On 28 July a gender critical woman demonstrator, Julie Marshall, was “punched in the face” by a political opponent in Aberdeen. The man who struck her was questioned and issued with a police caution not to punch people.

He was neither arrested nor charged.

A month later, Scottish Government minister Patrick Harvie was giving a TV interview at the scene of the forthcoming Rutherglen byelection when a man heckled him, calling him a “deviant”. Harvie responded that the man was a “bigot”.

The heckler has now been arrested and charged, though when Stuart Campbell spoke with Police Scotland, they refused to confirm with what offence he had been charged.

Now we might conclude from this that Police Scotland believe it is not a serious criminal matter to punch a woman in the face in the street, but it is a serious matter to call someone a deviant in the street.

Or we might conclude that Police Scotland is very heavily politicised. That it is at the beck and call of ministers. That it has taken sides in the “culture wars” debate that poisons Scottish politics.

The latter explanation is obviously true. This is not an isolated incident;

• The prosecution of Mark Hirst for saying that those who plotted to fit up Alex Salmond would “reap the whirlwind”.
• The prosecution of David Llewellyn for a Facebook joke saying Angus Robertson should be dumped in the Water of Leith.
• The prosecution of Marion Millar for gender critical tweets so inoffensive the Crown Office had to drop it after the case had started
• My own jailing for “jigsaw identification clues” on the perjurers against Salmond, no greater than – and mostly identical to – many “clues” published by pro-Sturgeon journalists on much bigger platforms
• The arrival of two senior detectives at my home just three hours after I stated that I have Stewart MacDonald MP’s leaked emails – which, as they acknowledged, is no crime
• The three weeks warning given to SNP Ministers by Chief Constable Iain Livingstone of the progress of Operation Branchform, leading to Sturgeon’s resignation and giving ample time to dispose of evidence before the theatre of search tents

I could go on. Police Scotland, like the Crown Office, is thoroughly politicised. It is used as a personal tool against the perceived enemies of Scottish ministers. It has taken sides in the culture wars.

If you are on the “wrong” side, you will get prosecuted for an innocuous tweet or a remark in the street. If you are on the “right” side, you can punch women in the face or parade a sign calling for the decapitation of those who disagree with you, and face no legal jeopardy.

But, you say, surely it is wrong to call people “deviant”?

Well, I do not approve of yelling “deviant” at people in the street. It has unpleasant connotations. But I am absolutely opposed to the ever increasing encroachment of the power of the state into the lives of ordinary people.

The coercive power of the state is an awesome thing to set in motion, and terrifying to those it is used against. It is entirely disproportionate in a case like this.

Patrick Harvie is a government minister. He is used to the give and take. His robust reply of “Bigot” was an appropriate and sufficient response. That should have been an end to it.

Harvie is hardly a virgin in the rough and tumble of politics. Harvie was himself rebuked by Age Scotland only a week ago for dismissing the views of individuals on the grounds that they are old. Is ageism somehow a more acceptable prejudice than (alleged) homophobia?

Politicians should beware of ageism. Older people have a much higher propensity to vote.

With Scotland’s notorious Hate Crime Act due to come into force shortly and make this kind of prosecution much more common, I wish to reinforce the argument against over-use of the power of the state.

Modern discourse has lost sight of the fact that behaviour can be unpleasant and even morally wrong, without being illegal. It is thankfully impossible to involve the state in every social transgression, but its sphere is ever-widening.

Social sanction not involving the state is important. If a person is a routine adulterer, making the life of their partner a misery, they are likely to lose a number of friends and be socially shunned. We do not have them arrested for the bad behaviour.

Similarly if I come to a dinner party and make fun all evening of your big ears and bad cooking, you will presumably never invite me again and the other people present will be likely to follow suit. That is social sanction.

There is also the question of what is criminal and what is civil.

The defamation courts are open to Mr Harvie if he feels he was unfairly called a deviant. Interestingly, “vulgar abuse” has always been excluded from defamation. Just hurling silly abuse has not been taken as a legal matter, and I suspect that is how both sides of the “Deviant!”, “Bigot!” exchange would be viewed by a court.

I always turn to John Stuart Mill in these questions as a source of great wisdom, and to those who would scoff, I would add that there is no doubt that were it not for the profound influence of the philosophy of Mill on British political society, homosexuality would never have been legalised in the first place, or at least not for many more years.

In On Liberty, Mill cautions heavily against over involvement of the state in correcting actions even when they are harmful to others:

“The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others, or wanting in due consideration for their welfare, without going to the length of violating any of their constituted rights. The offender may be justly punished by opinion, though not by law. As soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects the interests of others society has jurisdiction over it, and the question of whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion…

…But disinterested benevolence can find other instruments to persuade people to their good, than whips and scourges, either of the literal or the metaphorical sort.”

Mill also argues that the effect of speech should be viewed in context. He gives the famous example that to argue that corn merchants are thieves who starve the poor is a perfectly legitimate expression of opinion. But to yell the same thing to a howling mob armed with torches outside a corn merchant’s house at midnight might be a different thing.

This I think is useful guidance in the Harvie case. As I said, I don’t really approve of calling people deviants, but to use it to a powerful politician in his pomp, surrounded by aides and police and giving a TV interview, is one thing.

If a gang of big blokes were following a gay person at night down a dark street yelling “deviant” at them, the situation and the perceived threat would be entirely different.

