I have obtained access to all of Stewart McDonald’s emails, after approaching a number of people to find out who might have them. This is something the entire Scottish mainstream media have failed to do.

I had no hand in obtaining the emails nor prior knowledge. I am grateful they have been so generously shared.

I want to reassure Mr McDonald that his hysterical ranting about being hacked by a state intelligence service, when he appears by his own account to have fallen for a phishing scam the average 12 year old would see through, is hilariously wide of the mark.

Who in 2023 enters their login details into a third party website because they receive an email asking them to?

I think Mr McDonald’s credentials as a defence expert and NATO warrior have perhaps taken a hit.

I also want to reassure Mr McDonald that a highly responsible journalistic process will now be undertaken. Nothing will be altered or falsified. Nothing purely personal or about his love life will appear.

In particular, anything related to his constituents will remain absolutely and properly confidential.

If Mr McDonald or the SNP wish to get in touch about other material in the emails which is particularly sensitive for reasons of which we may not be aware, that will be given every consideration.

What will be published is material in which there is a legitimate public interest, relating to interactions with NATO, the British military and MOD, the Integrity Initiative and journalists in that crooked network, parliamentary committees, intelligence agencies, foreign powers, UK government defence institutes and conservative think tanks.

There has been little online support for Mr McDonald – and what there has been is telling

There is much of interest in the cache, including emails direct to and from Nicola Sturgeon, showing the toxic relationships within the SNP group at Westminster, where McDonald regards himself as in a very small minority of Sturgeon loyalists.

It is my hope that all those emails which are in the public interest for the public to know, with redactions if responsibly required, will eventually be published as a cache, so you can make up your own mind about the material.

This is also going to be a very interesting test on journalistic freedom in Scotland and Sturgeon’s iron control over the police and prosecutorial services.

In this context, the fact that I had no connection to, nor prior knowledge of, the materials being obtained is the essential point. My own involvement is purely to have tracked down who had them and then been given access to them, as journalist and publisher.

Doubtless after the usual pressure from Murrell and Robertson, the Lord Advocate will have the Crown Office looking feverishly to find a crime in that before the end of the afternoon.

It is a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called western democracies, that Sy Hersh, arguably the greatest living journalist, cannot get this monumental revelation on the front of the Washington Post or New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net.

Hersh tells the story of the US destruction of the Nordstream pipelines in forensic detail, giving dates, times, method and military units involved. He also outlines the importance of the Norwegian armed forces working alongside the US Navy in the operation.

One point Sy does not much stress, but it is worth saying more about, is that Norway and the USA are of course the two countries who have benefitted financially, to an enormous degree, from blowing up the pipeline.

Both not only have gained huge export surpluses from the jump in gas prices, but Norway has directly replaced Russian gas to the tune of some $40 billion per year. From 2023 the United States will appear in that list in second place behind Norway, following the opening in the last two months of two new Liquefied Natural Gas terminals in Germany, built to replace Russian gas with US and Qatari supplies.

So Russia lost out massively financially from the destruction of Nordstream and who benefited? The USA and Norway, the two countries who blew up the pipeline.

But of course, this war is nothing to do with money or hydrocarbons and is all about freedom and democracy…

To return to Hersh’s account, particularly interesting are the series of decisions taken to avoid classification of the operation in various ways which would require it to be reported to Congress. In terms of United States history, this ought to be a big deal.

For the Executive to commit what is an act of war without the approval of the Legislature is fundamentally unconstitutional. But that is one of those quaint remnants of democracy that the neo-liberal elite consensus can quietly sidestep nowadays.

Hersh sets out the well known background in compelling detail,  including the fact that, from Biden down, the Americans effectively announced what they were going to do, openly.

But what most worries me about the entire story is the unanimous complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring the completely obvious.

The media line, parroted here relentlessly by the BBC and corporate media, was  that the Russians had probably themselves blown up the pipeline on which they had expended such great resources and three decades of intense diplomatic activity, and which was to be the key to Russia’s single most valuable source of income for the next 40 years.

This was always quite literally incredible. You would have to be deranged to believe it.

It actually taught me not just that we truly are in the realm of totalitarianism and the Big Lie, but I learnt something very important about how the Big Lie works.

The secret is not that people genuinely believe an outrageous claim. The secret is that people do genuinely believe that they are in a battle of good against evil, and it is necessary to accept the narrative being promoted, in the interests of fighting evil.

Don’t question, just follow. If you do question, you are promoting evil.

I am sure that is how it works.

State and corporate stenographer journalists are actually intelligent individuals. If they thought about it, they would realise that the narrative that Russia blew up its own pipeline is obvious nonsense.

But they are convinced it is morally wrong to think about it.

Which is why none of them challenged the equally mad claims that Russia was repeatedly shelling its own forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, and indeed is why none of them challenged the utterly risible official version of the Skripal story.

I previously told the anecdote from when I worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and asked a good friend if he really believed the misinformatioin on Iraqi WMD with which he was involved.

He replied by referring to the video game Championship Manager (now renamed Football Manager), which we used to play together. He said when he was in the game, it was immersive, he was manager of Liverpool, and it fully absorbed him.

Similarly, when he walked through the FCO gates, the world of the intelligence reports was immersive and Iraq did have these WMDs inside that world. He worked in the “reality” of the FCO. Once he left in the evening, he lived in a different reality, the world of us in the pub.

I do know of one or two journalists bright enough to detach their professional output from what they really think, in a similar way. (I once had a conversation along these lines with Jeremy Bowen in Tashkent.)

Most however don’t think like this. They simply think that all right thinking people support the historic struggle against the evil Russians, so it must be right to read out the propaganda without thinking too much about it.

Those of us critical of the aggressive promotion of war in Europe, are not only barred from all mainstream media and confined to corners of the internet, and even then heavily suppressed on social media (which is why Sy Hersh’s article does not have the scores of millions of readers it merits).

We can’t even obtain freedom of assembly.

Two established left wing venues have cancelled the No 2 Nato meeting I am addressing in London on 25 February. Conway Hall’s reasons for cancellation included threats to funding and fears for the safety of staff.

We are now reduced to a guerrilla meeting, the Central London venue for which will not be announced until the evening before.

Is this really a democracy, where it is not possible for dissidents to hold a public meeting without secrecy, subterfuge and hiding from supporters of the state?

I do urge you to come along on the day, whatever your views on the subject, to support the right to freedom of speech.

I have a different view from perhaps all of the other speakers, on the legitimacy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which I oppose.

But I also oppose NATO expansion which is an underlying cause of the war, and indeed oppose the existence of NATO itself.

NATO is a war machine which sucks resources from working people to benefit the military industrial complex, and unleashes devastating destruction on developing states which do not make their natural resources available to western billionaire elites.

It is also a fundamental node of the propaganda apparatus which manipulates and controls our society, particularly as counter narrative and dissident thought is now rigorously and systematically excluded.

There is no longer an Overton window of permitted debate. It has narrowed and should be renamed the Overton letterbox.

One of those small difficult ones right down at the bottom of the door.  With a very fierce spring, and snarling dogs guarding it.

————————————————

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How much of Shell’s record US $40 billion profit was due to the Ukraine war and freezing Russia out of the market?

If you apply the “excess deaths” methodology we became familiar with during covid, comparing profit against a running average of the previous five years, we get a figure of about $25 billion “excess profit”.

This is of course a rough technique, both with deaths as with profits, as neither covid nor the Ukraine war were the sole factor affecting the outcome, and “all other things” are not equal but in some degree variable.

But it is a good indication when a major new factor comes in to play.

