I have never considered myself a Marxist. I came to adulthood at the end of the one, forty year long, period in the history of Western civilisation when there was a reduction in the chasm between the rich and ordinary people.

In consequence I believed that a tolerable society might be achieved by simple measures to ameliorate capitalism. I grew up with public ownership of utilities, natural monopolies and strategic industries, with free healthcare and medicines, free university tuition with good maintenance grants, schools under control of elected local councils, controlled fair rents including the private sector, significant public housing.

We thought it would last forever.

In 1973 I joined the Liberal Party. Much of the 1974 Liberal Party manifesto I could still believe in now. The above things like public ownership of utilities and major industries and free education were not in the manifesto, because they did not have to be – they already existed and were the basic structure. The manifesto added things like a basic guaranteed income for everybody in society, compulsory worker shareholdings in those industries not nationalised, workers’ councils, and a rent freeze in both public and private sectors.

I am not claiming it as a great socialist document – there were signs of right-wing thought creeping in, like a shift to indirect taxation. But the truth is that the Liberal Party manifesto of 1974 was at least as left as Corbyn’s manifesto. Some of its ideas were far ahead of their time – like the idea that continuous economic growth and increasing consumption are not sustainable or desirable.

Believing in essentially the same things now, I find myself on the far left – without ever having moved!

Here are a couple of extracts from the 1974 Liberal manifesto which may surprise you. This kind of language you will not hear from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – indeed it would probably get you thrown out:

That Liberal Party is of course gone, along with the radical, anti-war, anti-unionist traditions of British liberalism. They were diluted by the merger with the SDP and finally killed off by Nick Clegg and the “Orange Bookers” who turned the hybrid party fully neoliberal, a doctrine with almost no resemblance to the liberalism it claims to reassert.

Those hardy souls who follow and support this blog are witnessing the last knockings of the legacy of political thought that was bestowed by John Stuart Mill, William Hazlitt, John Ruskin, John A Hobson, Charles Kingsley, Bertrand Russell, William Beveridge and many others, seasoned by Piotr Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I don’t imagine any further generation attempting to be active in politics will develop their worldview with those thinkers as their primary motivators.

But the point of this self-absorbed drivel is that I am not a Marxist and do not come from an organised labour or socialist background or mindset.

The key thought towards which I am plodding through this morass of explanation is this: I grew up in the one era when capitalism was sufficiently moderated by palliative measures that it seemed a reasonable way to conduct society. That ended around 1980 when the doctrine of neoliberalism took hold of the Western world. In the UK, that doctrine now firmly controls the Conservative, Lib Dem, Labour and SNP parties and is promoted relentlessly by both state and corporate media.

The result of this neoliberal domination has been a massive and accelerating expansion in the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of society, to the extent that ordinary, once middle-class people struggle to pay the bills required simply to live. The situation has become unsustainable.

In short, it turns out Marx was right. The crisis of capitalism is now upon us. Neoliberalism (another word for designing state systems deliberately to lead to incredible concentrations of wealth amid general poverty) is coming to the end of its course. There are no palliative measures that will make the situation bearable. A radical change in the ownership of assets is the only thing that will address the situation – starting with public ownership of all energy companies, from hydrocarbon extractors like Shell and BP, through gas, electricity and fuel generators and manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

Nationalisation should be done properly, without compensating shareholders. If I had to choose between compensating the shareholders and imprisoning them, I would imprison them. I suggest we do neither.

That is only one sector and only the start. But it is a good start. I frequently pass the Grangemouth refinery and am amazed that all that land, massive equipment, all those chemicals and processes, go primarily to the benefit of Britain’s richest man, Jim Ratcliffe, who is considering buying Manchester United as his latest toy, while his workers protest at another real-terms pay cut.

This obscenity cannot continue forever.

Wars are not incidental to neoliberalism. They are an essential part of the programme, because untrammelled consumerism requires massive acquisition of natural resources. Constant war has the helpful side-benefit for the global elite of enormous profit to the military industrial complex. The cost in human misery and death is kept at a discreet distance from the Western world save for refugee flows, which meet with a response increasingly founded in the denial of humanity.

