Commenters on this blog directly caused the exposure of Clement Freud in the ITV story. I published an anodyne obituary in 2009 giving my memories of Freud. One commenter wrote:

He was a notorious old goat and his pursuit of young women could verge on the sinister. I met one of his young ‘victims’ who told me about a job interview with him turning into a very traumatic experience.

And a second wrote the startling

Writing as one of his 1000s of sexual ‘victims’,
still surviving, terrified as I write for fear he is not yet quite yet dead – the man was an evil, conniving,
ruthless user for his own bottomless ego of all he came into contact with.
Our children – boys and girls are all that much safer for his demise.
And that is just the tip of an iceberg of political and media dirty dealings that reaches into the heart of the broken Britain he has left behind him.
His family will now, unfortunately, reap the rage and revenge of those he destroyed and their much needed justice for his many heinous – still untold – actions.

Six years later I was contacted by a journalist working for ITV who had leads on Freud and looking for more evidence. He had dug up those comments on my blog. Using the magic of the internet, I was able to trace the last commenter and put them in touch, with their permission, with the ITV team.

I also told them an anecdote I myself recalled. I was a young First Year Rep on Dundee University Students Association Council while Clement Freud was Rector. One day the then President of the Students Association, Ian Morris, came out of his office in a terrible mood after a phone call from Freud, saying that Freud had asked him to line up female students for him and was trying to use him as “a pimp”. This was not paedophilia but it was unpleasant – Freud was 35 years older than the students he was targeting.

It then all went quiet for a year before ITV contacted me this morning to tell me the story was running.

It is hard to know what to make of Freud owning a holiday villa close to where Madeleine McCann disappeared. Clement was apparently not in Portugal at the time. When you add in the fact that the McCanns’ sleazy “spokesman”, Clarence Mitchell, works for Freud’s son Matthew, the coincidences do add up. I am not jumping to any conclusions at present. But I found the following fascinating.

Clement Freud assured Kate McCann she had nothing to fear from the cadaver dogs giving a positive response inside the McCann’s hire car, hired after Madeleine “disappeared”. They had no evidential value. “So what are they going to do? One bark for yes, two barks for no?” asked Freud.

This is a transcript of the evidence I gave, at their request, to the Metropolitan Police. I published scans of the witness statements yesterday, and a commenter has kindly transcribed them to make them web searchable. I was interviewed by the Police both at my home and at their headquarters, and it was made very plain to me that not only Sir Mark Allen, but Tony Blair, Jack Straw and numerous officials in the FCO and the Security Services were in the frame. I confess I therefore always expected the Establishment would have the case dropped despite overwhelming evidence.

I first offered this evidence to the Gibson Inquiry, I was treated by that Inquiry as an important witness and Judge Gibson ordered the FCO to give me full access to all documents I saw while Ambassador, to refresh my memory. No. 10 panicked at this and other evidence that Gibson was doing a genuine job, and the Gibson Inquiry was closed down by Cameron with the active complicity of Nick Clegg. I was then told by the Gibson secretariat that the Metropolitan Police were taking over aspects of that inquiry. I was then contacted and interviewed by the Metropolitan Police and gave this evidence.

The Director of Public Prosecutions having corruptly closed down the criminal case, the matter is now purportedly under investigation by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament – consisting entirely of “trusties” of the security services. They have continually and repeatedly refused requests by me to give evidence. I last heard from them on 15 December 2015, a simple acknowledgement of a receipt of a communication.

As nobody can claim my evidence is untrue due to the amount of documentary report, the Establishment simply ensures it does not get heard by any inquiry or court. When the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee had hearings into extraordinary rendition, they directly asked seven different witnesses – including Jack Straw – whether I was telling the truth, but they refused to call me as a witness or to accept written evidence from me.

WITNESS STATEMENT
CI Act 1967. 3.9: MC Act I980. ss.5A(3)(a) and SB; Criminal Procedure Rules 2005. Rule 27.1
Age if under 18 Over 18 (if over I3 insert ‘over 18’) Occupation: Development Consultant

This statement (consisting of pages each signed by me) is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and I make it knowing that, if it is tendered in evidence, I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated anything in it which I know to be false, or do not believe to be true.

I joined the Foreign Office in 1984 direct from University in the ‘fast stream‘ process. I held a number of posts including second secretary in Lagos, then Head of the Maritime section in London and the Cyprus section. Around 1992-l993 I was also head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) embargo surveillance section both before and after the first Gulf War. Its role was to monitor Iraqi attempts of weapons procurement. I then served in Poland as first secretary in the Embassy and returned to London as deputy Head of the Africa Department, and thereafter in Ghana as Deputy High Commissioner. I was security cleared to Developed Vetted level and because of my earlier work in relation to Iraqi arms embargo l was given extra security clearances enabling me to view other sensitive intelligence material up to including various extra codewords over and above Top Secret. I have never worked for either the Security Service (SYS) or Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). I speak both Polish and Russian.

In August 2002 I took up the role as Ambassador, at the Embassy in Uzbekistan. I was given very little formal pre posting briefing by the FCO and met the outgoing ambassador Chris INGRAM only for about half an hour during which we only discussed a staff issue regarding an embassy member called Chris HIRST. Ihe staff at the Uzbekistan Embassy included a Defence Attache, an assistant, a Deputy Head of Mission, a third secretary, a management officer, consular ofiicer and assistant. My number two was an acting second secretary called Karen MORAN. I didn’t have many staff or much ability to discuss matters with them.

After my arrival in Uzbekistan as part of my role I viewed certain intelligence material originating from Uzbekistan. This material came to me from SIS in London and was sent to them by the CIA via the CIA Headquarters in Washington. It was sent to me if SIS thought it appropriate information I should be aware of. The only person security cleared to see such telegrams were I and Karen MORAN in her role as Deputy Head of Mission (DHM).

I was aware even before I arrived in Uzbekistan that the Uzbekistan security services had a terrible reputation for torture that included for example using boiling water on individuals as well as electrocution. I never whilst in Uzbekistan ever had direct involvement with the Uzbekistan security services, SIS officers came out on liaison visits but I don’t recall who they were or who they met.

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Continuation of Statement of Craig MURRAY …………………………………………………………………………………….. ..

In my new role I was proactive in meeting local Uzbekistan people and I had only been there a couple of weeks when I attended a trial of dissidents accused of terrorism. More than one witness tried to change their original account claiming it was made under torture. I found them credible that they were tortured to give a false account. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture came out to Uzbekistan to do a special report and we arranged for torture victims to see him.

The intelligence that was sent to me by SIS at this time concerned me on two grounds; firstly it showed how systematic the torture was by the Uzbekistan security services as the intelligence was coming from tortured detainees. And secondly the quality of the intelligence was inaccurate. I knew these from my first hand experience in Uzbekistan and I knew individual facts could be shown to be false.

I came to these conclusions after about three to four months of being in Uzbekistan. This was due to the fact I had been doing some work around tortured Uzbekistan detainees and I could see links with the intelligence I was seeing. Most of the intelligence didn’t name the detainees but it had similar trends such as Al Qaeda (AQ) membership or attending AQ training camps which wasn’t true. I was aware that my defence attache Colonel RIDOUT had been to one training camp location that was cited in the intelligence reports and found they did not exist. I knew that Uzbekistan was getting money and arms from the United States and I believed the Uzbekistan government were exaggerating the AQ threat in response. I believe this was a view shared by colleagues in the Embassy.

My concerns revolved around the intelligence and the cooperation between the Uzbekistan security services and CIA. I was uneasy about what the US were not doing to stop the torture. I decided something was going wrong and London (the FCO) must have not known about the torture. I asked Karen MORAN who had regular meetings with the US mission in Uzbekistan to ask the US about the intelligence flow from torture and to confirm from the US mission that it in fact was not from torture. Karen told me that the US response she received was that the intelligence was from torture however it was justified in the ‘war on terror‘. This response was possibly from the US Mission political counsellor.