If we simply remove Shell’s 2020 accounts, with their US$20 billion covid loss, from the equation as exceptional, we still have a figure of US$15 billion excess profit, arising largely from the war in Ukraine.

Isn’t it good to know that all those people have not died or been maimed in vain? At least Shell are raking it in.

Shell of course are not alone. We will see something similar from all the energy companies, including those that are billing you massive amounts to heat your home. It isn’t costing any more to produce the energy, it is simply vulture predation on market disruption.

Capitalism in theory works in free markets of trade flows. But in practice financial flows are manipulated by states to the benefit of the rich in numerous ways, of which war and sanctions are just the bluntest examples.

The United States blowing up the Nordstream 2 pipeline was a pretty significant state market intervention. Yet when the result of that kind of action is to cause super profits to western energy companies at consumer expense, market intervention to remove that super profit becomes “unhelpful”.

Arms manufacturers are also coining it. To December, investors in merchants of death BAE had seen an increase in value of their investment by 63% in twelve months. Now everybody with a finger in the pie is clamouring to send more tanks and planes to the Ukraine. Money, money, money.

The story is no different at Lockheed Martin etc.

We should also not forget that the military and security services are themselves a vested financial interest. Vastly rising budgets, more career opportunities, more second career jobs in the arms industries and the think tanks that pump out the propaganda for more war, war without end.

I have said this before, but J A Hobson’s short book, Imperialism: A Study contains analysis of how all this works that stands true over a hundred years on, is expressed with clarity, and fundamentally changed how I view the world, when I read it forty years ago.

There is yet more acceleration in the massive transfer of resources to the wealthy. Every world event – Covid, the war in Ukraine – is manipulated by states to increase inequality. Oxfam, who seem the most genuine of the large relief charities (admittedly not a high bar), recently published this:

Billionaires have seen extraordinary increases in their wealth. During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent, while $16 trillion (37 percent) went to the rest of the world put together. A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 percent. Billionaire fortunes have increased by $2.7 billion a day. This comes on top of a decade of historic gains —the number and wealth of billionaires having doubled over the last ten years.

In this western world, I am not sure what percentage of ordinary people have to reach what stage of desperation before we see the start of genuine revolt. Should things continue on this trend, we are going to find out eventually.

————————————————-

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

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

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It is nearly 20 years since I blew the whistle on British Government complicity in torture and the extraordinary rendition programme, under which thousands of people were deliberately tortured as a systematic act of government policy.

Many of them were killed.

I had, and I leaked, substantial documentary evidence to back my claims, of which this is but one example.

Yet the BBC never gave a spectacular, combat shot illustrated four and a half minute lead television news item to my revelations of official UK government involvement in mass torture, as they gave to junior Russian officer Konstantin Yefremov’s far less spectacular allegations.

My revelations were actually about the UK, not a foreign country. They came from a much more senior source than Lt Yefremov. They had undeniable supporting evidence. They revealed ministerially approved policy, not the possibly rogue behaviour detailed by Yefremov.

Yet to the BBC it was a much less important story.

Now I don’t actually doubt Yefremov’s modest testimony: he witnessed a single incident of torture and some looting. I am sorry to say I have no doubt, from close study, that torture and other crimes have always been committed by all armies in war.

Those who deny that Russian soldiers do it are as purblind and bigoted as those who deny that British or United States – or Ukrainian – soldiers do it.

But the massive propaganda punch given to Lt Yefremov’s testimony is in stark contrast to the treatment of domestic UK whistleblowers, or to the equally harrowing stories of the torture of Russian prisoners.

When have you ever seen Australian Major David McBride given four and a half minutes of BBC main news headline story to outline his allegations of widespread war crimes by allied forces in Afghanistan?

Of course you haven’t seen that. Such coverage would never happen.

How much prime time news coverage did the BBC allocate to the International Criminal Court’s listing of torture, rape and murder by British forces in Iraq?

Virtually none.

On the other hand, when Public Interest Lawyers were closed down over irregularities in soliciting and pursuing the cases of victims of British atrocities in Iraq, the BBC gave that enormous coverage including on prime time news broadcasts, as though it proved no such atrocities ever occurred.

The BBC gives blanket coverage to a junior Russian officer, but gave almost none to New Zealand’s Operation Burnham, in which the Special Air Service killed a child, tortured an opponent and handed him over to further torture, and then systematically lied and covered up – all of which an official inquiry confirmed happened but declared “legal”.

Of course we know we live in an age of wall to wall propaganda. Of course we know that the BBC is an integral part of it. The really shocking thing about propaganda – as true of today’s BBC as it was of Goebbels – is that being massively unsubtle and obvious appears to magnify rather than diminish its power to sway public opinion.

The lesson of this current article is that it is not necessary to invent facts for propaganda. A completely false narrative can be built by extreme selectivity of what facts you amplify, and what facts you bury.

————————————————-

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

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

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I spoke at this meeting on Saturday and gave a broader overview than usual of the Assange case and its importance. I think it comes over fairly cogently, even though I was actually feeling pretty dizzy and faint.

Jonathan Cook is, as ever, particularly worth listening to closely, and it was great to catch up with Jeremy Corbyn again.

At the end of the event I was particularly honoured to receive from Jeremy the Gavin Macfadyen Prize for supporting whistleblowers, not for myself but on behalf of Julian Assange, and I say a few more words on that subject.

————————————————-

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

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

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

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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.

Scotland has no shortage of dreadful right wing judges, but as the very epitome of reactionary conservatism, one gobsmacking judgment from Perth Sheriff Michael Fletcher stands out.

In a major rowing back of Scotland’s right to roam legislation contained in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, Sheriff Fletcher ruled that plebs must not be allowed within many acres of rich people’s mansions, because the thieving commoners may rob the rich people.

That really is precisely what he ruled.

53] While I accept that it is quite possible that the average proprietor of Kinfauns Castle might not have the resources or the tastes or the interests of the pursuer in this case it is I think legitimate to infer from the nature of the premises and in particular its value and cost to run that any person using the premises as a private house would require to have very substantial resources. It is also legitimate to infer from the evidence that such a person would be likely to be the possessor of valuable objects of some kind be it furniture or pictures or jewellery or at least to infer that outsiders including those of a criminal disposition might think that the owner of the Castle would have valuable possessions. If that is so then any such proprietor would have concerns as to whether their premises were secure and thus the evidence relating to security assumes some significance. It may be that the reasonable proprietor of the Castle might not have the same finely tuned concerns about security that were offered in evidence on behalf of the pursuer and might not require elaborate precautions such as tamper detectors and other electronic devices, but I think it can be inferred from the evidence that any owner would have greater or lesser security concerns more highly developed than most other householders in the country.

….

[55] No one in my view would have their enjoyment of their private house ensured if they were concerned about the security of the premises either from the point of view of theft or some sort of attack. If I am correct that most inhabitants of such a house would be persons with substantial assets then I consider that all such persons would have some concerns about security and it would be expected that their enjoyment of the house would be able to be ensured only if they were happy that the security of the premises was taken care of.

“Taken care of” specifically meaning by excluding the public right to roam for many acres around their house. Because they have a big house and so are “persons with substantial assets”, and thus the law should treat them differently to the plebs.

He further ruled that, where there had been a fence erected before the passing of the 2003 right to roam legislation, that fence should be respected as the boundary where the right to roam legislation did not permit access, as that fence would indicate where the historic castle owners reasonably believed it was necessary to exclude the public in order to protect their own privacy.

Yes, he specifically stated that the Land Reform legislation could not alter the boundaries to public access previously set by estate owners’ fences, and it is historic estate owners’ opinion on where they should exclude the public, that is the only opinion that counts.