Mill is absolutely right to say that context is important. The word deviant in itself has very different nuances in different contexts, not all insulting.

What should be plain to any person with any instinct for freedom and democracy is that the greatest danger to society in this particular situation is the abuse of power, by or on behalf of a powerful minister, against a member of the public attempting to make his peaceful protest known, albeit not as perfectly as we might wish.

To leave the particular for the general, this is part of the Scottish Government’s reliance on culture wars as the wedge issue which firstly, removed the fundamentalist Independence supporters from the SNP, and secondly, they hope will keep them in power on a specifically generational political platform.

The claim of various minority personal identities by Scottish government politicians has become an intrinsic part of their political culture. There has in particular been a remarkable foregrounding of sexual identity as part of political life.

Now I am entirely tolerant and non-judgmental on different sexual identities, as long as neither children nor coercion are involved.

But to me politics is about the governance of society in a way that improves the lot of those masses living in poverty, with few economic or social opportunities for advancement, condemned to lives of insecurity and struggle.

Politics is not about how middle class people choose to sexually pleasure themselves or their fashion choices.

It is now generally understood that identity politics has been used to neuter class politics on the left. That instead of focusing on the need to redistribute wealth, political power and personal agency to the working class, energy has been diverted into ending discrimination for minority groups, to the extent that putting very wealthy women in power becomes a “victory” even when, once there, the very wealthy woman does nothing to eliminate child poverty.

Humza Yousaf writes in the Guardian, not about Scottish Independence or even wealth inequality, but about “toxic masculinity“.

I am not sure I understand this subject. Would, for example, having sex with a female assistant working directly to you, then accepting large cash donations from her father to pave her way to a lucrative job, be an example of “toxic masculinity”?

In the SNP this obsession with identity politics has become institutionalised, part of the very fabric of the organisation itself.

On the ruling body, the SNP National Executive, members elected by the entire membership are substantially outnumbered by members appointed by affiliated minority groups, sometimes with only a couple of hundred members.

Any notion of selection on merit through the party’s democratic processes has been dispensed with entirely. All women shortlists, which were initiated on a firm promise they would be for one election only, have become permanent. Most pernicious of all, the effects of preference for disabled candidates – self-declared as such – gave some truly bizarre results.

In possibly the worst of these, Emma Roddick received just 3% of the vote to be selected as the MSP candidate, but was promoted top of the list due to mental illness. There are many similar examples.

Now as a lifelong sufferer from bipolar myself, I don’t think anyone should be unfairly disadvantaged from mental illness, but to be made an MSP because of poor mental health is just strange.

When I was in the FCO I never thought I should be made Ambassador to the United Nations because I was bipolar.

It would have been most amusing if, when I came second to Mike Russell in election for President of the SNP, I had been declared the winner because I am bipolar!

The result of all this is that Scotland is governed by politicians whose primary political identity is their personal victimhood, be it through gender, race, sexual orientation or disability.

They continually wave the bloodied bandages of their personal victimhood at us – and they have their own Police Scotland Gestapo ready to arrest anyone who dares to impugn it.

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As long term readers know, I often assist with refugee and immigration cases, including representing at immigration courts, and we have occasionally over the years housed refugee families in our home for a while.

I have nowadays to add for the avoidance of trolling, no I do not get paid for any of this, by anyone.

Yesterday I was introduced to a case unlike any other I have seen.

A student arrived in the UK, with a new, valid and genuine student multiple visa in his passport. His course fees are paid and he had money to support himself.

On first arrival at the UK airport immigration desk he was told his visa was cancelled. There was no interview and no questions were asked, he was just told the computer said it had been cancelled.

He was taken aside to a holding cell, and there told they would not say why his student visa was cancelled, as it was confidential.

He was not given any paperwork. The visa was not physically cancelled in his passport – it still has not been. That is itself very strange, if it had been cancelled it should have been stamped as such at the airport.

If the student visa had been refused rather than granted, he would by law have been required to be issued with a “decision letter” giving the grounds for refusal. That letter would also by law explain his rights of appeal.

Now a visa does not give an automatic right of entry to the UK. The immigration service at the border have the right to interview the entrant and refuse entry if they are not satisfied. This might most frequently be because the person has no evidence of funds to support themselves.

It is however very unusual indeed for a person with a valid visa to be turned back.

If it happens, it should be following interview and based on evidence and would still require a letter to be issued.

None of that happened. The border staff did not claim they were making the decision, it had been made mysteriously elsewhere, explicitly with no explanation, and existed within their computer.

The student was told they would simply be deported immediately back. They therefore entered a claim of political asylum – something they had no intention whatsoever of doing when they boarded the plane with their student visa. Their grounds included that they had borrowed the money for their course fees, travel and maintenance, from people who would now kill them if they returned with no means to repay.

I find this case utterly baffling. It seems to have been handled in a manner designed to circumvent all the rights of the student and all the legal requirement for a paper trail.

If the visa had been cancelled before travel, why was the student not informed of the cancellation in their home town and a new decision letter issued, and why was the airline not informed at pre-clearance?

We now have the situation that the student is stuck here in asylum seeker limbo, not allowed to attend the course they have paid for and not allowed to work. How does this help anybody?

I have written before of the privatisation and deprofessionalisation of UK Immigration Services. What we seem to have here is the empowerment of entirely arbitrary racism. There seems a complete contempt by the “UK Border Force” for the laws they are supposed to be enforcing.