On about 17th December 2002 I wrote a telegram back to London setting out my concerns. I have obtained a redacted version of that telegram under a Freedom of lnformation request I made I produce a copy of which as CJM/l telegram number I47 of I7/I2/2002 at 0345. It was addressed to the permanent under secretary (PUS) Sir Michael JAY as he was the head of the Diplomatic Service and Michel WOOD the Foreign Office legal advisor as it dealt with legal issues. I also sent it to relevant UK Missions (UKMIS) who had interest/deal in torture policy, these included New York, Geneva, Vienna and ‘Organisation Security and Cooperation in Europe‘ (OSCE) of which Uzbekistan is a member. lf you send a telegram on policy it is practice that it is also sent to other UK Missions who have an interest as with this telegram.

I don‘t know how I received a response but I got a message back stating that I could discuss the matters with William ERHMAN during an Ambassadors conference that l was due to attend in London in January 2003. I believe this message originated from Sir Michael JAY and I believe it is back referenced as telegram 323 of 2002 which appears on the next telegram I sent.

In January 2003 I returned as planned to London for a few days and could not get hold of William ERHMAN so the conversation I intended never took place with him. I subsequently returned to Tashkent, Uzbekistan and it was around this time I was aware public concern had just started regarding detainee issues in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. I seemed to be the only person within the FCO who was worried about it. I had never done this before by that I mean flagged up these kinds of issues/concerns.

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Continuation of Statemait of Craig MURRAY …………………………………………………………………………………….. ..

On 22nd January 2003 I sent another telegram this was addressed to William ERHMAN again I produce a redacted copy that was supplied to me under a Freedom Of Information request I made as exhibit CJM/2 on it there is the back reference 323 which I believe was the response originating from Michael JAY that I previously referred to. ‘The telegram essentially states the same as my first. I did not receive a response to any of the points: this is unheard of because if an Ambassador writes a telegram in relation to a policy matter there is always response. I was frustrated and could not understand why there was no written reply on this policy on torture.

Shortly after this I was asked back to London to discuss the issues I had raised. I can’t recall what method this summons was communicated to me. I believed I was coming back to London to see Sir Michael JAY however I never did see him.

I thought I was in trouble due to the nature of the recall to London and I suspected I was going to be sacked. I returned to London on 6th March 2003 I don‘t recall what dictated the timing but it was two weeks before the war started in Iraq. At that time, with the ‘dodgy dossier‘ going around supporting the war and my concerns regarding the inaccurate intelligence I had seen, the atmosphere was not good at the FC0. It was not the best time to be saying openly that our intelligence was not reliable. A retired ambassador had stated that we should not go to war as the intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) was not reliable. From evidence subsequently given in the Chilcott enquiry I believe Sir Michael WOOD had advised Jack STRAW at the time, it was not legal to go to war in Iraq. So all this was going on around my return to London.

I was called into a meeting on the 7″‘ or 8″‘ March 2003 with Linda DUIFFIELD who was the Director Wider Europe (DWE) and my counter signing manager. This meeting took place in her office and she told me Sir Michael JAY wanted to see me but was too busy. With her at the meeting were Michael WOOD and Matthew KIDD who I believe was from MI6 (SIS), he was introduced as being Permanent Under Secretary Department (PUSD) which is a liaison department that deals with SIS. It was a two part meeting with either a private discussion between Linda and myself and then a gmcral discussion with everyone present or the other way around I can’t recall now. She told me that ‘JAY was not pleased I had put things in writing, things like that should not be in writing.‘ In the general meeting with all three she stated Jack Straw had seen my telegrams (CIM/l and CIM/2) and they ‘troubled him and he lost sleep at night over this‘. Also that he had met ‘C’ Sir Richard DEARLOVE and discussed whether, in relation to the ‘war on terror‘ should intelligence from torture be used. Also that Jack Straw made the decision that I should not send over ‘emotional and melodramatic’ telegrams like these and that intelligence and torture were ministerial decisions.

In the general meeting Sir Michael WOOD stated he had looked at the United Nations convention on torture and that it was his legal position that if we didn’t ask someone to be tortured but got intelligence from torture then we were doing nothing illegal.

I asked him about complicity in torture and Article 3 and 4 of the UN Convention on torture. Sir Michael WOOD stated that he didn’t know but Article l6 allowed us to get intelligence from torture but it could not be used in court. Mr KIDD went on to add that intelligence coming from Tashkent was useful to SIS. I told him the intelligence wasn’t true. He disageed with this.

A formal response to my telegrams was read out to me by Linda with everyone present and she told me the response would not be sent as these things were best not put in writing.

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Continuation of Statement of Craig MURRAY …………………………………………………………………………………….. ..

I produce a copy of the minutes of this meeting again supplied to me under a Freedom of lnformation request I made which 1 exhibit as CIMI3. I do not accept the minutes as a full and accurate account of the meeting. it was not sent to me in draft afierwards for ‘signing off‘ which was practice. It also mentions l was given a revised telegram which I was not. I was shown it but not to keep and it was never sent to me.

Afler this meeting I went back to Tashkent. Later in 2005 I obtained a message dated l4/3/2003 supplied to me under a Freedom of lnfonnation request I made which I exhibit as CJM/4. This indicates Jack Straw saw the minutes of the meeting referred to in exhibit CIM/3. There were hundreds of meetings at the FCO each day and it would be very rare for minutes to be seen by Jack STRAW unless he had previous documents regarding the matter i.e. my original telegrams and an explanatory briefing from Sir Michael Jay or another oflicial. Simon McDONALD was Jack Straw’s number 2 private secretary and Alan CHARLTON was Head of Personnel.

Whilst in Tashkent l was concerned my career was ruined. I had upset my line managers and I decided I wasn‘t going to say anything else as I was extremely concerned about my future.

I was then told that my third secretary Chris HIRST had attacked a blind person in the street with a baseball bat. I had been told by my predecessor that he had been accused of doing something similar before, but that my predecessor had supported him, this was the staff issue I referred to earlier in this statement. I personally had witnessed his verbally violent outbursts in a local bar before. I knew that as a result of this baseball bat incident that he had to go, which he did. After this I then found papers regarding Chris HIRST that had been hidden from me by his partner Karen MORAN and I learnt she had destroyed other similar documents. As a result of this Karen had to go as well.

At this time I was not receiving any replies from London and asked them why they were ignoring me but got no response.

In June 2003 Colin REYNOLDS from the Foreign Office arrived in Uzbekistan ostensibly to find out what was happening at the Embassy with the sudden departure of Karen and Chris. He had been sent out by Alan CHARLTON. All the Embassy staff was seen by Colin and the staff told me that in fact he was asking them not about Chris & Karen as they expected but things about me such as my drinking habits and whether I used prostitutes. The staff were confused and surprised. I let Colin finish the interviews of staff and then l asked him what was going on as it seemed to me that he was investigating me. He told me not to worry and that he had been instructed to investigate allegations raised about me. He would not tell me what those allegations were. He later as I understand reported back to London that the staff supported me and there were no issues. I obtained a copy of his findings dated 26/6/2003 supplied to me under a Freedom of information request I made which I exhibit as CJM/5. This confirms he reported that all the staff supported me. The report has been ec‘d to amongst others Harvey BOWYER of the FCU. This is the internal audit section called the Financial Compliance Unit (FCU) l did‘t know where this fitted into the investigation by Colin REYNOLDS. However a few months later a team fiom the FCU internal audit came to the embassy to go through all our accounts. All they found at the end of their audit was that I owed about $20 for a lunch for which I lost the receipt, this I repaid. It appeared to me that they were plainly out to get me and I thought I had survived: the only criticism of me was the handling of the HIRST matter.

