Julian Assange was released in the midst of the election campaign and the event was not really given the attention it deserves. Alex Salmond invited me to take a look back with him on what this persecution means and where we are now.
I do recommend that you subscribe to Alex’s show Scotland Speaks. He is a fascinating and, in my view, admirable man whose public image is massively distorted by the mainstream media. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the range of topics he tackles and his approach to them, as well as his breadth of intellect.
I also had the opportunity on Consortium News to discuss at length the ramifications of the arrest of Richard Medhurst, in the context of the general attack on dissident journalism and particularly the widespread abuse of anti-terrorist powers against journalists.
Richard and I were meant to appear together, but unfortunately he was delayed due to technical difficulties caused by the police confiscating all of his equipment. But he was able to be interviewed shortly after I left (I have not been able to watch this myself yet at time of posting).
Our freedoms are disappearing all over the western world, and the panic of the political class as they lose control of the narrative over Gaza has accelerated this.
What we always feared is here, now.
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We were waiting for Richard Medhurst to arrive and join our panel at the Beautiful Days festival, when he was arrested and imprisoned for 23.5 hours. Obviously we were all worried sick about him.
I was arrested at Heathrow Airport under the Terrorism Act, Sec 12 because of my reporting.
6 police officers were waiting for me at the entrance of the aircraft.
It is now becoming easier to list the truly dissident UK journalists who have not been arrested for terrorism than those who have! This fascist ploy of labelling journalists as terrorists is incredible.
Richard’s case is slightly different to that of other journalists including myself, John Laughland, Vanessa Beeley, Johanna Ross, Kit Klarenberg and many more to suffer the same treatment, in that Richard was specifically held under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act – which outlaws support for a proscribed organisation.
Yes, you are reading that right. You can go to jail for 14 years for expressing an opinion in support of a proscribed organisation.
We now have an extraordinary conflict between UK domestic law and international law.
The International Court of Justice has just last month stated definitively to the UN General Assembly that the Israeli occupation is illegal and it is the duty of states not to support it.
279. Moreover, the Court considers that, in view of the character and importance of the rights and obligations involved, all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It is for all States, while respecting the Charter of the United Nations and international law, to ensure that any impediment resulting from the illegal presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the exercise of the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end. In addition, all the States parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention have the obligation, while respecting the Charter of the United Nations and international law, to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law as embodied in that Convention.
Yet it is perfectly legal in UK domestic law for zionists to state that they support the Israeli Defence Force and they hope that the IDF kill every Palestinian in Gaza.
Indeed zionists state this all the time, supporting an action that is entirely illegal in international law, and no action is ever taken against these zionists by the UK state.
Members of the IDF who have actually participated in the genocide are able to come and live in the UK unmolested.
In stark contrast to the illegal acts of the occupying power, the Palestinian people do have the right of armed resistance in international law.
This right is founded on the right of self-determination in the UN Charter and is encapsulated in the First Protocol of the Geneva Convention (1977) Article 1 Para 4:
The situations referred to in the preceding paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
Yet under UK law it is legal to express support for the completely illegal operations of the IDF (illegal even without considering the question of Genocide!) while it is illegal to express support for completely legal acts of resistance by certain Palestinian groups.
Let me spell this out again.
It is legal in UK law to support Israel’s genocidal and illegal acts of colonial occupation, but illegal in UK law to support Palestine’s legal acts of armed resistance to colonial and racist occupation.
The Protocol to the Geneva Convention makes clear that those engaged in armed resistance against occupation are both entitled to the same humanitarian protections, and obliged to respect the same humanitarian law, as other combatants.
There is a fascinating twist here from the days when Robin Cook was Foreign Secretary and I was Deputy Head of the FCO Africa Department. In 1998 the First Protocol of the Geneva Convention was incorporated into UK law, and the United Kingdom made a very telling reservation.
British law stipulates that the First Protocol’s recognition that a person not wearing uniform may still be a lawful combatant, and entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Convention provided he carries his arms openly, applies only in occupied territory or when engaged in fighting colonial or racist occupation.
It is the understanding of the United Kingdom that:
the situation in the second sentence of paragraph 3 can only exist in occupied territory or in armed conflicts covered by paragraph 4 of Article 1;
… which means that this provision of the First Protocol:
Recognizing, however, that there are situations in armed conflicts where, owing to the nature of the hostilities an armed combatant cannot so distinguish himself, he shall retain his status as a combatant, provided that, in such situations, he carries his arms openly:
(a) During each military engagement, and
(b) During such time as he is visible to the adversary while he is engaged in a military deployment preceding the launching of an attack in which he is to participate.
Acts which comply with the requirements of this paragraph shall not be considered as perfidious within the meaning of Article 37, paragraph 1 (c).
… only applies in UK law where:
The situations referred to in the preceding paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
So, and it is absolutely important this is understood, the right to fight against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes is not only an absolute right in international law, it is also a specific right in UK law.
And UK law further specifically recognises that when fighting colonial domination, alien occupation and a racist regime you do not have to wear uniform.
Applying this to 7 October, it means that those armed Palestinian combatants who were not members of a proscribed organisation (see below) were engaged in legal armed struggle in terms of UK law, provided they respected international humanitarian law in so doing.
Which makes the recent clarifications that the majority of civilian casualties were killed by the IDF and that the mass rapes and beheaded babies stories were a total fabrication, still more important.
Every colonial or racist power that has ever faced armed resistance has always characterised the native peoples resisting as “terrorists”, “savages” or similar. Asymmetric warfare is by nature unconventional. The systematic and often legalised atrocities of the coloniser will indeed often spark uncontrolled acts of rage that rightly fall outside what international humanitarian law will condone.
So we now have the situation that Richard Medhurst is arrested for allegedly supporting armed resistance that is not only undeniably legal in international law but is also specifically legal in British law.
The source of this conundrum is the extraordinarily arbitrary power of proscribing an organisation.
Now to proscribe an organisation the government does not have to prove its actions were illegal, either under international law or UK law. An organisation is proscribed simply on the basis that the government says so.
If the government proscribed the Girl Guides, you could get up to 14 years in jail for expressing support for the Girl Guides, and no amount of argument in court that the Girl Guides is not in fact a terrorist organisation would help you.
Hamas and Hezbollah are acting legally in UK law in terms of the Geneva Convention First Protocol Order of 1998, but expressing support for them is nevertheless illegal because the proscription of an organisation is an entirely arbitrary power of the executive.
When I ran the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s South Africa (Political) Desk in 1985, it was the firm position of the Thatcher Government that the ANC was a terrorist organisation and that Nelson Mandela was rightly and correctly imprisoned as a terrorist.
The notion that governments can fairly and impartially designate “terrorists” is very obviously nuts.
It is important to add that this analysis of the legal position in no way implies that I do, or do not, approve of Hamas or Hezbollah. In general I am not in favour of mixing the state and religion, so I come from a very different place and have my criticisms.
But it is also important not to be scared to state that the proscription of Hamas as a terrorist organisation does not align with the UK legal position in the First Protocol Order that specifically recognises the right of an occupied people to armed resistance.
It also causes great confusion. It is, for example, only the military wing of Hamas that is a proscribed organisation. So far as I can tell, it would not be illegal to state that Hamas did a very good job of running Gaza’s schools and hospitals.
But it is very difficult to be sure – the law and its application are arbitrary and not foreseeable.
When I stood for election in Blackburn, I had the specific endorsement of the Palestinian Foreign Ministry which had been engaged with the South African delegation in the ICJ Genocide case against Israel at the Hague.
I was then also (unsolicited) offered the endorsement of Hamas. This caused some head-scratching and I consulted an eminent lawyer. He advised that while it would be illegal for me to endorse Hamas, it would not be illegal for Hamas to endorse me.
Particularly so if it came from the political and not the military wing.
I thought this sounded great fun, but perhaps not great enough fun for me to spend several years of my life fighting the case from inside a prison cell. So I did not take up the offer.
Any law which states you can be jailed for fourteen years simply for expressing an opinion is a very bad law, no matter what that opinion may be.
To use such arbitrary power to seek to silence those who are opposing a most dreadful genocide, is the action of an over-mighty state led by evil people.
I think it is most important that we are not silenced. Hence this article. Most of my friends are advising me I should travel abroad for a while once again, and I am trying to make up my mind about this. I should be grateful for your views.
The UK is plainly not a safe place for political dissidents.
The reason for this galloping authoritarianism is of course panic by the political class that they have lost popular consent, particularly for zionism in view of the appalling genocide in plain view by the terrorist settler state.
To conclude on an optimistic note, here is a photo of the gathering that Richard was prevented from joining. It brought together at Beautiful Days a few of the wonderful people who will not be silenced, and who will be remembered as being on the right side of history.
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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
The purpose of Scottish Independence is not to replicate the UK state on a smaller scale with a prettier flag. The purpose is to eschew the imperialist past, stop invading other countries, and build a fairer and more equal society both domestically and internationally.
I thank God I was alive and campaigning in 2014 when for a joyous few months a better world seemed within our grasp; genuine transformational change to a better society was almost tangible, we only had to reach for it.
In all the speeches I gave in that campaign, I concentrated on international relations, because others were covering domestic policy comprehensively and brilliantly, and because Independence at essence is a factor of international relations: it is the standing of a state in relation to other states.
