I think it is very important that I provide irrefutable proof of the systematic lies behind the boycott campaign with which BECTU, supported by the MSM, destroyed Doune the Rabbit Hole.

The most devastating of these lies was the repeated, and entirely false, claim that the Festival was not just unable to meet its bills in 2022 due to carried debt from two late Covid cancellations in 2020 and 2021, but had not paid artists and suppliers over many festivals.

This is from BECTU’s statement of 23 May, which called for a customer, supplier and artist boycott:

When the organisers contacted our branch in December 2022 they claimed that no one was owed any money from any of the festivals previous to 2022. We already knew that this was not true. When it was pointed out to them that at least one company was owed thousands of pounds from Festival and Beverage (the company now back running this year’s festival) the response was “oh yes – except for them there is no-one else”…. We have also found other companies that are owed from multiple previous festivals.

The total costs of the 2019 festival were approximately £812,000. Of these £806,000 were paid. One single company was indeed owed £6,000 (the last instalment on a £21,000 bill) due to a simple error, compounded by subsequent covid dislocation.

2020 and 2021 were the covid cancellations. We have no idea who are the companies BECTU claim to have found who are owed money from 2019 or earlier. We have had nobody – no artist, no crew, no supplier – contact us with an outstanding invoice from 2019 or before.

Crucially, I have spoken to the liquidator of DTRH Ltd. In seven months of operation, not one person or company has come to the liquidator with any claim arising from the 2019 festival or before.

Yet BECTU say plainly: “We have also found other companies that are owed from multiple previous festivals”.

Who are they? So who are these companies? We don’t know.

We have repeatedly asked BECTU, from December 2022 onwards. I asked them in person at a face to face meeting at their Scottish branch office in March 2023.

BECTU have never given us the name of a single one of the companies they have repeatedly claimed we owe money from 2019 and earlier, even though we have repeatedly asked.

In June, when it became clear this claim was destroying ticket sales, we asked BECTU repeatedly in writing.

BECTU finally told us that they could not tell us who was owed money from before 2019, because that information is confidential. Yes, really, confidential from the people trying to make any payment due.

So to sum up. The Festival was crashed by BECTU chiefly on a claim that people were owed money from the 2019 festival and earlier, but none of the nameless companies they claim are owed that money has ever contacted us or contacted the liquidator.

Furthermore BECTU said they know who these companies are, but refuse to tell us – nor did they assist any such company to contact us.

Plainly BECTU had no interest whatsoever in securing payment for any such companies, but rather were using them as leverage to crash the festival – which means they would never be paid.

The only other explanation, which seems to be the most likely, is that these companies do not exist, that BECTU had no contact with any companies owed money from previous festivals as nobody is owed money.

The whole story is a malicious falsehood concocted to destroy the festival.

Can you make any other sense of why no requests for payment were ever made for this alleged pre 2022 debt?

Other BECTU falsehoods in their statement calling for the festival to be boycotted, concerned broadly health and safety issues.

This one was another major BECTU lie:

There was only one water outlet for much of the build due to the supply being tapped from a Scottish Water outlet without the company’s knowledge or permission.

This is completely, utterly untrue.

This is a picture of the water supply plant for the festival. It was bought by the Cardross Estate with the festival paying for installation and connection. It was installed on the advice of Scottish Water and it was tested and approved by Scottish Water.

Scottish Water tested the quality several times, with the last check just before the 2022 festival. In fact this caused a major problem, as owing to a delay in Scottish Water’s bio-culture laboratory, clearance did not come through as expected, and gate opening was held back by three hours.

There are no Scottish Water outlets on the estate: Scottish Water’s mains piping ends at the gate. We have never tapped in to any Scottish Water outlet.

BECTU at no stage ever asked us about the water supply. They published this utter nonsense without any attempt to discuss with us first. Again, that is absolute proof the intention was to destroy the festival, not to solve another non-existent problem.

Their entire statement is similarly inaccurate. It makes wild claims, including that food was “inedible”. I presume this refers to crew catering.

Catering was inedible and people refused to eat it.

Well, I was on site for four weeks and I ate exactly the same food as everybody else, and I am still here. Approximately 8,000 crew meals were produced from a field kitchen over this period.

Other claims include that somebody saw heavy plant being driven in a public area. But apparently said nothing at the time, and the complaint is first brought up 10 months later.

The festival happened in July 2022. BECTU first published this claim in May 2023, again without asking us first.

One of the SLEN committee was on site with a headline band (who have still not been paid) and saw a number of H&S concerns including heavy plant moving across public areas with no escort while the festival was open.

All heavy plant was driven by expert professionals who were paid £350 per day by the festival. None would have risked their career doing anything unsafe. Plant movements were accompanied by banksmen.

The only plant movement in public areas we are aware of during the festival was to set down stands of bottled water, which had been supplied free by Scottish Water due to the heatwave. This was done safely using banksmen and cordons established by volunteers.

Here is another wild claim from BECTU in their statement, this time on ticket sales by March:

We believe that those 2000 sales will have brought in at least £400,000.

The most expensive ticket sold had been £180 for an adult weekend ticket. A full third of sales were children’s weekend tickets at £10. There were also adult day tickets at £60 or £80. Do the sums yourself on 2,000 tickets.

The claim of £400,000 was not just a lie, it was a very malicious lie which two minutes’ due diligence would have negated.

BECTU’s claim of revenue was fantastically wrong. It was designed to play in to their constant sub-narrative that large sums of money were available but being misappropriated.

I could go on for some time. BECTU, on the basis of this onslaught of malicious fabrication, called for a total boycott of the festival and were enthusiastically echoed in both mainstream and social media, by the entire Establishment.

The festival in 2022 made a large loss because its attempt to make up massive covid cancellation debts from 2020 and 2021 failed. This meant some artists, crew and suppliers are owed money from 2022, even though approximately £1.3 million WAS paid out.

We are deeply sorry for the debt.

We were determined to pay off the debt. We wished to make the festival a success again and work like crazy over these next three years to get all those owed, paid up in full.

Payment had sometimes been late in the past, but before Covid everybody who ever worked at the festival had been paid, (bar a single mistake). If the festival had not been destroyed by the most cynical and vicious campaign of lies, I believe there was a real prospect everybody would get paid off over time.

Now nobody will be paid and this year’s ticket holders have lost out. Congratulations to BECTU on this achievement. When they called for a boycott by artists, suppliers and public, there is no doubt this was the intended consequence.

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Please start by listening to this brief BBC interview.

I should state again upfront in text that not only have I never taken one single penny, directly or indirectly, from Doune the Rabbit Hole in salary, fee, dividend or expenses (nor from concessions etc), I have put in over 300,000 of personal money, all my retirement savings, to help pay debts.

I have also put in thousands of hours of unpaid work.

I will also state, I think the first time I have made this public, that some years ago (when I had money) I put 90,000 into the Eden Festival to save that festival also from bankruptcy.

I have always believed strongly that society needs more social interaction, and that the increasing isolation of people as consumers in their own living rooms causes a great deal of harm. Community, shared experience, family and plain having fun together are extremely important to me, and always have been. That is why I have been involved.

This is the most personal article I will ever have published or will publish. It is about a campaign of hatred and blatant lies that has caused a great loss to many other people and messed up the holiday hopes of hundreds of families and children, for which I simply cannot apologise enough. I am the target and so many others have been collateral damage.

But it is also a story with much wider resonances that I believe makes it worth your reading – about corporatism, political power, authority, the power of lies, and the desire to destroy something beautiful.

It has had a devastating effect on many people but including on me personally and on those close to me.

I therefore hope it is worth your reading.

Long term readers of the blog will know how important the Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival has been to me since it was started by my son Jamie in 2010. It has now been closed down by an orchestrated campaign of falsehoods which devastated ticket sales.

The Scottish media – including the Herald, Daily Record, Sun, Courier, BBC and STV, have each dedicated at least three times as much space to attacking the Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival as they have to Baroness Michelle Mone taking over 30 million of profit for dumping dodgy PPE on the NHS and disappearing out of the country on her private yacht.

An extraordinary alliance of “progressives”, including the union BECTU and social media such as the Bella Caledonia website and scores of SNP troll accounts, campaigned actively and successfully in combination with the MSM to close the festival down.