[56] Another consideration arising from the characteristics of the house seems to me to arise from the evidence again unchallenged of Mr McCleary that the fence erected by the pursuer was erected following at least for some of the way but probably for most of the way a fence which was already in existence albeit in poor condition. Mr McCleary described it as what I think could be described as a stob and wire fence with perhaps two wires and about waist height. Such a fence could not be described in any respect as a security fence but it is significant in my view that the fence was not one which surrounded the whole of the property owned by the owners of the Castle but travelled at least part of the way through the property so that property owned by the Castle was both inside and outside the fence. Counsel for the respondents argued that there was no significance in the fact that there was a fence there partly because it was erected at a time when it was perfectly possible to own land privately. I consider that it is legitimate to take into account that the fence was built on the line of an original fence, or more precisely a previous fence. It is clear that the fence would not have prevented anyone who desired to do so from entering the premises but standing its condition it was probably erected at a time when the existence of such a fence would indicate to the vast majority of people that they were coming to land owned privately. When one is trying to assess what is sufficient land adjacent to the house to afford reasonable measures of privacy in the house and to ensure the enjoyment of the persons living there is not unreasonably disturbed it seems to me to be not unreasonable to take into account the boundaries established by persons not influenced in any way by the new rights created by Parliament in relation to access across private property at least as an adminicle of evidence. It is I think legitimate consider that such boundaries were placed there on the basis that persons considered that ground within the boundary would be required to secure their privacy and enjoyment of the property especially when the fence was not erected automatically on the boundary of the land owned by the house. For these reasons I have taken the line of the fence as being a pointer to what might be considered by persons occupying the house as reasonably required for the enjoyment of the house.

Sheriff Fletcher, in a ruling since quoted by estate owners all over Scotland, ruled that Ann Gloag was entitled to fence off 12 acres around her castle as “private garden”, and keep out the little people.

He did not stop there. In a pointer to roll back the Act’s victory over repressive rulings of criminal trespass, Sheriff Fletcher stated that Mr Morris of the Ramblers’ Association should have been charged by the police with breach of the peace when he entered the gates of the estate to check on compliance with the 2003 Act, and refused to leave when asked to by a land manager in a Land Rover.

Sheriff Fletcher plainly felt that for ramblers to disobey orders from people in Land Rovers is the first step to Marxist insurrection and the guillotine.

The case was brought in 2007 by Ann Gloag, owner of Kinfauns Castle against Perth and Kinross Council and the Ramblers’ Association, to stop walkers from transiting or just enjoying her estate of Kinfauns Castle, outside Perth.

Ann Gloag’s Perth home, Kinfauns Castle.
(Please see Gordon Currie story 01738 446766).
NO BYLINE TO BE USED WITH IMAGE.
COPYRIGHT: Perthshire Picture Agency.
Tel. 01738 623350 / 07775 852112.

Sheriff Fletcher also stuck the Council and Ramblers Association with £160,000 of Gloag’s legal costs. Probably as a result the case was never appealed – that was also a realistic assessment of the predelictions of Scotland’s estate weekending senior judiciary.

The Gloag judgment remains a huge bleeding hole in the intent of the 2003 Land Reform Act on public access to land.

Politicians huffed following this judgement about the need to amend the Act to make plain the precedence of public access –

As the Guardian reported at the time:

Yesterday, senior figures in the ruling Scottish National party, which has championed land access legislation, said the act must be reviewed and if necessary tightened, while the ramblers urged the Crown Office, which oversees Scottish courts, to issue guidance to clarify the legal position.

Roseanna Cunningham, a nationalist and the local MSP, put down emergency questions on the case at Holyrood yesterday. “If the Queen doesn’t require fences at Balmoral, I’m not entirely clear why they’re needed at Kinfauns. I hope we’re not going to sit by and watch this being eroded,” she said.

But nothing happened, in Scotland’s timid parliament of the bought. Instead we got the exact opposite, with the Scottish Government incoporating the Gloag judgment in its countryside access code, as a restriction.

That is just another heart-rending example of the gap between what the SNP claims to stand for, and how it behaves in government.

Anyway, “Dame” Ann Gloag, who detests human traffic across her property, has now been charged with human trafficking related to the operation of her African oriented charities, and persons brought to Scotland.

One effect, of course, of the extensive privacy and large right of access exclusion zone granted to Dame Ann Gloag, is that all domestic servants and other persons working at the castle, in whatever capacity and voluntarily or not, would be removed from the possibility of public view.

It would therefore be most interesting in terms of Sheriff Fletcher’s judgment if any of the alleged trafficking activity relates to the Kinfauns estate. Watch this space.

On the other hand I view the Crown Office, to which Police Scotland have handed the dossier, as entirely corrupt and shall be most surprised if there is a prosecution.

I ran across Ms Gloag’s interests when I lived in Ramsgate in Kent from 2007 to 2014. My home was under two miles from Manston Airport, at that time a struggling commercial airport on which many local jobs depended.

In November 2013, with the close involvement of Thanet District Council, Ann Gloag purchased Manston Airport for just £1, on the assurance that she would keep it running for at least two years.

Within a very few months Gloag had closed down the airport, with substantial harm to the local economy, and submitted plans for an extremely profitable scheme to build 1,000 homes – the first phase on just part of the massive site.

Gloag turned down a £7 million offer to buy the airport from a company willing to keep it open.

You can still find online this introduction to an ITN investigation into what happened:

Meridian investigation has discovered that after private meetings with senior officers from Thanet District Council, Manston Airport owner Ann Gloag believed there was the potential for large-scale house-building on the site.

Was that why she rejected a £7m buyout offer that would have kept the airport operational and saved 140 jobs? John Ryall has this exclusive report.

Sadly the investigation itself has disappeared. I wonder whether Dame Ann Gloag’s legal friends have been at it again?

You will gather I am not a fan of Dame Ann Gloag. But then why would she care what we think? We are not permitted within acres of her home.

Yet everything I have written above obviously is a complete fiction, because according to the BBC’s James Cook, the human trafficking charges against Ann Gloag are an incredible shock because she is the most saint-like and unimpeachable human being the world has ever known.

She is vouched for by Gordon and Sarah Brown, for goodness sake. (Gordon Brown not being at all a war criminal complicit in the awful deaths of millions of people in Iraq and across the Middle East). She is vouched for by lots of heads of charities who get six figure salaries for patronising Africans.

In fact James Cook could find nothing at all worrying or controversial to write about Dame Ann Gloag. Her cupboard is apparently full of Christ like charity and zero skeletons.

Dame Ann has been charged with human trafficking. Now I am not an expert on media contempt of court, except that I am the only living person in Scotland ever to have gone to jail for it. But now that Dame Ann has actually been charged, is it really OK for James Cook to publish that:

“A source close to Dame Ann told the BBC that the family were “victims of collusion” and had endured “a Kafkaesque nightmare for the last two years.”

The source added: “Everybody is bewildered by these accusations and the level of this investigation.

“It is deeply ironic that Dame Ann actually funds an Eastern European charity called the Open Door Foundation whose job it is to stop the trafficking of poor women into sex crimes.

“She is very attuned to the real dangers that are going on in this world.

“This is bizarre. We are dealing with technicalities.

“There are countless people who are stepping forward to support Dame Ann from around the world.”

Is that not material likely to influence a jury? And if James Cook is allowed to publish this, am I allowed to say that my position on Dame Ann Gloag’s saintliness is one of extreme scepticism?

Do read James Cook’s piece. It really is quite astonishing hagiography of somebody with so much controversy in their past, now charged with a serious crime by Police Scotland.

It is astonishing hagiography even coming from Scotland’s smarmiest sycophant and stager of false incidents.