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I despair that there appears to be no discernible political debate over economic policy in the UK at all, outwith a few left websites and magazines with tiny readerships.

The Labour Party has completely abandoned the mildly social democratic platform of Jeremy Corbyn, and now actively renounces public ownership of utilities, improved workers’ rights giving greater job security, public spending to stimulate the economy and the use of taxation to redistribute wealth.

Rachel Reeves, Labour’s shadow chancellor, explicitly promotes the Thatcherite doctrine that taxation, public spending and all forms of regulation are detrimental to economic growth. She not only dismisses Modern Monetary Theory in its entirety, she also in her pronouncements makes plain that she does not accept the basic tenets of Keynesian Economics.

I am tempted to say Reeves and Starmer are Thatcherites, but that is not really correct. Their belief that wealth is created by economic giants building vast empires of monopoly, untrammelled by government, draws on something much older than Thatcher.

The social consequences of unbridled capitalism are all around us. A whole generation is growing up in which an extraordinarily high proportion have never known job security, cannot aspire to owning property, pay a huge proportion of their income just for rent and heat, are saddled with student debt and have precious little hope of self-advancement.

I cannot understand why anybody would believe that this state of affairs is healthy for society or for the economy. Nor can I understand why some of the economic giants dominating this economy are not recognised for the monopolies they are.

In what sense are Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple not monopolies in the same way that Standard Oil was? A company – and let us be frank, the individuals who own it – can reach a position of unhealthy market dominance without having done anything illegal or particularly unethical on the way.

We have been propagandised out of the belief that the state should in any way regulate economic activity for the greater good, while at the same time being propagandised into the belief that the state should become ever more intrusive in its surveillance of the lives of ordinary citizens.

Jeremy Corbyn’s modest social democratic platform, which proposed merely a few measures to ameliorate some of the worst injustices of this wildly unequal society, was very popular with the electorate. That is why he had to be eliminated using the extraordinary “anti-semite” scam.

But with Corbyn out of the way and the political “opposition” neutralised, there simply is no way that more progressive policies can ever reach the ears of the large majority of people.

The single exception is the odd media interview by Mick Lynch, who briefly became wildly popular by stating a few pro worker views plainly and articulately, something people normally are not allowed to see or hear.

You will note he is seldom on a TV screen now.

Which leads me to the unfortunate fact that most other unions have themselves become power structures manipulated to serve the career ambitions of their own highly paid leadership.

The election of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister is not going in any way to help the average worker. Why are the unions still paying over vast sums of money to a Labour Party which has utterly abandoned ordinary people, unless their leadership has also utterly abandoned ordinary people too?

In academia, there remains serious opposition to neoliberal economic doctrine, but this thought does not have any outlet into popular consciousness. Where there used to be some media which gave a slightly wider platform to left wing economic thinking – the Guardian and New Statesman would be examples in the UK – these have been entirely captured by neo-liberalism and indeed led the charge in destroying Corbynism.

This graph is from the Financial Times.

Let me add these thoughts. The graph is wrong to start its vertical scale at zero, as a substantial number of households at the bottom have negative wealth.

And if you wished to extend the vertical scale to reach the UK’s wealthiest household, the graph would have to be over 4,000 times taller than it is, without being any wider, with various members of the oligarchy sunning themselves at vertiginous heights along the way.

That is the truth of wealth inequality in the UK.
 

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UPDATE

I no longer have a source with access to Putin’s inner circle. I did not pretend to understand the astonishing episode of the Wagner march on Moscow at the time, and plainly it was impossible, if the Russian and Belarussian official narrative were remotely true, that Prigozhin could be allowed to carry on living.

Well, at least I got that right. But I still am no closer to understanding the entire dynamic. Unless Prigozhin has been effectively a prisoner these last few months, it seems incomprehensible that he did not flee.

To move from something I do not understand to something I do.

In comments below the line here, and even more so in replies to the post of this article on twitter, I am intensely irritated by the sheer stupidity of the lines trotted out by the Putin cult.

Ukraine has not lost 400,000 dead. That is half of British Empire casualties in World War 1 – in one year? It is 80% of the size of the Ukrainian armed forces in 2021. To try to give a meaningful comparison, those units of the Iraqi Republican Guard destroyed in the initial 2003 onslaught by vastly superior forces using massive firepower, lost about 20% dead in the most extreme cases. They had broken long before that many were killed in flight.

There would be evidence of fields piled up with thousands of bodies if 400,000 were dead. In all the drone and headcam footage we have seen, there is nothing remotely like that. It is simply a quite extraordinary example of the Big Lie technique. Ukrainian casualties have been serious, but nothing like on that scale.

I wrote below in the original article that ludicrous casualty figures have been claimed by both sides. I really do not need idiots doing so here.

The “Putin is perfect” narrative claims that Russia has failed to entirely subdue Ukraine because a) it never intended to b) Ukraine had an immensely powerful army at the start of the conflict.

Both claims are utter nonsense. Russia sent a column of its finest troops and armour to Kiev from the North at the start of this stage of invasion. It also sent special forces ahead into Kiev with the object of decapitating the Ukrainian command structure. The ground had been prepared by very large sums of money paid to key Ukrainian officials and generals.

The aim was regime change.