The promotion of continual war has led to the acceleration of crisis. Much of the current cost of living explosion can be directly attributed to the provoked, prolonged and pointless war in Ukraine, while neoliberal doctrine forbids control of the horrendous associated profiteering of the energy companies.

There is going to be public anger, come spring, of a strength and reach not seen in my lifetime. The ultra wealthy and their political servants know this, and therefore strong action is being taken to forestall public protest. The new Policing Act is only one of a raft of measures being brought in to clamp down on avenues for free expression of public discontent. Demonstrations can simply be banned if they are “noisy” or an “inconvenience”. The 2 million person march against the Iraq War in London, for example, could have been banned on both grounds.

I met and talked last weekend at the Beautiful Days festival with the admirable Steve Bray; we don’t agree on everything but his public concern is genuine. He is getting used to being removed by police from Parliament Square after being specifically targeted in legislation. I reminded him – and I remind you – that the Blair government had also banned protest near the Westminster parliament, and the Scottish parliament has recently taken powers to do the same. Intolerance of dissent is a feature of modern neoliberalism, as people in Canada and New Zealand are also witnessing – or as Julian Assange might tell you.

But in addition to legislative and state attack on protest, the neoliberal state is also ramping up its more subtle elements of control. The security services are continually being expanded. The media is not only increasingly concentrated, it is increasingly under direct security service influence – the Integrity Initiative, the Paul Mason revelations, and the barely disguised spookery of Luke Harding and Mark Urban all being small elements of a massive web designed to control the popular imagination.

The splitting of the political left by identity politics has been the go-to weapon of the state for several decades now. The replacement of horizontal class solidarity by vertical gender solidarity being the most obvious tool, epitomised by the notion that it was better to elect the multi millionaire, corrupt, neoliberal warmonger Hillary Clinton than the class politics espousing Bernie Sanders, simply because the warmonger was a woman.

A specific use of this tool has been the weaponisation of fake sexual allegations against any individual likely to be a threat to the state. You see this in the cases of Julian Assange, Tommy Sheridan, Scott Ritter and Alex Salmond (they tried it on me when I left the FCO but had to drop it because they could not find – despite massive efforts – any woman who knew me who would say anything bad about me).

Those in power know that the portion of the left who identify as feminist, which is almost all of us, are highly susceptible to support alleged victims due to the extreme difficulties of real victims in obtaining justice. This makes sexual allegations, no matter how fake, very effective in removing the support base of anti-establishment figures.

The propaganda narrative against Assange, Salmond, Ritter and Sheridan depends on the idea that at the very moment that each of these men reached the peak of a lifetime’s endeavour and posed the maximum threat to the state, they lost focus, lost their marbles and acted very wrongly towards women, despite no previous history of such behaviour.

It astonishes me that anybody does not see through it.

Rather quaintly, they use different methods on women. Brigadier Janis Karpinski was the chosen patsy to take the blame for the USA’s Abu Ghraib atrocities (entirely unfairly – she had no role or authority in the CIA controlled portion of the jail where the atrocities took place). Dismissed from her post, she was prepared to testify to a memo personally signed by Donald Rumsfeld authorising torture.

How did the US security services fit up a woman, not a man, who threatened the powers that be? Shoplifting. The day after her enforced resignation, Karpinski was “caught shoplifting”. Because of course, when at the eye of an international storm and under CIA surveillance, you immediately go out and steal some clothes.

The cynical weaponisation of the trans debate has taken the art of using identity politics to split the left to a whole new level, and in particular to alienate the younger generation from traditional left feminists. It has also been used successfully – and remarkably – to neuter the most potent current threat to the UK state, by driving both the non neoliberals and the more ardent Independence supporters out of the SNP.

Similar to the use of gender politics to undermine class solidarity is the weaponisation of accusations of anti-semitism. Just as accusations of misogyny, however false, succeed in alienating left unity, so do allegations of racism.