The more radical vision I proposed was well received everywhere. I spoke of a Scotland without enemies, without nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers, with genuinely defensive defence forces, not part of the organised aggression that is NATO.
I remember Glasgow Green erupting in cheers when I quoted James Connolly to a huge crowd:
When it is said that we ought to unite to protect our shores against the ‘foreign enemy’, I confess to be unable to follow that line of reasoning, as I know of no foreign enemy of this country except the British Government
I should add that having then addressed grassroots meetings of every conceivable size over months, on pavements, in meeting rooms and church halls or on stages in parks, not a single person ever turned round and said to me “Oh no, I think we should stay in NATO” or “I think Trident is essential”.
Well, we lost the Independence referendum, though it was far closer than anybody had imagined a year previously. The energies of the Independence movement were all diverted into the institutional structure of the SNP, which became temporarily dominant in Scotland.
But there all the energy and enthusiasm, all of that idealism, was dissipated by the leadership of a political class who turned out to be just the same as the political class at Westminster. Corrupt, greedy, self-serving and desperate for “respectability” and their role within the UK Establishment.
This has been brutally hammered home this week by Angus Robertson, the Scottish Government’s external affairs and culture minister, meeting the Israeli Deputy Ambassador to the UK in the midst of the current accelerated phase of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
Thank you @AngusRobertson for welcoming us to wonderful Scotland.
Discussed the unique commonalities between 🇮🇱-🏴 and also emphasized the urgent need to bring back our 115 hostages.
Looking forward to cooperating in the fields of technology, culture and renewable energy. pic.twitter.com/sh2KeqRa9j
A Scottish Government spokesman confirmed that areas of mutual cooperation had been discussed before John Swinney, alarmed at the criticism from the membership, dribbled out a statement to say it was “essential” to meet the Israeli diplomat to “call for a ceasefire”.
The Scottish government spokesperson’s account aligned with Israel’s account:
The spokesperson said: “They discussed areas of mutual interest, including culture, renewable energy and engaging the country’s respective diasporas.
In 1985 my first big job in the FCO was running the South Africa (political) desk during apartheid there and while Thatcher was Prime Minister. As the US and UK stood alone against international calls to sanction and boycott South Africa, the Thatcher line was that contact was essential to promote reform.
The contact was of course in fact pretty well devoid of any advocacy of reform, other than a hurried mention so civil servants could say it had been raised. Instead, it was all about making money from apartheid.
Forty years on the SNP is pulling the same stunt as the Tories did over apartheid South Africa . As the ever brilliant Robin McAlpine put it:
Let me be really, really blunt; if calling for an end to genocide is only one item on your agenda for a meeting, you’re an appalling human. ‘Please stop killing Palestinian babies, oh, and would you like a Scotwind contract and an invitation to the Edinburgh Festival’? Fuck right off.
Swinney and Robertson are of course long term Zionists, as is almost the entire UK political class (and mark my words, there are few members of the British political class with their feet more firmly under the UK political structures table than Swinney and Robertson). Indeed, as I have previously explained, Zionism is a necessary badge of entry to the UK political class.
Here is Robertson with former Israeli government spokesman and Israeli Ambassador to the UK Mark Regev:
And here Robertson is with Israeli President Herzog, who was quoted directly by the International Court of Justice as giving an example of genocidal speech which was among the markers that justified their finding of a case to answer on genocide. Herzog also has signed bombs ready to drop on Gaza.
All of this begs the question, what other undisclosed meetings and contacts have @theSNP@scotgov been having with Israeli officials that weren't inadvertently revealed by Zionist representatives?
Note Kirsten Oswald front left, Nicola Sturgeon’s close political ally. These last photos were taken before last year, but Israel’s illegal and genocidal actions have been in train for 76 years, not just 10 months.
First Minister John Swinney has a terrible record of collaboration with Israel.
Eden Springs was an Israeli settler owned water company, bottling water from the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights. They opened a subsidiary company in Scotland which was the subject of much controversy a decade ago, with a huge and successful boycott movement, especially among students.
As Scottish Minister for Trade and Industry, Swinney actually gave Eden Springs £200,000 of Scottish government money to help them overcome the effects of the boycott.
Before that, as SPSC reported in 2012, John Swinney made a rare foray into the BDS arena: A subsidiary of Eden Springs, an Israeli water bottling company operating in Britain “turned successfully for help from the Scottish Government to deal with what the Israeli company called ‘a wave of protests…that is threatening the future of Eden Springs UK’”.
On January 5th 2010, a meeting took place between Eden Springs’ UK Managing Director Jean-Marc Bolinger and Scottish Minister John Swinney. The Scottish Government the following year gave £200,000 of Scottish taxpayers’ money to Eden Springs, some of which will end up as profits in Israel, taxed there and freeing up state funds for military aggression and further dispossession of the Palestinian people.
So, to use the modern phrase, Swinney and Robertson’s Zionism is a feature not a glitch. The SNP is just like the other parties in being led by career politicians for whom Zionism is an essential belief for admission to the UK Establishment.
This episode has served to highlight the difference between the continued aspiration of the Scottish people for a better state, in which foreign relations are conducted on ethical grounds, and the actual SNP political class who have precisely the same cynical and transactional approach to politics as their UK peers – they see it essentially as a tool to make a fat living.
The key point is of course that everybody cares about Gaza because of the immediacy with which we can see the devastating genocide on our mobile devices. The political and media classes cannot gaslight us that it is not happening.
Ordinary people look at creatures like Robertson with horror. Swinney is counting on the summer holidays and the traditional extreme deference of the SNP membership to enable him to ride out this storm.
Despite the best effort of the traitors to Independence who run the SNP, the extraordinary thing is that the dream has not died. Support for Independence has not fallen even as the SNP itself has dwindled to a despised rump of its former representation.
A huge well of support remains for anyone who can invoke again the spirit of 2014.
We are not far off that day. As come it will for a’ that.
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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
In Murder in Samarkand I describe how as a British Ambassador, when I discovered the full extent of our complicity in torture in the War on Terror, I thought it must be a rogue operation and all I had to do was make ministers and senior officials aware and they would stop it.
When I was reprimanded and officially told that receipt of intelligence from torture in the “War on Terror” was approved from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary down, and it became clear to me that there was a deliberate promoting of false intelligence narratives through torture which exaggerated the Al Qaida threat to justify military policy in Afghanistan and Central Asia, my worldview was severely shaken.
Somehow I mentally compartmentalised this as an aberration, due to overreaction to 9/11 and the unique narcissism and viciousness of Tony Blair. I did not lose faith in western democracy or the notion that the western powers, on the whole, were a positive force when contrasted with other powers.
It is a hard thing to lose the entire belief system in which you were brought up – probably particularly hard if like me, you had a very happy life right from childhood and were highly successful within the terms of the governmental system.
I have however now finally shed the last of my illusions and I am obliged to acknowledge that the system of which I am a part – call it “the West”, “liberal democracy”, “capitalism”, “neo-liberalism”, “neo-conservatism”, “Imperialism”, “the New World Order” – call it what you will in fact, it is a force for evil.
Gaza has been an important catalyst. I am not lacking in empathy, but my knowledge of the horrid butchery by the Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya was an intellectual knowledge, not a lived experience.
Sirte, Libya, after Nato “liberation”.
Technology has brought us the Gaza genocide – which has so far killed fewer people than any of those earlier NATO member perpetrated massacres – in gut wrenching detail. I have just been looking at 75kg bags of mixed human meat handed over to relatives in lieu of an identifiable corpse, and am in shock.
That is not the worst we have seen in Gaza.
If only the people of Mosul and Fallujah had had modern mobile phone technology, what horrors we would know.
Incidentally, I tried to find you some images of the massive US destruction of Mosul and Fallujah in 2002‒4 and Google won’t give me any. It will, however, offer thousands of images from fighting there with ISIL in 2017. Which rather underlines my point about the extraordinary lack of imagery of the Second Iraq War.
Of the current genocide in Gaza, again I found myself naively thinking at some point this will stop. That Western politicians would not in fact countenance the total destruction of Gaza. That there would be a limit to the number of Palestinian civilian deaths they could accept, the number of UN facilities, schools and hospitals destroyed, the number of little children torn into shreds.
I thought that at some stage human decency must outweigh Zionist lobby cash.
But I was wrong.
The Ukrainian attack into Kursk also has a profound emotional resonance. The Battle of Kursk was arguably the most important blow struck against Nazi Germany, the largest tank battle in the history of the world by a wide margin.
The Ukrainian government has destroyed all the monuments to the Red Army which achieved this, and denigrates the Ukrainians who fought against fascism. By contrast, it honours the very substantial Ukrainian components of the Nazi forces, including but not limited to, the Galician Division and their leaders.
Kursk is therefore a place of great symbolism for Ukraine to attack now into Russia, including with German artillery and armour.
German politicians seem to have an atavistic urge to attack Russia, and support the genocide of Palestinians to an astonishing degree.
Germany has effectively ended all freedom of speech on Palestine, banning conferences of distinguished speakers and making pro-Palestinian speech illegal. Germany has intervened on Israel’s side in the genocide case before the ICJ, and intervened at the ICC to object to an arrest warrant against Netanyahu.