The whole was based on very faulty intelligence that there would be little resistance and the Ukrainian people would welcome regime change. Much of the money to have been laid out in bribes had in fact been stolen within the Russian FSB (something, I would add from personal experience, MI6 is not immune from either).

The initial Russian assault on Kiev was a costly failure, with many of Russia’s best forces very badly damaged. The attempt to deny this is pathetic. We all saw it.

Elsewhere the Russian advance meant much better. This is largely because:

It is nonsense to state that Ukraine had very powerful armed forces. In 2021 the Ukrainian army was equipped almost entirely with largely outdated ex-Soviet hardware. There were huge problems in supply chains caused by quite astonishing levels of Ukrainian corruption (though this was true of both sides). A Ukrainian command structure riddled by co-option of large, supply favoured, units of Nazis, which ran on bragadaccio, was hardly efficient either.

The Russian invasion of its far smaller, weaker and corruption-riddled neighbour has been a demonstration of Russian weakness.

Of course Russia will ultimately win – Russia is a lot bigger and it is taking on a smaller, underdeveloped and scarcely functional mafia state.

But that this is all an example of Putin’s genius, and casualty rates favour Russia by ten to one, are claims so divorced from reality they can only come from those who are utterly delusional – or paid to put them out.

END OF UPDATE

For well over a decade, we were used to nightly shots on our television news of British and US forces, in heavy combat gear, storming across desert landscapes in cloud of dust or firing heavy machine guns over the top of mud walls.

These shots were provided by “embedded journalists” with the UK and US forces, swaggering around in the same kind of body armour and helmets as the troops, often distinguishable only by a blue bib with “press” written on it.

Thankfully, we see almost no such screen footage of the proxy war NATO is fighting against Russia in Ukraine. War porn has almost disappeared from our screens. We saw a lot of it when the failed Russian column to Kiev was destroyed in the early part of the war, but since then, very little.

The answer is of course not hard to find. The ratio of Iraqi dead to American dead in the second Iraq war was about 200 to 1, and in the “triumphant” early advance was still higher than that. The embedded journalists travelling as part of US or UK armed forces in their armoured vehicles were posing as heroes, but in little real danger at that stage.

The US forces were a real danger to non-embedded journalists. 16 journalists and 6 other media workers were acknowledged as killed by US forces in Iraq, while scores of other Iraqi journalists disappeared with no certainty as to who killed them. By contrast 2 “embedded” journalists were killed.

The “embedded journalists” were of course not real journalists at all, they were simply functioning as actors, presenting images of the exhilarating triumph of colonial massacre of a technologically inferior people, to a home audience that lapped it up.

By contrast, being in the front line with Ukrainian troops now would be very dangerous indeed. The very tiny number of journalists who have done it are indeed worthy of the name. Streaming along as a passenger in a glamourised turkey shoot in Iraq is much more congenial than being embedded with troops in Ukraine who are fighting where the kill ratio is somewhere close to even.

(There are utterly ludicrous enemy casualty claims by both Ukraine and Russia, which should be treated with equal contempt).

The territorial gain in the vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive is of the same order as that in the notoriously futile Battle of the Somme. It doesn’t make for glorious television.

You may have noted a repeated Western propaganda meme, that very often when a Russian missile strikes hundreds of miles from the frontline, it is frequently said to have landed close to a hotel, bar or cafe used by western journalists.

I am not sure this is the propaganda win they think this is.

The Ukraine war is going extremely well for those who are making billions from the arms sales and increases to western defence budgets that have resulted. It is going extremely badly for ordinary people all over the world, who have suffered the inflationary and other consequences of the disruption of trade and production and the population flows.

Our rulers would love it to go on like this for years – in fact a quick Ukrainian victory would be a disaster for the profiteers.

This war is going nowhere on the ground. I do not expect a Russian winter offensive will be significantly more successful than the Ukrainian spring offensive. It would be impossible to display frontline coverage that did not demonstrate both abject horror and utter futility. Which is why there is almost none.

I am grateful we are seeing so little war porn on our screens. But I know why.

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This is one of those unusual occasions, where a little while ago I intended to write a post advocating the precise opposite, but events have changed my mind.

After long and hard thought, I had come to the conclusion that pride had to be swallowed and personal animosity set aside. For the sake of Scottish independence we all had to reunite the movement and that could only be behind the SNP. I had a few attempts at starting an article on this.

My mind was changed by Humza Yousaf stating that, unequivocally, Independence can only be achieved through a referendum sanctioned by Westminster, and that could only be obtained if polling showed the majority for Independence to be significantly over 53%.

That is an entirely fair précis of Humza’s interview found here.

As I have consistently explained, Westminster will never consent to lose Scotland’s resources. Independence will have to be taken.

Anybody who believes that we need permission from London for Independence, by definition does not believe in Scotland’s right of self-determination.

Humza Yousaf plainly has no intention whatsoever of progressing Independence.

I therefore cannot possibly suggest the Independence movement unite behind the SNP, because the SNP is de facto a unionist party, interested only in governing within the devolution arrangement of the UK.

The concomitant of that is that any real Independence party must seek not to cooperate with the SNP, but to replace it entirely.

That is a long hard slog, but there is no genuine alternative that is real about Independence. The other option is to seek an accommodation with the SNP, but that can only ultimately aim at sharing some of the fruits of office obtainable within UK institutions. That is all the SNP want.

The SNP and Independence are clean different things.

