Now that precisely the same individuals who organised the conspiracy to frame Alex Salmond are under heavy police investigation for financial fraud, many people are now prepared to listen who refused to do so before.

I am going forward with a case to the UN Human Rights Committee over my substantial imprisonment for journalism. This will set out what really happened in Scotland – to Alex Salmond, to me, to Clive Thomson, to Mark Hirst and others – on the international stage.

It will highlight that it remains illegal to publish almost any of the truth about the conspiracy led by Sturgeon, Murrell, Lloyd and Ruddick.

Going to the UN has several advantages.

I am no longer constrained as I was in appeals, to stick to matters presented at the original hearing, which you might recall was over in half an hour and at which my lawyers appeared to believe the case would be simply dismissed if not much fuss was made.

I am also no longer constrained to use Scottish lawyers. The extraordinary deference in the Scottish legal system, and the refusal of a series of Scots lawyers to say anything remotely critical of Lady Dorrian, or anything that might challenge the extreme restrictions on evidence she had placed in both my trial and the Salmond trial, has been crippling.

I am going to the United Nations with non-Scots international lawyers. You can judge the difference in their approach from the fact-finding report below.

Among the evidence barred by Lady Dorrian from the Salmond trial, and on which she refused a formal application for disclosure in my own hearing, were the WhatsApp messages between Murrell, Ruddick and others in which they were plainly trying to generate and influence complaints against Salmond.

I cannot put this better than David Davis did in the House of Commons using parliamentary privilege.

For example, these texts show that there is a concerted effort by senior members of the SNP to encourage complaints. The messages suggest that SNP chief executive Peter Murrell co-ordinated Ruddick and Ian McCann, the SNP’s compliance officer, in the handling of specific complainants. On 28 September, a month after the police had started their investigation of the criminal case, McCann expressed great disappointment to Ruddick that someone who had promised to deliver five complainants to him by the end of that week had come up empty, or “overreached”, as he put it. One of the complainants said to Ruddick that she was

“feeling pressurised by the whole thing rather than supported”.

The day following the Scottish Government’s collapse in a judicial review in January 2019, Ruddick expressed to McCann the hope that one of the complainants would be

“sickened enough to get back in the game.”

Later that month, she confirmed to Murrell that the complainant was now “up for the fight” and

“keen to see him go to jail”.

Ruddick herself, in one of her texts, expressed nervousness about

“what happens when my name comes out as [redacted] fishing for others to come forward”.

Note, again, that this was after the criminal investigation into Salmond had commenced. This is improper, to say the least. Contact with, and influence of, potential witnesses is totally inappropriate once a criminal investigation is under way. That was known inside the SNP itself.

Text messages reveal that at an SNP national executive committee meeting early in January 2019, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) raised concerns among staff at Westminster that SNP headquarters were engaged in “suborning” of witnesses, while on 28 August 2018, a senior member of SNP staff in this building described in an email the SNP headquarters move against Salmond as a “witch-hunt”.

Shortly after charges were brought against Salmond, Peter Murrell sent messages saying that it was a

“good time to be pressurising”

detectives working on the case, and that the more fronts Salmond was having to “firefight” on,

“the better for all complainers.”

When the inquiry put those messages to Mr Murrell, he said that they were “quite out of character”. That is no defence even were it true, but, having seen the evidence of other messages, it seems to me that they were all too much in character for Mr Murrell. In a Committee evidence session on 8 December last year, Mr Murrell replied under questioning that there were no more messages of the type already in the public domain from January 2019.

That statement, delivered under oath, is hard to reconcile with the dozens of messages stretching over a period of months from September 2018 that I have now seen. There is more, but it would take the whole debate to read them out.

You will recall that, after release from prison, I was interviewed by police at my home about who was responsible for leaks to MPs of Murrell’s and Ruddick’s self-incriminating messages.

It does seem that the lesson of these revealing messages was learnt by the Sturgeon clique:

In a properly run country, Sue Ruddick would have been correct to worry what would happen if it came out that she was “fishing for complainers to come forward”. It has always been my contention, and it remains so, that in the attempted fit-up of Alex Salmond the Crown Office were in cahoots.

Sue Ruddick has been promoted now to Chief Executive Officer of the SNP.

I am afraid it will take funds to get my case before the UN. £30,000 will get us over the line, and more than that will enable us to do a more thorough job (there are over 1,000 pages of supporting documentation) and to pay the costs for further organisations and experts to become involved.

I will remind you that among the urgent issues on which we seek comment from the UN, is the ruling that bloggers and citizen journalists do not benefit from the protections for free speech enjoyed by mainstream media.

This is the initial draft report (small redactions purely for publication on this blog) prepared by the team that will be taking the case forward:

Depending on your device, this might be easier to read in the original pdf here:

KORFF-AZIZOV – Factfinding report on Craig Murray – EDITED 230423finalfinal2

I keep going with this because it is important to lift this cloud that looms over Scotland’s political life, that leaves journalists in fear of persecution, that threatens bloggers, unfairly stigmatises me, and is frankly a disgrace.

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The collapse of the governing party of the Scottish colonial administration is a direct consequence of the Union. It shows the need for Independence.

Devolution infantilises Scottish politics. The Scottish Government budget is a massive £60 billion. But that all comes through London. The Scottish Government has no effective control on the productivity of its economy.