In July after Colin REYNOLDS left I then went on holiday. London then sent out Dominic SCHROEDER from the FCO political Eastern Department who came and interviewed the same staff as Colin Reynolds again after which he came up with some 18 discipline offences against me.

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In August I was called back from holiday in Canada to London to see Howard DRAKE the personnel department director. Present at this meeting were Tessa REDMAYNE of the personnel department and Kate SMITH who was my union representative. At this meeting Howard DRAKE asked me to resign and I declined this is detailed in a report he completed dated 27/8/2003 that was sent to me for ‘clearance’. I produce a copy as exhibit CJM/6. During this meeting l was told that if I forgot about Tashkent that I would be offered another ambassadorship, but I declined this. It was at this meeting that I first became aware of the allegations albeit Colin REYNOLDS had previously told me they were nonsense. The source of the allegations was never disclosed to me.

All the disciplinary allegations were false and around this time my security clearance was up for review. My security clearance reviewer contacted me to state my clearance had been passed by him but it had then been sent back to him and he had been put under pressure not to clear me. He said that he was sticking by his recommendation and my clearance was renewed.

l was suspended for four months and sent back to Tashkent and told not to speak to anyone about the outstanding allegations. l was banned from entering embassy buildings and the stress of it all caused my health to collapse. I suffered severe heart and lung problems as a result.

After four months of investigation l was cleared of all l8 allegations: there was a formal hearing in relation to two matters only. These related to being seen with a ‘hangover’ by a local member of staff in Tashkent and secondly misusing an embassy car, l was cleared on both counts and the evidence against me was shown to be rubbish or non-existent.

l was however found guilty of telling someone about the existence of the allegations when I returned to Tashkent for which I was given a final written warning in January 2004.

Later in June 2004 one of the initial telegrams l had written was somehow leaked to the Financial Times newspaper and the Times printed sections of it. This was not done by me and although I denied it I was suspended as a result and in February 2005 I resigned from the Civil Service. I was given six years early retirement severance pay.

I firmly believe that the allegations against me were knowingly false or grossly exaggerated,. and were concocted against me deliberately to silence me after l was the only senior civil servant to enter a written objection to the policy of collusion in torture. As a consequence my career was destroyed and my health permanently damaged.

Anybody who is in any way surprised at today’s announcement that nobody will be prosecuted for extraordinary rendition and torture, is in deep denial about what a corrupt and rotten state the United Kingdom is.

Among the many documents the Metropolitan Police (who are genuinely furious) handed to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and which now lies in a bin, is my own sworn evidence of the complicity in torture of Jack Straw and senior FCO officials. I therefore now publish the statement I made to the Metropolitan Police.

I should explain this is not my language. The Metropolitan Police officers interviewed me for two days at my home and then wrote the statement which I signed. This is not the signed copy because I did not have a photocopier at my home. Two copies were printed off on my printer, one of which I signed and gave to them. This is the other copy, and is exactly the same as the signed copy.

If a second Independence referendum were called now, who would lead the official No campaign? A serious and important question. Not enough attention has been paid to the utter disarray of the unionist camp.

Last time, the Tories were by and large content to hide behind Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Jim Murphy and let Labour do the bulk of the heavy lifting. At that time, Labour were still a massive force in Scottish politics, with the large majority of Scottish MPs and a formidable numerical (if not quality) presence at Holyrood, plus an awful lot of urban councils.

Now the landscape is utterly changed. The Tories, following the Holyrood election, see themselves as taking over the leadership of the Unionists from Labour with whom they are engaged in a neck and neck struggle for distant second. The Tories will not agree to play second fiddle now, while for their part Scottish Labour will not rush to complete their suicide by again sharing platforms with the Tories. The Electoral Commission will have to make a choice between two “No” campaigns, just as it had to choose between UKIP and Tory Leave organisations in the EU referendum. I suspect it will again choose the Tories.

The media adulation of Ruth Davidson after the Tories managed the “stunning result” of just over 20% in the Holyrood elections was astonishing – in fact it was about the same level as the media adulation of Jim Murphy when he became Labour Party leader. But still only one in five Scottish voters in that election, and one in nine of the registered Scottish electorate, actually voted Tory, and I am prepared to bet that was a high water mark. As the reality of Tory rule, and the prospect of still more Westminster Tory rule, is reinforced, then a straight choice between the Tories and Independence, with no Gordon Brown media-hyped pretence there is something inbetween, is precisely the situation in which I would like to campaign for Independence.

Support for Independence rose by over 15% during the course of the referendum campaign, after rising only very slightly for the previous decade. Since the campaign it has gone back to rising slightly and slowly again. The difference is that now we only need a very small improvement to go over the winning line, and I have no doubt whatsoever that once again during a campaign we will see a major advance in support for Independence. If however we wait for the “natural rise” to take its slow effect and set a bar of 60% in opinion polls before we call a referendum, there is a real danger we will lose the moment. Indeed without a campaign, I doubt 60% will happen in my lifetime. With a referendum campaign, we will hit it.

That moment is now. Our opponents have never been weaker and never been more divided. Nationalists have become too inclined to gaze at their navels, and are failing to look up and see the complete and utter disarray, the total shambles, in the opposing camp. We should strike before they recover.

I still do not expect to see Brexit. If we did see Brexit, I would argue for Holyrood MSPs and Scotland’s Westminster MPs to meet together as a National Assembly and declare Independence, to be followed by a confirmatory referendum, the object of the Delcaration being to maintain the rights of Scots as EU citizens. There would be a great deal of international sympathy for that, and as I have continually explained, as a matter of firm and indisputable international law you achieve Independence through recognition by other states, not by any arrangement or otherwise with the residual UK.

But assuming Brexit does not win the Tory Leadership Referendum, the Greens’ idea of a million person petition to trigger a new referendum is a good one. Sooner rather than later. I suggest 2018 for the vote – stripping Labour of their corrupt local council resource next year must be a key stepping stone.

Contrary to Article 44 of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, to which the UK and Russia are both party, the UK has engaged in extensive illegal harassment of a Russian naval submarine engaged in fully lawful transit of the Dover Strait.

A Russian naval vessel en route between the Baltic and Black Seas is fully and specifically entitled under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea Articles 37 and 38 to the right of passage through the strait. This is in addition to the general right of passage through the territorial sea at Article 17. The Russian navy was in full compliance with the provision at Article 20 that, while in territorial waters, the submarine must be on the surface and displaying its flag, and in compliance with Articles 29 to 32 on warships.

Not only does the Russian Navy have every right to sail through the Dover strait on passage, it has been exercising that right – along with many other navies – for over a hundred years. The decision of the British government now to employ military harassment and threat is not only illegal, it is a gross and entirely deliberate act of provocation designed to sour international relations and disturb the atmosphere of world peace.

The author of this article, Craig Murray is a former Head of the Maritime Section of the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and former Alternate Head of the United Kingdom Delegation to the United Nations Preparatory Commission on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. He is a retired British Ambassador.

Leanne is a schoolgirl who gave a talk about something she believed in for a school speaking competition. But she spoke outside the right wing comfort area, and thus her speech got attacked online and then pulled. The Speakers’ Trust charity stated that “Following vile and hateful comments posted online during this Bank Holiday weekend Speakers Trust removed the video of Leanne’s speech.” It has since been reinstated.

The current aggressive campaign against anybody who speaks out for Palestine is gathering force. It’s most obvious manifestation lies in the ridiculous claims of “anti-semitism” against many left wing or radical campaigners who have worked against all racism their entire lives. As the establishment becomes more desperate to portray any thought or expression outside their neo-con orthodoxy as illegitimate, the related attack on supporters of Palestine becomes increasingly shrill.