I therefore cannot any more support Alba’s campaign for a Scotland United ticket, because that would involve asking Independence supporters to vote for SNP MPs who are in it entirely for personal career and are a block on Independence, not movers towards it.

Besides, with the SNP rudely rebuffing Alba at every opportunity, there is now an extrordinary irony:

Alba repeatedly asking  the SNP for a “Scotland United” joint ticket is becoming as pointless and humiliating as the SNP repeatedly asking Westminster for an S30 referendum.

Alba has already decided, at conference, that it is a political party not just a popular movement, and therefore is not confined to the Salvo/Liberation route.

Well, you are not a political party if you do not fight elections, and Rutherglen is here.

Now I am not a complete idiot (although I would be grateful if nobody polled my household on that).  I realise that a great many genuine Independence supporters have not yet realised they are betrayed, indeed taken for fools, by the SNP.

I understand that the “Scotland United” proposal is designed to avoid Alba being blamed for loss of seats to unionists under the First Past the Post system when the Independence vote is split.

But we have passed that now. We have offered again and again, and the SNP has said no. Scotland United is a very dead parrot.

I also no longer care if the SNP does lose seats to Labour.

We have incontrovertible proof that if the SNP holds 95% of Westminster seats, it does nothing to move for Independence.

We have incontrovertible proof that if the SNP holds a majority in the Scottish Parliament, with or without the Scottish Greens, it does nothing to move for Independence.

There is simply no connection, since Alex Salmond left, between the SNP winning seats and “mandates”, and Scottish Independence.

That is an incontrovertible fact and we need to bite the bullet and start explaining it relentlessly to the electorate.

Starting in Rutherglen.

I realise this is a hard road. I realise we may convince only hundreds this time. But a long hard road starts with the first step.

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Fernando Villavicencio, who with the Guardian’s Luke Harding and Dan Collyns fabricated the notorious Guardian front page lie that Paul Manafort and Julian Assange held pro-Trump meetings in the Ecuadorean Embassy, has been shot dead in Ecuador.

The appalling lie, which the Guardian’s $700,000 a year editor has refused to retract or remove, despite criticism even from the Washington Post which named Villavicencio as the fabricator, was aimed to give support to Clinton’s flagging “Russiagate” invention, which was crumbling fast.

Here is a photo of CIA assets Collyns, Harding and Villavicencio together in Quito.

Villavicencio’s claim to be an anti-corruption campaigner was highly selective and aimed only at making accusations against left wing figures, including a long history of fabricating documents.

Having been elected to the National Assembly in 2021, he devoted all his energy to obstructing the impeachment for corruption of Ecuador’s current President, fellow CIA asset and banker Guillermo Lasso. That seems rather strange for an anti-corruption campaigner.

Astonishingly, Villavicencio’s Wikipedia page presents him as an anti-corruption hero. It does not refer to the Manafort fabrication at all.

The Wikipedia page states that in 2015 Villavicencio informed Wikileaks of surveillance against Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy, as well as providing other documents to Wikileaks.

What it does not say is that Wikileaks did not publish Villavicencio’s material because their checks revealed at least some of it to be forged.

I must state here, for legal reasons, that the episode of surveillance on Assange in the Embassy mentioned in Villavicencio’s Wikipedia page, occurred before and was entirely unconnected to the UC Global affair, in which court case I am a witness and victim.

The result of Villavicencio’s information on surveillance of Assange in the Embassy led in fact directly to an attempt to blackmail over intimate moment images. Villavicencio’s role in that is, to say the least, murky. He was not present at the attempted shakedown.

None of which justifies Villavicencio’s awful death. But it does explain why you should not believe anything you are reading about it in the mainstream media.

CIA assets who forge documents, or distribute CIA forged documents, and spread corruption allegations against left wing figures, are most useful working in the shadows. If they become over-ambitious, draw attention to themselves, and run for President as Villavicencio did, when the CIA already has its approved puppet in the race, it is very easy to move from CIA asset to CIA liability.

Which is very bad for your health.

My sincere condolences to Mr Villavicencio’s family and those who loved him.
 

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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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Given the large population in the UK of Pakistani origin, the lack of serious media coverage of the overthrow and incarceration of Imran Khan, and the mass imprisonment of his supporters, is truly extraordinary.

Imran Khan was last week sentenced to three years in prison – and a five year ban from politics – for alleged embezzlement of official gifts. This follows his removal as Prime Minister in a CIA engineered coup, and a vicious campaign of violence and imprisonment against Khan and his supporters.

It is currently illegal in Pakistan to publish or broadcast about Khan or the thousands of new political prisoners incarcerated in appalling conditions. There have been no protests from the UK or US governments.

Imran Khan is almost certainly the least corrupt senior politician in Pakistan’s history – I admit that is not a high bar. Pakistan’s politics are, to an extent not sufficiently understood in the west, literally feudal. Two dynasties, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos, have alternated in power, in a sometimes deadly rivalry, punctuated by periods of more open military rule.

There is no genuine ideological or policy gap between the Sharifs and Bhuttos, though the latter have more intellectual pretension. It is purely about control of state resource. The arbiter of power has in reality been the military, not the electorate. They have now put the Sharifs back in power.

Imran Khan’s incredible breakthrough in the 2018 National Assembly elections shattered normal political life in Pakistan. Winning a plurality of the popular vote and the most seats, Khan’s PTI party had risen from under 1% of the vote in 2002 to 32% in 2018.