It has extremely limited, essentially cosmetic, powers to vary fiscal policy, excluding indirect and corporate taxation. It has no power whatsoever over monetary policy. The “Scottish government” is in essence very little more than a distribution mechanism for government revenue channelled through London.

The Scottish government is not a government in any real sense of the term when it comes to the ability to run the Scottish economy. It does however have tremendous powers to manage huge sums in spending. It has a great deal of power, and extremely limited responsibility.

Of course, much spending is not really discretionary. The NHS and Education will always need vast sums. But even little droppings off the margins of £60 billion remain huge sums of money in personal terms, and the Scottish government finds itself able to deploy life changing patronage on an astonishing human scale.

The result of all this is that devolution has created a Scottish political class at Holyrood fattened on this dripping roast, and swept into heights of vainglory by the pretence that their tightly constrained body is a national parliament, when on any rational analysis it is a slightly tarted-up regional council.

It does not control the Scottish economy, it does not control Scottish foreign policy, it does not control Scottish defence policy, it is not permitted to enable democratic decisions on the future Scottish constitution.

It is not a parliament.

So here we have this “parliament”, stuffed with MSPs who are not particularly bright, and have an irresponsible role but control immense amounts of dosh to spread around. The first thing they do, of course, is feather their own nests and build little empires.

You will recall that the first crack in the SNP wall came with the resignation of their chief spin doctor, Murray Foote, for being caught in repeated lying to the media about SNP membership numbers.

I was astonished then to discover that Murray Foote was not an employee of the SNP,  but of the Scottish Parliament. Apparently the Corporate Body of the Scottish Parliament (a committee of MSPs) provides money to each political party to fund the central staff “supporting” the party’s MSPs, including spin doctors.

Parties have every right to campaign at their own expense and try to persuade us to vote for them, but I object fundamentally to party spin doctors being paid by the taxpayer to spread their lies and propaganda.

Welcome to the cosy world of the Scottish political class, where everything is cushy on the gravy train of flowing money, and the public are mugs.

As the SNP leadership election campaign proceeded, I realised that there are hundreds more paid SNP staff than I realised, 95% of them toiling away night and day to bundle continuity candidate Humza over the finishing line.

As the daily flood of twitter endorsements for Humza started to reach the bottom of the barrel, endorsements were tweeted out from people billed as “activists”.

I googled one of the “activists”, Doug Daniel, and found he is in fact full-time staff – again paid for by the Scottish Parliament. He is “communications and campaigns manager” to an MSP.

Now I don’t mind the public purse paying for MSPs to have secretaries and constituency caseworkers, but why on earth should the public pay for MSPs’ campaigners?

It is not just the SNP, of course. All political parties welcome the ever burgeoning gravy train, and seize the opportunity to employ each other’s families, their friends, thrusting young careerists and, to an astonishing degree, young people they fancy.

(The confidential report  Nicola Sturgeon and Leslie Evans received on sexual harassment inside the Scottish Parliament contained over 200 allegations. They buried everything except one against Alex Salmond. There have since been numerous high profile cases of harassment by MSPs).

The SNP command the lion’s share of the money as the ruling party, and the direct political class expands and expands. Why Humza needs almost twice as many ministers as Alex Salmond did, and more than twice as many SPADs, is not immediately obvious other than to provide jobs for the faithful.

But the “direct” political class pales into insignificance compared to the massive cloud of government-funded positions in Scotland’s disproportionately large “third sector”. Pop into any bistro on Byres Road in Glasgow, and you will find it replete with people from NGOs or the “creative industries”, keeping their bills to submit to some Scottish Government branch or agency or funded organisation.

Sometimes one of these figures emerges into the daylight. HIV Scotland, the “national HIV policy organisation”, were in receipt of a grant of £270,000 per year. Its chief executive was Nathan Sparling.

Sparling is a good example of the career path available to the Scottish political class. He started off his taxpayer-funded campaign as a parliamentary assistant to Angus Robertson.

Robertson and Sparling

He then became Chief Executive of HIV Scotland – from which position he was forced to resign, and has just been charged with fraud. He is of course entitled to the presumption of innocence.

HIV Scotland has stopped operating and been closed down.

The interesting thing about this is that I cannot find any reaction from anyone – not the Scottish government who were funding them, not the HIV sufferer community, not the Terence Higgins Trust – bemoaning the closure of HIV Scotland. It is as though the “national HIV policy organisation” is not missed and was not actually doing anything useful at all.

A remarkable number of those organisations being funded by the Scottish government in this way are “policy organisations”, rather than actually delivering a service. The salaries in this part of the troughocracy are better than in the direct public service, with several effectively taxpayer-funded NGO chief executives earning substantially more than MSPs.

One remarkable effect of this system is that the Scottish government is constantly holding stakeholder consultations on policy with policy NGOs funded entirely by the Scottish government to promote the policies of the Scottish government. (You probably need to read that sentence twice. I needed to write it twice.)

One reason the Gender Recognition Reform measure has caused such political damage to the SNP is that the excessive ideological purity of the approach was continually reinforced at closed meetings between Scottish government officials and trans rights campaigning organisations funded by the Scottish government.

