed Julian’s arrest warrant and also just after Pompeo had been summoned by a Spanish court to give evidence on the plot.

That photo is more unusual than might be immediately realised. With a Democrat in the White House, it is extremely rare for a senior British cabinet minister, acting in an official capacity, openly to flaunt friendship with senior Republicans from the defeated administration, and to hold official meetings with them.

Pompeo is now a private citizen. He could quite naturally be meeting Patel as a friend in her home – but officially, at the Home Office? This is really not done, or if exceptionally needed, it is done quietly.

What did they discuss in the Home Office?

Here is something else downright peculiar. According to the Wall Street Journal, Priti Patel asked the US government to give her public congratulations for agreeing the extradition of Julian Assange:

After Ms. Patel’s ruling on June 17, for example, a U.K. official asked the U.S. Embassy in London if officials there or at the Justice Department could release a statement welcoming Ms. Patel’s ruling, adding that she would appreciate such a show of support, according to people familiar with the request.
The Justice Department declined to issue such a statement,

There is a very strange smell surrounding this extradition.

The film Ithaka is not a dissection of the legal issues, nor an in-depth recounting of the Assange case. It rather focuses on the devastating effect of his cruel imprisonment on his family, both his wife and children, and on his father John Shipton.

John’s personal crusade to save his son is the main focus. The insight into the fundamentals of the case – that the man who did most to expose war crimes is the man locked up and tortured, not the people who committed the war crimes – mostly come from interviews with Professor Nils Melzer, then UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

Do go see the film – which has had excellent reviews from mainstream film critics. Chairing the Q&A sessions afterwards I have been struck by the number of tear-stained eyes when the lights go up, and the audience mood shifts from sorrow to anger fairly quickly. It is a remarkable film.

Let me give my own insights. As a technical bit of film-making, it is edited down from what must have been thousands of hours of footage. During the various stages of extradition hearings I was personally miked up every single day for the film for a total of over five weeks. Tens of hours of conversation between John and myself were recorded, not one second of which made it into the film.

That is absolutely not a complaint, you see more than enough of me. It is merely an illustration on the remarkable technique of editing down on this film. Over a thousand hours were left on the cutting room floor to get down to just two in the film.

That of course gives the director, Ben Lawrence, and his editor massive ability to shape the narrative by selection. Ben has chosen to illustrate the bleakness of Julian’s isolation by emphasising the loneliness of John and Stella’s quest. I am sure that is artistically valid and it presents a real truth – nobody can truly share the despair of the family, and in the long dark night of the soul they are alone.

But I do wish to assure you that the families are surrounded and supported by a group of really loving and caring people, very much more involved than I am. They are not foregrounded in the film for reasons of narrative selection, but they exist and they know they have the eternal gratitude of Julian and his whole family and many of the rest of us.

I would further add that John Shipton’s eclectic mind and deeply philosophical nature are brought out wonderfully, but his immense charm and also his great pleasure in social company perhaps do not come across on the screen. Ben has focused on the more angular bits of John’s nature.

None of that in any way detracts from the experience of a superb film by Ben Lawrence, produced by Julian’s quieter but very talented brother Gabriel. Undoubtedly the public perception has already been turning in Julian’s favour. Don’t just go see the film: take somebody who might have their eyes opened to the truth.

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All Empires end in ignominy. The United Kingdom is drawing to a close, not with a bang but with a fart.

A century from now, the dominant historical narrative will be Chinese, and Chinese historians will puzzle over how Boris Johnson fell over a lie about what he knew of sexual harassment by a very junior member of his government. Learned papers will be written over whether this was truly the cause, or whether the underlying socio-economic crisis caused by inflation and Brexit was the real determinant. Chinese books (or their technological equivalent) will be written on the crisis of neo-liberalism and how western society reached unsustainable levels of concentration of capital and wealth inequality.

Acres have been written in the mainstream media about Johnson’s lying and personal immorality, but there is very little serious effort to understand why so many in society have been prepared to tolerate this. The answer is that neo-liberalism has succeeded in destroying societal values, to the extent that anti-social and even sociopathic behaviour no longer appears peculiar.

In a society where authority condones, and constructs a system to enable, personal fortunes of US $200 billion or more while millions of children in the same country are genuinely hungry and poorly housed, what values is the socio-political structure telling people to hold? What value is placed on empathy? Ruthless ambition and resource grabbing is applauded, encouraged and held up as the model to be followed.

More and more, you are either part of the elite or you are struggling.

In the UK, the Thatcherite dream of mass property ownership is abruptly canceled. Social mobility and meritocracy are changed from an opportunity for large scale social advancement by multitudes, into Hunger Games. Where significant numbers of young people see their best shot at financial comfort as selection for Love Island, how do we expect them to be repulsed that Johnson was having multiple affairs while his then wife was struggling with cancer?

Johnson is explicitly a devotee of the great man theory of history. But in fact his startling political career is in itself merely a symptom of the decline of the United Kingdom, from great Imperial power to the breakup of the metropolitan state (the latter of course started to take formal effect in 1921).