The dates are important. It was not Khan’s cricketing heroics which made him politically popular. In 2002, when his cricket genius was much fresher in the mind than it is now, he was viewed as a joke candidate.

In fact it was Khan’s outspoken opposition to the United States using Pakistan as a base, and particularly his demand to stop the hundreds of dreadful US drone strikes within Pakistan, that caused the surge in his support.

The Pakistani military went along with him. The reason is not hard to find. Given the level of hatred the USA had engendered through its drone killings, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hideous torture excesses of the “War on terror”, it was temporarily not in the interests of the Pakistan military to foreground their deep relationship with the CIA and US military.

The Pakistan security service, ISI, had betrayed Osama Bin Laden to the USA, which hardly improved the popularity of the military and security services. Imran Khan was seen by them as a useful safety valve. It was believed he could channel the insurgent anti-Americanism and Islamic enthusiasm which was sweeping Pakistan, into a government acceptable to the West.

In power, Imran proved much more radical than the CIA, the British Tories and the Pakistani military had hoped. The belief that he was only a playboy dilettante at heart was soon shattered. A stream of Imran’s decisions upset the USA and threatened the income streams of the corrupt senior military.

Khan did not only talk about stopping the US drone programme, he actually stopped it.

Khan refused offers of large amounts of money, also linked in to US support for an IMF loan, for Pakistan to send ground forces to support the Saudi air campaign against Yemen. I was told this by one of Imran’s ministers when I visited in 2019, on condition of a confidentiality which need no longer apply.

Khan openly criticised military corruption and, in the action most guaranteed to precipitate a CIA coup, he supported the developing country movement to move trading away from the petrodollar. He accordingly sought to switch Pakistan’s oil suppliers from the Gulf states to Russia.

The Guardian, the chief neo-con mouthpiece in the UK, two days ago published an article about Khan so tendentious it took my breath away. How about this for a bit of dishonest reporting:

in November a gunman opened fire on his convoy at a rally, injuring his leg in what aides say was an assassination attempt.

“Aides say”: what is this implying?

Khan had himself shot in the legs as some kind of stunt? It was all a joke? He wasn’t actually shot but fell over and grazed a knee? It is truly disgraceful journalism.

It is hard to know whether the article’s astonishing assertion that Khan’s tenure as Prime Minister led to an increase in corruption in Pakistan, is a deliberate lie or extraordinary ignorance.

I am not sure whether Ms Graham-Harrison has ever been to Pakistan. I suspect the closest she has been to Pakistan is meeting Jemima Goldsmith at a party.

“Playboy”, “dilettante”, “misogynist”, the Guardian hit piece is relentless. It is an encapsulation of the “liberal” arguments for military intervention in Muslim states, for overthrowing Islamic governments and conquering Islamic countries, in order to install Western norms, in particular the tenets of Western feminism.

I think we have seen how that playbook has ended in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, amongst others. The use of the word “claim” to engender distrust of Khan in the Guardian article is studied. He “claimed” that his years living in the UK had inspired him to wish to create a welfare state in Pakistan.

Why is that a dubious comment from a man who spent the majority of his personal fortune on setting up and running a free cancer hospital in Pakistan?

Khan’s efforts to remove or sideline the most corrupt Generals, and those most openly in the pay of the CIA, are described by the Guardian as “he tried to take control of senior military appointments and began railing against the armed forces’ influence in politics.” How entirely unreasonable of him!

Literally thousands of members of Khan’s political party are currently in jail for the crime of having joined a new political party. The condemnation by the Western establishment has been non-existent.

It is difficult to think of a country, besides Pakistan, where thousands of largely middle class people could suddenly become political prisoners, while drawing almost no condemnation. It is of course because the UK supports the coup against Khan.

But I feel confident it also reflects in part the racism and contempt shown by the British political class towards the Pakistani immigrant community, which contrasts starkly with British ministerial enthusiasm for Modi’s India.

We should not forget New Labour have also never been a friend to democracy in Pakistan, and the Blair government was extremely comfortable with Pakistan’s last open military dictatorship under General Musharraf.

On my last visit to Pakistan I went to Karachi, Abbottabad and the Afghan border. I hope to return in the spring, should the new government let me in.

May I make the plea that all of this activity (and my coming Assange tour in the US next month) is funded entirely by your subscriptions and donations. Please do consider helping if you can, as the finances of the blog are very tight at the moment, as the cost of living crisis bites people. All the contributions, even the smallest, add up to a major cumulative difference to keep us going.
 
 
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This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

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

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

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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.

Here is Friday’s New York WBAI broadcast hosted by Randy Credico with Roger Waters, John Shipton, Alicia Castro, Ray McGovern and myself.

I was slightly worried in retrospect we sounded like friends and campaigners having an internal conversation about strategy. But it appears people found that interesting to hear.

Alternatively, listen on the Live On The Fly website: Live On The Fly – Fri, Aug 4, 2023 15:00 PM
 
 
————————————————

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.

In discussing government proposals to effectively enforce a mass public switch to heat pumps for home heating rather than gas boilers, I venture into an area where I have no expertise. I therefore intend to set out a series of numbered propositions which appear to me incontrovertible.

SONY DSC

I follow this by a series a) b) c) of policy propositions. (I have been trying to think of a word for enumerate when you are marking by alphabet, but can’t come up with one).