This kind of paid echo chamber explains how the mad, and since apparently abandoned by Humza, position of insisting that convicted rapists could self-identify and simply change sex, came to be adopted.

But my main point here is that the taxpayer is paying for swathes of trans rights campaigners. As it happens I am sympathetic in general to self-ID (though not for rapists). But I do not believe the public should be paying for this stuff.

This political-class gravy train in Scotland is massively disproportionate to the size of the country.

Gender reform is just one area where the Scottish government has wasted large amounts of money paying young activists substantial salaries to agree with them. You will find Scottish government-funded environmental groups advocating for Highly Protected Marine Areas. You will find swarms of the public funded self-righteous advocating to ban alcohol advertising.

The Scottish government estimates its grant support to the third sector at half a billion pounds.

Yes £500,000,000.

That is a stunning amount of patronage. Most of it is to excellent organisations doing very good work. But that still leaves huge scope for political patronage to policy and campaigning organisations.

Often of course third sector organisations are involved in both service delivery and policy work, including not just policy development but lobbying and campaigning. One such organisation is Rape Crisis Scotland.

Now as it happens I would support a very substantial increase indeed in government support for rape victims, though I would prefer it to be delivered via the NHS and local authorities rather than a highly politicised NGO.

I should also like to see a very large increase in resources, in personnel, training, finance and equipment, and above all priority, devoted by Police Scotland to rape cases.

Rape Crisis Scotland is almost entirely Scottish Government funded. In that circular policy making, its chief executive Sandy Brindley has played a key role in formulating and promoting Lady Dorrian’s proposals to abolish juries in sexual assault trials.

In an example of exactly the kind of highly paid circle jerk I am explaining, the official Jury Trials Working Group contains three third sector organisations funded by the Scottish government which accordingly support the abolition of juries – Rape Crisis Scotland, Women’s Aid Scotland and Victim Support Scotland.

The Scottish government do not fund any organisation that works for fair trials, so there is no NGO represented in favour of juries.

You would imagine that the highly remunerated CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland, Ms Brindley, is a lovely person motivated by humanitarian concern, given that she devotes her life to campaigning for rape victims.

And yet an Employment Tribunal recently found that the Establishment hero Ms Brindley deliberately and persistently hounded a disabled woman out of her job at Rape Crisis. This is from the Scottish Legal News on the tribunal judgment:

In its decision, the Tribunal expressed concerns at the extensive role played by Ms Brindley throughout proceedings, commenting: “While the Tribunal was mindful that the respondent was a small mainly voluntary organisation, it seemed extraordinary that the chief executive of the organisation would make a recommendation that an employee be suspended, take part in a grievance hearing concerning that employee and then be present at the disciplinary and appeal hearings concerning that same employee where the employee was suggesting that the grievance and disciplinary proceedings ought to have been combined.”

It continued: “Ms Brindley appeared unable or unwilling to understand that her presence throughout both the grievance and disciplinary processes could have a bearing on the extent to which these were conducted in an impartial manner. It was clear to the Tribunal that Ms Brindley operated an invisible hand throughout both processes and her presence was not neutral.”

Assessing the respondent’s awareness of the claimant’s disability, the Tribunal said: “The respondent appeared to be of the view that in the absence of a formal diagnosis, then they were not obliged to consider whether there were any steps they ought to take in terms of the claimant’s condition. While such a position is of course wrong in law, the Tribunal was extremely surprised that an organisation such as the respondent, whose services were focussed on supporting women who had experienced trauma would adopt such a position.”

…The Tribunal concluded: “The disciplinary hearing was not fair. Further, the presence of Ms Brindley at every stage of the proceedings reinforced the Tribunal’s view that the dismissal of the claimant was predetermined. Ms Brindley was aware of the grievance raised by the claimant and the outcome and recommendations which had been made. However, she did not raise this with the disciplinary hearing as an alternative potential outcome, which the Tribunal found very surprising.”

The Tribunal was “extremely surprised” and Ms Brindley’s behaviour was “Surprising”. That is about as tough as language ever gets from an employment tribunal, but their opinion of Ms Brindley is extremely clear. She withheld information from a disciplinary hearing, and her “invisible hand” hounded a disabled woman out of a job.

I would, incidentally, be prepared to wager a sum that the £50,000 in compensation and costs that Brindley’s appalling behaviour cost Rape Crisis Scotland, will ultimately be met by public funds. Certainly not by Brindley.

Yet Sandy Brindley remains a Duchess in the enormous realm of Scottish government-favoured, public funded NGO’s, a star in the firmament of policy lobbyists with big taxpayer-funded salaries.

With hysterical levels of hypocrisy, Brindley, who broke all procedure against her employee, is still the Scottish government’s star authority on the requirements of justice in sexual assault cases.

Their jobs may not be in Politics with a capital P, but I would argue that Ms Brindley and Mr Sparling are prime examples of Scotland’s sprawling, public funded political class, excrescences of the vast patronage wielded by Holyrood.

Of course it extends beyond the third sector. Failed Scottish politicians easily find eye-watering highly paid positions in Scottish universities, for which they are in no sense qualified. Wendy Alexander, Kezia Dugdale and Stephen Gethins are all clear examples.

Arts funding in Scotland and the capricious patronage behind it requires not just a separate article, but a separate book. One theatre in Aberdeen not entirely unconnected to the Aberdeen Independence Movement received more government Covid relief funding than the entire independent music festival sector.