Here it is not so much that accusations were believed – the conflation of criticism of the crimes of Israel with criticism of Jews per se being all too obvious – as that the attack was so blistering, with the full weight of the establishment political and media class behind it, that people cowered rather than face up to it. The worst example of cowering being Jeremy Corbyn.

One lesson from both the “leaked report” and the Forde report is that Corbyn and his office believed that if they threw enough sacrifices to the wolves, betraying decent people like Tony Greenstein (son of a Rabbi), Mark Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone, then the wolves would be appeased.

Israel is the last large scale project of colonisation by physical occupation of a conquered land by European people. Ukraine and Israel are the two current neo-liberal violence projects, which it is not permitted to criticise. The banning of any nuance of opinion on Ukraine should frighten everybody who is thinking rationally. If you are thinking rationally, try this small antidote to the unremitting propaganda:

The Ukraine war is unusual in the attempt to enforce wartime levels of unanimity of narrative on the population, in western countries which are not only not combatants in the war, but not even formally allied to Ukraine. The United States was a party to the Vietnam War, but it was still possible for Americans to criticise that war without having all media access banned. Today you cannot criticise Ukraine in the state or corporate media at all, and your social media access is likely to be severely restricted unless you follow the official propaganda narrative.

This is the Establishment’s strongest method of control – the labeling of opposing opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation”, even when there is no genuine evidential base that makes the official “facts” unassailable, as with Douma or the Skripals. To ask questions is stigmatised as traitorous and entirely illegitimate, while official journalists simply regurgitate government “information”.

Yet, despite this interwoven system of dampening all dissent from the neoliberal agenda, the Establishment remains terrified of the public reaction to the crisis that is about to hit. The controlled opposition is therefore used to attack actual opposition. Keir Starmer’s banning of Labour MPs from union picket lines is a clear example of this.

We are seeing for the first time in many years an assertion of the rights of organised labour in the face of the massive attack on workers’ real incomes. This is the first time many adults under thirty will ever have encountered the notion that ordinary people are able to defend themselves against exploitation – that is one reason the impressive Mick Lynch has been such a revelation, and is viewed by the “elite” as such a threat.

The Starmer line is that strikes inconvenience the public, which you will recall is the government excuse for banning protest also. Well, of course they do. So does the spiral of real terms wage cuts. The fractured workers of the gig economy are now showing interest in unionising and organising; this is too little and too late to avert the crisis that is about to hit us, but a useful indication of the will to resist.

Popular resistance terrifies the elite and thus must be demonised. The political class is to be protected from insult or contradiction. You may recall in February it was headline news that Keir Starmer was “mobbed” in Whitehall as he walked down the street, by protestors shouting at him over lockdown and over his role in the non-prosecution of Jimmy Savile (and, less reported, in the extradition of Julian Assange).

In fact, nothing happened. Aerial photographs showed that the protestors numbered about a dozen, that they were heavily outnumbered by Starmer’s handlers and the police. The only, mild, violence was initiated by the police. There was no threat to Starmer other than the threat of being verbally opposed by members of the public on subjects he did not wish to be discussed.

This protection of highly paid politicians from the public, this claim that it is extremely bad behaviour for ordinary people to confront elite politicians with an opposing view, is an extraordinary assertion that the people must not challenge their betters.

We are going to see a great deal more of this in the coming crisis. There is currently the most extraordinary manifestation of it in Scotland where the Chief Constable has announced an investigation into people daring to protest against the Tory leadership hustings in Perth.

In truth, absolutely nothing abnormal happened. People protested. Nobody spat at anybody – there is no evidence of it at all, nobody saw it, none of scores of media cameras and people’s telephones captured it, none of the very large police presence witnessed it, not a single journalist claims to have personally seen this “spitting”. Yet the entire media reported it, to delegitimise the protest.

These are the “reports” the Chief Constable refers to – unevidenced media lies. That is the basis of policing today.