This is very much an invitation to debate, not an attempt to impose my view. I am reliant on common sense, which is really just an idiom meaning logic. Here are my propositions:

1) It is not unreasonable for people to wish homes to be heated to 20°C or slightly higher.

2) Heat pumps are much more energy efficient than gas boilers. They are therefore undoubtedly a good thing for reducing energy use. But in home size applications they cannot match a gas boiler’s ability to generate very hot water quickly.

3) Insulation should come before heat pumps. To concentrate on how heating is produced, ahead of reducing the need for heating, is illogical. This is particularly true as a great deal of the housing stock is so poorly insulated that standard domestic heat pumps are insufficiently powerful to maintain 20C in them in cold weather.

4) The efficiency of heat pumps reduces in cold weather. They use more electricity to produce the same amount of heat. This is a different point to the obvious fact that more heat is needed in cold weather.

5) Almost all heat pump systems therefore have an auxiliary method of simple resistance electric heating to boost output when needed, akin to an immersion heater. The “they work in Norway” argument therefore needs deeper consideration.

6) Ground source heat pumps do not suffer such efficiency losses but are much more expensive installations and of course you have to own enough ground.

6) In fact, particularly in colder areas, the fuel cost of running a heat pump is not significantly cheaper, and often not cheaper at all, than running a gas boiler with the same result in heat output. The notion that a heat pump will pay for itself in lower fuel bills is generally false.

7) The primary reason for this is that electricity is much more expensive than gas per thermal unit.

8) Electricity prices in the UK are double those in France from their state energy company, while the British privatised energy companies throughout the supply train make massive profits.

9) A full heat pump installation to an average home obviously varies but costs around £20,000. With upgraded radiators and insulation it not infrequently can be double that or more.

10) As a general rule, those least able to afford it live in the worst housing, particularly with regard to insulation.

11) It is simply impractical for the cost of transition to heat pumps to be met by the ordinary citizen.

12) The national grid already operates at 99% of capacity in coldest days of winter, even including the capacity to import. If all gas boilers were swapped for heat pumps, electricity demand on the coldest days of winter would approximately double.

So what is the solution? Well, I have long argued that the state needs to undertake a massive, fully state funded programme of insulation in every home. Here are my policy propositions:

a) The transition to a lower carbon economy is a massive undertaking that cannot be met by consumers “nudged” by government incentives or taxations

b) It requires emergency state intervention akin to the state takeover of virtually all industry during World War 2

c) All energy companies must be nationalised

d) The state must undertake a massive and urgent programme bringing every home up to high insulation standards, mobilising the needed resources and labour

e) Distributed electricity production must be prioritised. All buildings should be fitted with solar panels and battery storage, and marine type wind turbines

f) Heat pumps should be installed by the state in homes where practical. District heating systems should be constructed in all dense urban areas. A range of other technologies, eg biogas and geothermal, should be deployed for these where appropriate.

g) Use of fossil fuel should be minimised but abolition is impractical.

h) Land based wind power should be massively boosted and storage options, particularly pumped hydro-electric, selected and capacity built. Estuary barrages should be prioritised.

i) There must be an acceptance of undesirable localised environmental impact necessary to the big picture

I fear that ill thought out schemes that threaten to land households with massive and unrealistic transition costs are leading to an upsurge in climate change denial.

This claim from the Scottish Greens paints a far more optimistic picture:

?A new poll shows that a majority of people in Scotland back @patrickharvie's plans for a change in the way we heat our homes. ?

A majority of respondents said they would install a heat pump in their home. ♨️

[1/5] ? pic.twitter.com/KAG6obUaUY

— Scottish Greens (@scottishgreens) August 1, 2023

Unfortunately it is not really true. If you look at the actual datasets for the survey, you find that 46.76% answered: “I would be willing to install a heat pump only with government finance”. Only 10.02% said they were prepared to install a heat pump without government finance.

Current proposals for subsidy would still leave the average consumer with a five figure bill. This is not the way forward.

Your views are most welcome. I realise this will attract some climate change denial in the comments, but hey-ho it’s a free blog.

————————————————

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
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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.

This is simply an anecdotal tale of my personal experience, but it seems to illustrate so much that is wrong with being an ordinary individual in modern late capitalist society, that I thought it was worth relating.

I sit writing in my study. Water is dripping through the ceiling across the other side of the room.

After a heavy storm about six weeks ago, there was a downpour from the ceiling. The water was very dark and smelly. I don’t think I have any outflow pipes it could possibly come from, or I would have thought it was sewage.

So I phoned the insurance company. I bought the household insurance through Comparethemarket.com. I accepted a quote from a company called CETA which was for approximately £450 per year.

So I called the Claims number provided and was rather surprised to find the phone answered by a totally different company, the Davies Group. I spoke to a very pleasant lady with a young voice who had great difficulty hearing me and apologised for her faulty headset. She promised to phone me back the next morning.

The next morning she did phone me back, took my policy details and the nature of my claim, and said they would be in touch.

Nothing happened for another week. Water continued to drip in occasionally, adding to the internal damage.

After about another ten days I received a phone call from a drone operator. They wanted permission to access my property to make a drone survey of the house for the insurer. I confess I was rather surprised by this, especially as you can walk on to the flat roof above the study via a door from the bedroom. But I agreed.

The water continued to drip in. The floor now needs replacement.