It is very possible to plot the demonisation of radical thought in stark and recent examples. It brings to mind the demonisation of the Chartists as violent revolutionaries. For example, those in the openly left wing campaign for Scottish independence were repeatedly and regularly accused by the mainstream media of vicious online abuse. Bernie Sanders supporters were quite falsely portrayed throughout the mainstream media as violent after the Nevada Democratic Convention, even though widely available video evidence showing what really happened was totally contrary to what was reported. The 38 Degrees petition against the Tory bias of Laura Kuenssberg was withdrawn as “misogynist”, a charge echoed by the entire mainstream media, even though there is virtually no evidence of any associated misogynist abuse. Similarly the very slight three second mocking of Kuenssberg by the audience at a recent Corbyn event was, again with total absence of evidence, portrayed throughout all mainstream UK media as anti-woman rather than anti-Tory. The right wing meme that left wing Corbyn support is anti-female recurs almost daily in the mainstream media.

On the positive side, the establishment’s patently shrill demonisation of radical opposition is a reaction to a very definite upswell against the results of neo-liberalism. There is no denying that the SNP, Corbyn and Bernie Sanders phenomena on the one hand, and the Trump and UKIP phenomena on the other, represent a significant upsurge of popular discontent with the status quo. The Trump and UKIP side of that movement reflects a deliberate attempt by the Establishment to use the mainstream media to divert the focus of discontent away from the exploiters and burgeoning billionaires, and focus it on “foreigner” scapegoats.

The popular momentum is linked to intellectual momentum. Thomas Piketty and others proved the glaringly obvious, that neo-liberalism vastly increased wealth disparity in society. The recent IMF Research Department paper on the consequences of neo-liberalism made quite a splash. It agreed that neo-liberalism had caused a vast and growing wealth gap, and made a very significant apercu that “Increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth.” This is a vital challenge to neo-liberal orthodoxy. Simply put, if Mike Ashley has billions while his thousands of harassed agency workers are struggling to survive, there is less money actually circulating in the economy buying goods and services from local business and providing balanced and sustainable economic growth. Massive inequality does not drive economic growth, it damages it.

There seems to be a reluctance to accept that the Sports Direct story of massive degradation and exploitation is the inevitable consequence of the neo-liberal bonfire of workers’ rights and attack on the trade unions. Compulsory proper employment contracts with protection from dismissal and compulsory recognition of union representation are safeguards vitally needed to redress the imbalance between the fat-cats and those desperate to make a living. A minimum wage – even a living wage – is of little use if you are soiling yourself because you are scared to take time to go to the toilet, and can be dismissed on a whim of your employer.

A great many of the population now realise that they work in declining conditions and with declining means, to make an elite ever more super-rich. The mainstream media are the tool by which the population is to be controlled. Bernie Sanders’ heroic fight is drawing to a close for the present. I am hopeful that the appalling non-choice which Americans face for President will serve to fan popular discontent further and prove a Pyrrhic establishment victory over Sanders. The examples of demonisation of anti-establishment people with which I started this article all have one thing in common. They are attacks on people putting over radical views by means outside the mainstream media – social media and citizen journalism, or old fashioned standing up at meetings or organising together. The inspirational combination of new media and old fashioned community campaigning has been the hallmark of the Scottish independence, Corbyn and Sanders campaigns. It is the methodology that must give a blueprint and hope for the future.

All is fine, thanks, I was just taking a few days to recharge my batteries. Will be back in harness shortly.

More space has been devoted by the mainstream media in the last week to the terrible effects of “austerity” on the vulnerable, than in total since the Westminster election. That is entirely in the context of Ken Loach’s Cannes Palme d’Or winning film I, Daniel Blake. The film itself will now get a much greater cinema distribution than it might otherwise have anticipated. I think it is worth highlighting some excellent points made at the winners’ press conference:

Ken Loach:

We talked about finding a style that was absolutely clear and plain and unadorned…there’s a quotation from Bertolt Brecht…”and I always thought the simplest of words must suffice. When I say what things are like, it will break the hearts of all”. And the thing that we tried to do is to say what things are like, because it not only breaks your heart, but it should make you angry.

It is an issue not just for people in our country, but all across Europe. There is a conscious cruelty in the way we are organising our lives now, where the most vulnerable people are told that their poverty is their own fault. If you have no work, it’s your fault you haven’t got a job. Never mind that… throughout Europe there’s mass unemployment and in Britain there’s two million known unemployed but in reality four million. And the most vulnerable people are caught, disabled people are caught. The increase in suicides… in fact in the places where these assessments take place, some people who work there have been given instructions on how to deal with potential suicides, so they know this is going on… It is deeply shocking that this is happening at the heart of our world… the heart of it is a shocking, shocking policy.

Paul Laverty (scriptwriter):

After travelling the country, in Scotland and all the way down to England, travelling round foodbanks, listening to people’s stories, talking to welfare rights organisations, disabled groups, what was remarkable was how many of the most vulnerable people were the ones who bore the brunt of it. Now in this particular instance Daniel is a very competent man who has had a life of work, who’s got friends, who’s smart, intelligent, he’s had a very, very full life. But what really amazed us was talking to experts… the people who work with mental health, the stories we heard about that would just break your heart.

The people who are disabled, they have suffered six times more from the cuts than anyone else, and there was a remarkable phrase by one of the civil servants we heard who talked about the cuts, who said “low-lying fruit”, in other words the easy targets. So this story could have been much harsher, it could have been somebody with mental health difficulties… we could have told a story from someone who is much more vulnerable, much more heartbreaking.

I think it’s very important to remember too the systematic nature of it….talking to whistleblowers, people who worked inside the Department of Work and Pensions… there are several people we met, and they spoke to us anonymously, and they said they were humiliated how they were forced to treat the public. So there is nothing accidental about it, and it is affecting a huge section of the population.

I have inveighed long and hard against the massive increase in the wealth gap between the rich and poor in the UK and in the West in general. It is great to see popular resistance today in France to the extreme erosion of workers’ rights that has facilitated this.

In an indisputable measure of the growing inequality in society, the life expectancy gap between rich and poor is growing for the first time in 150 years. Let me say that again. The life expectancy gap between rich and poor is growing for the first time in 150 years. Our desperately unequal society now becomes more unequal at an exponential rate. The UK has more than 100 billionaires, and it has foodbanks and children crying from hunger, not developing properly due to malnutrition. I sense a true swelling of popular discontent that has the potential to break through the consent manufactured by a billionaire-owned media and billionaire-owned politicians.

I declared this blog an EU referendum free zone a few months ago. In the last couple of days I chanced to be in Edinburgh, Perth, Dundee, Banchory and Edzell on quite other business, and can report the remarkable fact that I did not see a single house or flat exhibiting a Leave or Remain poster. It is not just this blog, the entire country is an EU referendum free zone.

Personally I remain an EU enthusiast, but I am horrified by the arguments being put forward by the Remain campaign, and even more by the personalities associated with it. I could never display a Remain poster in case people felt I agreed with David Cameron. I strongly suspect that explains the mass public apathy, which friends tell me is no different down south. Whatever their views on the EU, people do not want in any way to be associated with George Osborne, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Tony Blair or Peter Mandelson on one side, or with Ian Duncan Smith, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson et al on the other.

There is a fascination in watching Tories pulling each others heads off. The level of intra-Tory hatred is really ramping up now. The Leave Tories have just worked out the Remain Tories are all liars. The Remain Tories have just worked out the leave Tories are all liars. The rest of us knew all the Tories are liars for years.

In all the wringing of hands about the violence at the end of the Hibs/Rangers Scottish cup final, there is a reluctance to tackle the root of the question. The debate has in recent weeks been reinvigorated over the Scottish law banning sectarian songs and displays at football matches, with speculation that the Scottish Parliament will now have a majority for lifting it. Public mass displays of hate speech do not to me come under freedom of speech. My guide as usual is the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who stated that to argue that corn merchants are parasites who thrive on the misery of the poor is freedom of speech. To yell the same thing to an armed mob outside a corn merchant’s house at night is not. That seems a precise analogy to sectarian songs in football grounds and Mill – whose father was from Montrose – is right.