Doune the Rabbit Hole specifically aimed to revive the original spirit of festivals and avoid corporatism and rip-off. Just how horrible many so-called festivals have become, is extraordinary to me. Many “festivals” are commercial urban park concerts. Few people realise that Live Nation, which dominates the industry, is a Saudi music-washing effort. Several festivals that were independent, like Belladrum on which we used to model ourselves, have become corporate and changed atmosphere to hard, expensive sell inside.

I have written about Doune the Rabbit Hole frequently here. This is from a March 2020 article.

I have written before about why we do the festival. It is about lifestyle and community, about creating a nicer, kinder world for a short time in the fields on the edge of the Highland Line. Doune the Rabbit Hole is a conscious attempt to maintain the communal values of the earliest music festivals, and the experience is very different from that of the large commercial ones. It is a family festival not just in the sense of being family owned and run. Under 12s come free and there is a huge amount of time and other resource devoted to providing facilities and entertainment for them. The very presence of so many children is important to the sense of being a community, not an audience, as is the extraordinary age range of those who come. There is no dominant age group. Pets are welcome and lots of people bring them.

The finances of the festival are a huge challenge. The fixed costs of the required infrastructure – fencing, temporary roads, water, stages, lighting, sound systems, toilets, tentage, signage, security, first aid and more – are colossal, amounting to over £400,000. This is why many of Scotland’s camping festivals, including Wicker Man and Electric Fields, have closed down in recent years. In the modern age, much of that is mandated by the authorities, for example we would be much happier without six miles of fencing. That is before you pay the musicians. Live performance rather than selling recorded music is nowadays a much higher percentage of a musicians’ income, and the cost of leading bands has increased exponentially in real terms over the last couple of decades. Plus, as a matter of principle, we pay all the musicians, including those looking to break through, of which we have masses.

Ten years of trying has proven to us that the only way a camping festival can survive financially is to reach a size of about 8,000 people, due to the fixed costs. You can imagine the challenges of attempting to grow the festival to the size needed, with all the infrastructure required to keep that many people entertained, safe, fed, watered and with clean toilets (and having the cleanest toilets of any festival is very high on our priorities), yet at the same time retain the community, family, non-commercial and above all friendly atmosphere. I hope that this link might take you to the public reviews on Google. My feeling was last year that we achieved this atmosphere for the visitors but not for the crew, who were over-stressed. I am spending a lot of time on how to make the community work for everybody and keep the finances together, while avoiding commercialisation. We are always very keen on keeping bar and food prices down to ordinary, non-festival levels and making sure that people never feel ripped off on site.

Artistically, I think we succeeded. Doune the Rabbit Hole was a beautiful experience. The Herald’s review of the 2022 Festival called it “the most relaxed of festivals” and concluded:

the self-proclaimed ‘Scotland’s biggest independent festival’ has proved it is a crucial part of the nation’s festival scene, after pandemic-related postponements in 2020 and 2021, with a tasty recipe of relaxed, family-friendly fun, cutting edge new music and established names.

I believe uniquely among music festivals of this size, Doune the Rabbit Hole had no permanent police presence, because the police deemed it unnecessary. Over 14 years, Doune the Rabbit Hole witnessed a total of eight arrests, six for drug dealing and two over matters unrelated to the festival. Most commercial festivals have at least that many arrests every single day. There was never a single fight in the bars, even though they opened until 3am.

I treasured this description of her first festival experience by Nicola Biggerstaff:

The thing that immediately struck me was the relaxed nature of our fellow festival-goers. Knowing only of the hundreds of thousands-strong Glastonbury crowds and the horror stories of the Astroworld crush and the lack of crowd control at Wireless, I was blown away by the chilled-out atmosphere hanging in the air, almost conflicting with the now soaring heat. With my history of anxiety, I was worried about being looked at, being judged, if I was wearing the right thing. I was immediately put right at ease by the array of characters who passed us by without a care in the world. Mad Hatter’s, inflatable T-Rexes, men in flowing skirts and women in suits, families in hiking gear and everything in between. Glitter, neon face paints, bandanas for miles. I had no reason to worry, I could breathe freely. By the first evening, we had given up on make-up and could not have cared less about it. All we needed on our faces was a smile, and a wide-eyed admiration of those who continued to adorn themselves in the forementioned for the duration of the weekend.

Robin McAlpine’s analysis of Doune the Rabbit Hole also summed up precisely what it meant to me.

Finally, what is it that makes people that go to this festival so often reach for ‘friendly’ as the first adjective to describe it? Why does that sense stick with us so much? The answer is because that’s the culture which is created. You smile at strangers when you pass because they smile at you. You help people or start conversations with them because someone else did it for you.

I’m pretty sure these aren’t ‘particularly nice and friendly people’ – it’s not a weekend based on genetic selection or anything. It’s the expectations we set ourselves when we arrive. We expect to not mind taking the ten seconds to stop and say hello, or to pick up something someone has dropped for them, or to tell someone that they look great. So we do.

Happy moments which are out of our normal reality are messages from ourselves to ourselves about why we should not accept our normality

Why are those expectations not ones we hold the rest of the time? What is it that gives us permission to be better people at this event than we might be day to day? I think the main answers are community and time. No-one is rushing, things will wait and if they don’t well that’s not a disaster. You don’t have ten things you have to do with time to do only six.

And you are instantly in a community, one that is going to share much of the same experiences over the weekend. You feel together because you are together.

The key points were that there was no corporate sponsorship or advertising, bars and catering were ordinary prices not “festival prices”, children’s tickets were always free or a token cost and until 2022 children’s drinks at the bar were free. Once inside the festival, all activities were free, there were no extra costs.

After years of financial struggle, in 2020 we finally seemed to have broken through to a size where the festival would stand on its own two feet. With a line up featuring Public Enemy, Belle and Sebastian, Bill Bailey, John Cale and Kate Tempest, we had sold two thirds of the tickets with three months to go, (having always sold over half the tickets in the last six weeks).

In 2020 we were projecting a £300,000 profit which would then set the company up with a reserve against future bad weather years.

Then Covid happened.

Lockdown regulations came in causing us to cancel, just three weeks before the festival, with almost all the infrastructure and artists booked and large deposits paid. The net loss from that Covid cancellation was about £350,000.

We offered to refund tickets and everybody who asked for a refund got it instantly. But such was the festival’s reputation that 96% of ticket holders rolled over their tickets to 2021.

The 2021 festival was planned for a few weeks after the announced date for lifting of covid restriction. Again, everything was fully booked and deposits paid. Then the extension of the restrictions was announced, even after restrictions were lifted in England, with no definite end date.  Festivals in England were meantime allowed. So was the corporate Transmt festival in Scotland, allowed as an experiment. We on the other hand were obliged to cancel yet again, racking up a further loss of over £300,000.

We had now lost almost £700,000 to covid. Against that, we received a £50,000 bounceback loan and Scottish government covid support of just £90,000.

The Scottish government Covid support to festivals amounted to just one fifth per ticket sale of the amount given to festivals in England, as detailed in this letter from Scotland’s Independent Festivals.

The Case for Greater Funding Support of Scottish Independent Music Festivals

This is an extract from the letter:

In absolute terms, the average grant to independent Scottish music festivals, none of which were allowed to take place in 2021, was just £31,545. The average grant to independent English music festivals which had to cancel in 2021 was £432,380, twelve times the amount. In England even those independent festivals which were permitted to go ahead in 2021 received an average grant of £236,948.

The Scottish Government received equivalent Covid relief funding for the Arts from the Treasury. Simply Angus Robertson decided to heavily prioritise the big arts companies and permanent venues – ie buildings, plus a few specific touring artists.

The Stand Comedy Club received four times the funding of Knockengorroch, a vital node for Scotland’s traditional music, while one theatre in Aberdeen received more Covid funding than all Scotland’s independent music festivals put together.

So by Autumn 2021 we were £700,000 down from two Covid cancellations, continuing to have our staff and overheads costs and, after a second year of cancellation, understandably about 20% of ticket holders wanted their money back – and they all got it.

This left a terrible dilemma. If we simply gave up, there was no money to pay back the remaining ticket holders – it had all been spent on the two cancelled festivals and on refunds. If the event went ahead as in 2019, it could never cover the losses.

There was every reason to believe the festival was long term viable. It’s sales growth had been remarkable and consistent. The “go big” strategy in 2022 was nearly pulled off. Look at this graph and understand that, but for those huge Covid losses, the festival was well on the path to success.

(NB these include day tickets, so they are individuals over all three days, not the capacity of the event)

This graph is the answer to those who are arguing that Independent festivals ought not exist, that the sector should be left to the corporations with big pockets, that you ought not be allowed to run a festival unless you have all the cash upfront. That agenda is now being pursued actively and would knock out all the independents to the advantage of the corporates.