Eventually the drone came and went. More time passed. Then I received another email pointing out that it was a condition of the policy that any flat roof must have been inspected, and repaired if necessary, in the two years prior to the start of the policy.

By total chance, I had in fact had the flat roof relaid in the two years prior to the start of the policy. The Davies Group – who in this email described themselves as “loss adjusters”- had asked for evidence that the work had been carried out by a qualified roofer.

A general building company doing maintenance had sub-contracted the roofer, so more time went by – and more water came in – while I obtained documents from the actual roofing company. This eventually happened and I sent them to the Davies Group.

The Davies Group are also asking for “evidence” that no more than 50% of the roof of the property is flat roof. But it is obviously well less than 50% and they have themselves sent up a drone, so they have the evidence already.

It has been raining heavily and the water is coming in quite hard. What kind of insurance company immediately puts all claims – including quite small ones like this – out to a loss adjuster?

They seem to be spending more resources denying the claim than it would cost to fix the leak. What was the drone for?

I called the Davies Group this morning, and got another nice young lady who could not access my claim as their systems were down, and asked me to call back in a few hours.

I therefore decided to call the CETA Group who comparethemarket.com had listed as the insurer and who had sent me the policy documents. That did not get me very far. CETA are not an insurer, but a broker. Their website calls them “the broker for the broker”.

So comparethemarket.com – which is licensed as an “insurance intermediary”, had taken my money and sold me a policy provided by CETA, an insurance broker.

But what company was actually insuring me? It would be neither the intermediary nor the broker.

I phoned CETA and spoke to a very helpful lady in a call centre, apparently overseas. She read from her screen and kept trying to refer me to the Davies Group.

I explained that I did not want to speak to the loss adjusters, I wished to speak to my actual insurer.

After a long, long phone conversation she spoke to her supervisor and I was given an 0203 number for the insurer, where I was told I could register a complaint about claims handling.

I called this number which was for a company named Arkel. Now after research I found that Arkel are in fact also not the insurer. They are an underwriting agency, which is an agent that has been given the authority by the insurer to conclude contracts.

Arkel do not have a website but do have a Linkedin page. They are a little company with just seven employees.

When I phoned Arkel, I was answered by a young man who just gave his own name, not the company, and plainly was not expecting to receive calls from a member of the public. He really did sound exactly as though I had just woken him up.

However when I explained the situation he could not have been more friendly and helpful. He explained that Arkel do not handle claims, but he did offer to contact the Davies Group on my behalf and find out what was happening, and I believed he would do it.

By this time I had read very carefully through my policy document, and while it had a big Arkel letterhead at the top, in the detail it gave the name of the actual insurer as the Chaucer Insurance Company.

The Chaucer Insurance Company is in fact 100% owned by China Re. China Re is 100% owned by the Chinese state.

I was just trying to get my roof fixed and the ceiling repaired. I did not expect to have all this trouble, or to discover my home is actually insured by the Chinese state, to which, while it seems a strange thing for the Chinese state to spend its time doing, I have no objection.

But consider this. I bought my insurance from comparethe market.com, an “insurance intermediary”, who took a cut. They got it from CETA, an “insurance broker”, who took a cut. They got it from Arkel, an “underwriting agent”, who took a cut. They were acting on behalf of Chaucer Insurance, whose frontmen get a cut from China Re, who ultimately get the profit, which goes to the Chinese State.

It is amazing there is anything left from my £450 to be pooled for the payment of claims. Which is perhaps why any claims immediately go to a loss adjuster – who of course gets yet another cut – and we have weeks of messing around, including drone shots of a roof you can walk on.

For me the worst part of this has been that every individual I have spoken to, in all these companies, has seemed a really nice person, genuinely wanting to help, but stuck there wearing a headset, reading limited responses from a screen, operating within their tiny delimited space in this nightmarish corporate jungle.

So many people now have this kind of utterly demeaning employment it has a real effect on human welfare.

Since I started writing, another very nice gentleman from CETA has called me in response to a lousy review I published on Trustpilot. He too said he would contact the Davies Group.

It is impossible that in the real world this corporate spaghetti is more efficient than the old insurance company that used to collect premiums and handle its own claims.

Involving this vast plethora of intermediaries can only work by screwing more out of the consumer – by not paying their claims.

Automatically bringing in loss adjusters on a small household claim is vexatious.

This is just a small personal story, but it seems to illustrate how impossible it has become for ordinary people to interact effectively with the hypercapitalism that orders so much of our lives.

Finally one last irony.

I did not expect to find the Chinese State insuring my home. The claim is being “handled” by loss adjusters The Davies Group, a huge portmanteau services company.

The Davies Group is 100% owned by BC Partners.

BC Partners is 100% owned by the Guardian Media Group.

I didn’t expect that either. The Guardian. Loss adjusters to the Chinese state. Welcome to 2023.

UPDATE Incredibly the loss adjuster has come up with a new reason to try to deny the claim. They say that the weather in Swanston 18 to 19 June did not meet the definition of “storm.”

The word “storm” does not in fact appear in the policy document, so I don’t know where this comes from.

They have now accepted my evidence that the roof was relaid by a qualified roofer in 2020, and that less than 50% of the roof area is flat.

They have referred the question of “storm” to the insurer and promised me an answer in three to four days, “Possibly sooner”. The rain is still dripping in. END UPDATE

————————————————

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.