So whatever happened in SNP finances must be seen in this much wider context of the morally shrivelled political culture of Scotland, of the limited power but excessive patronage enjoyed by Scottish governments and of the widespread use of public money for personal advantage of the political class.

The devolution system is a moral sink. Scottish Labour was massively corrupt in its years in power, with good old fashioned brown-envelope corruption all over Scottish central and local government in the Labour years. It was worse than the SNP.

But what really killed off Scottish Labour’s years of power was the recognition by the public that the Scottish Labour political class were interested in their own careers entirely, and had zero real concern for the people of Scotland.

The problem is that all those careerists nowadays flock in to the SNP rather than Labour. The interests of the Scottish political class once again take priority over the interests of the Scottish people.

It is a direct consequence of the fundamentally flawed devolution system, which confers power of patronage with no real responsibility for the economy.

The underlying fact is that Scotland produces vastly more wealth for government in London than the amount which is returned to Holyrood. But the producers are diverse, whereas the portion returned is concentrated into a single channel of distribution, creating that power of patronage and corruption.

Thus we have this strange combination of a poor and exploited nation but a sated and self-satisfied political class. This kind of devolution is precisely how to buy off any Scottish leadership and draw the sting of popular demand for Independence.

That was of course Blair’s open and admitted goal in initiating the devolution project. And it works.

Humza Yousaf has exacerbated all this by specifically excluding from his government those who have some understanding of the supply side of the economy, particularly Kate Forbes and Ivan McKee, and filling his cabinet precisely with those who are interested in nothing but how to control funding to client groups.

Devolution is a trap. Working within the financial ruination that is Westminster economic policy, with no monetary and little fiscal control, suffering from hard Brexit and Tory austerity, it is impossible properly to run proper public services.

Of course Scottish education and the Scottish NHS are in a bloody terrible state. Because of the grossly mismanaged UK economy and Tory austerity, they are bound to be in a terrible state. But devolution makes the SNP take responsibility for the disaster made elsewhere, and it ends up defending the indefensible and arguing that it is not quite as terrible as London.

Under devolution the Scottish government will always get it in the neck for problems made in London. Devolution is a trap. The Scottish political class accept it, and furiously defend it, because it feathers their nest.

The only escape for Scotland is Independence. The Scottish political class are bought off by the corruption of devolution.

This scenario is familiar to every student of imperialism and post-colonial studies. There is always a nominally nationalist governing caste of collaborators sucking at the Imperial teat. Those collaborators always claim to represent and act in the interests of their nation.

The balance of resource flows always benefits the Imperial capital and disbenefits the colony, but enough is “graciously” dispensed to the local ruling caste to keep them sweet.

Scotland is not in any way unique. It is a sad old story. The good news is that the people always triumph in the end and throw off both the local collaborating political caste and the yoke of foreign rule.

That London yoke is onerous. It has impoverished Scotland for centuries, and of course current Tory Westminster corruption is several orders of magnitude worse than anything seen in Scotland. I have every sympathy for those wondering why the houses of Michelle Mone and dozens of other senior Tories who profiteered from Covid have not been turned over by police.

Scotland’s people need to move forward quickly to Independence. That will probably entail writing off the SNP.

Realising that devolution and its advocates are not friends to Independence is a key step to progress.

————————————————

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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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Ten years ago Edward Snowden was helped to escape by Wikileaks and to publish his revelations by The Intercept, Guardian, New York Times and others.

In 2023 Jack Texeira is tracked down by UK secret service front Bellingcat in conjunction with the New York Times and in parallel with the Washington Post, not to help him escape or help him publish or tell people his motives, but to help the state arrest him.

Those outlets have accessed a cache of at least 300 additional secret documents in doing so – and have kept them secret, with the exception of a couple of snippets that forward the official state narrative.

That contrast with ten years ago tells a very real and glaring truth. The idea that the legacy media in any way serves the truth or the public interest is now completely buried. The legacy media serves the state, and the state serves the billionaires.

Wikileaks is now so hamstrung by attacks on its finances, personnel and logistics as to be almost inoperable. Propaganda outfit Bellingcat was conceived as a way to counter it, by producing material with the frisson of secret access but actually as an outlet for the security services. An astonishing amount of “liberal opinion” falls for it.

Similarly the Intercept, like the Guardian, was subject to an internal takeover that delivered it entirely into the hands of the neo-conservatives.

Neither the alleged journalists of New York Times, Washington Post, nor Bellingcat did the most basic things a real journalist would do.

They did not contact Texeira, speak to him, ask him to explain his motivation, and look through the other secret material to which he had access, to get Texeira’s view on its meaning and implications, and to publish what in it was in the public interest.

Instead they simply shopped him to the FBI and closed down the remaining documents.

I am not at all surprised by Bellingcat, which is plainly a spook organisation. I hope this enables more people to see through them. But the behaviour of the New York Times and Washington Post is truly shocking. They now see their mission as to serve the security state, not public knowledge.

In the ten years between Snowden and Texeira, the world has changed hugely for the worse. Not only has a huge amount of freedom disappeared, freedom’s former Guardians have been subverted. It has been ten years of disaster.