Incidentally, I do not mean to make too much of this next as it is probably simply a muddle arising from Cook’s inability to make coherent sentences, but I did a double take on this sentence in his piece.

I give you Dame Ann Gloag. Fit to stand alongside Baroness Michelle Mone as exemplars of titled Scottish businesswomen.

————————————————-

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The next morning I stayed in the Aparthotel writing, while Niels went out to the airport, to pick up the BMW 4×4 he had hired. Our destination was Halle an der Saale, near Leipzig. It was, I think, our first – and overdue – foray into the former East Germany.

Hotel rooms in Halle were thin on the ground and again very expensive. But as we were now hiring a vehicle, there was no need to be in the city centre, and for a change I booked us in to the Schloss Teutschenthal, a hotel about 8 miles outside the city.

At just 75 euros a night it was a fraction of the cost we had been paying, and given the choice I much prefer rural surroundings.

About 11.30am Niels phoned and reported a problem. He had been unable to collect the car. Neither the firm he had booked nor any of the others had availability.

He had argued long with the agent, who had explained to him that the agencies are franchises.  The brand name company itself is a separate entity and the online booking site is a third separate entity. Because the online site took your money did not mean there was a car in fact available. They frequently oversold.

At busy times like just before Christmas, cars were in very short supply. The railway lines were in crisis, which also increased demand. We were looking to hire in Bremen and drop off in Berlin five days later. But the Berlin drop off was to another company within the same franchise; each franchisee wanted their own vehicle back, they were not interchangeable. Arranging that at times of high demand was very difficult.

So, no car, and over 70 euros spent on a wasted taxi ride to the airport and back.  We had to dash to the railway station, and the itinerary for 7 December was 12.33 pm RE82022 Bremen to Hamburg, 14.04pm ICE1007 Hamburg to Halle (Saale) arriving 17.16pm.

Without a car, having booked in to Schloss Teutschenthal was a mistake, because it meant we would arrive in the city centre at 17.16, then have to get a taxi out to the Schloss to check in, then come back in again, while the event started at 18.00.

Our normal format was for me to do an introduction, then Ithaka would be screened, then Niels and I would take questions and lead discussion after the screening.

Today our trains ran to time, which was fortunate as we really needed them to. As we pulled in to Hamburg where we had to change, I observed an incident through the window of a carriage on the opposite side of the platform.

A stout Muslim lady, heavily swathed in grey hijab, was being escorted off the train by a female police officer. Two other police officers were waiting on the platform for her.

The Muslim lady had a child in a pushchair and another, about four years old, clinging to her skirts. Her pushchair was festooned with bags looped around the handles. None of the police were assisting her with children, pushchair or bags as she got off the train.

It was a small incident, but crystallised a sense of unease within me.

Germany is not a country at peace with itself. The closure of Dusseldorf Christmas market, the guard yelling at the young man with the wrong ticket, the aggressive begging everywhere, the man scouring the litter bins in the first class carriage for deposit bearing bottles, the heavy police presence on every station, the complete lack of surprise at the theft of my two laptops. You can add in to that the substantive dysfunction in the railway system.

I was just passing through everywhere, seeing nothing in depth.  But Germany did not feel as I expected it to feel – tolerant, efficient, prosperous and content. It felt like a society under real stress. No doubt I am reading too much into a succession of small incidents, and my mood was rattled by the loss of my laptops. But such was my sense.

Hamburg station was very crowded, and the first escalator we came to where we could change platforms was blocked off by police, for reasons that were not plain. We walked along to a further escalator, up which was a concourse with a row of shops.

Niels spotted a car hire agency and went in to speak to them, but again they had nothing available. So we got on the ICE to Halle, which went right through Berlin, and arrived there after darkness had fallen.

The taxi driver had never heard of Schloss Teutschenthal, and entered it dubiously into the satnav on his telephone, which he proceeded not to follow very often, as we headed out of Halle and on to unlit country roads.

It was a dark night and there were no other vehicles around. A surreal picture unfolded. We were surrounded on all sides by red lights in the air, like fields of magic giant poppies.

At first I thought we were amongst the airport landing lights, but there were too many of them, and they were the wrong colour – all the same deep red – and far too widespread.  As the car sped along and parallax took effect, I realised that, although on all sides, they were further away, and thus much larger, than I had realised.

The driver got hopelessly lost, largely because he kept deviating from his satnav route on lanes that he thought looked to be shortcuts, but kept turning away in the wrong direction.

We eventually arrived in Schloss Teutschenthal, checked in, left our baggage and dashed back to the car. We meandered back through the giant poppies, and then as we hit Halle heading to the cinema we again became lost, this time in the city itself. I noticed more than once we passed back the way we had come.

I do not think the driver was taking us for a ride, to increase the fare, I think he was lost. The atmosphere in the cab had become rather tense. Niels had texted the organisers who had put back the start time from 18.00 to 18.15, but when we were still not there at 18.20 it was decided to start the film and do the speaking afterwards.

Generally, this does not work well. If you get to speak before the film, you can convince the audience you are interesting and informative enough for it to be worth staying for the discussion afterwards. Otherwise they tend to rush for the door at the end of the film.

Niels and I were chatting to the taxi driver to defuse the tension in the cab, which was affecting the driver as well. He had switched the meter off. He came from Bosnia, and had only been driving the taxi a few weeks. He said apologetically that he knew Halle well but not places outside the city. We were too polite to point out his deficiencies in Halle itself.

The film having started, I have no idea why we felt the urge to arrive as soon as possible to make our apologies to the organisers, but we did. The cinema was in an imposing Gothic building at the top of quite a steep hill, which we dashed up as quick as we could.

Arriving breathless, we found a very pleasant young woman from Amnesty International, the organiser, standing outside the cinema. She was a little testy at our delay, exacerbated by the fact that Amnesty had booked and paid for a hotel for us in town, which message had not got through to us.

She asked, in a wondering rather than accusatory way, why it had still taken us another 20 minutes to arrive when Niels had said we were in a taxi 5 minutes away. I found myself explaining that the taxi driver had got lost repeatedly and that he was new to the city, having just arrived from Bosnia.

It just came out wrong. I realised immediately I must sound like some kind of horrible racist. I tried to disentangle, explaining that the problem was not that he was Bosnian but that he did not know Halle, but it was one of those situations where anything you say just sounds unconvincing and digs deeper.

I retreated to cover my confusion, saying (truthfully) that Niels and I had eaten nothing since breakfast and needed to find something before the speeches. We went down the hill again to a very good local restaurant.

I felt a bit better after a very good schnitzel and a few glasses of wine. It was possibly the only occasion I have been glad that Ithaka is almost two hours long.

Which is a good place to mention that even modern electronic copies of films have frames – it seems capturing motion still works the same way, a series of still images not a seamless whole, even without physical film.

The length in time of a film differs depending on the frame rate at which it is played, and the convention on this differs from country to country. Therefore Ithaka was about seven minutes shorter in Germany than in the UK.

At least, I think that is how Niels explained it.

There was a very good audience, notably with many young people and happily they fairly well all stayed for a very lively discussion. Niels spoke particularly well that night.

I had noticed that German audiences seemed to warm to Niels more readily than they did to me. I seemed to have a difficulty forming that empathetic connection with German audiences that is so essential to good public speaking.

Feeling the response of your audience, which presumably comes largely through a process of interpreting and aggregating signals of body language, and then adapting to it, is an ability I have prided myself on my entire adult life.

Any experienced political speaker will tell you there is an intuitive element – the emotional reaction of the audience communicates itself back to the speaker in a way that we do not always understand.

This is not just projection. When the audience is feeling intense personal sympathy towards Julian and his young family, or anger at the way he is treated, you pick that up as you face them.