But sensible as the ban is, it does nothing to tackle the cause of sectarian hatred. The greatest cause is segregated education. It is difficult to hate people when you grow up amongst them, share your earliest friendships and experiences with them, and learn together. It is easy to hate people when you are taught from your most innocent youth that they are different, and are forcibly segregated from them by the state for all the time you spend outside the family environment in young childhood. They are the other, different, rivals, the enemy. Name-calling, stone throwing, hostile chanting, sectarian singing and your football banner and scarf all ensue in obvious and logical succession.

I find the fact that the state routinely segregates Catholic and Protestant children in school, as the norm in much of Scotland, deeply shocking. The lack of intellectual honesty in facing up to the open consequences is pathetic. It behoves me as someone whose family is Scots-Italian and Hibs supporting to say that the Catholic Church bears a major share of the blame. So do Scottish politicians, who are in large majority too scared of voter reaction to take a firm stand on the issue.

The Catholic/Protestant divide is particularly acute in Scotland, but England has precisely the same problem with faith schools. If you filter out the substantial degree of Islamophobia in many reports, it is still plain that there is a problem with “Islamic” schools which teach values which have no place in modern education. (I would argue they are also a deviation from Islam, but that is a different argument for another day). I recently highlighted the interview by Mark Wallis Simons about education at a Jewish Orthodox school in England where pro-Israel propaganda was such that the pupils would fight for Israel against Britain. Thanks to Tony Blair, the leader who believes God wanted him to start war in Iraq, England has actually seen a growth in state schools which are a strong feature of the neo-cons’ “Academy system”. This has led to state schools being run by all shades of religious nutter including creationists.

Finally I would add to this sorry mix my experience in Blackburn, where with the active connivance of a Labour council there were apparently normal state schools under local authority control, within a couple of hundred yards of each other, which were 99% Muslim or 99% non-Muslim.

The answer to this problem is not to cherry-pick which faith is acceptable and which faith is not. The answer is simple. It has been accepted for centuries that the state has the right and duty to prescribe and provide education for children. There must be no segregated religious education in the UK. Children should attend school in a mixed environment and there learn a broad educational curriculum in which shade of religious belief has no place. Outside of school the religious life of the family is no business of the state. The children’s education is no business of the religion.

Private schools are a further different question. Quite simply I would abolish them, irrespective of the faith question, as they entrench the networks of growing social inequality.

I fear I am pretty rubbish at giving my writing commercial appeal. Not only have I just completed a biography of somebody most people have never heard of, but I find myself writing about aspects of his life which are as non-commercial as imaginable. In a story of spies, disguises, sex, assassinations, battles, heroism, Knights Templar(!), exploration and more sex, I often find myself writing about minute details of the most mundane things.

I find I want to recreate for readers the world that Alexander Burnes encountered in his everyday existence, the stuff of his normal life, what he actually did all day apart from the adventure and spying. So I also write about accounts, and tents, and maps and packing lists. I fear that I must tax the patience of my poor publisher. Here are a couple of extracts from the final manuscript. I will never be able to write as well as William Dalrymple, but he won’t tell you the dimensions of a tent pole or how receipts were processed.

The book should be out in August.

Tents

If Burnes performed well it might open up permanent appointment to the Political Branch. The reports he submitted are therefore painstaking. In the first, marked ‘Camp at Keerawow, 14th December 1829’,1 he apologised for reporting in such detail. He noted he was the first European ever to visit other than on a punitive raid, and added he was motivated by a ‘great anxiety to shew myself worthy of the honour and trust which the Government have conferred upon me’.

He lived a great deal of his life in tents, and it is important to form a picture of these camps. British officers had large, individual tents. These would be taken ahead by bearers and pitched, ready for the officers’ arrival in the evening. Their escort and servants would inhabit numerous tents around them. The camp would be very diffuse, as men of differing castes could not share a tent or cook their food together. Camp-fires were therefore numerous and small. Horses and baggage animals would be pegged or corralled on the margin of the camp.

The kind of tent in which Burnes slept would have had both an inner and an outer; valets and bodyguards were sometimes allowed to sleep in the space between. At the entrance and ventilation points would be hung additional screens called tatties, kept soaked to provide cooling through evaporation. In very hot weather the British sank a pit under the tent. The floor was covered with rich carpet. The official issue tent for a subaltern, the most junior officer, was a substantial twelve feet square, but many officers used larger, private tents.2

A contemporary traveller in India, Charles Hugel, had a tent with poles twenty-five feet high – like a modern British telegraph pole. The outer roof alone of Hugel’s tent weighed 600lb, and the fabric needed six horses to carry it. William Hough wrote that when a regiment’s tents were brought down by a storm, sleeping officers were in danger of being killed by falling tent poles. There are numerous references to marches delayed by heavy rain, because the wet tents were too heavy to be lifted.

Accountancy

Mundane worries intruded. There is always an irresoluble conflict between the exigencies of spying and the needs of public accountancy. Payments for information, informal messengers, gifts, payments for supplies of provisions from locals who may be illiterate – all had somehow to be accounted for. A significant proportion of the manuscripts indexed under ‘Alexander Burnes’ in the National Archives of India consist of detailed querying of his accounts.

To give but one example, in the midst of his vital negotiations with Dost, on 4 December 1837, Burnes sat down to submit his mission accounts for the period when his mission had been living largely on boats and travelling from Karachi to Sukkur. Burnes made no attempt to provide receipts, and instead wrote:

Cabool
4th December 1837
Sir,
I have the honour to forward statements of my actual receipts and disbursements for the months of January, February and March 1837, which I declare upon honour to be correct and according to the best of my knowledge.
I have etc
Alexr. Burnes
On a Mission to Cabool
To The Accountant General
Fort William

On 10 October 1838 this was forwarded from Accountant General Charles Morley to the Secretary in Bombay, with a sniffy note:

Sir,
The Civil Authority having returned the accounts (noted in the margin) of the receipts and charges connected to Captain Burnes’ Mission to Cabool – unaudited, from the circumstance of their not having been approved [. . .] I have the honor to forward them for the orders of His Honor the President in Council, together with a copy of a letter from Captain Burnes to my address [. . .] which accompanied them.
It will be observed that the charges exhibited in the accounts are unsupported by original receipts, or any other document than the declaration furnished in the conclusion of Captain Burnes’ communication before adverted to, and that the funds have been raised by Bills upon Presentation under the Bombay Presidency.2

Bombay batted them straight back to Calcutta advising that they would need to be considered by Auckland himself:

I have been directed [. . .] to [. . .] point out that the accounts having been rendered by Captain Burnes without vouchers it will be necessary if the Governor-General considers the charges to be moderate and warranted that His Lordship should authorize their being passed to Captain Burnes in account leaving receipts to be adjusted and checked by comparison with the accounts of the Treasury on which his bills were drawn.3

It is not a small point. Empires live on their accounting – some of the oldest documents in the world are surviving accounts of Mesopotamian empires, indelibly inscribed on clay tablets. The commercial origins of the EIC made accounting even more central to its culture. The pressure on Burnes over accounts was a major worry; if the government repudiated his bills he could be ruined.

Moorcroft and Gerard both died penniless for this very reason. Burnes had already lost money redeeming Gerard’s bills. Mohan Lal’s life was devastated by government refusing to refund payments made in the last days of the Kabul garrison. Edward Stirling’s expenses were turned down entirely. Stoddart’s Herat accounts were repudiated and many of Arthur Conolly’s bills remained unhonoured at his death. The entire story of the Great Game on the British side has this strange undercurrent.