An egg – singular – may or may not have been thrown. Media showed photographs of a single broken egg on the pavement after the event. Again, footage of it flying through the air is conspicuously absent. Someone may have just dropped their shopping. It may even be a false flag egg!

Personally, I don’t care if somebody did throw an egg at a Tory. Egg throwing at politicians is a traditional expression of popular protest with hundreds of years of history behind it. It is not really dangerous – I am not aware of a single instance of a politician being maimed by a flying egg – and carries a comedic punch. Personally I would rather see the custard pie, but those crowd barriers…

But what really rattled the political class was the lack of deference shown to their agents of control, the client journalists. One such creature, the BBC’s James Cook, walked through the barriers dividing the journalist pool from the pen for the public, and walked up to the barriers to provoke a reaction.

The propaganda of the BBC is particularly unpopular in Scotland, so Mr Cook got the reaction he expected. He was shouted at, and called a “traitor” and “scum”. The most vociferous abuse came from one particular individual not known to local activists, who may or may not have been an agent provocateur. That the British security state employs such tactics is beyond dispute. But I do not enormously care if he was an agent or a genuinely annoyed member of the public.

The fact is this. Mr Cook, like Mr Starmer above, got shouted at. He did not get hit. He was not the victim of the great egg throwing scandal. Nobody spat at him. Mr Cook met with verbal disapprobation of his journalistic output, after approaching people specifically to that purpose.

Here is a photo of James Cook immediately after the “someone spoke rudely to me” incident, showing exactly how shaken and concerned he was:

The reaction from the controlled, neoliberal opposition in Scotland was off the scale.

The notion that the BBC does “not support any viewpoint”, particularly on Independence, is laughable. Also how much scrutinising of the Ukrainian government has it been undertaking recently?

Mr Cook has form in claiming that Scots expressing their opinion in the street amounts to some form of illegitimate mob or riot, when it is in fact perfectly peaceable.

A couple of days after the Perth non-incident, the neoliberal controlled opposition were joining in with the client journalists in their claims to victim status.

The interesting thing here is that these neo-liberal politicians plainly believe that it ought not to be allowed for people to call them or their journalistic enablers traitors or scum. The expression of popular protest is in itself illegitimate, according to their worldview. Politicians are using the verbal armoury of cancel culture – talk of “offence” and “safety”, as reasons to limit freedom of speech – to justify the suppression of criticism of those who wield the power of the state.

This extends to the suppression of free speech and popular protest under the guise of protecting employee rights. The neoliberal opposition quickly hit on this line on the Perth incident. Mr Cook should not have been abused because he was only an employee “doing his job”. Everyone has a right to be protected from abuse in the workplace.

As though voicing state propaganda is the same as serving coffee and as though Cook’s work is morally neutral. It is not.

Perhaps aware that journalists are not the most popular recipients of public sympathy, James Cook decided to spread the accusation of abuse wider:

Here James Cook is simply lying. I have very frequently heard extreme discontent at the BBC expressed by Independence supporters, both at public demonstrations, including outside BBC Scotland HQ, and in meetings. I have never once heard any anger expressed at staff other than the lying “journalists”.

In meetings I frequently express the view that upon Independence, BBC Scotland should be closed down and everybody made redundant (I last expressed this in Dunfermline last month). I have taken to always adding that this should apply only to editorial and journalistic staff and not to technical, clerical and industrial staff. The reason I always add it now is that, if I don’t, I am invariably corrected from the floor. There is no animus against these people.

Cook is making it up, which I suppose is his profession.

The resonances to wider cancel culture are not accidental. That the near approach of capitalism to its crisis is marked by both legal and social suppression of freedom of speech is not an accident. There is a strong resonance between the Perth incident and the cancellation of the Edinburgh Fringe show of veteran Glaswegian comic Jerry Sadowitz, for which the excuse given – accepted by a remarkable number of people on the left – was that the workers’ rights of the staff of the venue were affected.