That may make you think about who was behind the massive media and social attack.

We decided to bank on further sales growth and make 2022 much more ambitious, spending over twice as much on artists and aiming to provide big name acts who would pack in the crowds. If we could sell out on a 12,000 capacity, we could cover the carried debt from Covid.

With a lineup including Patti Smith, Amy MacDonald, Belle and Sebastian, The Buzzcocks, 10cc, Sleaford Mods, Teenage Fanclub, Boney M and many more, we were advised by our booking agents and by industry professionals we could certainly sell out 12,000 tickets. So we went for it, putting in a £120,000 marketing budget.

It seemed to work. Early sales were extremely good. We had always sold over half our tickets in the last six weeks, and with six weeks to go we were well over half the needed sales.

Then the expected surge did not happen.

I still don’t fully understand why. In May 2022, the massive increase in people’s fuel bills and the onset of the cost of living crisis certainly had a major effect in dropping sales, but could not be the entire explanation. We also had some bad publicity with local councillors grandstanding over our license application (any music festival has the odd local opponent), but that does not explain it fully either.

We discussed with others in the industry. Everybody was experiencing lower ticket sales. Everybody was also experiencing higher costs post-Covid – fencing, stages, toilets, trackway etc had all bounced up by about 40% post pandemic.

But many in the industry reported a tendency for people to put off ticket sales right until the last week, after two years of cancellations. So we decided the late surge would just be later than usual.

With a week to go, having lived at site now already a couple of weeks during the build, sales were still not picking up, and it was now too late to cancel. Life became really unpleasant. Money was lacking to pay people for essential, safety critical equipment and operations, and I found myself cashing in all my pension savings and paying for these things direct.

Various organisational tasks were falling behind for lack of ability to pay people to do them. On top of which my son Jamie, the guiding hand behind the festival, was hospitalised with severe Covid and had been out of action for a month.

In previous years, in the last week we had been getting in £20,000 a day in ticket sales. In 2022 we had nothing near that, so the cash to pay for things was just not arriving.

Astonishingly, in 2022 we sold virtually zero tickets on the gate for the entire festival. This was unprecedented.

The Festival runs its own bars and these could be relied on for £250,000 (indeed!) profit once the gates opened, but getting to that stage was a nightmare.

I contacted everybody I know who might be able to chip in something, explaining that many families and children would lose their holiday if we cancelled. I think at this stage I can reveal that the one person who put his hand in his pocket and gave a four figure donation was Alex Salmond. There were also contributions from other family members.

We had frequent meetings with the management team about the dire situation. There was certainly nobody on the crew side of the fencing who did not know about it. It was incredibly stressful for me, dealing with companies demanding full payment immediately or threatening to not deliver or to withdraw services and equipment.

I also had to deal with numerous bands’ agents. In all of this I was just acting as a stand-in for Jamie, who remained very unwell although he dragged himself to site. I had scores of conversations with agents where I stated, openly and honestly, things like:

“Look, I am really sorry. We just have not sold enough tickets. I just cannot make you the final payment of £x before the artist goes on. No, I just don’t have the money. The Festival has made a loss. I am not going to bullshit you, I can’t promise we will ever be able to pay it”.

Frequently, these conversations concluded with the agent stating that the band/artist would therefore not perform.

Here is the heartwarming bit.

Every single artist did perform. Nobody refused to play. That goes for even the biggest of names. One artist actually said to me directly “These are my people, this is my community, they have come here to be entertained.”

I am very aware that not every artist, particularly those smaller ones without agents, may have gone out to perform in the knowledge that their fee was in danger. I am extremely sorry for this, and should have been more careful to make sure the situation was understood. It was not deliberate omission, everything was such a whirlwind.

Due to a simply incredible “the show must go on” attitude by artists and crew, we got through the weekend very successfully, and as the reviews show I think the festival goers had a wonderful time. The subsequent debt was appalling. When everything was added up, it seems the £600,000 debt we had gone in with had increased to over £800,000 as a result of our efforts to “go big” to get the debt cleared off.

I simply cannot get over to you the terrible feeling that this was. Some of those owed are small businesses and minor artists. Some are individuals. Having been running the festival for so many years, a significant number of those owed are personal friends of Jamie or myself.

I would also stress how astonishingly little rancour there was at first. A great many of those owed money were incredibly pleasant about it. There was much understanding that the basic problem was Covid, which had collapsed so many businesses. People could see for themselves that ticket sales were not what they needed to be. Nobody seemed to believe that anybody had run off with a huge pot of secret money.

There was now a huge decision to make. We could either close down the festival for good – which after this traumatic experience was extremely tempting – or we could go on with it. We were still on a trend of long terms sales growth. There was immediate, high demand for 2023 ticket sales.

The deciding factor was that, if we simply closed down the festival, not one of those people and businesses owed money would ever get paid.

We decided to go ahead with the Festival again in 2023, using the parent company. Doune the Rabbit Hole Ltd was put into liquidation to seal off the debt, but with an agreement with the liquidator that any profits from 2023 and future festivals would go to the liquidator, until all creditors had been paid off in full.

We believed we could pay off all the debt in three years, and starting with a financial clean slate for the 2023 festival we were confident all would be OK. Early ticket sales were very strong.

We were also promised a donation from a “White Knight”, a major corporation, of at least £600,000. Various practical arrangements were required to put this in place, including receiving approval from the charities regulator of a plan to funnel the money via a grant giving charity.

Everything was set up, including with the charities regulator, and the money was supposed to arrive in the bank account by end October 2022.  But it never did arrive, in quite extraordinary and still inexplicable circumstances that would be an article in themselves.

This was yet another emotional rollercoaster, but just put us back to the idea of a three year plan to pay off the creditors.

All seemed to go very well, and a much less expensive but nonetheless highly enjoyable lineup was put together for Doune the Rabbit Hole 2023. Ticket sales were good. Then from about November 2022 began an astonishing series of media and social media attacks on us, ever mounting in vitriol, and very often aimed at me personally.

Very few of these appeared to be initiated by anybody we owed money, though one or two people we owed money were occasionally co-opted by the media. The attacks originated in what I might characterise as Scotland’s public funded arts sector.

They frequently repeated a series of lies that became unquenchable social media myth. Of these the most pervasive were these two. There are others –

1) That Doune the Rabbit Hole had paid nothing to artists and crew in the 2022 Festival
Whereas in fact we had paid over £380,000 to artists and over £180,000 to crew. That is in addition to over £750,000 to suppliers.

2) That Doune the Rabbit Hole had large debts from festivals prior to 2022
We believe this to be simply untrue. We only know of one company owed a debt from before 2022, and that is a final instalment on a lighting company bill that slipped through the cracks during Covid.

The technicians’ union BECTU has appeared frequently all over the media claiming that Doune the Rabbit Hole has debt from multiple years. We have told them repeatedly that we do not believe it is true. We have asked them, face to face and repeatedly in writing, who we owe money to from before 2022.

Eventually BECTU replied to us stating they could not say who we owed money from before 2022, as it was commercially confidential information. Nobody (bar the single company mentioned) has been in contact with us or with the liquidator to claim to be owed from before 2022. BECTU have just been using it as a tool to argue for the closure of the festival; they have done literally nothing aimed at getting any such company paid.

There has been a constant bombardment of negative stories, often fuelled by BECTU. They have campaigned openly to destroy the festival, calling for a boycott, for artists not to perform, and for suppliers to break their contracts.

One major artist has told us that their coach company had cancelled their tour bus on the grounds that Doune the Rabbit Hole is blacklisted. Two of our key staff resigned because they had been told they would not be allowed on other jobs if they continue to work for us.

Music festivals bankrupt in Scotland with unfortunate regularity. Playground, Electric Fields and Wickerman are all major independent festivals that went bust. None has ever been subjected to this sustained campaign of hatred.

Three independent music festivals in Scotland have announced cancellation in the last two weeks, Otherlands, Midnight Sun and EH32.  The post-Covid carnage in the sector, of which we warned the Scottish Government, is unfolding.

In December, January and May, coordinated attacks on Doune the Rabbit Hole were launched across all Scottish newspapers and the BBC and STV. Two of these “coincided” with the very day of 2023 first lineup launch – traditionally our largest sales day – and of our final lineup announcement.