I do not know how many civilian dead would assuage German lust for the expiatory blood of Palestinians. 500,000? 1 Million? 2 Million?
Or perhaps 6 Million?
The West are not the good guys. Our so-called “democratic systems” give us no ability to vote for anybody who may get into power who does not support the genocide and imperialist foreign policy.
It is not an accident and it is not genius that makes a man-child like Elon Musk worth 100 billion dollars. The power structures of society are deliberately designed by those with wealth to promote massive concentration of wealth in favour of those who already have it, exploiting and disempowering the rest of society.
The rise of the multi-billionaires is not a fluke. It is a plan, and the misallocation of more than adequate resources is the cause of poverty. The attempt to shift blame onto the desperate constituents of waves of immigration forced into life by Western destruction of foreign countries, is also systematic.
There is no longer any free space for dissent in the media to oppose any of this.
We are the Bad Guys. We resist our own governing systems, or we are complicit.
In the United Kingdom it falls to the Celtic nations to try to break up the state which is a subordinate but important imperialist engine. The paths of resistance are various, depending where you are.
But find one and take one.
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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
I cannot think of a period in my lifetime when so much was happening in the world so quickly with which it feels that, as a reluctant UK citizen, I have a direct connection and indeed responsibility.
Race riots in the UK, the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on civil liberty and decline in effective democracy across the western world, the ever darkening reach of mass surveillance, including of the individual’s use of currency; those are just a few of the issues in play and the links between all of them are intimate and inextricable.
I do not believe that the race riots have been fomented in order to provide an excuse to crack down further on civil liberties. But that Starmer – whom I suspect will prove to be the most authoritarian Prime Minister in British history – is seizing on them for that prupose is undeniable.
In particular the announcement that the already deeply worrying Online Safety Act will be amended, to give the state still greater power over information sources like the one which you are currently reading, could signal a massive blow to internet freedom.
Publication of “misinformation” is to be criminalised – which means the official narrative will be enforced on social media.
Given that, for example, the government has relentlessly promoted the demonstrably false stories of mass rape by Palestinians on October 7, while studiously failing to notice the vast amount of unquestionable evidence in the last fortnight of systematic rape of Palestinian prisoners on a vast scale by the Israeli Defence Force, no reasonable person can fail to understand the danger of the enforcement of state-approved “truth”.
Articles like my dissection of the state narrative on the Skripals look set to be deemed a threat to the “online safety” of the nation. Alternative narratives over Covid, over 9/11, over the death of David Kelly – any deviation from the official line is liable to be deemed criminal.
Meanwhile, with “two-tier justice” being the latest right wing mantra, we find that race rioters who set fires in inhabited buildings and threw rocks at policemen, in fact get lighter sentences than environmentalists involved in planning non-violent actions.
Predictably, we are already seeing the unrest used as a justification for increased usage of facial recognition technology. 24/7 state surveillance of the individual is no longer a wild dystopian fear.
Looking further afield, the narrative is moved on by the claims that an ISIS-linked terrorist in Austria planned to attack a Taylor Swift concert. This plays nicely into the Taylor Swift theme of the dance class where the girls were horribly murdered in Southport, and reinvigorates the flagging wave of Islamophobia.
Given that ISIS cooperates closely with both Israel and the CIA and has avoided attacking Israel or western targets, while I still can without being locked up may I express my scepticism at this item of news management.
Islamophobia is of course an important link between events here and in the Middle East. While there is of course a small Palestinian Christian minority, there is no doubt that hatred of Muslims is a large driver in the Israeli dehumanisation of Palestinians that paves the psychological grounds for genocide, mass rape and torture.
Here Israel is just acting as the Western colonial enterprise that it is. As the West has sought to seize the physical resources of the Middle East – the hydrocarbons of Iraq, Syria and Libya and the lands of the Palestinians – the deliberate promulgation of Islamophobia at home has driven public support for these ventures, though that public support is thankfully a dwindling commodity.
After decades of being fed nonsense about a war of civilisations and the dangers of Islamic terrorism, whipping up anti-immigrant mobs has not been difficult. It does not require too deep an analysis of the nexus of Islamophobia and wider racism to understand that.
But it is also true that Zionist interests have been extremely keen to stoke this unrest, as a counter-narrative to the mass popular support for Palestine which the genocide has engendered among western populations.
What’s causing the Islamophobic riots across the UK, and why now?
1. The riots have been instigated by the Zionist asset Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), who has been working for the State of Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called ‘counterjihad’ Islamophobia…
It is also well worth reading this thread from Lowkey
Tommy Robinson has previously stated he would “fight for Israel in a war.”
This thread examines Robinson and EDL’s very clear material relationship with the Zionist Movement and considers the possibility that the racist attacks and pogroms in Britain are part of that fight.
It is also of course impossible to ignore the role of born-again Zionist Elon Musk and his cohort in whipping up the Islamophobic and racist narrative.
These people, of course, always support free movement for themselves. Elon Musk is in fact an immigrant from Africa, whereas “Tommy Robinson” is an immigrant in Spain.
Predictably the state has countered with the anti-semitism narrative, and rather hilariously they have yet again brought out the utterly ludicrous claims of the “Community Security Trust” of an increase in “anti-semitic incidents”.
This time the Trust are claiming a 210% increase in anti-semitic incidents, which is quite modest by their standards. I have pointed out again and again that any journalist with a Maths O-level would have been able to work out that their claims of increases in attacks between 45% and 300% every year for twenty years simply cannot be true or there would now be many hundreds of thousands of attacks on Jewish people per year and thankfully that is plainly untrue.
Every single year since 2005 the Community Security Trust has claimed an increase in anti-semitic incidents of between 42% and 300%. “Journalists” like Peston always retail this.
If true there would now be at least 36,000 violent anti-semitic attacks a year.
Average number of… https://t.co/Tf3Mx7mBj0pic.twitter.com/bQbjITXgOg
I suppose if the lie works as propaganda, they simply stick with it. But there could hardly be a starker illustration of the pathetic enslavement of mainstream media journalists that nobody ever queries these plainly impossible claims.
It is also worth noting that as the CST – which gets £12 million a year from the Home Office – construes references to “apartheid Israel” as anti-semitic incidents, then the ICJ Opinion on the Occupied Territories would count as an anti-semitic incident by these Home Office sponsored standards!
Finally, while the racist tide appears to be receding, I commend everybody who got out there to counter-protest. It is extremely dangerous to allow fascists the run of the streets and we must remain both nimble and active.
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Please check if your subscription is still active. There is in fact no way to reactivate – you have to make a new subscription with a new card if your card expired.
The bank standing order method works very well for those who do not want to use Paypal.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
The people of Blackburn scored a vital victory today against the forces of fascism as “Tommy Robinson”‘s overweight racist disciples were met with an overwhelming show of solidarity in the street, of which I was proud with my friends to be a part.
The fascists like to attack defenceless targets. Faced with the prospect of real resistance, they ran away.
Poor little Tommy is not happy in his Spanish hideaway, where he lives his life as an immigrant.
Blackburn should be a model of how to face down the fascists.
Yesterday I received a phone call from a police Inspector asking me to delete my tweet calling for people to assemble to prevent the far-right demonstration called for Blackburn today and tweeted out by “Tommy Robinson”, the well-known immigrant to Spain with the false name.
She also asked me not to come to Blackburn myself, and said that members of the community had contacted her and said I was an outsider coming to Blackburn to make trouble.
I am therefore on a train to Blackburn, a place where a number of people have been telling me to leave for weeks, but I genuinely can’t walk down the street without being warmly greeted by name by random locals.
Although our conversation was perfectly friendly and I have no complaints about the police Inspector, who seemed to accept that her telling me not to come was unlikely to work, I do rather object to the police telling me what to do.
There are a number of interesting questions raised by this. There is a wave of anti-immigrant far-right violence spreading across the North of England – Sunderland, Southport, Hartlepool and elsewhere – and recently London saw the largest fascist demonstration for many years.
The horrific murders of the poor little girls in Southport at a dance class have been seized on by the far right to foment anti-immigrant violence. This is such a well-established pattern now across the country that it is impossible to deny.
And yet the police inspector who phoned me did deny it. She told me to be aware that three little girls had died and this was about commemorating them. I replied it was not about that at all; it was about stirring up racial hatred against a community who had no connection at all to the murder.
Blackburn’s newly elected independent MP, Adnan Hussain, has also issued a call to people not to gather to oppose any far-right demonstration today. I believe this is mistaken. The wave of fascist violence across the country has gathered momentum precisely because it breeds copycat activity. Fascism has to be confronted and stopped.
That is not just a matter of explaining that poverty and deprivation is not caused by immigration but by an economic system designed to produce massive inequality of wealth. Fascism has also to be nipped in the bud by denying them control of the street. That is what we achieved with the Anti-Nazi League 40-odd years ago.
If you do not confront fascism and defeat it, it will grow.
How does this stand with my strong commitment to free speech?
In On Liberty, the great John Stuart Mill argued that to state that corn merchants are thieves and profiteers who starve the poor was perfectly valid. But to shout the same thing to a howling mob outside a corn merchant’s house was not valid freedom of speech.