This co-option of workers as state censors is remarkable given the complete disinterest in staff rights shown by the state in general, and by the large Edinburgh Fringe employers in particular. As food for thought, here is a 1987 transcript of Sadowitz’ act where he discusses the Establishment protected paedophile, Jimmy Savile:

“There have been serious allegations in the news of child abuse in Cleveland. Now to my mind there is only one way of finding out whether it is true or not, and that is to call in Jimmy Savile. You can’t afford to fuck about, bring in an expert. Am I right? Now a friend of mine reckons that Jimmy Savile is a paedophile, rubbish he’s a child-bender. That’s why he does all the fucking charity work, it’s to gain public sympathy for when his fucking case comes up. I’ve always known that. Aye, aye, well he may have fooled you, not fucking me, I am telling you that. He doesn’t fool this big-nosed Jewish bastard over here, I’m telling you that. I have always thought that if you took the action of a voice and turned it into a wank you would get Jimmy Savile wouldn’t you? (Savile masturbating impersonation).”

Read that with an eye to how many things in it could today have got Sadowitz banned, because somebody on the staff could have taken offence or been triggered. Pretty well every single sentence. Yet Sadowitz was one of a tiny number of people prepared to tell the truth about Savile.

I hope that puts you off the idea of canceling free speech “on behalf of workers’ rights”.

To sum up.

The 2008 banking bailout gave hundreds of billions of dollars straight to the ultra-wealthy, to be paid for by ordinary people through over a decade of austerity cuts to social services, real terms cuts in pay, and increased taxation. In the current crisis the plan is to advance money in some form to ordinary people, for them to pay off by a further decade of the same.

In neither instance was taking money from those with billions in personal wealth even considered.

The neoliberal phase of super-capitalism has run its course. The gap between the wealthy and ordinary people has become so extreme that, even in the West, ordinary people no longer can afford to live decently. Consumerism has desperately depleted natural resources and accelerated climate change. The policy of perpetual war has finally undermined the world economy to a fatal degree.

The situation is not sustainable, but the global elite have no intention to give up sufficient of their massive wealth to make any difference. They seek to control society through the propaganda model and through increasing state repression of dissent, allied to an assault on “incorrect” thought by censorship of the internet and by populist demonisation. “Left” causes such as identity politics and protection from offence have been weaponised to support this suppression.

There is no democratic outlet for popular anger. The “opposition” parties which people can vote for are all under firm neoliberal, warmonger control. Democracy has ceased to present any effective choice that offers any hope of real change. The revival of interest in organised labour and the willingness of young people to engage in direct action in the field of climate change offer some avenues for activism, but it is too little, too late.

Yet this will not hold. Discontent is now so strong, and public anger becoming so widespread, that change is coming. With no available democratic mechanism for change and a firm clampdown on the development of coherent radical programmes and on radical organisation, that change will initially manifest in chaos.

The Establishment response? They clutch at their pearls, twitch at their curtains and condemn the uncouth masses.

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Well over 70% of migrants arriving in small boats are eventually found by the British state to be genuine refugees seeking asylum. I know this from a quite remarkable speech by Lord Kerr.

John Kerr is something of a mystery to me. I came across a video of this simply superb speech he made in the House of Lords last November (I missed it as I was in jail). It is well worth reading:

It really is not a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Desai, because he raises the bar far too high. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, for this appallingly well-timed debate, to which I would just like to contribute three sets of facts. First, overall refugee numbers are currently running at about half of where they were 20 years ago. We are not the preferred destination in Europe. We are, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, well down the list of preferred destinations.

Secondly, yes, small boat numbers are up, partly for the reason the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, adduced — the fences, patrols and heat sensors around the train tracks and marshalling yards mean that people are now driven to the even more dangerous sea route. But the principal reason clandestine numbers are up is that official resettlement routes are shut. Our schemes, in practice, no longer exist. We have closed the Syrian scheme, we have scrapped the Dubs scheme, we have left Dublin III and we have not got an Afghan scheme up and running. The largest group crossing the channel in the last 18 months, by nationality, were Iranians. In the last 18 months, 3,187 Iranians came. In the same period, one got in by the official route. How many came from Yemen in these 18 months? Yemen is riven by civil war and famine. None came by the official route — not one.