I have had occasion before to praise Sam Kiley, Sky News security correspondent, who often seems to be fighting a one man battle against rampant Islamophobia and alarmism in the media. He has just given an extremely sensible analysis. He counselled against rushing to brand the crash as terrorism without evidence, discussing both mechanical failure and pilot suicide. He added that even if it was terrorism it was not necessarily Islamic terrorism. He quoted Anders Breivik and the fact that early reporting speculated that massacre was Islamic terrorism. Kiley even went so far as to state it was a possibility that, if it were terrorism, it could be carried out by a fascist group attempting falsely to implicate Islamic groups and stoke Islamophobia. Kiley also outlined the possibilities for various Islamic groups to be involved.

His summary was as balanced and sensible as it could be possible to make. Indeed Eamonn Holmes felt it necessary to ramp up the terrorist narrative by stating there have only ever been 68 mechanical failures on Airbus 320 aircraft. That is true, but it is a very much larger number than the number of terrorist incidents on A 320 aircraft.

I do not know what happened. I do know that it is remarkable that anybody as balanced as Sam Kiley – who four years ago stated on Sky News that Israel was perceived as “moving towards an apartheid state” – continues to be employed by the mainstream media. I frequently criticise corporate media journalists for doing a bad job. When one is doing a particularly good job I should in fairness note it.

It is hard to think of bigger news than that the Electoral Commission is taking the governing party to court over alleged fraud in its election accounts, with possible disqualifications that could cost the government its majority. Yet the issue has received remarkably little coverage apart from the very dogged work of Channel 4 News. Why is that?

There are a number of reasons. The first is that the media has a major pro-Tory bias and minimises bad news for the Tories as a matter of course. The most remarkable example of this is the continual playing down of divisions within the Conservative Party over Europe, which run to extreme levels of personal hatred and abuse. But you do not see that hatred and abuse reflected, whereas divisions within the Labour Party are reported daily in extreme detail.

If you doubt what I say, consider the fact that it is quite openly acknowledged that, under pressure from No.10, the media are organising the televised debates for the EU referendum so that Conservatives are never seen to be debating each other. That is the most extraordinary piece of media connivance, and even entails the media excluding the official Leave campaign from at least one national debate. What is deeply worrying is that the UK has become a country where nobody is surprised or concerned at this kind of blatant state propaganda manipulation.

Which leads me to the second reason for lack of mainstream prominence for the Tory electoral fraud. The entire political class realise that they are now floating atop a sea of massive popular resentment. There is a wariness of further laying bare the corruption of the system, and darkening the public mood still more. The Establishment wants the EU referendum to go through as smoothly as possible, with people voting how their betters instruct them; it is no time for Establishment dirty linen to be laundered in public. So they pretend that absolutely nothing is happening:

The Guardian briefly ran a story on the front page of their website – it was there only a few hours – explaining that legal restrictions made it impossible for them to publish. This is untrue, particularly when so much has been published by Channel 4. The Guardian also connived to make it appear that the only expenses in question were the costs of a bus. It is very much more than that.

The Ramsgate angle caught my eye because I used to live there, not far from the Royal Harbour Hotel which the Conservatives rented out for £14,000 to house activists bussed in to support their local candidate. You leave the money for your drinks in the Royal Harbour on the counter, it has an honesty bar – evidently as a door policy. The Conservatives did not declare this spending, which would have put their candidate far over his constituency spending limit. Having been rumbled, they claim it was a part of national spending.

I stood as an independent anti-war candidate against Jack Straw in Blackburn in 2005. One of the very many ways the system is fixed against independent candidates, is that while I had to keep spending within very tight limits, all the major commercial billboards in the city were plastered with massive “Vote Labour” posters. This did not count against Straw’s expenses because it was part of a national poster campaign, and his name did not appear on those huge billboards.

But there is a very definite difference between that, and the cost of bringing in workers who were actively canvassing and leafleting for a named candidate in the constituency. This must be constituency spending or the term is meaningless. There is no doubt that at least 14 Tory MPs whose campaigns ran this massive overspending (and that one undeclared hotel bill alone made the total overshoot the limit by 50%) ought to be disqualified.

But they will not be. The other reason that this has not been more of a story, is that everyone in the metropolitan political and media bubble knows that nobody will be disqualified. Because we only live in the illusion of a democracy, and threats to the Establishment are gently put to sleep.

When I stood against Jack Straw, he held specifically targeted “Muslims for Labour” rallies during the election campaign at which all the voters who came were given free food and drink. That is a specific criminal offence known as “Treating”. Jack Straw was foreign secretary at the time, and not only were the police aware of the treating, they were actually both inside the hall and guarding it from protestors outside.

In an effort to have the law of the land enforced, I gathered a number of sworn affidavits from voters who had been present, and gave them to the Police with my own sworn complaint. Here is one example of the affidavits:

“I,,,,, OF ,,,,,,, BLACKBURN DO HEREBY AFFIRM AS FOLLOWS:
THAT
1, I attended an event in Audley yesterday on Sunday 25 April 2010 at Jan’s Conference Centre in Blackburn.
2. I heard that Mohammad Sarwar MP and the ex Prime Minister of Azad Kashmir Sultan Mahmood were going to be present.
3. I can confirm that the people on the stage were Mohammed Sarwar MP, Barrister Sultan Mahmood, Jack Straw MP, the ex Mayor Salas Kiyani, Lord Adam Patel and others.
4. They all gave speeches to support and ask us to vote for Jack Straw in the MP elections.
5. We were given free food consisting of roti, meat curry, sweet rice and coke.
I CONFIRM THAT THE CONTENTS OF THIS AFFADAVIT ARE TRUE AND TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF
Affirmed this 26th day of April 2010
By the within named …… at
BLACKBURN in the County of Lancashire
Before me
M Wrendall,
Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths”

This is the provision of the 1983 Representation of the People Act

114.-(1) A person shall be guilty of a corrupt practice if he .
is guilty of treating.
(2) A person shall be guilty of treating if he corruptly, by
himself or by any other person, either before, during or after an
election, directly or indirectly gives or provides, or pays wholly
or in part the expense of giving or providing, any meat, drink,
entertainment or provision to or for any person-
(a) for the purpose of corruptly influencing that person or
any other person to vote or refrain from voting ; or
(b) on account of that person or any other person having
voted or refrained from voting, or being about to vote
or refrain from voting.
(3) Every elector or his proxy who corruptly accepts or takes
any such meat, drink, entertainment or provision shall also be
guilty of treating.

Blackburn police were obliged to investigate my complaint, and after interviewing witnesses a file was passed to the Crown Prosecution Service. I was told by Blackburn Police that the CPS had decided not to prosecute because it was an “old law”. While it is true that, like murder, it is an old offence, the crime had been included in the 1983 Representation of the People Act. I have no doubt whatsoever that Jack Straw was guilty of treating, ought to have been convicted, and was corruptly protected by the Crown Prosecution Service. Needless to say, the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time is now in the House of Lords. That folks is how the UK works.

The truth is that in this country, electoral law is not enforced against those in power. That is why there is not much publicity around the Tory electoral fraud in at least 14 of their constituencies. It will be made quietly to go away.

I had heard much about the way that Hillary was able to use control of the Democratic Party machine to suppress the challenge of Bernie Sanders. I had not fully understood it until I saw this truly shocking video of the Nevada Democratic Convention, a stage in the awarding of that state’s delegates to Hillary or Bernie. After the announcement of a narrow win for Hillary, which to many seemed improbable, the chairwoman of the Convention, Roberta Lange, a member of the National Democratic Committee, absolutely refused demands for a recount. She then closed the Convention after calling for a voice vote, again uncounted, on a rules change to allow her to do that.

Twice as many Sanders delegates to the Convention were disqualified by the Committee,for “administrative reasons”, as the supposed majority for Clinton, which even after those disqualifications did not appear to reflect the apparent balance of delegates present.

I think watching the video will tell you more than anything I can say. When adverts appear keep watching past them as it seems to be in several parts.