It is not just the words, it is their context. This is a crucial insight (and it also carries a pro-freedom of speech weight against the sledgehammer of hate speech legislation which denies the importance of context and seeks to condemn simple forms of speech).
And I have no doubt at all that as for the likes of “Tommy Robinson” to be encouraging anti-immigrant speech in the highly ethnically diverse town of Blackburn, in the context of widespread anti-immigrant violence, this fits perfectly with Mill’s exception to free speech in the case of the mob and the corn merchant.
I hope all goes quietly and my journey is quite unnecessary. There are multiple far-right demonstrations today and perhaps this will not be one of those that gets nasty. But I shall be there ready to profess my truth and my opposition to fascism if called for.
Allowing fascists to speak and sitting mute ourselves – or being prevented from speaking by the police – is completely the wrong prescription.
I very much hope I don’t get arrested because I have to dash back to speak at the Free Palestine Film Festival this evening, Genesis Cinema, Mile End Road, London. Yesterday’s opening night was great and I will blog about it when life is less fraught. There may still be tickets for tonight – phone the cinema to check.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
It is no longer possible to categorise the nihilistic violence of the Israeli state. It appears to have no objective other than violence and an urge for desolation.
In 24 hours Israel has murdered the man with whom it would need to negotiate hostage release in the short term and political settlement in the long term, and a key figure in its most dangerous potential military enemy which has refrained from full-on war.
In doing so it has violated the territory, indeed the capitals, of two crucial regional states.
Israel has also taken a policy decision that the mass rape of detainees by soldiers – and, somewhat strangely, homosexual rape in particular – is acceptable in war and not to be punished.
Ironically Israel has also underlined its genocidal intent in Gaza by proving that it has the technical ability to carry out targeted attacks, and that the flattening of entire cities with 2,000lb bombs and the massacre of tens of thousands of innocents has been a policy choice.
The western media appears paralysed by this. I have seen virtually no serious comment or analysis. Nor has anybody pointed out the contrast between Israel’s lies about mass rape on October 7 and Israel’s now-admitted policy of tolerating rape of detainees.
The political class seems even more paralysed than the media class. Caught in their commitment to Zionism – basically bought and paid for – they have nothing to say about these incredible events more sensible than Kamala Harris’s zombie-like incantation of “Israel’s right to self-defence”.
The British Foreign Office has failed to produce its promised considered reaction to the ICJ Opinion on the illegality of Israeli occupation, let alone responded sensibly to Israel’s crazed paroxysm of destruction this week.
For me it is now axiomatic that there is no two state solution and that apartheid Israel must be completely dismantled as an entity. I believe that more and more people around the entire globe believe that now.
And if we have to dismantle our own political and media classes to get there, so be it.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
The cause of the tragic Druze deaths in Majdal Shams was the illegal Israeli occupation in Syria, a fact which the residents of the town are clear about. The large majority of the Druze community in the Golan Heights has always refused to accept Israeli citizenship.
That picture is from a demonstration four years ago, but it shows that the Golan Druze know where their allegiance lies, and it is not with their Israeli occupiers.
The deaths are a tragedy, and they would be a tragedy if they were Druze, Palestinian or Jewish kids. The right of occupied peoples to armed resistance against Israel is absolute, but that does not remove the personal tragedy of anybody who loses their children.
But last night the disproportion of the BBC coverage of these deaths, which the BBC blamed on Hezbollah, compared to the coverage of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, was so outrageous as to be beyond parody and almost beyond belief.
It was the lead item on the main news. It was the full treatment. Intrepid British BBC journalist visits the scene, shows the blast area and damaged football pitch, interviews eye witnesses, interviews parents, scenes of funerals. Grief piled upon grief. Bellicose self-righteous statements from Israeli ministers.
It was not just hugely more coverage than given to any of the ten times the number of kids in Gaza who have been killed on average every single day for nearly ten months; we have a direct comparator where Israel recently attacked a Palestinian children’s football game killing scores more people.
The Palestinians did not get a British BBC journalist, coverage of the funerals, interviews with relatives. That incident got about 3% of the BBC airtime.
Furthermore, while reporting the Hezbollah denial, the BBC then said that the United States regime had confirmed it was a Hezbollah missile, as though that settled it.
The notion that the United States is either a neutral or an honest arbiter is utterly ludicrous. But it passes muster in BBC la-la land.
Israel has been bombarding Syria relentlessly from long before October 2023 and has continued unabated – and unreported by western media. Israel’s attacks on civilian areas of Damascus this last few weeks have been devastating.
It is pretty obvious that any loose missile that dropped on Majdal Shams is likely to have come from Israel, which is slinging huge quantities of munitions into Syria and Lebanon with wild abandon.
Alternatively if Netanyahu wished to pull a false flag to justify escalation, it is also pretty obvious he would choose a minority community within Israel as the victims.
Of course, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, anybody in the BBC capable of such thoughts would no longer be in the BBC.
Finally, many congratulations to Nicolas Maduro on his re-election in Venezuela.
I have to confess I got this wrong. I thought the huge amount of effort and money poured in by the CIA would be effective, particularly in undermining key officials through bribery. The collaboration of Twitter and Meta with the CIA programme also looked more effective than it evidently was.
A great day for democracy. In a few hours’ time I shall raise a glass of Lagavulin to Nicolas Maduro and the revolution in Venezuela.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
I have frequently explained that when I sat in the International Court of Justice and heard Israel’s lawyers tell lie after lie to justify or excuse the Gaza genocide, I could feel I was palpably in the presence of evil.
At least in the Hague you could also feel and indeed observe that most people in the courtroom – including the majority of the judges – were repulsed by the evil.
Yesterday that same evil, and the same lies, was manifested in the US Congress by Netanyahu, to an audience which glorified, reflected and amplified that evil.
Let us not forget that the large majority of citizens of the world, including majorities in many Western countries with pro-genocide leadership classes, are indeed repulsed by and reject the genocide.
The United States has now, openly and before the entire world, endorsed its genocidal imperialist project and rejected both the very notion of international law and the institutions which a more idealistic American generation worked so hard to create – the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.
Netanyahu’s slanderous attacks on the institutions of international law were applauded to the rafters by America’s political leaders. The whole world was watching, and took note.
The Zionist project per se is evil. To steal another people’s land and subject them to long and progressive genocide is about as evil a deed as can be imagined.
There is no such thing as a moderate or progressive Zionist. Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide are fundamental to the entire Zionist project.
I am hopeful that for an entire younger generation around the world, any notion that the United States are the “good guys” has now been destroyed. The reduction of international relations to USA = good guys vs Russia and China = bad guys was never true.
In Europe I am also hopeful that this will lead to a more widespread realisation that NATO is anything but a force for peace and stability, that the destruction of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan was a series of terrible crimes, and that Ukraine/Russia is massively more complicated than the media would have you believe.
We always have hope, we always have courage, and we always have determination. The fight for truth and freedom never ends.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
There is an argument to continue the convention of referring to the President of the United States as the most powerful man in the world. The dollar has not quite yet been replaced as the world’s international reserve currency and Bretton Woods still, creaking and cracking, holds.
China is now the manufacturer of the world and its brands are no longer laughable worldwide. The United States has just sustained massive damage to its soft power from its support for Gaza genocide.
But China still plays the long game, relying on trade, investment and loans to increase its economic reach. It does not depend on military force or covert regime change to secure access to economic resources.
The more direct American methods work in the short term. Israel is benefiting from the Arab regimes of the Gulf, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia all being dependent on US military and security service support to protect them from their own populations.
The USA is still prepared to project direct military power and fight wars overseas to maintain its influence. China now has greater military capability than the USA, but sees no advantage in using it.
Chinese leaders look with disdain at the crazed and sustained violence of the NATO states this last quarter century, and sees the West losing, not gaining, global influence. That China is gaining steadily such influence, nobody seeks to deny.
But the USA has succeeded, by defying international law, in physically enabling the genocide in Gaza. They will in the next week install a puppet government in Venezuela and quickly move to strip that country’s vast oil wealth into the hands of the US oil giants.
Short-term American crudity can succeed a little while longer, as the Chinese watch their trillions of dollar reserves build, and bide their time. So for now I think we can still go along with the cliché that the US President is the most powerful man in the world.
Except obviously he isn’t. The fact that Joe Biden wakes up in the morning and has to be reminded to remove his pyjamas is no longer hidden. That Biden’s mental faculties declined past normal operation some time ago has been extremely obvious, yet denied by the media and the political establishment even when it was obvious to everybody.
There is a parallel to F D Roosevelt. The myth is not true that his paralysis was hidden from the American public, though it was minimised in PR output. But what is certainly true is that when he stood for re-election for his fourth term in 1944, his extremely poor health, including heart failure, was hidden and directly lied about. He died after five months in office.
We seem to live in a strange age where politics relies more than ever on the big lie technique, even as social media makes the exposure of such lies inevitable. My interpretation is that the permanent state of cognitive dissonance and bewilderment of a population that does not know what to believe any more, is a state which power likes to see in the population.
As the radical fall in turnout in the UK general election showed, the bewilderment and distrust simply leads populations to disengage.