I know it is not just projection of my own emotion onto the audience, because occasionally you pick up that you are failing to carry the audience’s feelings in the direction you wish. It is also not just visual, because my eyesight is awful.

When I speak to a Scottish audience about the clearances, and about the need for land reform today to return the land to the people, I feel this sentiment strongly reflected, emotionally, back to me from the audience. On other subjects, such as gender reform, I have felt emotional barriers come down and resentment of me from the audience, although nobody else is speaking but me.

It is intuition. I have found it best expressed in fiction by Isaac Asimov in the character “the Mule” in his Foundation trilogy.

You may, if you like, take this with a pinch of salt purely as an expression of the way I feel about audiences and public meetings, and just more evidence that Craig Murray is eccentric.

But the feeling I got back from our audiences in Germany was one of rather austere respect, as though I were at a remove, some exhibit generally acknowledged as valuable, rather than a warm human being with whom you might interact.

Niels on the other hand appeared effortlessly to be on the same wavelength as the German audiences, and they seemed to warm to him instinctively. His speaking style is much more intellectual than my own, but he also was very effective at conveying the pain of the family he witnessed while filming Ithaka, and the inhumane and degrading treatment of Julian in Belmarsh.

In Halle, Niels gave a simple description of the terror of Julian’s infant children at being subjected to internal oral inspection while visiting Belmarsh, and sniffed and pawed by Alsatians taller than them. He delivered it in a quiet voice and low tone, and it has stayed with me.

This photograph after the talks rather nicely captures Niels as the star of the show that evening.

I did however come away with a great deal of chocolate given me as presents. I am very easy to cheer up.

After chatting with activists and being photographed in an excellent reproduction of Julian’s Belmarsh cell, complete with authentic harsh prison soundtrack, we returned to the very comfortable Schloss Teutschenthal.

The hotel was completely dark and apparently deserted, so we went to our beds for an early night.

Daylight the next morning and I found that the Schloss reminded me very much of the von Trapp family home in the film of the Sound of Music.

We had breakfast in the magnificent dining room. We were the only guests in the hotel, although it was quite busy with staff preparing the ballroom for a banquet that evening. The hotel functions chiefly as a conference centre and wedding and events venue, though you can just check in as we did.

In that dining room in November 1943 the estate’s owner, Carl Wentzel, had hosted a grand dinner for leading German industrialists. The discussion centred on the urgent need to get rid of Adolf Hitler.

Wentzel went on to be actively involved in the Wolf’s Lair assassination plot of July 1944, and he was hung by the Nazi regime on December 20, 1944. Most, possibly all, of the participants in that November 1943 dinner were also executed around that time.

The hall was hung with a painting of Wentzel referencing his fate.

The estate and mansion, now hotel, is  back in the hands of the Wentzel family, having been in communist East Germany during the cold war period.

In Germany, restitution of lands confiscated by both Nazis and communists has been patchy post reunification, but seems to have been achieved in this case; presumably Carl Wentzel’s history helped the case.

In neighbouring Poland I had visited many such properties in the early 1990s, and there they had generally been turned into party rest and recreation centres or sanitoria during the communist period.

There were no accessible staff in Scholls Teutschenthal who spoke English, but it appeared to me this had been the case here too. Two large hostel blocks had been built in the grounds, by the look of them in the 1970s, and were now derelict.

In Poland in the early 90s there had been complete and full scale restitution to property owners, in those parts of the country which had been Polish pre-1939.

I supported this as part of my job in the British Embassy, but privately I viewed it as disastrous. Massive tracts of country were restored to the same hopeless and bickering aristocrats who had made Poland unviable for centuries.

The current elegant “Schloss” dates from about 1880 but the original medieval castle still stands in substantial ruins and looked fascinating, but was blocked off.  After a walk in the grounds with Niels after breakfast, I went to do some writing – I later learnt he had then climbed a wall into the old castle. I fear my wall-climbing days are behind me.

In taking a taxi back into Halle station in daylight, the mystery of the giant poppy lights was revealed.

We were in the middle of a vast wind turbine plantation, by a long way the largest I had seen in Germany. Each of the huge turbines was topped by a red warning light for aircraft. They were indeed much bigger and much further away than it had seemed in the dark, while the sails had been completely invisible – Niels’ picture near the top of this article conveys the illusion rather well.

We were now heading back into Berlin. Our itinerary for 8 December was 13.06 Halle ICE800, Berlin HBF 14.25.

As this was a short hop, I decided this was the moment to save a day on my Interrail pass and buy a ticket. Much to my surprise, it was 85 euros for a first class ticket. German trains are not cheap.

This train returned to the tradition of being very late, and it behaved oddly. It came into the station faster than you would expect, and seemed to have difficulty stopping, ending up much further down the platform than the marked positions indicated. It seemed to have difficulty stopping at subsequent stations too.

In Berlin we were staying at Viktor’s Residence, a very grand but slightly quirky establishment we had chosen as very close to the cinema. Our rooms had kitchenettes, but a notice sellotaped to a cupboard door stated that they were only equipped with cookware, crockery etc for guests who stayed over two weeks.

There was not so much as a kettle or cup. In fact, almost none of the hotels I stayed at in Germany provided kettles. They all had those little Nespresso machines or equivalents, which provide you with a thimbleful of lukewarm gunge.

Viktor’s Residence did not even provide one of these. Perhaps unless you were staying a fortnight.

The event that evening was in a venue with the intriguing name of “musikbrauerei”. The first challenge was finding it.

The hotel reception kindly gave me a map, together with an explanation that the musikbrauerei was not actually at the location marked, but on the next street. Google Maps had another idea completely.

When I arrived at the general area, in the back streets of some flats amongst some unlit commercial buildings, I could find nothing indicating the musikbrauerei and no signs for the event.

One building had some structured red uplighting which made it stand out, so I went there. I walked around it, but it appeared deserted. Just as I was about to about to leave, a basement door opened and a man walked to the top of the stairs to have a smoke. He confirmed it was the musikbrauerei and let me in through the basement door.

Once inside, a very large doorman was difficult to convince I did not have to pay. He was in a room with rows and rows of very industrial looking coat racks, all empty. I then was shown to a flight of stairs leading down from the basement into a series of chambers even further underground.

This was becoming surreal. The rooms were equipped for exactly the kind of strange party you see in films (at least that is the only reference I have). The bachelor party scene in Succession comes to mind.

It was a very strange and wonderful space. I could post a dozen photos, but these two give you the idea:

Well Toto, I said, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

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It was 2.30am in Bochum before Niels finished setting up his security and self destruct mechanisms on my new laptop, as we sat in my gloomy little box of a room in the Mercure Hotel.

About a decade ago, chain hotels universally abandoned the idea of a central bright light to illuminate a bedroom, in favour of scattered little lights at bedsides, desk and in an odd corner, all of which require separate switches to be tracked down, and each of which struggles to reveal objects within a two foot distance. They mostly act to accentuate the overall murk.

At least it led my colour changing keyboard to feature sharply, brightening my mood. When Niels had locked within a passworded box, within a passworded box, on a passworded Wikileaks server, somewhere inside an Icelandic volcano, the ages long password to the last of my programmes he was protecting, he finally got up with a Nordic huffy noise and went off to his own bedroom.

I then spent until about 6am going through all my accounts for signs of intrusion and sending warning emails to key contacts. It felt like I had just put my head down on the pillow when the door was ruthlessly banged and the telephone simultaneously shrilled, to tell me it was 11am and I should have checked out.

Bochum railway station was not a very welcoming place that morning. It was about minus 5 degrees, the snow was whipping into my face and I was regretting still more keenly the loss of my gloves.