Most of our advertising is online and most of our ticket sales are online, and there have been literally thousands of posts calling on people to boycott the event. These have been positively organised by BECTU, who asked their staff to do it, and by the Scottish government linked troll farms.

It is not just our own posts which have been trolled. Individuals notifying others on Facebook or Twitter and saying that they are going, have attracted numerous trolls telling them to cancel.

The underlying and quite deliberate insinuation had been, throughout, that this is some sort of rip-off and that money had gone missing. This is absolutely untrue.

Well, the campaign has worked. Ticket sales are now so poor we simply cannot afford the infrastructure needed to put the event on safely and in accordance with Council standards.

Over 30 bands have received 100% payment for this year’s performance and many more have received part payment. Many suppliers have already been paid. But we just can’t get it home, and it is not fair to try to sell more tickets when the event may not happen.

So now we have the irony that many artists have been paid to play but will not perform this year, while many performed and were not paid last year.

Because of this campaign to close the festival, those owed from 2022 will now never be paid.

But there is no money left for ticket refunds; people will have to apply to their card issuer. That should work – the card processor holds back 20% of revenue from us, and other independent festivals, as a bond against this happening. But I am extremely conscious that this is not an instant process and many families’ holiday plans will be messed up.

I am sorry there is no happy ending to this story. But that is the unvarnished truth. You will hear much unpleasantness about me this next few days which is not true. I realise some of my decisions did not work out so some criticism is fair, and I accept that. I will try to answer any genuine questions in comments below.

 
 
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The massive obituaries to Daniel Ellsberg at the weekend in both New York Times and Washington Post were proof of the status he held in the United States.

Only Presidents get that size of obituary.

His name was not nearly so widely known in the UK. I first met Dan on 3 May 2006 when we were giving a joint presentation at Berkeley. The large hall was full to overflowing, and to my surprise there were young students queuing outside and striving to listen on stairways through open doors.

The large majority of the audience were not born when Dan leaked the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971. But his star status endured.

I know the date because we went afterwards for a marvellous dinner at his Californian home, replete with excellent wine. We talked long into the night, and he signed – and dated – me a copy of his book Secrets, which tells the story of his path to whistleblowing on the lies that kept the Vietnam war going.

I am looking at his message now. It reads “To Craig Murray – with greatest admiration for your conscientious truth-telling! and looking forward to a friendship”.

In 2010 we were again on stage together in London, at a massively attended Wikileaks press conference on the release of the Iraq war logs. We jointly presented Julian Assange with his Sam Adams Award.

It was at this event that I first realised that something had gone disastrously wrong in the relationship between Wikileaks and the Guardian.

They had been cooperating closely, and I myself had published frequent articles in the Guardian over the past four years. Arriving at the press conference, I ran into David Leigh, Deputy Editor of the Guardian, whom I viewed as a friend. We had lunch together a couple of times in the previous few months.

I said “Hello, David” and he simply stared at me. I thought he was lost in thought or somehow had not recognised me. I waved my hands in front of his eyes to get his attention. He stared at me, turned on his heel and walked away.

It was from that day that the Guardian’s coverage of Assange entirely changed and he was treated as a bitter enemy – and that the Guardian became a servile channel for security service propaganda.

For me the Guardian smashing of the Snowden hard drives therefore came as no surprise. I had already witnessed them turn. David Leigh, incidentally, never spoke to me again and the Guardian stopped accepting my articles.

At the time of that press conference, the publication of Leigh and Harding’s book on Assange – which gave away the location and password of the Chelsea Manning cache – was two months away, so it must already have been written.

There had been a massive row between them all over Assange’s biography, which at that height of his fame was worth millions. Julian had decided he did not want the Guardian journalists involved after all, and I think a large part of the bitterness of the break was largely the sordid matter of money.

Which brings me at last to the thought behind this article.

Dan Ellsberg maintained until the last his “respectability” in society as the “good whistleblower”.

Yet the publication of papers from Chelsea Manning and others, similar in so many ways to Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, became demonised, then criminalised, and Julian became the “bad whistleblower”, or more accurately publisher of whistleblowers.

Now Dan Ellsberg totally rejected this characterisation. It infuriated him and he actively fought against it, including at Julian’s extradition hearing, on which see below.

But how did this process of characterisation happen?

To me, the fundamental point is that the United States achieved consensus that the Vietnam War had been a terrible mistake. It was fought in the interests of colonialism, for the suppression of a nation, and was ultimately unwinnable.

The USA went through a cathartic rejection of the Vietnam War, which included recognition of the atrocities perpetrated by their armed forces on civilian populations. Portrayal of the Vietnam War, in Hollywood, in popular fiction, or in the “serious” media, portrayed it unflinchingly as a bungle and a disgrace; notably often relieved by comic treatment.

We have never really been through that process with the Iraq War. Although it is now generally accepted that the war was started on lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, a very significant number of the political class – and quite possibly a majority of MPs, for example – do not accept that the Iraq War was a mistake.

There has been a serious failure to accept and process the fact of the numerous atrocities committed by British troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Oslo last week, Jeremy Corbyn told me that, when he stood up as Labour leader to apologise for the Iraq War, he was very conscious that he did not have the support of the vast majority of his own MPs.

It is extraordinary how many politicians, and how many high profile “journalists”, cleave to the view that the Iraq war was justified because it saved the Iraqi people from a dreadful dictator. It killed or maimed millions, displaced millions more, blasted the entire infrastructure back forty years, destroyed the economy, and set off unending civil war, but somehow the devotees of “liberal intervention” see all this as “better”.

Precisely the same, of course, can be said of Libya or Afghanistan or of Western backed Saudi organised wars in Syria or Yemen. Not only have those countries been completely devastated, the resultant mass refugee crisis has politically destabilised Europe.

Sirte, Libya, after NATO bombing

Yet, astonishingly, there is no Establishment consensus that the attacks on the Middle East and Central Asia were a terrible mistake, in the same way that Vietnam is acknowledged as a terrible mistake. The doctrine of “liberal intervention” retains a deep hold on the political and media classes.

“Liberal intervention”, of course, is simply “imperialism”. The notion that non-European people would be better off if their rulers were deposed and replaced by western mandated puppets is precisely how the British Empire worked. The justification was always the same – it was always for the good of the conquered people themselves.

The reason Dan Ellsberg attained a folk hero status denied to Assange, Snowden or Manning is that Vietnam has full Establishment acceptance as an error, but the 21st century invasions, interventions and the population mass surveillance are viewed as “justified”.

In the Assange hearing, counsel on behalf of the United States government openly stated that the New York Times – could have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for the publication of the Pentagon Papers, but that US Executive had chosen not to do so.

Let me tell you this of Daniel Ellsberg.

At the age of 89, Dan gave evidence in the Assange extradition hearing, by videolink. The court had scheduled his evidence at 2.30pm, which was 6.30am for Dan in California.

The defence applied for this to start later in the afternoon, given Dan’s age and the time. The court refused.

Then consider this also. The court had only sent Ellsberg the “bundle” the previous day, giving him less than 24 hours to master 600 pages of documentation, before rising at 5.30am and getting ready to give evidence and be cross-examined.

This to an 89 year old man.

Here is my eye witness account of Ellsberg’s subsequent testimony. I cannot do better to give you an idea of the man.

Re-reading it, I am still lost in admiration:

In the afternoon, the witness was Dan Ellsberg, doyen of whistleblowers. Born in Chicago in 1931, he was educated at Harvard and Cambridge. He served in the Marines from 1954–7, and from 1964–5 was Special Assistant to the US Secretary of Defence. He was then involved in the making of an official classified 47-volume report entitled History of Decision Making in Vietnam.

Ellsberg briefly explained that the report showed that the war in Vietnam had been continued in the knowledge that it could not be won. It showed that both the public and Congress had repeatedly been lied to. He had leaked the report to lawmakers and then the public as “The Pentagon Papers”. This had resulted in the famous case on prior restraint on publication. There had also been a less well-known criminal case against him personally under the Espionage Act. This had been dismissed with prejudice by the court.

Asked by Edward Fitzgerald QC (counsel for Assange) to comment on the Wikileaks/Manning publication on Afghanistan, Ellsberg replied that he saw extremely strong parallels with his own case. These papers had the capability of informing the public of the progress of the war and the limited possibility that it could be brought to a successful conclusion at all. The Afghan War Logs showed operational-level information not a wider view, but the effect was similar. He strongly identified with both the source (Manning) and the process of publication.