So now we know that Biden is not running anything much, who is? Certainly not Kamala Harris, who has been completely sidelined as Vice President and given only poisoned-chalice briefs like border control. Her function till now, other than the obvious box-ticking of having her on the ballot, was as a lightning rod for public dissatisfaction.
Being President of the United States is a big job. I have no doubt that Biden has enough faculty to make some broad calls, without absorbing a great deal of detail on policy or information on recent events. His career long support for Israel has determined policy; how much he really understands about what is happening in Gaza is a different question.
Most important is that Kamala Harris is absolutely tainted with the active genocide support of the Administration; the supply of weapons and direct military assistance to Israel are all on her too.
But if Biden is not the man running the USA, then who is? How does the state operate?
Well, according to my sources, the most powerful man in Washington, and effectively de facto President, is Jake Sullivan. His official position is National Security Advisor but I am told his work covers far more than this, including domestic policy questions, and he is the person who does the detailed work which Biden cannot do.
Which makes it interesting how seldom he appears in the news – which he does primarily when visiting foreign leaders.
Sullivan has the classic Atlanticist background, as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford to supplement his Yale education. He is fanatically pro-NATO and anti-Russian, unquestioningly Zionist and was the architect of the destruction of Libya as senior policy adviser to Hillary Clinton.
Given the obvious inadequacy of Biden, the studied disinterest of the media in analysing how his Administration actually functions, tells us a very good deal about self-censorship and media ownership.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
In its reaction to the International Court of Justice’s crystal clear ruling on occupied Palestine, the Labour government has disgracefully attempted to ignore the ruling and to continue the Tory policy of total support for Israel.
The UK statement says that:
The Foreign Secretary was clear on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories earlier this week that the UK is strongly opposed to the expansion of illegal settlements and rising settler violence.
But of course it is not the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements that is at issue. It is their existence.
New Labour’s position is that the 800,000 Israeli illegal settlers currently in the West Bank and East Jerusalem should stay in their illegal settlements. That is the opposite of what the International Court of Justice said in its Opinion, which is that Israel must undertake restitution.
270. Restitution includes Israel’s obligation to return the land and other immovable property, as well as all assets seized from any natural or legal person since its occupation started in 1967, and all cultural property and assets taken from Palestinians and Palestinian institutions, including archives and documents. It also requires the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements and the dismantling of the parts of the wall constructed by Israel that are situated in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as allowing all Palestinians displaced during the occupation to return to their original place of residence
Plainly “It also requires the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” is fundamentally different from the Lammy/Starmer line that Israel must not further expand the illegal settlements.
This is extremely important. Maximum pressure must be brought on the Labour government to align with the ICJ. The official policy is that the UK does respect and follow ICJ judgments.
MPs need immediately to press ministers on this precise point. Does the UK accept the ICJ ruling that all illegal settlers must be removed from all settlements?
You can help by writing to your MP asking for their view on this specific question, pointing out the UK’s legal obligation to follow the rulings of the ICJ.
Furthermore the Court specifically stated that states may not trade with Israeli interests in the Occupied Territories. The ICJ said at Para 278 that all states are obliged:
…to abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territory or parts thereof which may entrench its unlawful presence in the territory…and to take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Again the Labour government must be pressed to meet its legal obligation to comply with the ICJ ruling. I fully support direct action by activists to destroy products in shops imported from Occupied Palestine, and thus ensure compliance with international law.
The second part of the British government statement is an attempt to maintain the position which was roundly rejected by the International Court of Justice. The Zionist states had attempted to argue before the court that the general principles of international law had been superseded in this case by the Oslo Accords.
The British government is striking for the “safety” of this position in the second part of its statement, where it says:
This government is committed to a negotiated two-State solution which can deliver a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.
The problem is that there can be no equality of negotiation between the occupier and the occupied, particularly when the occupied are subject to the apartheid and systematic despoilation outlined at length in the ICJ judgment.
The British government position is precisely the same as arguing that the general principles of international law were negated by the “negotiated settlement” that set up Vichy France.
The ICJ directly addressed and overruled these objections put forward by the UK and partners to its acting in this case:
38. Some participants have contended that the Court should decline to reply to the questions put to it because an advisory opinion from the Court would interfere with the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation process laid out by the framework established in the 1993 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (hereinafter the “Oslo I Accord”) and the 1995 Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (hereinafter the “Oslo II Accord”), and may exacerbate the Israeli-Palestinian disagreement, thereby compromising the outcome of negotiations.
39. In the view of other participants, an advisory opinion from the Court would not interfere with the negotiation process and the Court should not decline to give one on this basis. They have suggested that, on the contrary, an opinion from the Court is all the more necessary in light of the fact that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have been stalled for many years.
40. In the present circumstances, the question of whether the Court’s opinion would have an adverse effect on a negotiation process is a matter of conjecture. The Court cannot speculate about the effects of its opinion. In response to a similar argument in another case, the Court stated:
“It has . . . been submitted that a reply from the Court in this case might adversely affect disarmament negotiations and would, therefore, be contrary to the interest of the United Nations. The Court is aware that, no matter what might be its conclusions in any opinion it might give, they would have relevance for the continuing debate on the matter in the General Assembly and would present an additional element in the negotiations on the matter. Beyond that, the effect of the opinion is a matter of appreciation. The Court has heard contrary positions advanced and there are no evident criteria by which it can prefer one assessment to another.”
(Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 1996 (I), p. 237, para. 17.)
In light of the foregoing, the Court cannot regard this factor as a compelling reason to decline to respond to the General Assembly’s request.
41. It has been contended by some participants that the Court should exercise its discretion to decline to answer the questions before it, while others have argued that, even if the Court were to reply to these questions, it should take care that its reply does not interfere with the established framework for negotiations, since it is the Security Council, and not the General Assembly, which has primary responsibility for issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to these participants, an advisory opinion from the Court could negatively affect or interfere with the negotiation framework that the Security Council has established for resolution of the dispute. Other participants who have addressed the question have argued that the Court’s opinion would not be detrimental to the work of the Security Council. In their view, the Security Council does not have exclusive responsibility under the Charter with respect to the maintenance of international peace and security, since the General Assembly may also address, alongside the Security Council, issues of such concern.
42. This argument is similar to the one examined in section 3 above, in so far as the negotiating framework is concerned, but also concerns the respective competences of the Security Council and the General Assembly in the maintenance of international peace and security. The Court addressed the latter issue in its Wall Advisory Opinion as follows: “Under Article 24 of the Charter the Security Council has ‘primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security’”
(I.C.J. Reports 2004 (I), p. 148, para. 26).
However, the Court emphasized that “Article 24 refers to a primary, but not necessarily exclusive, competence” (ibid.). The General Assembly has the power, inter alia, under Article 14 of the Charter to “recommend measures for the peaceful adjustment of any situation”. The Court further stated that “there has been an increasing tendency over time for the General Assembly and the Security Council to deal in parallel with the same matter concerning the maintenance of international peace and security” and that this “accepted practice of the General Assembly, as it has evolved, is consistent with Article 12, paragraph 1, of the Charter”
(Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 2004 (I), pp. 149-150, paras. 27-28). This is indeed the case with respect to certain aspects of the Palestinian question.
43. The Court also recalls that Article 10 of the Charter confers on the General Assembly a competence relating to “any questions or any matters” within the scope of the Charter and that Article 11, paragraph 2, specifically provides it with competence to “discuss any questions relating to the maintenance of international peace and security brought before it by any Member of the United Nations”. This is the case with respect to the questions posed by the General Assembly in the present proceedings. As the Court has stated previously,
“[w]here, as here, the General Assembly has a legitimate interest in the answer to a question, the fact that that answer may turn, in part, on a decision of the Security Council is not sufficient to justify the Court in declining to give its opinion to the General Assembly”
(Accordance with International Law of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Respect of Kosovo, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 2010 (II), p. 423, para. 47).
As pointed out in paragraph 40 above, whether the opinion of the Court would have an adverse effect on the negotiation framework is a matter of conjecture on which the Court should not speculate.
Moreover, in view of the fact that the General Assembly has the competence to address matters concerning international peace and security, such as those raised in the questions it has posed, there is no compelling reason for the Court to decline to give the requested opinion
I have given the link to the full Opinion of the ICJ. This is an excellent summary from Law For Palestine. The Opinion is extremely lucid and decisive.
The ball is now back in the court of the UN General Assembly, which requested the Opinion. The General Assembly now should move to suspend Israel’s membership of the United Nations. That is the next project on which I shall be working.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Under Sturgeon, Scotland was in thrall of an incredible degree of rampant corruption that included government, civil service, police, prosecutors and judiciary.
Listen to this simply stunning speech in Parliament yesterday by David Davis MP and you will understand precisely why I spent four months in jail, almost all in solitary confinement.
It is time for a public inquiry, led by judges from outside Scotland.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
An old man in a comic opera uniform was dragged by carthorses in a gilded carriage through the streets of London, then bedecked in diamonds and more gold, all to very little purpose.
That we truly have a uniparty could not be better proven than by a new captain taking over the ship of state, and not moving the tiller one inch, instead merely making minute adjustments to the trim of the sails.
Take the centrepiece Great British Energy company, to be sited in Scotland as a butcher’s apron branded beacon of unionism. GBE will invest in renewable energy with a budget of £8.3 billion over 5 years.