Brexit was just a convulsion, as the United Kingdom went through the psychological trauma of accepting its change in status from great power to reasonably senior European state. There is a great treatise to be written on this and the consequent wave of populist English nationalism.

You may like to note the constant Tory use of the phrase “world-leading” in risible circumstances, the fact that even yesterday Starmer felt the need to comment on government collapse while planted between three Union Jacks, the constant militarism and fetishisation of the armed forces on TV, and the desire for reflected glory by fighting a great war to the blood of the very last Ukrainian.

Peter Oborne’s meticulous compilation of Johnson lies shows how peculiar it is that the crisis should come over a comparatively minor lie about knowledge of bad sexual behaviour, in which Johnson for once was not personally involved. But it is quite wrong to think of Johnson as unique. Oborne’s wonderful book The Rise of Political Lying chronicles the massive attack on governmental standards perpetrated by the charlatan Tony Blair.

Johnson is just a part of a process. As the power of an Empire disintegrates, so do its mores. Since the second world war, over sixty states have become independent of British rule. The pink bits on the map (“this colony is where your tapioca comes from”) they showed me so proudly at primary school have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. Thank God children are no longer taught to sing “Over the seas there are little brown children” in need of conversion (I really was taught that, I am not making stuff up).

As the UK’s military, economic and political power have collapsed, so have its political mores – both for good and for bad. Johnson is but a turd spewed to the top of the gushing sewer of British decline.

Every one of those sixty states that have left British rule, was warned that it would struggle without the UK. No state has ever wanted to return to British rule. Fellow Scots, take note.

I also want to make plain to my English readers – and remember I am half English myself – that I genuinely believe the breakup of the highly artificial British union will be very beneficial to England. Scottish Independence and Irish reunification are coming soon. Welsh Independence is fast gathering support.

It will take the break-up of the UK to jolt the great power nostalgia and silly patriotism that underlies so much of Tory support – and that of other right wing union jack fetishists like Starmer. Only the shock of the formal closure of the British state will precipitate the psychological change needed for England to become a modern, forward looking, middle ranking European state with concern for domestic and international fairness.

The UK has been in socio-political turmoil since 2016 and is now entering profound economic crisis. These very days are the end-time of the United Kingdom. Rejoice!

I shall leave the last word to that great radical Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

Footage has emerged of the Uzbek authorities cleaning up a huge amount of blood after suppression of protests in Nukus, Uzbekistan.

The Karakalpaks are a separate ethnic and linguistic group. Karakalpakstan covers a huge area, but almost all of it is uninhabitable desert. A small majority of the population of the autonomous region of Karakalpakstan are not Karakalpak ethnically or linguistically – they are Kazakhs, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Koreans, Tatars and others – but the regional, arguably national, identity is also strong among these groups settled in Karakalpakstan.

Among the historical events that gave the Karakalpak such a diverse population, were mass deportations by Stalin of Krim Tartar from Crimea and Koreans from the Russia/Korea border. The latter group in particular were simply dumped from trains into the desert. Many perished, while others were saved by the kindness of locals. Official provision for their sustenance was deliberately scanty. When I was there in 2001 there were still many eye witness and direct victims of these events fifty years earlier.

Although protest was sparked by constitutional changes aiming to eliminate Karakalpakstan’s regional autonomy, the discontent runs much deeper than that. Karakalpakstan has suffered most from the enormous, almost unthinkable, environmental degradation arising from the destruction of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers and consequent disappearance of the Aral Sea.

Being right at the end of the line for agricultural water from river systems which are massively over-extracted for irrigation of the cotton crop, Karakalpakstan is permanently drought struck and agriculturally impoverished. The massive over-use of fertiliser to maintain the upstream cotton monoculture has left the dried up river beds and Aral seabed as a source of friable poisons swept over towns by wind. That is even without considering the legacy of Soviet biological and chemical weapon research programmes centred on Nukus.

Karakalpaks have had no clout in independent Uzbekistan’s oligarch driven system of government, and benefited hardly at all from having most of Uzbekistan’s oil and gas, the money staying in Tashkent (or rather London and Geneva). To add to this, there is substantial popular racial prejudice against Karakalpaks in the capital. Linguistic suppression both in education and in publications is a further long term factor of discontent.

I don’t currently have good contacts with Karakalpak dissidents, so I cannot give much detail of immediate events. The Uzbek government seems to have combined its usual vicious suppression of dissent with an abandonment of the constitutional proposals which were the immediate spark.

We will see the usual attempts to portray events through a prism understood by people in the West. But this is not anything to do with Islamic terrorism, nor is it a CIA provoked colour revolution. Beware comments from “journalists” who have just found it on the map. It is an attempt, I fear doomed for now, of a suppressed population to assert themselves.

————————————————-

 
 
Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Paypal address for one-off donations: [email protected]

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
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Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
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Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.