At least we had a very simple trip that day, to Münster. The itinerary for 3 December was 12.42 RE89719 Bochum to Hamm, 13.20 RE89978 Hamm to Münster arriving at 13.47. It was to be our first day riding on regional trains in Germany.

Since we had started the tour, new dates had been continually added and rest days been wiped off, so that it seemed likely the 15 travel days on my interrail pass would not be enough. You cannot extend the pass. I considered saving a day by buying a ticket for this short journey, but decided my brain was too frazzled by events of the past 24 hours for any extra complication.

Niels had a solution. It is fair to say that my determination to do the journey to the continent and the whole tour by rail, to help save the planet, was regarded by others involved as somewhat eccentric. From the start, Niels had been looking up hire cars and lovingly showing me pictures of BMW or Mercedes SUVs and describing their comfort levels.

Freezing in the driven snow on Bochum station and watching the board announce ever increasing delays, it was impossible not to have a certain sympathy for this view.

It is time to say something about German station clocks, as I was spending so much of my life staring at them. Germany has magnificent analogue clocks in its railway stations, but they have a most peculiar mechanism.

The minute hand does not glide smoothly and continually. The second hand goes round until it reaches the top of the dial, at which point the minute hand clicks forward one notch.

But there is a correction involved. The second hand evidently travels slightly fast, so when it reaches the top it pauses and there are a couple of seconds when no hand is moving, until the minute hand jerks its notch and the second hand starts its journey again.

I am almost, but not quite, certain there is another peculiarity. The second hand appears to glide smoothly rather than jerk, but in fact pauses momentarily at every second mark before gliding on to the next one.

At first I thought this was an optical illusion caused by the black tip of the second hand becoming hard to discern as it passes in front of the black second mark on the dial, but after acute observation from a variety of angles I think this momentary pause is really happening.

I am not sure what is the purpose of this observation, other than to illustrate that Germany’s horribly unpunctual train service can drive you nuts.

As we waited on the platform, we were approached twice by beggars. This happened on almost every station. Niels commented that they were much more aggressive than in the UK.

This is true, not in the sense of threatening physical violence, but in the sense of intruding forcefully into your personal space and being unapologetic in their demands. It really was not very comfortable.

Anyway, eventually we had one of those hurried last moment platform changes and caught what was supposedly an earlier train than the one we were booked on, which was running over an hour late, but with no change needed for Münster.

This particular privatised train service was run by the UK bus company National Express. It was a double decker train, clean and comfortable. We did not bother to go upstairs to first class.

I was not paranoid about a third laptop getting stolen on the train in the slightest…

The journey was uneventful save for an incident where the guard was arguing with a passenger over his ticket.  The thin young man, who was wearing jeans and a hoodie, was thrusting his ticket forward towards the short, bull-necked guard who was refusing to look at it, alternating between shaking his head and yelling ferociously.

It was very noisy and the levels of anger on both sides seemed wildly disproportionate to the subject. I could not understand anything said, but even assuming the passenger was indeed trying to cheat on his fare, the level of aggression from the guard, who was attempting to corral the passenger against a door, was extraordinary.

In the end the passenger pushed past the guard and moved to the back of the short train. The guard seemed to be looking around for support, while the other passengers were pretending nothing was happening. I do not know how this confrontation eventually played out.

Stella was joining us again in Münster, having been lobbying in Berlin and elsewhere in the interim. It had been very difficult and very expensive to book hotel rooms in Münster. In fact, Stella, Niels and I were all in different hotels, as we could not find rooms together.

I was in the Mauritzhof hotel, another building of stunning ugliness on the outside. It looks like a fortified police station in a particularly incendiary area of a troubled city.

In fact the hotel was very warm and pleasant inside, with a big open fire in a cocktail bar with a wide range of malt whiskies, and particularly friendly and helpful staff.

By contrast Niels was in one of those self-catering places where you get in through a combination for a key safe and discover nothing is clean, nothing works and there is nobody to talk to for assisatance.

Stella was in the impressive sounding Kaiserhof hotel, which somehow managed to be even more expensive than the Mauritzhof, but which was staffed by people who all appeared not only to be on their first day working in a hotel, but to be entirely unbriefed on what a hotel is.

Niels and I had a late lunch at the cinema with our hosts, who included the university branch of Amnesty International, several of whom were students of public international law.

I was able to discuss with them the international law aspects of Julian’s case, and particularly the judgment in Julian’s case affirming that the UK is not bound in law by international agreements or treaties not incorporated into UK domestic law.

In Julian’s case, political extradition is specifically forbidden by Article 4 of the 2007 UK/US Extradition Treaty. However the courts have ruled that the Treaty has no effect in UK law as it has not been incorporated in UK domestic legislation.

The British courts argue that the Treaty depends for its force on the 2003 Extradition Act, which does not exclude political extradition. But the 2003 Act is an enabling act on which subsequent treaties depend. It does not dictate the provisions of those treaties and it most assuredly does not say those treaties may not exclude political extradition.

The argument is extraordinary that the extradition is only taking place at all under the UK/US Extradition Treaty, but that Article 4 of the Treaty is not operative – but all the other articles are.

The rest of the Treaty is no more incorporated in UK domestic law than Article 4 is. It is a nonsensical argument, tying knots of legal sophistry to justify the extradition.

What interested the German students even more than the individual instance was the extraordinary general claim that the UK is not bound by provisions of international law in treaties it has ratified.

The accepted procedure in international law is that there is a two stage process, signature and ratification, for accession to international treaties.

A treaty is signed by the governmment of a state, as a statement of agreement and intent. Only when all necessary approvals have been obtained – which generally means when the Treaty has been through approval by the legislature – is the ratification stage then completed.

The UK, however, ratifies agreements on Crown prerogative without its legislature having passed them as domestic law. It then argues that because of the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament, the ratification by the Crown does not bind the UK to abide by the provisions of the Treaty it has ratified.

This bizarre situation really is true. I am not making it up.

This is known by lawyers as a “dualist system” (“dishonest” being too straightforward a description) and is the subject of an immense academic literature – one of many possible starting points is here – and a large number of UK legal judgments.

That the UK government does not consider itself legally bound, not only by customary international law but even by treaties it has actually ratified, was astonishing to the German students.

I later received an email from one of them saying they had found it hard to believe, so had asked a lecturer who confirmed it for them.

The cinema seemed everything an independent cinema should be, with a really good slate of arthouse and documentary films and a quirky, very busy cafe bar full of interesting people. The next screenings were shown on an old railway departure board that clicked over noisily. In fact the cinema is part of a chain owning much more conventional multiplexes.

On the top shelf of the bar, high up amid some very obscure liqueurs, was a glass globe about twelve inches high with a glass looped valve on top, containing a startlingly clear liquid with an ultra violet tinge. We asked what it was, and the barman did not know, so we ordered two of those.

It was some kind of grappa, but extremely smooth, though highly potent as it burnt the back of your throat. It was immensely satisfying so we had another two. There was no label of any kind on the glass globe, which sat in an iron stand. Perhaps most strange of all was that the barman said he had been there two years and nobody had ever asked for it: it looked irresistible.

The large cinema was full for the screening, and Stella spoke passionately and well, particularly on the obscenity of sending Julian legally to a state which had tried to kidnap and assassinate him. It was a good, full audience and a lively discussion that left me feeling warm and useful. The gladhanding afterwards felt especially heartening all round.

We then went out into Münster and walked around the Christmas markets, which are particularly famous. We were told that a million visitors come to Münster for these markets, primarily from the Netherlands. This explains why a night in a hotel costs as much as a car.