A cache of twitter images of some of the leaked documents is here. I am not aware of any broader cache – feel free to insert links to any in the comments.

The initial reaction to the leaked documents was to rubbish them with the memes routinely applied to all information embarrassing to the state nowadays – they were either “Russian hacks” or “faked or amended disinformation”.

These attacks were particularly important as the message that came over clearly from these Texeira leaks was precisely the same as that which came over from Daniel Ellsberg’s original Pentagon Papers leak 50 years ago – that the public is being lied to about how the war is going.

(It is worth reflecting that in today’s world the NYT and Washington Post would have condemned Ellsberg and emphasised those bits of the Pentagon Papers which reflect badly on the VietCong).

Ukraine was particularly concerned about US official figures showing Ukrainian casualties much higher, and Russian casualties much lower, than the Ukrainian official figures the US ostensibly endorsed.

I have to say I always find both Ukrainian and Russian casualty figures laughably false. The idea that either side is telling the truth appears to me one that no half-sensible person could entertain. I had presumed that was the general view.

Revelations about the fragility of Ukrainian air defences and supply lines similarly seemed to me a statement of the blindingly obvious.

It is also unhelpful for the US to have revealed that it is actively spying on President Zelensky, as well as allies like South Korea and Israel. But again, this is embarrassing in the sense it is embarrassing if somebody publishes pictures of you on the toilet; it is not that nobody thought you used the toilet.

There is not a diplomat alive who did not know the US does this stuff.

Eventually the media and security services, with Bellingcat in the vanguard, decided the best way forward was to admit the papers are genuine, but only tell us about very selected ones, and then with a positive spin.

So we have stories about how brilliant the US secret services are at penetrating Russian power structures and communications, and how the real danger from the leaks is revealing to the Russians the extent of American success.

That line has been splashed all over legacy and social media these last few days. As the public is being denied the original documents this conclusion is extrapolated from, it is difficult to assess. The journalists of course have not assessed it; they have just copied and pasted the line.

Other helpful snippets for the security services are published, such as an assessment that the UN Secretary General is pro-Russian, or standard stuff on North Korean nuclear ambitions. In the last week it is noticeable that, since original documents stopped surfacing into public view, nothing has been published that does not serve US propaganda narratives.

There remains the mystery that the sources of these documents seem particularly diverse – in particular some being apparently internal CIA – for an intelligence officer in the Air National Guard to access, but it is not impossible.

Jack Texeira is at the centre of this puzzle but remains the missing piece. We have heard nothing from him. A rather unconvincing interview with a suspiciously fluent, pixeled out acquaintance grassing him up to the Washington Post stated that he was a right wing patriot.

Texeira has been portrayed both as some kind of rampant Trump supporter incensed at the state, and as an inadequate jock revealing documents just to boast to fellow gaming nerds. We should remain suspicious of attempts to characterise him: I am acutely aware of media portrayals of Julian Assange which are entirely untrue.

It is a shame the Washington Post, New York Times, Guardian and Bellingcat each had no interest whatsoever in the journalistic pursuit of the truth behind this extraordinary episode. We live entirely in security states: there is no doubt about it.

————————————————

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.

I was standing on the street in the rain, speaking to a few dozen people, without a sound system. Remarkably this is captured brilliantly just on an inexpensive phone camera, and my words have already reached several thousand.

Good people cannot just give up and do nothing. We have to continue to try to do what is right. I was touched to see again unacknowledged campaigners I have witnessed pounding the streets for Julian for over a decade. We will never give up the struggle to free him.

————————————————

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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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.

I can’t recall such utter hopelessness in UK politics, with every political party in the grip of a self-serving cabal of the political class interested purely in personal interest.

The Labour Party is entirely taken over by the Wes Streeting tendency. Its method is to find the most right wing racist in Hartlepool who ever once voted Labour for reasons he is unsure of, and give him everything he wants that might lead him to vote Labour again.

Attack on liberal judges and left wing lawyers? Tick, Labour policy.
Hard Brexit? Tick, Labour policy.
Lock up disruptive climate protestors? Tick. Labour Policy
Kick out refugees quicker than the Tories? Tick, Labour policy.
End support for strikes? Tick, Labour policy.
More public spending cuts? Tick, Labour policy.
Massive defence spending and help bomb the Russians? Tick, Labour policy.

This is combined by throwing in some Labour policies to please the corporate paymasters that not even our right wing nutter in Hartlepool wants, such as massive privatisation of NHS services.

Those of us who are older and left wing will never forget the way that Margaret Thatcher destroyed the social democratic consensus in the UK and shattered British industry as a deliberate policy to that end. But I knew Margaret Thatcher a bit, and I can promise you she was nowhere near as right wing as Keir Starmer.

(Denis was. I once got gloriously drunk with Denis, and ended up hiding on the floor of the car that dropped him back off to a furious Margaret who was late for a State banquet. That is a tale for another day).

One of the very few things Boris Johnson said as PM which was both true and interesting was that Starmer was responsible, as Director of Public Prosecutions, for the decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile.

This was not merely true, it is impossible sensibly to deny. Yet the entire media and political class rallied round Starmer to attack Johnson when he said it. That was when I first realised Johnson would shortly be out and Starmer foist relentlessly upon us.