£1.6 billion a year. That sounds impressive until you realise that the turnover of the renewable energy sector is already £80 billion a year. And that the UK has to invest £77 billion a year in renewables, insulation and the grid to meet its carbon reduction obligations – of which it is estimated that £26 billion a year needs to come from the public sector.
£77 billion a year. Of which on these plans 2% is to come from the public sector.
This is what remains of Labour’s Green New Deal plans after being gutted by Starmer.
The other big headline announcement is that Thatcherite staple of deregulation. In particular planning controls on housebuilding are to be relaxed in order to stimulate housebuilding by the private sector.
By reinstating compulsory housing development plans for councils to hit housing targets, New Labour boldly rolls the regulatory regime back to… err back to…[checks notes again]… 2023.
Yes, this great measure reinstates the situation in place under Tory governments until last year, when Michael Gove gave more powers to local councils in England and Wales to protect green belts.
The timidity on public investment in both energy and housing is ludicrous. Nothing is being done to build more public housing. Nothing is being done to address the fundamental problem of the housing market, which is rentier landlordism.
What keeps house prices so high is competition to buy between commercial landlords. Mortgage payments are lower than rent payments, but ordinary people lack the capital formation or income as percentage of property price to secure mortgages at the inflated house prices.
So commercial landlords who have the capital for deposit and security own an ever escalating percentage of domestic property.
Landlords can rent at exorbitant prices to renters who have no choice, and landlords can abuse them by neglecting property maintenance.
Public sector homebuilding, rent controls and restrictions on lending for landlordism are the necessary measures that any government which was not a continuity conservative government would take. Starmer has no interest whatsoever in actually pursuing social justice.
The Labour Party has shackled itself to austerity. Rachel Reeves is to boost the power of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which is the institutional enforcement of Thatcherite economics and the total rejection, not just of modern monetary theory, but even of Keynesian demand management.
This is astonishing for what pretends to be a social democratic government.
Not everything is appalling. Ed Miliband’s support for onshore wind and for autonomous consumer energy production is to be welcomed. The improvement of workers’ rights is also welcome, though it should include a real move to a proper living wage and immediate abolition of age wage bands.
Children are to be sacrificed to maintain Kid Starver’s macho Thatcherite credentials, with the maintenance of the two child benefit cap having been elevated to a symbol of “toughness”.
Only 34% of those who voted, voted for this government. Why anybody would bother to do so I have no idea. We still have a conservative and unionist government.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
With Gaza genocide as the galvanising issue, in seats where Muslims are over 30% of the electorate, Labour’s vote share plunged from 65% in 2019 to 36% at the 2024 general election.
In Blackburn, where I stood, Labour’s vote share dived incredibly, from 65% to 27%. This in a general election where Labour won a huge majority.
The strategy to stand anti-Gaza genocide candidates and show Starmer that Labour cannot, as in the past, take the support of Muslim voters for granted, was therefore a success. Four anti-genocide Independent MPs were elected, taking seats from Labour.
However, if you look beneath this headline, the situation is less celebratory for a Left/Muslim anti-war alliance than it may appear on the surface.
To look into this requires a granular look at my own experience in Blackburn that I hope you will find interesting.
In the early 2000s, the Stop the War movement was a highly successful example of a broadly Left/Muslim alliance in which I was deeply involved. It went on to oppose not only the war in Iraq and Afghanistan but also the wave of officially inspired Islamophobia and the attacks on civil liberty in the “War on Terror”.
This video is of me addressing a Stop the War conference on Islamophobia in 2007.
Stop the War’s work goes on and is closely linked with the pro-Palestinian movement, of which I have been a member since the 1970s and which has also been broadly a successful Left/Muslim alliance.
So what is the problem?
Well one pointer is that, of the scores of specifically anti-Gaza genocide candidates, over 20 of whom were standing in constituencies with more than 30% Muslim voters, the only 4 elected were themselves Muslim.
None of the anti-genocide non-Muslim Left candidates, myself included, were able to be elected on the basis of Muslim support.
This is not a fluke statistic, as I hope to explain.
Firstly, there is a problem for many Left candidates in fitting in with the social conservatism of Muslim communities. In Blackburn I found previous writings of mine, for example on abortion, gay rights and on legalisation of cannabis, being widely circulated and used against me.
Muslim supporters urged me to say my views had changed, but naturally I could not lie in this way.
I was also contacted by panicked supporters the day before the election over a quote from the Koran being widely circulated against me, which states:
“O believers! Do not take disbelievers as allies instead of the believers. Would you like to give Allah solid proof against yourselves?”
Sometimes this kind of attack was quite crude. I was more than once called a “Kaffir”. This example is from comments on the Facebook page of popular Muslim media 5Pillars.
Maria Hussain, who joins in, is the sister of the successful candidate, now Independent MP, Adnan Hussain, and co-ordinated his extremely effective social media campaign.
My second point is that there is a real problem with sectarianism in the UK’s Islamic communities. What I came across in Blackburn – and I believe to be a general problem promoted by British security services – is a specifically Sunni extremist sectarianism. This was used to portray me as an “Assadist”.
By focusing on anti-Assad rebels and the Syrian civil war, this Sunni sectarianism explicitly supports the US/NATO/Saudi position. It was ruthlessly used within British Muslim communities against Workers Party candidates all over the UK, on the alleged basis that the Workers Party is pro-Assad. That assertion is itself based on some alleged comments praising Assad by George Galloway, which I have never seen adequately sourced.
This position was well expressed by Dilly Hussain of 5pillars in a dialogue with Sheikh Asrar Rashid held in Blackburn during the election campaign. This link takes you to a key moment.
The entire dialogue is well worth viewing as a fascinating discussion in which Dilly Hussain puts the prevalent view of the British Sunni community, and Sheikh Rashid responds with thoughtful points with which I very largely agree.
As brief background the Syrian rebel forces – DAESH, ISIS, Al-Nusra and to a large extent the Free Syrian Army – are mostly specifically Sunni, while the Assad regime has been broadly protective of Syria’s substantial Shia, Alaouite, Christian, Jewish and other minorities.
That is extreme shorthand: many Syrian Sunnis support Assad and the original Syrian democracy movement had broad cross-communal support.
The key point however is that the positions put forward by Dilly Hussain – supporting the overthrow of Gaddafi by NATO and supporting the alliance by Syrian rebel groups with the USA against Assad – are identical to those which were being advanced against me in Blackburn by the Adnan Hussain camp, where I was consistently and quite wrongly described as pro-Assad.
The first time I ever met Adnan Hussain, at a pro-Gaza demonstration in Blackburn in April, he included in his speech support for British policy in the Ukraine against Russia. I was bewildered by this. It was only during the election campaign that I understood where it came from.
This pro-NATO aspect of Sunni sectarianism, on the basis of the Syrian civil war, is hard for a liberal mind intellectually to reconcile with what is the genuine and heartfelt opposition of these same Sunni sectarians to Western policy in Palestine. It was a real problem for the Left/Muslim alliance in this general election.
Thirdly, the place of religion in politics is itself a problem for a Left/Muslim alliance.
In Blackburn, campaigning through the religious Establishment was the central plank of Adnan Hussain’s campaign, planned and organised from the outset.
Ulama means scholars of the Islamic religion, a specific and highly trained group. Imams are clerics. The Ulama and Imams together may be taken as forming the religious establishment.
Adnan Hussain very frequently claimed that he had the endorsement of the Scholars and Imams of Blackburn, and indeed that this was the very basis on which he was standing for election. He reinforced this by social media output, often filmed or photographed within mosques or madrassas, continually reinforcing the notion his campaign had the backing of the religious Establishment. Even at his few “political” meetings he always took care to have Imams and scholars behind him.
In this meeting publicised by his campaign and within a religious building, Adnan Hussain states:
With the duas [prayers] of (name of senior cleric present), with the duas of the scholars, I am taking this stance Inshallah [Allah willing], with your support I hope that we are successful Inshallah.
I am showing you here a small fraction of this kind of social media output by the Adnan Hussain campaign, featuring religious establishment endorsement:
There is much more of this. I confess I am uncomfortable with this religious basis of campaigning. On top of which it is very definitely illegal.
Using spiritual influence in an election campaign is against the law and grounds for disqualification. It was used against Luftur Rahman in his disqualification as Mayor of Tower Hamlets in 2015.
It is however a law which is extremely difficult to enforce. Neither the Returning Officer nor the Electoral Commission have any power to intervene against the use of spiritual influence. And while it is an offence, the Electoral Commission advise the police can only act where undue spiritual pressure is brought to bear on a named individual.
The wider electoral law against spiritual influence can, the Electoral Commission say, only be activated by an electoral petition brought against the result by a defeated candidate, to be heard by an electoral court.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not going to do this.
For one thing there is a £5,000 fee to bring the petition, plus you need to have lawyers to take it through the process who are likely to cost many times that.
But rather more importantly, I am not sure it would be right to bring a petition. The voters of Blackburn decided they prefer Adnan Hussain to me. Who am I to query their motives?
While I stated that I am not comfortable with the use of religion as a campaign platform, that is not to say that I agree that it should be illegal to do so. I am in two minds on the subject. I have always felt the disqualification of Rahman was unfair.