My third set of facts is as in the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. The Home Secretary says that 70% of channel crossers are

“economic migrants … not genuine asylum seekers”.

That is plainly not true. Her own department’s data show that, of the top 10 nationalities arriving in small boats, virtually all seek asylum—61% are granted it at the initial stage and 59% of the rest on appeal. The facts suggest that well over 70% of asylum seekers coming across the channel in small boats are genuine asylum seekers, not economic migrants.

That is hardly surprising because the top four countries they come from are Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria — not Ghana, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. These people are fleeing persecution and destitution, and the sea route from France is the only one open to many of them. Why not have a humanitarian visa, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said? The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, gave the answer to the objection of the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. Those who had a valid claim for asylum would not be at peril on the sea.

Unless we provide a safe route, we are complicit with the people smugglers. Yes, we can condemn their case and we mourn yesterday’s dead, but that does not seem to stop us planning to break with the refugee convention. Our compassion is well controlled because it does not stop us planning, in the borders Bill, to criminalise those who survive the peril of the seas and those at Dover who try to help them. Of course, we can go down that road. But if we do, let us at least be honest enough to admit that what drives us down that road is sheer political prejudice, not the facts, because the facts do not support the case for cruelty.

That is a great speech and I applaud the humanitarianism behind it.

John Kerr is ostensibly a pillar of the Establishment – the former head of the British diplomatic service. To those people who believe in shadowy world governments and the great reset, John Kerr would appear to be right at the heart of darkness. He was for 12 years secretary of the Bilderberg Group and is a member of the executive committee of the Trilateral Commission. He was for 13 years a trustee of the Rhodes Trust. He was a key architect of the merger that created Royal Dutch Shell plc of which he was Deputy Chairman. I could go on and on.

He is a crossbench member of the House of Lords, meaning not party affiliated.

You do not expect somebody of that background to be making such a strong, unqualified attack on the government in parliament from the liberal left, openly calling Priti Patel a liar:

The Home Secretary says that 70% of channel crossers are “economic migrants … not genuine asylum seekers”. That is plainly not true.

I first dealt with John Kerr in the Foreign Office which he then headed when embroiled in the “Arms to Africa” affair. I must say I liked him immediately – fiercely intelligent, very much to the point, but with a constant twinkle in his eye. I make no claim the liking was mutual. But I also sensed, as you do when discussing policy issues, that the political direction he came from was not that different to my own.

Five years later I was quitting the FCO as a whistleblower, John Kerr having retired in the interim (for what it’s worth, I have always felt that had he still been in post, matters would have been resolved internally and my life have been very different). My split with the FCO over torture and extraordinary rendition was then front page news, and Angus Robertson, then one of the tiny SNP group in Westminster, asked to see me (this was 2004).

I briefed Robertson in Portcullis House on my whistleblowing (having at that time no suspicions of the man). I also spoke to him about Scotland’s maritime boundaries and the international law route to achieving independence, offering any assistance I could to the SNP. He more or less told me that I wasn’t needed, explaining in a conspiratorial whisper “we’ve got John Kerr”. That was much more surprising of Salmond’s more radical SNP than it would be of the corporatist SNP now.

Liz Truss was referring to the FCDO when she said the civil service was “woke” and had “creeping antisemitism”. She was specifically referring to Foreign Office officials minuting Israeli human rights violations.

Truss was also annoyed by Foreign Office officials pointing out Rwanda’s very bad human rights record in relation to the plan to deport asylum seekers there. She has tried to suppress some of these minutes from FCDO officials by public interest immunity certificates, which are today being challenged in the courts.

The political culture of the FCDO is not left wing at all, I can assure you – particularly not after twelve years of Tory governments controlling the top appointments. There does remain, however, a certain level of commitment to honesty which plainly Truss found highly inconvenient. When the government has moved so far right that it cannot work with civil servants who are just carrying out their job, when as conventional a figure as John Kerr is appalled by government cruelty, our society has very plainly moved towards fascism.