I am just getting to the end of the copy-edit for Sikunder Burnes, which has involved reducing the text still further and been both hard work and painful, so apologies for disappearing for a few days. I am also acutely aware I have not replied individually to the 130 offers of assistance I received with the cartography for the book. I am very sorry, I have been a bit overwhelmed and in fact what is happening about maps is still not sorted with the publishers. And while I am apologising, I might as well fess up to what is now approaching 2,000 unanswered emails. I genuinely do feel both guilty and depressed about this, but I am simply not able to keep up with the volume of correspondence, though so much of it is so very positive and welcome. If your email needs a practical response, please do not feel shy to resend.

A hostile message I received from a fierce advocate of Israel, interested me because when I checked him out I noted he spent much time attacking Bernie Sanders. This led me to wonder what correlation there is between those individuals currently accused of anti-Semitism, and particularly those suspended from the Labour Party, and support of Bernie Sanders.

It occurs to me equally that many of those most ardently throwing around the accusations of anti-Semitism, particularly mainstream journalists and MPs, are those most hostile to Sanders or supportive of Clinton.

If I am right, the irony that the alleged “anti-Semites” support the excellent Jewish candidate for POTUS, and the witch-hunters oppose him, would be obvious.

If anyone has time while I am occupied, hunt around on the web for evidence that addresses this hypothesis either way. Post what you find in comments below. Remember even a single piece of evidence contributes to the picture. I shall pull it all together in a few days time.

Over 30,000 people within two days had signed an old languishing petition against the Tory bias of Laura Kuenssberg. They were motivated by outrage at the undisguised bias of her election night coverage, though that bias had already been evident daily.

For 35,000 people to be outraged enough to seek out and sign an online petition, millions must have felt that outrage. But the real furore started after 38 Degrees cancelled the petition due to “sexist abuse”. Unfortunately for them, they were forced to admit there was virtually no sexist abuse from the 35,000 people who had signed the petition. They next claimed the sexist abuse was on unrelated social media, but refused point blank to present any evidence of it. Then an extraordinary group started to coalesce in defence of Kuenssberg – Laura Bates, Yvette Cooper, Jess Phillips etc – all of them denouncing this widespread sexist abuse. Not one of these people produced a single shred of evidence of the existence of this sexist abuse.

Probably some abuse is there. I am a much, much less well known figure than Kuenssberg, but since I started writing on this topic I have been the subject of numerous extremely unpleasant tweets and facebook messages. Please note the same epithet applied to Kuenssberg would undoubtedly be claimed as misogynist abuse:

I have cropped this to protect the identity of the sender, but I assure you it is perfectly real and not at all unusual. (This is actually sexist on my part as if it were a man I would not have cropped it. I can only ask you to forgive me, I am old). I am sure Kuenssberg, being vastly more famous, gets more abuse than I do. But the fact either of us receives abuse does not mean we are above criticism. The young woman tweeting above being unpleasant is not evidence I am right about anything. Still less does it mean criticism of me should be suppressed.

To say that abusers “hijacked” the petition criticising Kuenssberg for her terrible biased journalism, is like saying your car is hijacked by an insect landing on it.

But the extremely cheerful news is that the furore caused by 38 Degrees removing the petition has meant that tens of millions more people have heard of the petition, than if it had gone ahead. David Cameron standing up in the House of Commons saying Kuenssberg is not biased in itself will have made a million people realise that she is. Laura Kuenssberg, meet Barbra Streisand. The “Streisand Effect”, named after the actress’ attempt to suppress photos of her mansion, is the internet phenomenon whereby attempts to suppress information lead to far more people knowing it.

In this case, that is really important. Because what has struck me the last few days is the number of people who are saying “Wow, I thought she was pretty biased, but I thought it was just me.” No, it wasn’t just you. She really is the most appalling Tory shill. And now tens of millions more people are alert to it.

The Establishment, by its attempt to invent a “Misogynist campaign” and link it to Jeremy Corbyn, has just shot itself squarely in the foot.

You might enjoy this interesting word analysis of the comments of the 38 Degrees petition. The comments themselves can still be found from here. It should be understood that 35,000 people signed, but the large majority only sign and do not leave comments.

Here are all the comments on the scrapped Kuenssberg petition. You know, the petition David Cameron condemned in the House of Commons today because it was accompanied by a storm of sexist abuse? Well, here are the comments in their entirety and out of 35,000 people who signed, there is virtually nobody whose comment can be seen as remotely sexist. See for yourselves. Can you spot the one sexist comment I found?

The comments show the petition was overwhelmingly signed by decent, concerned people who were sometimes quite eloquent. Also that the petition supporters are gender balanced and several specifically identify as feminists, and as supporters of the BBC. But neither Cameron, the Guardian and mainstream media nor 38 Degrees itself has any qualm about writing off all these decent citizens as a misogynist rabble.

The data link was left by a commenter on this site – I strongly suspect a mole within 38 Degrees has got it out. It is absolute proof that the politicians and mainstream media journalists have been pushing a plain lie about the nature of the campaign, and that 38 Degrees have colluded.

David Babbs of 38 Degrees appears to be setting new standards for lying. Now that the comments are public, he has changed his story and told Media Lens the abuse was not on the petition, it was on connected social media. I have repeatedly asked 38 Degrees for the evidence of abuse, but they absolutely refuse to show it. We have had five people searching all day. So far we have one single tweet, which was nasty – it called Laura K by a expletive reserved for women. And it did refer to the petition. But it was sent by a young man, 90% of whose comments referred to football and 100% of whose tweets used similar expletives. I unreservedly condemn what he did, but he was hardly a supporter of Corbyn or member of Momentum, as all the media are telling us. So far that is it – one young idiot – we have found nothing else.

But even if there are more nasty examples of abuse, that is not the fault of the 35,000 good people who signed the petition. And there is a disconnect between two establishment narratives, both unproven. One is that Kuenssberg has been a victim of terrible misogynist abuse since appointment. The other is that the abuse was caused by the petition. I utterly condemn any such abuse, but it does not negate the genuine concerns of the petitioners. Regular readers know I myself receive constant abuse, somethimes death threats. It does not mean I am not frequently in the wrong!

Now the lies have been thoroughly exploded. Of course the fact Cameron has been involved in peddling the lie may now be leading to some creative design, backdating and history creation in assorted Government establishments.

This is the transcript of my conversation with the 38 Degrees Press Spokesman today about the scrapping of the Laura Kuenssberg petition, for which 38 Degrees were praised by David Cameron in the Commons today.

Hello Craig

Hello Adam. I hope you are not quite so busy today? Has it calmed down for you?

It is a bit less busy. Well we are very busy on other important things. Did you see the article by David Babbs in the Guardian today?

I did, but it doesn’t really answer my question. I haven’t received the evidence of the abuse connected to the petition which you said you would consider sending me. Are you going to send it?

I don’t really have the time for this

But you must have this evidence. You took a well-supported petition down. You must have the evidence you based your decision on.

There were abusive tweets and comments

Can you send them to me?

You can search for them yourself online

I have done so. But you must have the evidence?

Look yourself online

This is a big story. In all the national press. You must have kept the evidence on the basis of which you made the decision?

You said yourself you had seen misogynistic comments

I said I could find a single one – very unpleasant but only one – out of hundreds of comments I read

So you did see misogynistic comments

One.

Search yourself online. There were tweets.

So far I have been able to find one. That is one comment and one tweet. Have you seen more?

There were misogynistic comments and tweets

More than two? Out of thirty five thousand signatories? How many have you seen?

There was misogynistic abuse

How many have you seen. You personally Adam. You said yesterday you had seen the evidence. Have you, personally, seen more than two?

If you are going to start shouting at me

More than two? Simple question, yes or no?

I don’t expect you to be impolite and abusive towards me.