While the fairy lights and wooden huts were again all very pretty, it still all boiled down to huts selling sausages and gluhwein. At every large church, crowds shuffled round the outside in a circuit, forming knots around the alcohol stalls which had long queues. We braved these a few times for gluhwein, which we all enjoyed.

St Lambert’s church tower is decorated with three cages, in which were hung the tortured corpses of the Anabaptist leaders after the revolution and siege of 1534/5.

When I was 14 years old I read with great relish Norman Cohn’s great book, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Cohn’s life work was to try to  understand the phenomenon of Nazism in the context of other historic movements that practised mass extermination in the name of ideology. His riveting account of the siege of Münster has stayed with me for half a century.

The great city walls of the siege were demolished and are now a promenade, the Church of St Lambert was substantially rebuilt in 1901 and again after World War II, and the dangling cages don’t look nearly old or crude enough, but still I was now there, on the spot I had visualised so clearly in my teens.

The Anabaptists preached equality of wealth as well as religious iconoclasm, and looked to divide the property of the very wealthy city of Münster with all who joined them. They practised ardent polygamy; sexual ecstasy was an important part of their revolution.

However they had no qualms about executing those who did not accept their adult baptism, and they did not care about the wild impracticability of most of their governance, as they believed the second coming of Christ to be literally imminent.

What is perhaps truly extraordinary is not just that the Anabaptists gained full control in Münster, but that they came close to doing so and held real influence in broad swathes of Northern Europe. It is important not to be seduced by their professed communism into overlooking the fact they were extremely violent, religious nutters.

The revolutionary millenarian wave that swept Europe in the early 1530s was the product of the usual famine and disease, but also fueled by the economic dislocation caused by emergent nationalisms disrupting the free trading of the Hanseatic network. I throw that in for you to draw your own modern parallels.

History is one long roll of ironies, one of which is that it was the genuine tolerance of Münster’s Catholic Prince Bishop Waldeck which had allowed Anabaptist doctrine to spread and made Münster an international haven for dissenters.  It was the same ex-tolerant Waldeck who later hung the Anabaptist leaders in those cages (or their originals) after their slow execution by red hot shears.

The whole is a fascinating story. I recommend Cohn’s book. I was told by the hotel that there was a German TV mini-series thirty years ago of the Münster uprising, starring a young Christoph Waltz.  I would love to see that. But for now it was good to walk through the holiday crowds in the snow and take in the town, imagining those events, in good company and with brandy-laced gluhwein.

The next day, Sunday 4 December, we left Münster for Dusseldorf on the 10.25 RE10212 which went direct. Again it was a two decker National Express local train and it was actually on time.

We went up to the very comfortable first class upper deck, where we were alone. The only incident of note occurred when a burly man came down the train, flicking something at each table with a metallic clang. Niels explained the man was opening the metal bin covers, on the lookout for discarded bottles which might have a deposit he could reclaim.

That seemed a lot of effort for little reward for a middle aged man. He made no attempt to disguise what he was doing, and presumably ought not have been in the first class carriage.  It led me to recalculate the odds of my laptops having been simply taken as opportunistic thefts on the train.

It is worth noting at this point that all the trains now had parties of men in vests marked “security”, patrolling up and down to ensure that everybody was wearing a face mask. Their general demeanour was not very friendly.

Stella would be leaving to fly back to London and her children, after the early evening screening in Dusseldorf. Niels and I were staying in the Stage 47 Hotel, which again was really delightful.

The hotel has been carved out of space from the adjoining theatre, and the reception is crammed into the narrow entrance corridor in a way that looks very unpromising indeed on first arrival. But the rooms are beautifully planned and all different, each one named after and containing a massive photographic portrait of, a star who has appeared in the theatre.

My room had the bed on a mezzanine level and loads of space, which was great but not designed for a man with bad eyesight likely to need to fumble his way down the tight spiral staircase from the mezzanine in the dark for a 3am pee, whilst not entirely sober.

The hotel was very much in a Turkish area. A Turkish travel agent was next door, a Turkish shop the other side, then a kebab shop, and there was a substantial looking Turkish restaurant just opposite. Leaving Stella’s suitcase in Niels’ room, we repaired to the Turkish restaurant for lunch.

They did not seem very pleased to see us. It was again very cold, and after some humming and hawing as to whether we could have a table at all, they seated us at the first empty one, right next to the front door.

We were constantly subjected to a vicious icy blast when the door opened, and a persistent very cold draught when it didn’t. Several times other tables emptied and we repeatedly asked if we might move, but were always waved back down.

The food was very good but the service terrible. I do not know whether this was because we seemed to be the only non-Turkish customers, but we all agreed we had the feeling of not being welcome. I have always found Turkish people extremely hospitable, so it seems strange.

I hurried back from lunch as at 2pm I was giving a Zoom talk from my hotel room to Alba International, on the subject of the way forward to Scottish Independence.

The background to this was the UK Supreme Court decision that the Scottish Parliament had no right to hold a referendum on Independence, which you may recall I had attended the Supreme Court to hear, the day before leaving on this European tour.

The discussion was also informed by the excellent work of Salvo, and of Sara Salyers in particular, in defining Scotland’s own historic constitution as an independent state and its continuing legal persistence.

I felt time and distance had given me a useful clarity in considering the Supreme Court decision and its consequences, and in brief, this is what I outlined.

The UK Supreme Court was quite right within the narrow confines of UK domestic law. Plainly the Union of England and Scotland is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act of 1998, and the Scottish Parliament could not hold a referendum on it in terms of that Act.

But UK domestic law is entirely irrelevant. The Kosovo Opinion of the International Court of Justice makes crystal clear that the domestic law of the state being seceded from, is not the determining factor as to whether a secession is illegal.

Whereas the reliance by the UK Supreme Court on the criteria of the Federal Court of Canada in the Quebec judgment, over fifty years old and superseded by the cold hard fact of over 23 non-colonial secessions since, is simply laughable.

But while the right of self-determination of peoples in international law is crucial in the case of Scotland, and while Scotland undoubtedly qualifies as a “people” because it is a long established historic nation with its own legal system, culture and institutions, there is one overwhelmingly important criterion for recognition grounded in pure realpolitik.

It was long accepted as the only criterion for recognition that a state had factual, practical control of its own territory. That position has become softened by more principled considerations since the second world war, but the actual control of the territory claimed remains the most important factor in gaining international recognition.

Why did Catalonia fail where Slovenia, Kosovo and the Baltic states succeeded?

Because realpolitik rules in practice, and the Slovenians, Balts and Kosovans had obtained actual control on the ground of the land they claimed. The Catalans had not.

Physical control is not a sufficient condition for recognition – see the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus – but in effect it is a necessary condition.

The UK Establishment will never agree to Scottish Independence. Scotland’s resources are far too valuable to them. Scotland has to declare Independence unilaterally, and take it.

It is no use doing this like Catalonia, where the Spanish civil guard and judiciary effectively wiped out the nascent state before it could breathe.

A Scottish government, whether arising from the Scottish Parliament or from another body, needs in declaring Independence to ensure it has practical control of Scotland.

That means that the organs of the state have to acknowledge the Scottish state. All taxes collected must go to Edinburgh, not to Westminster. The judiciary must apply Scottish laws and not Westminster ones, where they conflict, and specifically apply all new laws post the Declaration of Independence. The police must answer only to Scottish authorities. Ultimately so must the military stationed in Scotland.

At the time Independence is declared, immediate action must be taken to ensure all civil servants, judges, police and military take an oath of loyalty to the people of Scotland and its new government, and renounce any previous loyalty to Crown and to UK political institutions. Anybody refusing must be summarily dismissed from their positions.