Fitzgerald then asked Ellsberg whether Assange held political opinions relevant to this publication. Ellsberg said it was absurd for the prosecution to argue otherwise. He had himself been motivated by his political views in his publication and Assange’s views were very similar. He had held very interesting discussions with Assange and felt a great affinity with him. They both believed that there was a great lack of transparency to the public over government decisions. The public were fed much information that was false.

When the public had so little genuine information and were fed so much false information, real democracy was not possible. An example was the Iraq War, clearly an illegal war of aggression in breach of the UN charter, sold on lies to the public.

The Afghan War Logs were similar to low-level reports Ellsberg had himself written in Vietnam. It was the same thing; the invasion and occupation of a foreign country against the wishes of the majority of its population. That could only bring defeat or endless conflict: 19 years so far. The war logs had exposed a pattern of war crimes: torture, assassination and death squads. The one thing that had changed since Vietnam was that these things were now so normalised they were classified below Top Secret.

All the Pentagon Papers were Top Secret. None of the Wikileaks documents were. They were not just below Top Secret, they had no restricted distribution classifications. This meant that, by definition, there should be nothing genuinely sensitive, and certainly not life-endangering, in papers of this classification.

Fitzgerald asked him about the Collateral Murder video. Ellsberg stated that it definitely showed murder, including the deliberate machine gunning of a wounded and unarmed civilian. That it was murder was undoubted. The dubious word was “collateral”, which implies accidental. What was truly shocking about it was the Pentagon reaction that these war crimes were within the Rules of Engagement. Which therefore permitted murder.

Edward Fitzgerald asked whether Ellsberg was allowed to put forward the question of intention at his trial. He replied no, the distribution of classified material outside those designated to receive it was an offence of strict liability under the 1917 Espionage Act. This was absolutely inappropriate to trials of whistleblowers. “I did not get a fair trial and nor have recent whistleblowers in the USA. Julian Assange could not get a fair trial.”

Cross-examining for the US Government, James Lewis QC asked Ellsberg to confirm that at the time he copied the Pentagon Papers he was working for the Rand Corporation. He said yes. Lewis said that Assange was not being prosecuted for publication of the Collateral Murder video. Ellsberg said that the Collateral Murder video was essential to an understanding of the Rules of Engagement. Lewis countered that Assange was not being charged for publication of the Rules of Engagement. He was only being charged for publication of unredacted names of those who might come to harm.

Ellsberg replied that he had read the superseding indictment and that Assange was being charged with obtaining, receiving and possession of material including the Rules of Engagement and the Collateral Murder video, and all the documents. On publishing, he was only charged with the names. Lewis said the other charges related to conspiracy with Chelsea Manning. Ellsberg replied “Yes. They are still charges.”

Lewis quoted US Assistant Attorney Gordon Kromberg stating that prosecution was for documents up to Secret level containing the names of those “who risked their lives and freedom while helping the USA”. Lewis contrasted this with Ellsberg “when you published the Pentagon Papers you were very careful what you gave to the media”. Ellsberg replied that he withheld three or four volumes not to cause difficulties to diplomatic efforts to end the war.

Lewis suggested he was protecting individuals. Ellsberg said no; if he released those documents, the US government might have used it as an excuse to exit diplomacy and continue the war. Lewis asked if there were names in the Pentagon Papers that would risk harm to them. Ellsberg replied yes. In one case, a clandestine CIA agent was named, involved in the CIA assassination of a major Vietnamese politician. He was a personal friend of Ellsberg and Ellsberg had thought hard about it, but had left him in.

Lewis Asked Ellsberg whether he had read the article “Why Wikileaks is Not the Pentagon Papers” by Floyd Abrams, who had represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case. Ellsberg replied he had read several articles like this by Abrams. He did not know Abrams. He had only been involved in the civil case, not the criminal one. He had seen him once, at an awards ceremony long after.

Lewis said that Abrams had written that Ellsberg had withheld four volumes, whereas “can anyone doubt” that Assange would have published all of them? Ellsberg replied he disagreed, Abrams had never had one minute of discussion with him or Assange. “He does not understand my motives at all in his article”. The position he outlines is widely held by those who want to criticise Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden while pretending to be liberal.

What he writes is simply untrue. Julian Assange withheld 15,000 files. He went through a long, hard process of redaction. He requested help from both the State Department and Department of Defence on redaction. I have no doubt Julian would have removed the volumes as I did, in my place. He had no intention to name names.

Ellsberg continued that ten years later, the US Government has still not been able to name one single individual who was actually harmed by the Wikileaks releases. “I was shocked that Kromberg should make that allegation while offering no evidence. As nobody was hurt, clearly the risk was never as high as they claimed – as indeed the document classification would tell you.”

“They said exactly the same of me. They said CIA agents and those helping the USA would be hurt. They said I would have blood on my hands.”

There now followed an extraordinary “question” from James Lewis QC who was permitted to read out about 11 paragraphs from various locations in one of Kromberg’s rambling affidavits, in which Kromberg said that as a result of Wikileaks publication, some US sources had had to leave their homeland, go into hiding, or change their names, in a number of countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, China and Ethiopia.
Some individuals in Afghanistan and Iraq had subsequently disappeared. The Taliban were on record as saying that those who cooperated with US forces would be killed. One Ethiopian journalist was forced to flee Ethiopia after being named as a US source. The US Embassy in China reported threats had been made against some of their named Chinese sources. Wikileaks material was found in the possessions of Osama Bin Laden after he was shot.

Lewis asked in a furious voice “How can you possibly, honestly say that nobody was harmed?”

Ellsberg: With all these people who felt they were in danger, of course I am sorry it was inconvenient for them, and that is regrettable. But was any one of them actually physically harmed? Did one of them actually suffer the claimed physical consequences?
Lewis: You call it regrettable that people were put at risk. Is it your position that there was absolutely no harm caused by the publication of the names of these individuals?
Ellsberg: Assange’s actions are absolutely antithetical to the notion that he deliberately published these names. Had hundreds been harmed, that would count against the great good done by publication of the information. No evidence is produced that any actual harm came to them.
But this has to be put in the context of the policies which Assange was trying to change, invasions that led to 37 million refugees and 1 million deaths.
Of course some people could not be located again in a war that killed a million people and displaced 37 million. The government is extremely hypocritical to pretend a concern for them against their general contempt for Middle Eastern lives. They had even refused to help redact the names. This is a pretence at concern.
Lewis: What about the disappeared? Is it not common sense that some had been forced to disappear or flee under another name?
Ellsberg: It does not seem to me that that small percentage of those named who may have been murdered or fled, can necessarily be attributed as a result of Wikileaks, when they are in among more than 1 million who have been murdered and 37 million who have fled.

Lewis then asked Ellsberg if it was true he had held an encrypted back up copy of the Manning material for Assange. Ellsberg replied it was; it had subsequently been physically destroyed.

In re-examination, Fitzgerald took Ellsberg to a passage in the Kromberg affidavit which stated that the US Government could not positively attribute any death to the Wikileaks material. Ellsberg said that was his understanding, and had been said at the Manning trial.

He was shocked. It was just like Iraqi WMD. He had at first been inclined to believe the government on Iraqi WMD, just as he had first been inclined to believe the government on deaths caused by Wikileaks releases. In both cases it had proved they were making it up.

I hope that gives you an idea of the intellectual and moral stature and the incredible resilience of my friend Daniel Ellsberg. I will never forget that sparkling moment when, having been given almost no chance to prepare and so early in the morning, he corrected in detail the counsel for the US government on the contents of the second superseding indictment!

It was an incredible honour just to have known him.

————————————————

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There has never existed any government so evil and repugnant that it has been unable to find lawyers, and particularly judges, to do its bidding.

Hitler did not need to manufacture lawyers and judges. A very significant number, indeed the majority, of established and reputable German lawyers were prepared to participate actively in Nazi law, both its development and implementation.

That of course includes Roland Freisler, a Doctor of Law from the University of Jena, who was a practising solicitor before his elevation.

This was prosecutor Telford Taylor, opening the trial of Nazi lawyers at Nuremberg:

This case is unusual, in that the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the name of the law. These men, together with their deceased or fugitive colleagues, were the embodiment of what passed for justice in the Third Reich.

Most of the defendants have served, at various times, as judges, as state prosecutors, and as officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice. ALL BUT ONE ARE PROFESSIONAL JURISTS. They are well accustomed to courts, and courtrooms, though their present role may be new to them.

But a court is far more than a courtroom; it is a process and a spirit. It is the house of law. This the defendants know, or must have known in times past. I doubt that they ever forgot.