The law against spiritual influence in elections was introduced in the 19th century specifically to stop the Catholic church hierarchy in Ireland from instructing people to vote for Irish nationalists.
While I do favour the separation of the state from religion, and worry about the ability of religious hierarchies to exercise control over their followers which in some instances may be unhealthy, I am not certain that I agree the state should be able to dictate to people the criteria by which they should vote.
In short, if Muslims wish to vote for somebody because they are Muslim, or even because their religious hierarchy tells them to do so, is it not their right to vote as they wish?
There is however one aspect of this whole experience which does concern me. Blackburn remains an extremely segregated town, to a degree it is hard to believe if you have not experienced it. There are whole wards which are well over 95% Muslim or over 95% non-Muslim. There are state schools which are 98% Muslim or 98% non-Muslim.
I held 5 public meetings during my election campaign, and attendance at every one was roughly 50% Muslim and non-Muslim.
Contrast that to attendance at Adnan Hussain’s meetings. He held two public meetings I know of, and this the second is identical in composition to the first, i.e. frighteningly ethnically homogeneous.
It is of course natural that a campaign which is heavily based on religion will not attract those not of that religion. Hussain’s campaign tried to state that they had significant support in non-Muslim areas, highlighting in particular his personal friendship with a popular mixed martial arts fighter, but I can tell you for certain this is empty.
At the count you can see the ballot boxes from different polling stations counted, and I have no doubt whatsoever that Hussain’s total of 10,518 votes contained an absolute maximum of 500 non-Muslim votes, and probably a great deal less than that.
In a community as tragically divided as Blackburn, the effects of an MP being elected by only one section, across a divide that to some individuals is sadly bitter, can only be unhelpful.
I realise this is probably more information than you wanted to know about Blackburn and its politics. But I believe that those insights can be more widely applied to the electoral fate of the Left/Muslim alliance on Gaza.
I also think an account of what happened was owing to the readers of this blog, who after all financed my campaign through crowdfunding. For which I am, as ever, extremely grateful.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Six months ago I said to a well-known public figure that the US intelligence agencies had destroyed Trump’s first Presidency and that, in a second chance, he would have to uproot their entire leadership or simply let them continue to run the country and concentrate on making money for himself.
My contact replied that they had recently been told by Tucker Carlson that Trump was very aware of the danger that the intelligence services would have him assassinated. Trump was therefore likely to go for the second option. The last sentence was the musing of my contact, not of Tucker Carlson.
I am not suggesting that the intelligence services were behind the assassination attempt this weekend. I have no idea. I am however wondering what thoughts are currently flitting through Trump’s head about his near-death experience.
I was incidentally trying to calculate what fraction of a degree the rifle was mis-aimed by, to miss his brain by one inch at a range of 120 yards. My maths were not up to it, but it is a margin of the tiniest tremor of the hand on the trigger.
I think it is almost certain that Trump has wondered whether the security lapse were not, at the least, caused in part by a lack of zeal and enthusiasm on the part of those state actors co-ordinating his security.
That is no criticism of Trump’s immediate bodyguards, who acted admirably. It is also fair to note that Trump’s own defiance was courageous. He could not have known if other shooters were around, nor how seriously he had himself been hit already.
That personal bearing has almost certainly increased his election chances. Even more so is the fact that, by some strange political alchemy with little relationship to logic, it appears to be accepted wisdom that this incident makes it much more difficult for Democrats to make Joe Biden stand down.
In his address from the White House, Biden did not mistake Trump for Frank Sinatra or forget why he was there. It is thus touted as restoring his position. It was however a typical Biden performance, snide and partisan, particularly in restating his 6 January narrative as though that were a serious threat to democracy and not a stupid, isolated riot.
That democracy in the United States is meaningless is plain from the choice offered to the electorate between two incredibly flawed individuals. It is a scenario you could not make up.
If you were to put Donald Trump and Joe Biden into an entirely random yoga class in Oklahoma, neither Trump nor Biden would be the person in that yoga class best suited to be President of the United States.
There is however one sense in which democracy in the United States is more alive than in the United Kingdom. Here the Establishment got the operative they wanted in Keir Starmer elected, but had no argument with the Tories other than over competence.
In the United States the Establishment is worried that Trump’s isolationist tendencies and lack of enthusiasm for starting wars, may damage the never-ending gravy train of the military industrial complex.
In particular Trump sees both China and Russia as potential trading partners with whom money can be made to mutual benefit. He does not see them primarily as a military threat.
Trump is in short not on board for the whole propaganda narrative that requires designated enemies to fuel massive defence spending, and justify the continuous series of invasions of other countries.
This is not ideological opposition to war on Trump’s part. It is simply that, like China, he realises that trade, finance, investment and soft power are ultimately much more lucrative than the classic western imperialist model of armed conquest.
Trump’s problem is that the powerful vested interests who make money from the western imperialist model include the intelligence services. That is why they ruthlessly undermined his first Presidency.
We saw the utter empty nonsense that was the “Russiagate” hoax, on which I have written extensively, but the simple fact remains there has never been any evidence whatsoever of Russian involvement in leaking the DNC, Clinton or Podesta emails.
We saw the hounding from office of Trump’s National Security Officer General Michael Flynn for conversations with the Russian Ambassador which, when finally released in full, turned out to be entirely proper. We saw the jailing of Roger Stone for lying to the FBI, which the mainstream media disgracefully failed to reveal was for claiming to have links with Wikileaks that he did not in fact have.
We had the famously putrid Guardian front page claiming Manafort/Assange meetings that never happened.
Then to cap it all we had the CIA co-ordinated monstering as fake of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations two weeks before the 2020 election.
That this laptop – which all concerned knew was genuine – was proclaimed false was perhaps the most significant example of fake news in the history of the world. That lying narrative was coordinated between security services, and mainstream media all over the western world and undoubtedly affected the election result.
Even more significantly, both Facebook and Twitter cooperated to suppress Hunter Biden laptop stories and to boost the narrative that the laptop was fake. There was therefore the perfect alliance – security services, state and corporate media, alternative media corporate gatekeepers – working together to promote a lie and ensure Biden’s election.
It says something about the world in which we live that the most important and successful fake news in history was set up precisely by those who claim to be the arbiters of fake news.
Which brings me back to the start of this article. What does Donald Trump do about it if he gets back in to power?
I think Trump is quite right to fear that were he to negotiate a reasonable settlement of the Ukraine war, rather than continue the multi trillion dollar bonanza of weapons, death and high energy prices it now is, then he might be assassinated by his own security services.
For Trump to really run the United States would require an unprecedented cleanout of the Clintonite leadership throughout the security establishment, going much deeper than a normal change of administration. I think Trump always did understand that but found it impractical to “drain the swamp”.
With the ailing Biden, it is obvious to everybody he is not actually in charge of anything. I predict that, if we get a Trump administration, Trump will not actually be in charge either but will settle for an easy life while allowing the Establishment to continue to run the country.
When Peter Cook founded the Establishment Club, nobody scoffed at him and said “what a silly conspiracy theorist, there is no such thing as the Establishment”. I prefer to use that word rather than Deep State. But it is the same thing.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
What exactly has changed as a result of that election, other than a different team of snouts in the trough?
Starmer’s first act as Prime Minister of the UK was to attend a NATO warmonger fest and promise unlimited resources to keep the terrible and unwinnable war in the Ukraine going. In addition he is pledging to increase UK “Defence” spending to 2.5% of GDP, or over £18 billion a year extra – a massive bonanza for the arms industry.
Let us be absolutely plain that this is not “defence”. There is no country which has any plan or even vague intention to invade the UK. In modern history, only Germany, France and the Netherlands ever had such plans (the Netherlands actually succeeded but nobody noticed as the victors write the history).
Russia and China in particular have no intention whatsoever of attacking the UK. Let me write that again because, while it should be a basic fact of international relations, it is one that our entire geopolitical system depends upon denying. In fact I am not sure I have ever seen it stated plainly anywhere else.
Russia and China have no intention whatsoever of attacking the UK.
Our “defence” expenditure is not for defence. It is for power projection overseas. It is spent on aircraft carriers and worldwide nuclear submarines, not on anti-missile defences around British cities.
Our “defence” expenditure is geared to attacking other countries. And attack other countries we do. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen to name but a few. We are currently attacking Russia by proxy.
That picture is not Gaza but Sirte in Libya, once Africa’s most prosperous country, after receiving the benefit of NATO “defence” expenditure.
Ask yourself this simple question – when did a Russian missile last land on British soil? The answer is never. Yet Starmer has just announced we are explicitly sending Ukraine missiles capable of striking inside Russia.
Aircraft carriers have no purpose whatsoever except power projection. There is no defensive use of an aircraft carrier. You don’t park them just off the UK to intercept incoming attacks. Aircraft carriers have the sole purpose of taking aircraft to attack countries far away from us. They are agents of imperial power projection.
Starmer’s second call after NATO was to meet Joe Biden to do homage. Which is fitting in this context as our aircraft carriers are incredibly expensive platforms for American aircraft. If Biden had any idea who Starmer was at the time, he will certainly have forgotten by now.