We have the example of Catalonia before us. We also have the example of Egypt’s only ever democratically elected leader, President Morsi, who died horribly in jail after being overthrown by a CIA coup because he failed to take the elementary precaution of dismissing and imprisoning all the military regime’s corrupt judges. He should have learnt from Fritz Bauer.

Let us not make those mistakes.

Ultimately, it boils down to this.

1) Westminster will never agree to Scottish Independence.

2) Scotland therefore has no option but to declare Independence unilaterally.

3) Any independent state must be prepared to defend itself by physical force from foreign attack. So must a newly declared Independent Scotland.

4) All who refuse to serve an Independent Scotland must then be removed from all organs of the state.

5) Once an Independent Scotland has physical control of its territory and resources, international recognition will soon follow. Brexit has completely changed the political atmosphere with regard to the crucial attitude of the European Union to London’s government.

Not to mention that London’s government is an international laughing stock.

Interestingly enough, in the discussion that followed my talk, nobody fundamentally queried the radicalism of this approach. Most of the questions revolved around what I might call the determinism of Salvo’s approach.

To put this another way, no matter how many irregularities there might be in the 1689 Act of Settlement, no domestic or international court is going to annul it now. It is realpolitik again – no state exists whose form and institutions would survive re-examination of all their historic foundations under modern criteria.

I further clarified that while I support the notion of registering a Scottish liberation movement at the UN, it is going to take a lot of evidence of liberation struggle to achieve this. The notion which has somehow got abroad that it just needs 100,000 signatures, appears to me without foundation.

It was a really good 90 minutes discussion with excellent people, after which I had do dash to the cinema and turn my head back towards rescuing Julian.

The cinema had the interesting quirk that to get a big wide screen, the projector was separated from the hall by a number of corridors and offices, with glass windows that the picture passed through. This lent itself to a variety of interesting photos.

Stella was on excellent form.  In Dusseldorf she concentrated particularly on the extraterritorial jurisdiction the United States was claiming, in its effort to imprison an Australian journalist for acts of publishing, carried out entirely outside the United States.

Stella also expressed the relief we all felt that finally the Australian government was living up to its responsibilities and directly asking the United States to end the persecution of Julian Assange.

I was not on the best of form, and was perhaps a bit tired. But as usual there were inspiring activists on hand to give me a real boost afterwards. All over Germany, groups are out every weekend for Julian, demonstrating, manning stalls, collecting signatures and bearing witness to the truth.

After the meeting, Bibi gave us a lift back to the hotel, demonstrating in so doing that her definition of “a short walk to the car” was fundamentally different to my own. She then took Stella on to the airport.

I had a sudden and improbable rush of common sense, refusing Niels’ offer to go for a drink, in favour of an early night in my comfortable mezzanine bed.

The next day was a rest day, so we stayed again in Dusseldorf. Not only was it a day off, but the hotel did laundry – the first time since this adventure began!

In the morning I discovered that nobody sold gloves in a six block radius, except for a motorbike shop at astonishing cost, which I declined. I spent the rest of the day reading the Fritz Bauer biography.

About 4pm Niels called and we went out. The receptionist had recommended the winter market on Konigsallee, so we headed there.

We had walked a few metres when a great stream of fire engines and police vehicles came blaring past us. As we approached traffic lights, a number of ambulances came charging down from another direction and for a while there was a veritable traffic jam of emergency vehicles. The cacophony was awful.

New sirens continued to join in from all around us, apparently converging towards us. When we got to Konigsallee it was largely deserted. While the shops all remained open, all of the wooden Christmas market stalls were closed and the shoppers had disappeared.

We wandered around the empty stalls trying to work out what was happening, until policemen started yelling at us in a most threatening manner.

It appears there had been a phoned in terrorist threat of an attack on a Christmas stall, to which the police had overreacted by closing down all of the hundreds such stalls, placed on every shopping street and square in Dusseldorf, and calling out all the ambulances and fire appliances.

It was of course a hoax. It was also another example of my continually landing in unlikely drama on this trip. Niels, who had spent weeks photographing anything that moved, managed to capture almost nothing of the massive security presence closing down the Christmas market. He said he had previous experience that German police do not like cameras.

He did however manage to capture umpteen shots of me looking cold and miserable. My voluminous luggage was well prepared for the winter, except for a lack of boots. The streets were covered in ice and my leather-soled shoes felt distinctly insecure.

From Oxford Street to Princes Street, the UK’s flagship shopping streets have collapsed into tat and squalor, but Germany has maintained its high end shopping districts without apparent loss. So much so that the first shop I entered had no viable boots below 700 euros.

Round the corner I found a more practical shop and bought a pair of Skechers. This troubled me, as I recall my brother Stuart taunting my brother Neil that possessing Skechers was the first step on the road to adult diapers. They were however cheap, waterproof and had deep treads, so I got them and am now a convert.

While the shops had all stayed open, the restaurants appeared to have all been closed by the police alert and we went around for a while before we found a fancy burger restaurant, one of a franchise chain with a rustic, birch tree decor.

This seemed marginally better than starvation, so we ate a couple of burgers, which had a small nugget of meat drowned in various treatments of vegetable, from pickled, through mayonnaise-covered to caramelised, the whole shoved between vast mounds of bread.

The restaurant was very full indeed, being the only place open, and the excitement of the police closures gave the venue a vibrant buzz. We struck up a friendly chat with the manager, who was working the floor because it was unexpectedly busy.

We worked our way right through the cocktail menu and then had the Johnnie Walker Black Label brought down from a high top shelf. It was the worst fake Black Label I have tasted in decades, like cheap vodka with added Bovril, but  we drank it all anyway. We had a rollicking time. The drinks bill came to six times the food bill.

We both had horrible hangovers the next day, almost certainly from the fake Black Label. Fortunately we had the morning to recover, then it was up and off again, and our itinerary was 6 December ICE 714 Dusseldorf 13.33 to Bremen, arriving 16.15.

The train was comfortable and more or less on time, and I was able to write up some of the journey for my blog.

The large cinema was very full, I felt I spoke particularly well, and we had a good talk with activists afterwards. Bremen seemed a delightful city and the cinema was in a district surrounded by really good restaurants and bars.

Niels spoke particularly well. He outlined Julian’s vision of responsible, scientific journalism, where references would always be given with links to the original source material which should be made available to the public.

This of course had not happened, and even as mainstream media had been forced to move largely online, they had not taken the opportunity this offered to present the public with links to the actual source materials their journalists were discussing. This level of transparency was expected of bloggers but largely eschewed by the media, despite all their resources.

It was a good point and well put over. It is continually important to think of the work Julian can take forward on his release from jail, not only to think of him as a victim or a symbol.

This was one of the first meetings where the audience had required sequential translation into German. It is always very difficult, given the need to split up your argument into short cadences for translation. But it did not seem to spoil the evening or the enjoyment and interest of the large audience.

We had booked in Bremen into the Aparthotel Adagio. I was by now fairly sick of restaurant food, and wanted to be able to cook myself something very plain and simple. I called in to a local supermarket and was able to make myself a basic tomato and bacon sauce to eat with spaghetti and a baguette. It felt like a great relief.

One thing I liked about Germany was that the ambient soundtrack was much more to my taste than I generally heard in the UK. The taxi taking us to the cinema was playing Bachmann Turner Overdrive. The taxi taking us back was playing Fleetwood Mac. The supermarket where I bought the spaghetti was playing Supertramp. None of which was very German.

I had finally relented. The next day we were off to Halle, which was a complicated journey by rail but simple by road, so I had caved in and agreed Niels could finally get his hire car.

As I drifted off to sleep I was sure I could hear him making vroom! vroom! noises in the distance.

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