Indeed, the root of the accusation in this case is that these men, leaders of the German judicial system, consciously and deliberately suppressed the law, engaged in an unholy masquerade of tyranny disguised as justice, and converted the German judicial systems to an engine of despotism, conquest, pillage and slaughter.

Taylor’s quote “an unholy masquerade of tyranny disguised as justice” is a phrase that has been rattling around my head as a perfect encapsulation of the state “legal” process against Julian Assange, which I have been detailing this last several years.

Together, of course, with the fact that the NATO states hate Assange – and seek his judicial murder – precisely for revealing truths that embarrassed their system of “conquest, pillage and slaughter” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere.

It is worth noting Hitler was by no means alone in being able to call on the respected lawyers to do his bidding.

The prosecutor of Stalin’s show trials, Andrei Vishinski, whom Freisler traveled to Moscow to see in action and whose screaming and taunting Freisler consciously copied, was also a “proper” lawyer, a graduate of the University of Kiev with a background of practice in Moscow.

(I should note in passing the counter case that Stalin’s favourite judge, Ulrich, was an auto-didact out of military tribunals).

We are brought up with an innate respect for the rule of law and belief that, though it makes mistakes, it is impartial and honest. Unfortunately, that is merely one of the myths by which our society functions. That is something I have reluctantly come to understand.

I was, nonetheless, so taken aback by Justice Jonathan Swift’s current and curt ruling, dismissing Assange’s High Court appeal in the extradition saga, that I thought I would dig a little deeper.

I therefore started with Swift’s surprising December ruling, in cahoots with Judge Lewis, that the Tory government’s scheme to deport refugees to Rwanda is lawful.

His judgment depends above all on the notion that any fiction concocted by the UK government has more legal force than actual fact. There is no real world doubt that Rwanda is a ghastly dictatorship and kills opponents. Nor that it has killed the inhabitants of refugee camps on its soil.

But that is OK, say Swift and Lewis, because the government of Rwanda has said in an MOU that it won’t do that to our refugees, who are different to those other refugees:

73. The Claimants rely on what happened in 2018 when
refugees from neighbouring countries at Kiziba refugee camp protested at the
conditions in the camp. It has been reported (for example, by Human Rights Watch)
that the police who entered the camp in response to the protests used excessive force.
They fired on the refugees and some were killed. The Claimants also point more
generally to limits in Rwanda on the freedom to express political opinion if that opinion is critical of the Rwandan authorities.

74. We do not consider that any direct inference can be drawn from the events at Kiziba refugee camp in 2018. The circumstances that led to those protests are unlikely to be repeated for any person transferred to Rwanda under the MEDP. The treatment of transferred persons, both prior to and after determination of their asylum claims is
provided for in the MOU (at paragraphs 8 and 10) and in the Support NV. For the
reasons already given, we consider the Rwandan authorities will abide by the terms set out in those documents.
…

On top of which, the Refugee Convention, according to Swift and Lewis, says that refugees must be treated no worse than a state’s own citizens. So if Rwanda persecutes its own people, then there is no breach in persecuting the refugees we send too.

…the Claimants’ case comes to the proposition that, following removal to Rwanda, it is possible that one or more of those transferred might come to hold opinions critical of the Rwandan authorities, and that possibility means that now, the Soering threshold is passed.

77. There is evidence that opportunities for political opposition in Rwanda are very limited and closely regulated. The position is set out in the “General Human Rights in Rwanda” assessment document, one of the documents published by the Home Secretary on 9 May 2022. There are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The Claimants submitted that this state of affairs might mean that any transfer to Rwanda would entail a breach of article 15 of the Refugee Convention (which provides that refugees must be accorded the most favourable treatment accorded to nationals in respect of non-political and non-profit-making associations and trade unions). However, we do not consider there is any force in this submission at all. Putting to one side the fact that article 15 does not extend to all rights of association, it is, in any event, a non-discrimination provision – i.e., persons protected under the Refugee Convention must not be less favourably treated than the receiving country’s own citizens. There is no evidence to that effect in this case.

Indeed, Swift and Lewis tell us, the defendant’s case is “speculative”. There is no evidence that the government of Rwanda will wish to torture them, simply because the government of Rwanda hasn’t even met them yet. Besides, the government of Rwanda has promised not to mistreat people under an agreement with the UK, “the MEDP”, which gives the Rwandan government 120 million of cash to steal, or spend on Rwanda’s economic development.

Returning to the material covered in the Home Secretary’s assessment document, there is also evidence (from a US State Department report of 2020) that political opponents have been detained in “unofficial” detention centres and that persons so detained have been subjected to torture and article 3 ill-treatment short of torture. Further, there is evidence that prisons in Rwanda are over-crowded and the conditions are very poor. Nevertheless, the Claimants’ submission is speculative. It does not rest on any evidence of any presently-held opinion. There is no suggestion that any of the individual Claimants would be required to conceal presently-held political or other views. The Claimants’ submission also assumes that the response of the Rwandan authorities to any opinion that may in future be held by any transferred person would (or might) involve article 3 ill-treatment. Given that the person concerned would have been transferred under the terms of the MEDP that possibility is not a real risk.

Swift and Lewis argue further, at paras 81 to 84, that in UK domestic law, the Home Secretary’s certification of Rwanda as a safe country is “irrebuttable” – ie there is no legal avenue to question its truth, and nor does it require parliamentary approval. The “safety” of Rwanda is a fact in law simply because Braverman certifies that it is.

Having stated that under Tory immigration legislation the Home Secretary can certify anywhere she feels like as safe, irrespective of objective truth (provide certain procedural steps are taken) Swift and Lewis then go on to the non-sequitur on which their judgment depends, that because a country has been certified “safe” for the purposes of UK domestic law, that makes it actually eligible for receipt of UK deportees in terms of the UN Refugee Convention.

The UN Refugee Convention says this:

No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a
refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories
where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his
race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social
group or political opinion.

That is the obligation under international law, incorporated into British law. It does not disappear with a signature from the Home Secretary, but depends on the actual, real state of affairs.

It would not, in real life or in the Refugee Convention, be safe to deport people to Yemen, Eastern Ukraine nor the Sudan just because Braverman signed something. The Refugee Convention is not subject to the fantasy propositions of “irrebuttable” Whitehall certificates.

As devoted servants of the Executive, Lewis and Swift undeniably have one thing in common with Freisler, Ullrich and Vishinski, which is an impatience with pesky defendants bothering them with evidence, troublesome arguments and annoying amounts of paper, and trying to save their own lives.

Lewis and Swift begin their judgment on Rwanda with a full throttled rant at the annoyance of having to wade through the paperwork that the deportees had the downright cheek to produce in defence:

36. The pleadings in these proceedings are not models of good practice. Practice Direction 54A requires Statements of Facts and Grounds to be clear and concise. None of the pleadings meets this requirement, even though many if not all have been revised one or more times since the proceedings were issued. On the Claimants’ side the pleading in claim CO/2032/2022 (AAA and others) has taken pole position, setting out various generic grounds of challenge as well as grounds specific to the facts of the cases of the individual claimants in that case. Seven generic grounds of challenge are pleaded (Grounds 1, 1A – 1C, 2A and 3-6). However, these grounds tend to overlap or circle back on one another. Other claims brought by other Claimants have adopted these generic grounds of challenge or formulated variations on them, as well as pleading complaints based on their own circumstances. The pleading in CO/2056/2022 (the Asylum Aid case) raises complaints about the Home Secretary’s decision-making procedure. What is said about procedural fairness in this case largely overlap with the complaints on procedural fairness raised in CO/2023/2022 and other claims. Asylum Aid contends that these matters demonstrate there is systemic unfairness in the procedure adopted to deal with the inadmissibility and removal decisions. The Home Secretary pleading is a response in kind. The Amended Detailed Grounds of Defence (to all claims) runs to some 215 pages.

37. At the court’s request the parties prepared an agreed list of issues. However, that
exercise failed to simplify the position: the list identifies 29 generic issues, many of
which are repetitive or overlapping; and many more issues specific to each claim.

38. The same approach has been repeated in the Skeleton Arguments. Mention should be made of the Skeleton Argument in CO/2032/2022 and CO/2104/2022 (262 pages), and the Skeleton Argument in CO/2094/2022 (63 pages). Each comfortably exceeds the maximum length permitted by Practice Direction 54A (25 pages). Permission to file skeleton arguments longer than the maximum permitted was not requested in advance; each document was presented to the court as a fait accompli. The length of these documents has not served to clarify the way in which the various complaints are put. The documents meander and repeat themselves. .