As for the Tory Party in power, I don’t know what to say. The United Kingdom has reverted to 18th Century levels of corruption – and of nobody being surprised or alarmed by corruption.

A global pandemic was unashamedly utilised as a means to make vast, corrupt profits for politicians and their friends. I am taking not of millions, nor of billions, but of tens of billions of pounds in excess profits, some of it for vastly over-priced equipment, some of it for indeterminate services, some of it for non-functioning equipment, and much of it that simply cannot be traced at all.

Yet nobody seems to care. The media scarcely mention it, opposition politicians are very strangely silent, the public seem mired in apathetic helplessness. The Good Law Project bang away wonderfully, but in the face of a police and judicial system that does not seem to care either. It is like punching a gigantic, lightly inflated bladder.

Other than looting the public purse, the Tory Party merely enacts a strange set of performative cruelties, where ministers of visibly low intelligence punch down on whichever group drifts into
their sights next, but continually on desperate and sodden refugees.

I used to be a Liberal and my political thought remains steeped in that tradition – Grimond, Beveridge, Keynes, Hobson, Mill, Hazlitt, to name but a few. I left the party when Clegg took over and swung it hard to the right, and I now see no reason whatsoever why anybody would vote for it. I see no evidence of thinking of any kind, let alone radical thinking, coming from the Liberal Democrats.

As you know, I have since 2015 been warning people that Sturgeon had no interest whatsoever in Independence and was turning the SNP purely into a personality cult and a careerist vehicle for the Scottish political class, while gaining popularity through the dead end of Clinton style identity politics.

OK, so I have been proven right. How does that help us? The SNP is so far in the grip of the careerists, albeit by foul means, it is in no sense a radical alternative nor a threat to the United Kingdom.

So where does hope lie? The Green Party in England, (as opposed to the Scottish Green Party which has broken off links with it and contains several of the most unpleasant people on the planet), seems to me to consist of decent and well-motivated people who I could vote for if I lived in England.

The same goes for Plaid Cymru in Wales. In Northern Ireland, while some of my friends say that Sinn Fein have become over-comfortable with the personal luxuries of limited power, I still think the weight of history and community engagement will keep them basically straight.

Il faut cultiver mon jardin and I shall put my back into supporting the Alba Party, but the challenge of breaking into the political system from scratch is a huge one.

But that is it. Of course there are good individual politicians in every political party – yes, including the Tories – but they are increasingly rare. UK politics are a bust. To find someone you can even consider voting for, you are looking for party mavericks, or at the minority nationalities and their representatives.

Yet it is only a few years since Jeremy Corbyn was promising real change on one hand, while on the other Scotland looked able imminently to regain national freedom. From there to hopelessness is quite a giddying plunge.

I urge you to believe that the current, dreadful state of affairs is not permanent. The draining of hope from the sham democracy in which we live does not mean permanent stasis. The exploitation economy and the massive growing wealth gap are not a sustainable dynamic.

Change will come. It will not come through the exhausted charade of the Westminster political system. I do not believe the dystopian nightmare of permanent corporate control which we face, will be able to set its concrete over us before people notice and resist.

I do however now believe things will get worse before they get better. Considerably worse.

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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.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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Russia should release Evan Gershkovich; if as part of a prisoner swap it should be speedily concluded.

Gershkovich was arrested in Ekaterinburg while investigating the Wagner Group. Ekaterinburg is one of Russia’s grimmest, most mafia dominated and least open cities, which I have myself visited specifically to investigate the murders of local Russian journalists.

That was dangerous enough without the complications of a war and the fact Gershkovich was planning to visit the location of a nearby tank factory (it is unclear whether he got to carry out this plan).

I am not in the least surprised he was arrested, but I would have hoped he would simply be deported, or have his visa cancelled like Luke Harding. A journalist from a country openly supplying the enemy in an active war could hardly complain if deported. It is part of the game.

Let us not forget that Russia is still allowing western journalists to operate inside Russia, while most countries in the West, including the UK, have closed down all Russian media outlets and canceled the visas of their journalists.

But to charge Gershkovich with espionage for – from what we know so far – simply doing his job, is a major escalation.

I am going to assume Gershkovich was not actually working for the CIA or Ukrainian intelligence. No evidence has so far been produced of this and, so far, I have not seen Russia allege it. If alleged, it would change the game in some respects, but I for now assume that is not in play and Gershkovich was merely functioning as a journalist.

The Biden Administration’s problem is that it is in no position to object. Julian Assange is being charged with espionage solely for journalism: there is no allegation he was working for a foreign power.

If Assange committed espionage against the USA by publishing national security secrets of the United States, how exactly is Gershkovich not committing espionage against Russia by seeking to publish what it deems its national security secrets?

The answer is of course, that neither committed espionage. They are just doing journalism. But it is an answer the Biden administration cannot give whilst pursuing the prosecution of Assange.

I say this with no pleasure and I am as concerned for Gershkovich’s well-being as I am for Assange’s well-being.

But we warned again and again that the prosecution of Assange made life more dangerous for journalists operating in difficult conditions worldwide. We were ignored.

There is, in one sense, more justification for the prosecution of Gershkovich than for that of Assange. At least Gershkovich was actually in Russia when arrested. Assange is an Australian citizen whose activities were conducted entirely outside the USA, and is being extradited on an extraordinary USA claim of universal jurisdiction.