The drift to the right has become a surge.

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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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Politics in the mainstream media is entirely seen through the prism of the relentless race to the right of the Tory leadership election. The only people who can vote are two football crowds worth of overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, comparatively wealthy, mostly pensionable, overwhelmingly southern, people.

Brexit and the folding of UKIP into the Tory Party has changed the membership profile of the Tory Party. There are not many Dominic Greive comparative liberals still hanging in there. The typical Tory member used to be somebody like Miss Marple and her friends at St Mary Mead. It is now the St Mary Mead racist pub bore with a Jaguar.

The racist is of course key. People here get very upset every time I point out the exhaustively documented fact that the major motive of those voting for Brexit was anti-immigrant. I certainly accept that not all Brexiteers are racists. But all racists are Brexiteers.

The farce of the Tory leadership contest is that the inane Liz Truss is bound to win because of her skin colour. It is an entirely pointless exercise.

The prism of the Tory leadership contest has led the media to devote many column inches to the question of whether the massive energy bill increases should be tackled in part by tax cuts (Truss) or “handouts” (Sunak). Actual solutions, like renationalising the utility companies and imposing a 4% price increase cap as in France, are scarcely mentioned. These need to be adopted now to cope with the immediate emergency and provide the long term way forward.

Mentioned even less is the most obvious and urgent part of the solution – to consume less energy, as climate change roasts the planet.

A massive emergency mobilisation of resource to insulate existing buildings is the obvious first step. Every building should be insulated, at government expense, to the maximum practicable level. The homes of the poor should be the first priority – and are in general the worst insulated. Such a programme, on a wartime scale of mobilisation, would pump demand into the economy as it plunges into recession and provide massive employment opportunity.

This is true of every stage – the tooling up of production facilities and creation of raw materials as well as the actual installation. It seems to me so obvious a move that it is beyond me why the only people pushing it have to glue themselves to roads to get attention.

There are obvious other things to do, like reinstate attractive feed-in tariffs for domestic solar energy backed by government loans to cover installation costs, and make conversion to heat pumps free for those on benefits.

The Overton window has shrunk so small, the intellectual reach of public discourse is so enchained by neo-liberalism, that there appears no ability of the mind to respond appropriately to crisis. No solution can be attempted unless it makes some billionaires immeasurably richer. Society needs to awaken; people need to shed their chains.

————————————————-

 
 
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:

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The imposition of sanctions against British citizen and journalist Graham Phillips is an appalling violation of freedom of speech – which to have meaning must mean freedom to say things which disagree with the government, the media and/or majority public opinion.

Phillips has for almost a decade published and broadcast from Ukraine material which is openly supportive of the pro-Russian section of the Ukrainian population. He has operated from first Kyiv, then Odessa, then the Donbass. Phillips was sceptical of the Maidan protests and the popular revolution narrative. He subsequently for years covered much that the Western elites do not wish people to know – the shelling of civilian areas held by Russian separatists, the Nazi links of some Ukrainian military and politicians, the discrimination against Russian speakers and banning of Russian media and education.

All that is one side of the story in Ukraine, and the side that western governments and media are extremely keen you no longer can see. The information Phillips was providing was not in general untrue. The facts were selective and the interpretation partial, but that is also absolutely true of the western propaganda to which we are continually subjected.

In some incidents in the current war, it is impossible at a distance to be certain who was responsible for various acts. I see no reason in general to believe the BBC over Graham Phillips, or Graham Phillips over the BBC. It is good to have different sources.

Phillips has been criticised for broadcasting an interview with British prisoner Aiden Aslin, held by Russian separatist forces. The criticism is broadly correct. As I pointed out on twitter in the early days of this war, it is contrary to the Geneva Convention to make public display of prisoners.

This law was broken repeatedly by the Ukrainian side, with blanket footage of Russian soldiers phoning their mothers. Not one (except me) of those complaining about the Aslin interview complained about those. There are mitigating factors for Phillips – the interview was apparently Aslin’s initiative and he appeared pleased to give it. It was however still wrong. It is a good law – you never know what coercion or violence is applied to POW’s off-screen.