This is plainly a particular bugbear of Swift. My examination of his ruling on Rwanda deportations is only a prelude, to put into context this ruling on the Assange appeal. What I have found common to both decisions is an insistence that narrative put forward by the executive is not to be questioned, and an extreme distaste for having to entertain lengthy arguments on behalf of those individuals whose lives hang in the balance.

The Assange Appeal

I consider the High Court appeal of Julian Assange to be, in itself a document of historic importance. I have therefore decided to publish it in full, and I recommend you at the very least to dip in to it.

assangehighcourtappeal

The very first sentence of Assange’s Appeal rings out loud, and explains why his extradition proceedings were held effectively in closed court and why the High Court are determined to avoid any substantive public hearing:

Julian Assange and Wikileaks were responsible for the exposure of criminality on the part of
the US Government on a massive and unprecedented scale.

In the first 3 pages (of 150), it outlines the argument and the ground it covers:

IN THE MATTER OF AN APPEAL UNDER S.103 OF THE EXTRADITION ACT 2003
B E T W E E N:
JULIAN ASSANGE
Appellant
v
GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Respondent
__________________________________________________________
PERFECTED GROUNDS OF APPEAL
____________________________________________________________
References to CB/X are references to the core permission bundle.
EB/X are references to the section 103 evidence bundle.
1. Introduction
1.1. Julian Assange and Wikileaks were responsible for the exposure of criminality on the part of the US Government on a massive and unprecedented scale. The publication in 2010 and 2011
of materials sent by a serving military officer, Private Manning, sit at the very apex of publicinterest disclosures. By publishing this material ‘WikiLeaks…exposed outrageous, even
murderous wrongdoing [including] war crimes, torture and atrocities on civilians’
(Feldstein, EB/10, §4).
1.2. Julian Assange’s work, dedicated to ensuring public accountability by exposing global human
rights abuses, and facilitating the investigation of and prosecution for state criminality, has
contributed to the saving of countless lives, stopped human rights abuses in their tracks, and
brought down despotic and autocratic regimes.
1.3. Those who expose grave state criminality, defenders of fundamental human rights, are, and
always have been, vulnerable to acts of political retaliation and persecution from the regimes
whose criminality they expose. Julian Assange is no exception.
1.4. The law is fiercely protective of human rights defenders. Exposure of state criminality is, in law, a protected political act, the product of a political opinion. Prosecutions ‘on account of’ such acts are straightforwardly prohibited by s.81 of the 2003 Act.
1.5. The history of this prosecution, between Mr Assange’s exposures in 2010 and 2011 and the
indictment in 2018, is a textbook example of political persecution. The course of this case
since 2011 is simply extraordinary. It involves, inter alia, US Governmental plots to interfere
with judges who investigate the matters Mr Assange exposed; to silence the International
Criminal Court (ICC) who have taken up Mr Assange’s disclosures; and to kidnap and
rendition Mr Assange himself, or else murder him. What follows below is conduct of the type
one would normally expect from a military dictatorship. The DJ failed to act upon (or even
address) these issues from the perspective of s.81 because (despite having the law drawn
squarely and repeatedly to her attention) she failed to recognise or acknowledge that exposure
of state criminality is, in law, a protected ‘political’ act, engaging s.81.
1.6. The evidence in this case has, moreover, developed since the DJ’s decision in January 2021.
Investigations in America now provide a fuller picture of the US state-level plans to kidnap,
rendition and murder Mr Assange. They also reveal that the initiation of criminal proceedings
in this case – by a criminal complaint in December 2017 resulted after obstacles (some
reported as having been erected by the UK) to those criminal plans.
1.7. The prosecution that the US were forced to resort to instead, commenced in 2018, is no less
extraordinary. (a) It is unprecedented in law. (b) It cuts clean across established principles of free speech. (c) To deal with that, it anticipates a trial at which Mr Assange, as a foreigner, can be denied reliance on the First Amendment (d) indeed, a trial outwith protections of the US Constitution altogether, and (e) is accompanied by exposure to a grossly disproportionate sentence. In short, the circumstances of the prosecution are so stark and unusual that they engage bars to extradition in their own right.
1.8. As to the circumstances of the ensuing extradition request. (f) It violates the prohibition on extradition for political offences expressly provided for in the relevant treaty and under
international law. (g) It deliberately misstates the core facts. The DJ took these issues one by
one and reasoned that none offended the 2003 Act. For reasons which follow, she was plainly
wrong in multiple respects.
1.9. But even if she were right on each of these issues when viewed separately, the DJ then
needed, but failed entirely, to stand back and examine what they cumulatively told her about
the political origins of this case. They were all, in short, individually and cumulatively, the
clearest evidence of a prosecution mounted ‘on account of’ Mr Assange’s political opinions –
namely his stated and proven commitment to the exposure of US-state-level criminality.
1.10. These Perfected Grounds of Appeal, served in accordance with Crim PR r.50.20(5), are
structured as follows:
1.11. Part A: addresses Ground of Appeal 1, namely that the judge wrongly rejected the
argument that the request was being made for the purposes of prosecuting or punishing Julian
Assange for his political opinions, and therefore barred by s.81(a).1 Accordingly Part A
provides an overview of the history of this matter, and explains the over-arching s.81 case the
DJ failed to engage with. This includes:
(i) Section 2: the evidence before the DJ concerning Mr Assange’s political opinions;
(ii) Section 3: the evidence before the DJ about the criminality Mr Assange exposed.
1 Ground 1 also encompasses the allegation of abuse of process, by reason of ulterior motivation of the request and
the underlying prosecution, which is dealt with in Part D.
(iii) Section 4: The law the DJ ignored;
(iv) Section 5 and 6: the other evidence before the DJ concerning the origins of the 2018
prosecution.
(v) Section 7: The DJ’s decision
1.12. Part B: addresses Grounds of Appeal 2 to 6. That is the various egregious aspects of the
prosecution, eventually commenced in 2018, which individually bar extradition, regardless of
s.81; including:
(i) Section 9: An unprecedented prosecution (Ground of Appeal 2: Article 7 ECHR);
(ii) Section 10: A prosecution for protected speech (Ground of Appeal 3: Article 10
ECHR);
(iii) Section 11: A prosecution designed to secure a guilty verdict (Ground of Appeal 4:
Article 6 ECHR);
(iv) Section 12: A prosecution with no Convention Rights protections at all (Ground of
Appeal 5);
(v) Section 13: Followed by a grossly disproportionate sentence (Ground of Appeal 6).
1.13. Part C: addresses Grounds of Appeal 7 to 8. That is the aspects of the ensuing extradition
request which individually bar extradition, regardless of s.81; including:
(i) Section 14: An extradition request for political offences, in violation of the treaty and
international law (Ground of Appeal 7);
(ii) Section 15: An extradition request which deliberately misstates the core facts,
unfairly improperly and inaccurately (Ground of Appeal 8).
1.14. Part D: returns to s.81 and abuse of process (Ground of Appeal 1), as the DJ ought to have
done, in Section 16. Finally, Sections 17 and 18 address the new evidence in this case.

There follows a further 147 pages of outstanding legal argument, including compelling evidence.
The summary of the crimes of the US Government exposed by Julian Assange at pages 9 to 18 is simply mind-blowing. That section starts thus:

Every single one of the five ‘national security’ publications that are the subject of this extradition request exposed US Governmental involvement in crimes of the first order of magnitude. These disclosures exposed irrefutable evidence of, inter alia, illegal rendition, torture, and black site CIA prisons across Europe, as well as aggressive steps taken to maintain impunity and prevent the prosecution of any American operatives involved in these crimes. The following represents the unchallenged evidence before the DJ of the atrocities Mr Assange exposed.