There are voices within the Biden Administration, and within the USA’s major media corporations, who have been pointing out the dangerous precedent that the Assange case creates. Hopefully those voices will be strengthened by the Gershkovich case.

But Gershkovich should be released. Just a young journalist doing his job.

————————————————

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.

I have waited for anger to subside before writing about Humza Yousaf as First Minister. The obvious unfairness of the election created a lot of anger.

The SNP party machine did everything to get Humza elected, with the now huge payroll vote swinging into action from the start with coordinated endorsements and messages. Central party staff, the SNP’s Westminster spin doctor and even Sturgeon’s “fixer” Liz Lloyd were seconded to the Humza campaign.

The hundreds of paid staff of MPs and MSPs campaigned relentlessly for Humza, self-describing as “activists”. The numerous SNP HQ troll accounts swung into action.

Banners and campaign materials identical to those produced by Party HQ were instantly available to Humza, almost before the other candidates knew there was a leadership contest. Party hustings were packed with Humza supporters before the rest of the party knew there were hustings, with online tickets almost instantly “sold out”, but the same claque faces appearing at multiple hustings, to the extent that Kate Forbes and Ash Regan actually called it out.

The mainstream media swung into unanimous and ferocious attack on Kate Forbes instantly the election was called, attempting a knockout blow based on her religious beliefs.

Party HQ lied to the media and the world repeatedly about membership numbers, hiding the depth of Sturgeon’s failure, to the obvious benefit of the “continuity candidate”.

Entirely false claims were made by the same HQ about the role of voting platform provider MiVoice’s  – who just provide the software; they do not audit the list of voters or logins SNP HQ gave them. There is no audit or check.

Ultimately only 51,000 out of 72,000 supposed party members bothered to vote in an election effectively for First Minister of Scotland. That is 10% less than the member turnout in the Truss/Sunak Tory leadership election. The Tories have a large portion of membership which is purely social in rural England.

After all this bias, for Humza to get less than 50% on first preferences, and then get over the line by just 52% to 48%, was really quite remarkable. It speaks to the massive amount of dissatisfaction among ordinary party members.

It says everything about the mentality of Sturgeon and Murrell that GCHQ were brought in to ensure the cyber-security of the voting. Willie MacRae, my old friend Gordon Wilson and all the others who built the SNP will be birling in their graves.

In fact, if you excluded the votes of those who make a living from the SNP – elected representatives, their staff, HQ staff and the massive and too infrequently discussed tail of those in third sector organisations funded by Scottish Govt grants – I have no doubt Humza would have lost on the votes of those who support the party without reward and at their own cost.

Which is an interesting thought.

Those are reasons to feel angry about the mechanics, the process of election. There was also reason to be angry about the substance. From the start, the election was, as befits Sturgeon’s SNP, much more about identity politics than about Independence.

The use of culture wars to define “progressive” politics – rather than economic debate about reducing the massive wealth gap in society – was systematic and deliberate. It made listening to the debates frustrating and unrewarding. The mainstream media was delighted to play along with this narrative.

Now the strange thing about all this is, that had he not cast himself as Sturgeon’s “continuity candidate”, I would have been supportive of Humza Yousaf.

Yousaf’s instincts are more left wing than Sturgeon’s. Unlike the Clinton-mimicking Sturgeon, Humza is not a natural neoliberal, and when he muses about wealth taxes or genuine land reform I believe that is the real Yousaf coming out.

Humza also has a good, solid record of solidarity and activism with Palestine – something the SNP moved away from, and which is anathema to Sturgeon’s young praetorian guard. Unlike Sturgeon, Humza is not a natural NATO hawk nor supporter of United States’ neo-Imperialism.

Humza unequivocally declared himself a republican and in favour of a non-monarchical Independent Scotland, again marking out a far more radical approach than Sturgeon.

It is of course obvious but still worth saying that it genuinely is delightful that Scots would select a Scots Muslim of Pakistani heritage as leader. That says something very good about our society. The horrible Islamophobia this has attracted – almost entirely from unionists – has been very unpleasant to observe on social media.

In a career as a diplomat, you get access to senior politicians and observe governance at close quarters, all round the world.

One conclusion this has led me to, is that puppet successors very rarely work out as planned by whoever is holding the strings. Once they have gained enough control of the levers of power, the supposed puppets quickly find the advice of their predecessor onerous, and the interests of their predecessor less than compelling.

There are exceptions – Medvedev never made any real effort to pull clear of Putin, though Putin had guarded against that by calling himself Prime Minister and not actually letting go of the levers.

But that Humza, the self-declared continuity candidate, will simply be a cypher for the Murrells seems to be not certain, even though he plainly felt appearing to accept that role was the way to get elected. He was right – just.

It is however certainly true that his Cabinet is very heavy with those close to Sturgeon, who will keep her informed on every move. In particular Shona Robison, extremely powerful as both Humza’s Deputy and Finance Minister, is inseparable from Sturgeon, as is Shirley Anne Somerville, Minister for Social Justice.

We often talk loosely of ministers not being talented or bright. Humza, in reality, is both talented and bright; his failing has always been fecklessness and epicureanism.

But in the case of both Robison and Somerville, it genuinely is impossible to make a case for either of them being talented, or to put it bluntly, intelligent enough for the positions they occupy.