All of this money dedicated to destroying human beings is a firm pledge by Labour. There is however no firm pledge of anything for the NHS beyond further “reform”, which means piecemeal privatisation. There is no firm pledge for anything that does not kill people. It is of course a question of priorities.
For one quarter of the cost of the pledged increase in defence spending, Labour could both lift the two child benefit cap, thus taking over 300,000 children out of child poverty, plus give junior doctors the 30% pay increase they deserve.
Instead we have the unchanging priorities of the British Establishment, enforced by a Labour team who are more heartless and self-serving even than the Tories. Amazingly Labour are more in thrall to the private healthcare lobby, more in thrall to the armaments lobby and more in thrall to the Israel lobby.
Since the advent of universal suffrage, no government has ever been elected with the votes of a smaller percentage of eligible voters. 34% of those voting delivered a massive landslide under the ludicrous UK electoral system, and with a low turnout only 20% of eligible voters backed Starmer.
Picture 70 adults inside a big superstore. On average only 14 of them voted Labour. You can be walking down several aisles and to the checkout and never pass anyone who voted for this government. That is the foundation of popular “support” on which this Starmer regime rests. As the gap between rich and poor grows at unprecedented speed, it is not public support Starmer has to worry about, but something much more fundamental than that.
The Establishment is hacking away at the foundations of public consent to be governed.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
I left Scotland during this election campaign simply because I thought I could do more good campaigning explicitly for Gaza in a seat where Starmer could be punished for his genocidal zionism.
Scottish independence and the freedom of my own country remains the cause closest to my heart. But although Scotland suffers the drain on its resources of every kind that it has suffered every day of the pestilent Union, Scotland’s little children are not currently being blown into pieces. I am therefore justified in my prioritisation of Palestine at the moment.
I formed an alliance for Palestine with my old friend George Galloway. We have had very different positions on Scottish Independence in recent years, though he used to be for it. George told me, and indeed the media, he has given up campaigning against it.
I was happy to support the Workers Party in England because I supported more of their manifesto than that of any other party there, and particularly the re-nationalisation of all natural monopolies.
It was the intention that more of the Independent pro-Palestinian candidates across the country would stand as Workers Party, though with the election being called so quickly structures and alliances for the Left had to be cobbled together.
I did not actually join the party and I did not use the party’s leaflets or its red white and blue branding (except in small imprints of the party logo). I very definitely refused to wear a red white and blue rosette! My campaign concentrated very heavily on Gaza.
It has to be said that the political situation in Scotland is a toxic mess I was glad to be out of for this election. The SNP absolutely deserved the kicking they got.
Support for Independence remains defiantly around 50% as it has done this last eight years, despite the SNP having squandered every single chance to take it forward. The key moment was when Brexit occurred against the will of a very large majority of the Scottish people, expressed in a referendum. That was the moment to declare Independence, against the hated Johnson government.
It is not that Sturgeon bottled it. It is that she had no interest in Independence. She was far more interested in building an extreme cult of personality, featuring hoardings, conferences and vehicles plastered with giant images of herself, and forming a Praetorian Guard of ultra loyal supporters fuelled by a highly charged culture wars agenda.
That included the effort to jail Alex Salmond based on false accusations, which were orchestrated from ****’s office and **** HQ. Were I to fill in the blanks they would send me back to jail.
By accident or design, those most strongly opposed to Nicola’s side of the culture wars agenda also happened to be the most radical supporters of Independence, who were driven from the party en masse, which enabled Sturgeon to continue the conversion of the SNP into a de facto devolutionist party.
Scots are not stupid people, and given the choice between two parties, Labour and SNP, neither of which appeared willing to do anything in practice about Independence, they voted in this election for the one less obsessed with weirdo culture wars, and with a leadership less under criminal investigation.
The SNP were also not helped by the fact that those who left for Alba included nearly all the actual footsoldiers. In the constituency where I live, all of the ward captains who organise the leaflets and posters in their wards left for Alba. It turned out that the SNP’s remaining culture wars enthusiasts were less big on canvassing in the rain.
However Alba itself got nowhere. The ostensibly pro-Independence space is too crowded by the SNP while the media and electoral system militate against new parties. In my view Alba is also over-obsessed, from the other side, with culture wars issues that ordinary people are much too sensible to spend much time thinking about.
One thing that saddens me about the SNP rout is that the party’s talent lay heavily at Westminster, which is where the accident of timing sent many great activists after the 2014 referendum. The SNP benches at Holyrood make me groan, being a result of Sturgeon’s outrageous selection procedures.
Nobody is more sympathetic than me to mental illness (I am bipolar myself), but a situation where a candidate wins over another who got ten times the votes, because the mentally ill get preference, strikes many people as not entirely sound.
So it is a huge mess. I am not sad I missed this election in Scotland, because nothing I could do would have helped. My hope is that this huge defeat will wake the cult up to what Sturgeon did to the party and her monumental failure.
That can lead to a reconciliation to reunite the Independence movement in an SNP which becomes again a broad church, and again focused on gaining Independence, not only at elections.
The Scottish parliamentary elections are two years away. We have that period to capture the 30-40% of Scottish Labour voters who support Independence. I have no doubt disillusion with a Starmer government, elected on 34% of the UK vote (and just 1 in 5 of eligible voters) will set in very, very quickly.
Scottish Independence is still coming within my lifetime. I shall be home soon.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Millions fewer people turned out to make Keir Starmer Prime Minister than turned out to attempt the same for Jeremy Corbyn. That is the most important fact of this election, and the one the mainstream media works hardest to hide.
I don’t think any Prime Minister has ever come to power with less popular enthusiasm than Keir Starmer.
Here in Blackburn we had an astonishing result. I was working on projections which had the Labour vote falling from 29,000 to 15,000 which seemed amazing enough. Although on the doorstep the Labour vote seemed extremely soft, I didn’t imagine it could fall from 29,000 to 10,000 in one election.
This is even more extraordinary because the sitting MP, Kate Hollern, was standing again and during the entire campaign I never heard a bad word against her.
The Labour vote collapsed for two reasons. Firstly because of Starmer’s ardent zionism and the genocide in Gaza. Secondly because Blackburn is a town with a strong socialist tradition, which held entirely firm for Corbyn when the red wall collapsed in 2019.
It is fair to say that Gaza caused the Labour vote to collapse in the Muslim areas and that Labour’s extreme switch to the Thatcherite right caused the Labour vote to collapse in the (there is no good way to say this) white areas. But it is important to realise that there is community crossover on both issues.
While there was concern that “vote-splitting” of the pro-Palestinian vote would let Labour back in, in the end Labour just collapsed too far and in fact the mechanism was more complicated than that.
Very little of Adnan Hussain’s vote came from the “white” areas. I personally witnessed the counting of one ward in the south of the constituency where he only got 2 votes but I got 120, in a ward normally entirely Labour. In fact my ability to take “white” socialist or protest votes from Labour allowed Adnan Hussain in.
I have published my doubts about some of the figures behind Adnan. I sincerely hope he will now prove me wrong and become a formidable opponent to Starmer, particularly over Palestine.
Allow me to say I thought we did brilliantly to get over 7,000 votes. Only 5 weeks ago we had only Naila, myself and one local man who wished to be anonymous. We had no office, no money except what you readers crowdfunded, no party members and no contacts.
From that standing start we wrote, designed, printed and delivered 170,000 leaflets, held five great public meetings and spoke to thousands of voters. We had 80 volunteers working really hard by the end. 30 came from Blackburn and others from 13 different countries!!
Our opponents had well-established networks of supporters and activists. At times our campaign was enormously stressful, at times enormously fun. I must confess I found some of the personal and religious bigotry thrown at me hard to cope with at times.
Well, that is over. The voter turnout in Blackburn was a horribly low 53%. In an election where only 3 million people could bother to watch a Sunak/Starmer TV “debate” that was a race for the right-wing ground, the foundations of Starmer’s apparently huge mandate are very shaky indeed.
Watch this space.
I am exhausted today – obviously more developed thoughts will follow.
Yesterday was unforgettable. We have campaigned with open hearts and honed minds, against the slough of corruption which is politics under modern capitalism.
I cannot tell you how happy I am at Julian’s release. It is 4.00am and I haven’t been to bed yet. I have spoken to John Shipton but everyone else is on a plane en route to Australia.
The guilty plea is of course coerced in the extreme and nobody should take it seriously. It gives a chance to claim hollow victory to the odious Biden regime, at the cost of a terrible precedent in law classifying journalism in espionage. But the precedent is only in a court of first instance so is not binding.
I should be plain I have always advised Julian and Stella to take a plea deal if offered and get out of jail. I have no doubt this was a life or death choice. I also believe we will be grateful for the still greater contributions Julian’s immense intellect and capacity for radical thought will make to human development in the future.
The Justice Department were further motivated to offer a deal by the fact that they appeared to have painted themselves into a very difficult corner at the next UK extradition hearing in a fortnight, over Julian’s ability as a foreign national acting outside the US to claim constitutional protections, and could have lost the extradition case altogether.
There is so much more to say but if I don’t get some sleep I will not be alive to say it. I am crying with happiness.
Meantime my election campaign in Blackburn continues. We are very seriously out of money. If you can channel your elation into a donation that would be very helpful.