Here is just one example of the ensuing evidence:

3.3. Mr Stafford-Smith’s unchallenged evidence was that cables, for example, revealed by WikiLeaks regarding US government drone killings in Pakistan ‘contributed to [subsequent] court findings that US drone strikes are criminal offences and that criminal proceedings should be initiated against senior US officials involved in such strikes’ (Stafford-Smith, EB/22, §84, 91). ‘Those were very important in litigation in Pakistan’ (EB/40 Tr 8.9.20, xic, p4). The Peshawar High Court ruled, inter alia, that the drone strikes carried out by the CIA and US authorities were a ‘blatant violation of basic human rights’ including ‘a blatant
breach of the absolute right to life’ and ‘a war crime’ (Stafford-Smith, EB/22, §91). What
‘we have to term criminal offences were taking place’ (EB/40 Tr 8.9.230, xic. p4). Moreover,
and as a result, ‘the drone strikes, which were in their hundreds and causing many…innocent
deaths, stopped very rapidly’ such that ‘there were none reported…in 2019’ (Stafford-Smith,
EB/22, §93). WikiLeaks had ‘put a stop to a massive human rights abuse’ (Stafford-Smith,
EB/22, §92-93). ‘Pakistan was an American ally. It was not like we were doing that to an
enemy, and that again is just extraordinary to me’ (Stafford-Smith, EB/40 Tr 8.9.20, re-x, 26-
27). Without the WikiLeaks disclosures, it ‘would have been very, very different and very
difficult’ to prevent this crime (Stafford-Smith, EB/40 Tr 8.9.20, xic, p5).

There is much other material in the appeal which the US and UK governments would not wish to be rehearsed in public:

Secondly, the report provides further, corroborative, evidence (not
available to the DJ) of the fruit of the resulting ‘no limits’ discussions.
Namely, the emergence of US Governmental plans about which Witness 2 (EB/2)
gave evidence to the DJ to:
(i) Kidnap Mr Assange:
‘This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former
U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct
Assange’ (p2)
‘Pompeo and [Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange. At
meetings between senior Trump administration officials after WikiLeaks started
publishing the Vault 7 materials, Pompeo began discussing kidnapping Assange’
(p18)
(ii) In order to rendition Mr Assange to the US:
‘Pompeo and others at the agency proposed abducting Assange from the embassy and
surreptitiously bringing him back to the United States via a third country — a process
known as rendition. The idea was to ‘break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and
bring him to where we want,’ said a former intelligence official’ (p18)
(iii) Or else murder Mr Assange:
‘Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed
killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to
assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the
highest levels’ of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence
official. ‘There seemed to be no boundaries’’ (p1)
‘Some discussions even went beyond kidnapping. U.S. officials had also considered
killing Assange, according to three former officials. One of those officials said he
was briefed on a spring 2017 meeting in which the president asked whether the CIA could
assassinate Assange and provide him ‘options’ for how to do so’ (p20)
‘agency executives requested and received ‘sketches’ of plans for killing Assange …
said a former intelligence official. There were discussions ‘on whether killing
Assange was possible and whether it was legal,’ the former official said’ (p20).

Swift dismisses the 150 page appeal in just three pages, with a curt and sneering rejection.

There are 8 proposed grounds of appeal. They are set out at great length (some 100pp), but the extraordinary length of the pleading serves only to make clear that the proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the District Judge.

Swift then stipulates that if Assange’s lawyers apply for a hearing for their request for an appeal to be heard, then that hearing will be limited to 30 minutes.

Furthermore, he limits Assange’s defence to just 20 pages. 20 pages and 30 minutes (the latter being the time for the entire hearing, including the response by the US government). That is the value Swift places on pleadings for a man’s life. Swift even aims a prim taunt at the defence: “The present grounds of appeal are unwieldy and do not comply with any known rules of pleading”.

Swift states that “the issue is the one posed by section 103 of the 2003 (Extradition Act); ought the judge to have decided a question at the extradition heariing differently”. Swift then subjects this “issue” to impossible constraints. Neither the judge’s evaluation of fact nor their assessment of argument can be revisited. He also objects to new evidence, even though new evidence at appeal is specifically allowed by the Extradition Act.

Swift’s background is as a government lawyer. He revealed something of himself in this interview with a legal magazine, where he stated that:

Favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies. ‘They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.’

and

What really matters is that the bond of confidence between Executive and Judiciary is maintained

But perhaps even more revealing is that in this brief interview about his career, he chooses to throw in an entirely gratuitous and pointed anecdote about how unpleasant left wing people are, which perforce implies he was coming from an opposite position:

The first member of his family to go to university and the first to be a lawyer, he remembers his welcome at New College. ‘I unpacked and knocked on the door opposite to introduce myself. ‘Hello, I’m Jonathan,’ only to get the response ‘I’m Dave. I’m a Militant. F*** off!’’ After all, it was the mid-1980s.

It is perfectly plain what Swift is, and that he could be entirely relied on to dismiss Assange’s appeal with no discussion of any difficult subject matter on state crimes.

UPDATE

It turns out that Swift’s reputation is well established. I was sent a copy of this revealing tweet.

END OF UPDATE

In the District Court, Judge Baraitser ruled against Assange on the eight grounds, but had ruled for him on the grounds of mental health and US prison conditions. This resulted in the complicated process of successive High Court Appeals.

First the United States was permitted to appeal on health and US prison conditions. After they won, it was Assange’s turn to appeal on those other eight grounds, on which he had lost at the District Court.

The difference between the High Court treatment of the US appeal, which was accepted and eventually won, and Assange’s appeal, which is dismissed out of hand, is highly instructive.

The US appeal turned very largely on new evidence. That consisted of new diplomatic assurances from the USA in which they stated that Assange would not be placed in a super-max prison pre-trial and would not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures – unless it became necessary to do so.

These “assurances” could have been given during the original hearing but were not, because of course the US has every intention of placing Julian in super-max prison. Judges Burnett and Holroyde, ruling in favour of the USA, airily stated that the new assurances were admissible because assurances were not “evidence”:

A diplomatic note or assurance letter is not “evidence” in the sense contemplated
by section 106(5)(a) of the 2003 Act: it is neither a statement going to prove the
existence of a past fact, nor a statement of expert opinion on a relevant matter.
Rather, it is a statement about the intentions of the requesting state as to its future
conduct

So they ruled that, while new evidence is excluded, new “assurances” are not, a bit of special pleading they simply picked out of their capacious arses.

Compare this to the evidence submitted by Assange that the USA spied on his legal defence team and plotted to kidnap him, while actively discussing his assassination. That is excluded on the basis that it is “new evidence”, and on the fact that it is in part based on journalistic reports. The fact that the US government’s star witness has admitted he lied and gave his evidence for money, has also been dismissed on the grounds that information is available from journalistic reports.

Yet a media interview with one of the psychiatrist witnesses for Julian Assange, introduced by the US as part of their High Court appeal, was accepted, and not excluded as either “new evidence” or a “press report”.

You can read the entire the Burnett and Holroyde judgment, discussing the District Judge’s assessment of the evidence of Julian Assange’s mental health and US prison conditions, and it is impossible not to conclude that they are absolutely “second guessing the original judge’s evaluation of the facts and assessment of the arguments”.

There is literally nothing else they are doing.

Therefore, in finding for the USA appeal, the High Court conducted precisely the exercise which Swift rules is out of order when argued for the other side of the case, for the Assange appeal.

My favourite bit of stinking hypocrisy from Holroyde and Burnett comes at para 45:

Extradition proceedings are not private law proceedings but a process through
which solemn treaty obligations are satisfied in the context of a framework which
ensures that a requested person is provided with proper safeguards.

The phrase “solemn treaty obligations are satisfied” should cause an immediate revulsion. The Treaty in question is the US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2003, and it states at Article 4 that there can be no political extradition.

The District Court ruling, specifically upheld by Swift now, is that the UK/US Extradition Treaty has no legal standing and therefore the bar on political extradition it contains does not apply. Swift accepts the argument, that as the 2003 Extradition Act does not include a bar on political extradition, that provision of the Treaty does not apply.

The Extradition Treaty, Swift baldly states, is “not justiciable”, ie cannot be taken into legal account.

How it can both be that, and be a “solemn obligation” at the base of these entire proceedings, is an extraordinary contradiction which worries none of these judges in their concern to quickly and efficiently impose the brute force of the state. The entire process is designed as punishment for Assange’s unauthorised revelation of truth.

How an extradition can take place specifically under a Treaty whose provisions cannot be applied to that extradition, is a logical conundrum to which only the sophisticates of the UK judiciary could adapt their flexible intellects and – more to the point – consciences.

The executive will always find the judiciary needed to do its dirty work. Any executive. There may be occasional blips in periods of political convulsion. There was a temporary standoff with the Supreme Court over facets of Brexit, for example. But the judiciary will realign themselves with the executive in quick time. The power of the State is the constant.

Julian’s persecution has nothing to do with the law. It is a simple demonstration of the crushing power of the state.

————————————————

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