Their elevation depended entirely on their loyalty to Sturgeon and their belief in the kind of identity politics agenda that ignores the economic structures that suppress the poor, but focuses on opportunities for members of specified disadvantaged groups to thrive within the existing system.

In practice these opportunities often benefit only some of the already wealthier people in society.

Put another way, neither the persistent gender pay gap, especially in low paid work, nor the increasing number of children in child poverty in Scotland, has in any improved whilst having, as deliberate positive discrimination, more female ministers.

The lives of the female ministers have however improved immeasurably.

Humza has removed or excluded from his cabinet Kate Forbes, Ivan McKee and Michelle Thomson, any of whom would have easily been the most talented in it.

I have seen it very little commented upon – perhaps because it is simply taken as read – but the fundamental criterion, indeed the only criterion, for inclusion as a minister by Humza appears to be enthusiastic support for Gender Recognition Reform in its pure and ideological form.

That compelled purity includes the rejection of the elementary common sense of excluding convicted sexual offenders (a tiny percentage of trans people) from self-ID, which political bullheadedness politically holed the entire project and unleashed a horrible and entirely avoidable wave of hatred against trans people.

Humza is essentially squandering his political capital like a lottery winner, doubling down on precisely the Sturgeon behaviours that caused at least 53,000 members to leave the party – and counting.

In 2022 on average the SNP lost 80 members per day. In 2023 up until the point true membership figures were released three weeks ago, it was losing on average 120 members per day.

It is probably fair to measure the number of active party members who are concerned primarily with culture wars, as being those who voted for Humza and refused to give a second preference to either Forbes or Regan. That number is 9,763 people.

These figures are actually important because they speak to the intolerance of opposition of the Humza camp. Almost 40% of Humza’s displayed their closed-mindedness by refusing to give any second preference, compared to just 16% of Kate Forbes’ voters.

Yet it is Kate Forbes’ supporters who are the ones being enthusiastically castigated everywhere as intolerant bigots, despite the fact the large majority of them not only gave their second preferences, they gave them to Humza.

Humza’s problem is not only that he has chosen his Cabinet from only his own supporters, and has thus ignored the views of over half the party members, whose first preference he was not. Humza has the much larger problem that in doing so, this only represents the 9,000 who voted for him and nobody else.

His Cabinet consists solely of those who wish entirely to limit the SNP to those who meet their measure of ideological purity – which for some inexplicable reason means commitment not to Scottish Independence, but to an absolute, unmoderated right for everybody to change their gender by declaration.

This is a serious break with the traditions of a party that was always the big tent for Independence supporters. Much more crucially, the election provided the opportunity for the SNP careerists who overwhelmingly backed Humza to come out as, de facto, devolutionists rather than Independence supporters.

There is a continuum from gradualist to devolutionist to unionist, and under Sturgeon the SNP had been sliding steadily down that scale. A long way down that scale.

This election gave the devolutionists license to “come out” and shed the pretence that they had any intention of doing anything about Independence in the next few electoral cycles. Independence became an “aspiration”, a “goal we should always keep before us”. While actually becoming Independent was decried a “process” discussion of which was pointless.

This derogatory relegation of becoming Independent to “process” was a rhetorical trick constantly practised by Humza himself. Yet again we are being told that we have to wait until support for Independence somehow, by magic, reaches a sustained level of 60% in opinion polls before we can even look at what that “process” is.

If that is now the stance of the SNP – and I am 90% sure it is – then I would take the view that it is incumbent upon real Independence supporters to oppose the SNP as a de facto unionist power structure.

That means Alba should stand against the SNP not just as a list party, but in First Past the Post elections too. Otherwise genuine Independence supporters could be left with nobody to vote
for.

But – and this is a small but, as my hope is limited – I note that Alex Salmond, who knows Humza very well, has not yet written him off.

Humza has already requested an S30 for a new Independence referendum from Rishi Sunak. He did so orally but I presume a letter is following. He received the expected dismissive answer.

As you know, I think it is wrong to ask permission from London at all for Scottish self-determination. Asking permission is an admission ab initio you don’t actually believe in the right of Scottish self-determination.

But did Humza make the request in the spirit of homage to Westminster, or is it a formality he had to get out of the way to comply with his purported commitment to Sturgeon’s footsteps? The question is, now London has said no, will he have a plan B for Independence?

If so he needs to produce it in the next few weeks, or face mass desertion by SNP voters.

I am one of life’s sunnier optimists. I note that Humza frequently mentioned Independence, unapologetically, at his first First Minister’s Questions in Holyrood: about as many times as Sturgeon had voluntarily brought up Independence in the past three years.

Humza needs to find his inner radical, and that inner radical needs to act decisively.

I don’t expect it. But I am not entirely devoid of hope.

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A brief question. For years this blog published very frequently short, snappy opinions, often only a few lines, on the issues of the day. More recently, probably in line with a trend in blogging, I have largely stopped that and this blog produces much more considered, longer form pieces.

I tend to confine short snappy thoughts to Twitter instead.

On the upside, the much shorter thoughts were not always produced with much quality of argument. On the downside, abandoning them (which just evolved, not by policy) has definitely damaged the existence of regular community in the comments section.

What do you think?

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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.

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.