Personally there is much in Phillips’ line on Ukraine that I do not agree with. It is plain to me that broadly, the majority of the people of Ukraine genuinely wished in 2014 to move towards the EU rather than Russia, and dramatic efforts by Putin to reverse that process backfired.

But because I disagree does not mean Phillips should not be allowed to put across his view. It is also plain to me that Phillips was correct that the rights of the pro-Russian minority have indeed been trampled by ultra-nationalist Ukrainian forces, and Ukraine is a desperately corrupt and dysfunctional country.

The current proxy war is a disaster. It is not only killing tens of thousands in Ukraine, it is producing economic consequences that seriously damage the poor worldwide. The delight of politicians, the military and the arms industry is evident – and that is true of both Russia and the West. When wars happen, the bad people on all sides profit from them. The people suffer.

So I do not agree with Phillips’ cheerleading for the Russian “side” in this disastrous war. The answer to war is not to take a side but peace, and that is desperately needed.

The war will end with Ukraine ceding Crimea to Russia and perhaps more territory. Had Zelensky negotiated before the war started, Crimea plus the Minsk Agreements would have been enough. The Ukrainian negotiating position radically worsens daily. NATO is cheerfully sending Ukraine to disaster. The Russian invasion was illegal; the response now is immoral. The terms of the eventual settlement are obvious. Let it be reached now, without more pointless death.

But for Phillips, a British citizen, to be severely legally punished for publishing opinions about a war in which his own state is not a party – nor, it is important to state, in formal alliance with any party – is entirely without precedent. If we accept that Phillips supports the Russian side in the war, why should it be illegal to do that? How does this principle play out? Am I to be sanctioned for supporting the Palestinians? What about those who uphold the rights of the Houthis against the Saudi death grip?

What about american journalists who opposed the Vietnam War? Or the British journalists who stood up against the attack on Egypt in the Suez Crisis? What of campaigners against the Iraq War? When you think it through, the implications of this action against Phillips are simply appalling.

The sanctions against Phillips are serious. A British citizen has had his property seized by the state, his assets and bank accounts frozen, his ability to earn a living crashed by the blocking of funding mechanisms. All this for publishing opinions on a foreign war contrary to those of the British government.

This is a truly frightening attack on freedom of speech, whether or not you agree with Phillips’ views.

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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.

The lives of the latest fifteen Palestinian children to be murdered by Israel in Gaza, lives ripped from their small, terrified bodies with devastating violence, do not seem of much concern to the powerful in the West, or indeed anywhere.

The BBC repeated without question Israel’s claim that its latest launch of high explosive at the Gaza concentration camp was to prevent a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians – of which prospective attack no evidence has been produced. No western media has asked for any. Nor has it been explained why the attack would be stopped by Israel obliterating the alleged leader in Gaza of Islamic Jihad, and many innocents who chanced to be in his vicinity.

The scenarios in which the assassination of a leader prevent an attack which is in train are Hollywood.

The brave Daniel Hale sits in solitary confinement (euphemistically called a “Communications Management Unit) for blowing the whistle on the US drone assassination programme in Afghanistan. Hale, a drone operative, revealed that 90% of people killed by the drone assassination programme in Afghanistan were not the designated target, but that by default everybody killed by a drone strike was labeled an enemy combatant unless positive proof to the contrary were provided (which of course no effort was made to collect).

The extra-judicial execution of “Bad guys” with no legal process is not only carried out by Israel. The USA and the UK do it all the time, across the conflicts created by their own neo-imperial adventures and lust for hydrocarbons.

Nobody can tell you how many children have been killed by drone strikes or “targeted” missiles and bombings in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen or Libya.

The total across those countries is undoubtedly tens of thousands of dead children. We, however, are apparently the good guys. All those children have been killed in our self-defence, just like Israel killed those children in Gaza. I do hope that helps you sleep more soundly.

————————————————-

 
 
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
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

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.