How much evidence did you see?

We had seen sufficient evidence.

Is that more than two? Is that more than two? That’s a very simple question.

We had seen sufficient evidence.

Have you seen more than two things? Have you seen more than two things? That’s a very simple question. I am recording you. Is that more than two things?

You can record if you like. We had sufficient evidence.

Is that evidence more than one tweet and one comment?

I could…I have got to go I have things to do here

Do you have more than one tweet and one comment?

Hangs up.

I do not claim the 38 Degrees do not have any evidence to show to “justify” removing this petition. But if they do, I find their attitude absolutely astonishing. It seems to me most probable they did so under establishment pressure with no serious consideration of evidence, and zero concern for the 35,000 people – about half of them female – they have now stigmatised as misogynists.

“Professor” Rob Ford of the University of Manchester was a member of Professor John Curtice’s election night results team at the BBC. But he is also a very active anti-Corbyn and anti-SNP propagandist.

Indeed just the day before the election, which he was covering for the BBC as a “neutral and independent psephological expert”, Ford posted this nasty attack on Nicola Sturgeon. Please note that this is not a retweet – the slogan “All Hail Supreme Dear Leader, Daughter of Great Helmsman Sal-Mon” is all Ford’s own brilliant witticism.

It is of course a free country, and if this puerile behaviour makes Ford happy it is his business. If the BBC want to interview him as a right wing Labour man that is also their business. But for the BBC to employ him as an “independent expert”, to interpret the electoral results for us, is beyond a joke. Many of us already do not trust Curtice. That the right hand man on his BBC team is this anti-SNP and anti-Corbyn bigot is an outrage.

I had never heard of Ford until he foolishly decided to attack me on twitter over my coverage of the fake Nuneaton research designed to rubbish Corbyn. Ford had lovingly tweeted the details of this fake research, and retweeted uber-Blairite John Rentoul’s vicious article based on it. Ford suggested I criticised it because I am a conspiracy theorist who believes in lizard people and the Illuminati. (He has since asked me to clarify that this was a “joke”. He must be great company).

Ford rejected angrily the argument that the Nuneaton “research” was orchestrated anti-Corbyn spin prepared by the Blairites. It was legitimate and ethical focus group research, he said, rather heatedly. His refutation of accusation of disingenuous PR spin was, I felt, perhaps slightly undermined by the fact that he chose as his own twitter profile photo a picture of himself with Peter Mandelson! I think that probably says all you need to know about him.

Except that by attacking me on twitter he inadvertently caused me to notice something else extremely important. I had published that the Nuneaton “research” that made front page news, stating that voters found Corbyn “scruffy and old-fashioned”, was based on interviews with just 16 people. Those people were all Tory voters. There were no gays, no unemployed, no retired people, no tenants, nobody under thirty, no singles and no ethnic minorities. None of the media coverage – including the New Statesman article by the report authors – made those parameters clear. What is more they distorted the views of the respondents and did not make plain that 2 of the 16 said they will vote Labour next time.

The simultaneous publication in the Blairite outlets of this fake Nuneaton research – Guardian, New Statesman, and John Rentoul in the Independent – was plainly coordinated by the Blairite lobby in anticipation of Labour losing Nuneaton. (In the event to the bitter disappointment of the Blairites, Labour held the council). And here is the new information – looking through Ford’s twitter stream, I found tweets by BBC political correspondent Norman Smith. On results day, out of scores of councils contested, Smith had tweeted about only one single council – Nuneaton. And what he tweeted was specifically “Corbyn critics flagging up swing in key Middle England seat of Nuneaton.” So the day before the co-ordinated publication of this fake “academic research” in Blairite media, “Corbyn critics” were pointing out Nuneaton and only Nuneaton to the BBC.

It stinks to high heaven. What stinks still more is the refusal to state who paid the extremely expensive Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for the research. And why.

Oh, and the BBC employing Ford as a neutral expert. If they had any political credibility left, that would destroy it.

UPDATE This excellent comment was posted below. I thought it worth highlighting.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner doesn’t just do research. It helps you spin it:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Greenberg_Quinlan_Rosner_Research

On its website, it says:

For over three decades, we have used sophisticated polling and opinion research to help leading candidates, parties, government leaders, corporations, and advocacy groups across the United States and around the world. Whether you want to win your election, govern your country, raise your profitability, or change the world, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner has the research and strategies to help you succeed.

IOW, if I were looking for independent neutral research, I’d go somewhere else. For the dirt on my opponentst, I’d go to GQR.

Who paid for this?

The petition to sack Tory propagandist Laura Kuenssberg from her role as BBC Political Editor has been scrapped by 38 Degrees after it gained over 35,000 signatures. The reason given is sexist comments and tweets.

Having both signed and endorsed the petition myself, I was taken aback by this. I had personally read through every single one of the comments on the 38 Degrees site, when 26,000 people had signed the petition. I was intending to publish a selection of comments on this blog, as many of them were really quite elegant, and some moving in expressing the loss some people felt in their disillusion with the BBC.

Of the many scores, possibly hundreds (there is no counter) of comments I read through, only one was sexist. That one was very unpleasant, but totally unrepresentative. I can see no reason why they could not just delete any such stupid comments. Everywhere on the internet gets them, including this blog.

It seems to me astonishing that a tiny and unrepresentative number of people can get a petition scrapped which had been signed by many thousands of genuine people. I therefore today phoned 38 Degrees to uncover both the policy and the sequence of events.

What happened first was an article in the Guardian alleging the petition was linked to sexist abuse. Needless to say, the Guardian referred to alleged sexist abuse, by Jeremy Corbyn supporters, of Stella Creasy and Jess Phillips (in the case of Stella Creasy this was proven to be almost complete fabrication. I have not looked into the Phillips case). I have both phoned and emailed the Guardian to ask them on what evidence their story of sexist abuse of Kuenssberg was based, but they have not responded.

I asked the 38 Degrees spokesman whether they had personally seen the evidence of this sexist abuse. Their spokesman Adam said that they had seen it. I asked whether they would send me the evidence so I could check it. He said they would consider this. They have not done so. I asked him how many sexist comments there were? 2, 3, 10, 100? He said they had not looked through everything and would not give even a ballpark figure. I asked what impact their junking of the petition would have on the tens of thousands of non sexist people who had signed it, and why they felt able to slander those people as sexist. He replied this was not intended and they were still thinking about it. I asked why people opposed to a petition could not get anything taken down by adding a few nasty comments pretending to support. He said this had occurred to them as a problem too.

38 Degrees said that the petition originator had agreed to it being taken down, but I clarified they had contacted him to ask for his agreement. Whether he was shown the “evidence” or browbeaten I do not know.

So there we are. The petition has been binned and the people who supported it have all been libelled in the media as sexists. It is not apparently concern about a rampantly biased political editor, it is obvious sexism. Yet the only people who claim to have the actual evidence of this sexism – 38 Degrees and the Guardian – have not produced the evidence and refuse to produce the evidence when I ask.

Laura Kuenssberg is I think the most openly biased journalist I have ever seen on the BBC, particularly in her very obvious vindictive hatred of Jeremy Corbyn and of Scottish Independence. She does not in the least pretend impartiality. But she is by no means alone. Of course by targeting her we are only drawing attention to a particularly egregious symptom of the terrible disease of a rampantly right wing corporate and state media. Nobody believes that removing her would solve the problem. Nobody seriously believes the BBC actually would remove her even if the petition reached a million. It is purely a campaigning tool to highlight the injustice of media control, access and bias.

The fact we are denied even this tool of protest is deeply troubling. The continued process of stigmatisation of decent dissidents as “anti-Semitic” or “misogynist” is characteristic of a society in which deviating from the political line is rewarded with social stigma and exclusion. This poisonous climate should be seen as a reaction to the challenge the elite is currently facing to its neo-liberal certainties.