To bomb ISIS in Syria is now legal in international law, with authority granted by the Security Council. (I subscribe to the argument of my ex-boss Brian Barder on the interpretation of SCR 2249). Whether it is wise or not is a quite different question.

Even John Simpson on the BBC yesterday admitted that many innocent civilians had been killed in recent bombings of the ISIS occupied city of Raqqa. Though being the BBC, while reporting correctly that the United States, France and Russia are all bombing Raqqa, they contrived only to mention civilian deaths in a sentence about Russian bombing. That bombing creates terrorist blowback has been proven beyond any rational dispute. So if ending terrorism is truly the aim, it is a curiously counter-productive means of going about it.

There is also the question of mission creep. In Libya, the security council mandated nothing but the enforcement of a no-fly zone, to prevent the possibility of a massacre in Benghazi, which was precisely as genuine a danger as Iraqi WMD. Quite illegally, the UK participated in a massive western air to ground attack including on populated areas, under the pretext of disabling any possible threat to western aircraft enforcing the no fly zone. The aim, quite illegal, was regime change. This is how “the no-fly zone was enforced” by western bombing of Sirte.

The danger is that a bombing campaign will cause this kind of devastation of civilian areas, as indeed is now happening in Raqqa, but also as in Libya will be carried far beyond the authorised objective, and extended against the areas loyal to President Assad. This risks confrontation with Russia – a danger that has been starkly illustrated since I started sketching out this article by the downing of a Russian jet by Turkey.

Libya illustrates starkly the last and largest problem – that you cannot control what fills the vacuum. The governance of Libya is now a disaster. The ultimate irony was that the people of Benghazi demonstrated their gratitude at being saved from “massacre” by slaughtering the American Ambassador. The truth of the matter is that, despite the dreadful records of both Saddam and Gaddafi, the manner of their removal resulted in a situation where life was undoubtedly better for the vast majority of the population under the dictators. Which is a massive testament to Western incompetence.

David Cameron appears to have no idea whatsoever what will replace ISIS in the areas under its control. We know that he does not want the Syrian state under President Assad to take control. The area is not Kurdish, so they are not an option. Hezbollah is regarded as an Iranian proxy. The West’s attempts to create moderate pro-Western Sunni rebel forces have been a pathetic failure. The Saudis and other Gulf states have funded a variety of rebels, including much of ISIS and other groups which have an equally insane agenda. If any of the Wahabbi groups besides ISIS could be strengthened sufficiently to hold major territory, they would undoubtedly be found to be just as enthusiastic at persecuting Christians and other minorities and beheading people.

Someone has to control the physical territory, and Cameron has no viable alternative for this at all. Talk of funding and training moderate groups is whistling in the dark. The USA has already put far greater resources into this than the UK ever could, and the result has been complete failure.

Having delivered Sikunder Burnes to the publisher, I have started research on a life of Lord George Murray, working title The Man Who Terrified London. It is in fact true that some Scottish aristocratic families deliberately allocated members to each side in the 45, to ensure continued family control of the estates. But such instances are very rare, the Frasers of Lovat being the most notable. Most family splits, like among the Murrays of Atholl, were genuine and painful. My favourite example is the MacDonells, who were all Jacobite but decided that Glengarry himself, a hopeless alcoholic incompetent, would do more harm to the Hanoverians by remaining on their side. There is an excellent simile here to the Saudis, where numerous minor royals and all their business contractors are pumping money into ISIS and other extreme Wahabbi groups, while the King and Crown Prince pretend to be pro-Western and anti-ISIS. That is when they can spare a moment from their aerial massacre of the Houtha, or sentencing children and poets to death at home. The situation in all our Gulf “allies” is the same.

It is of course instructive that there is no sense at all in which Trident missiles are helpful in this dilemma. It is worth repeating out loud every time we consider a defence or foreign policy dilemma “Trident is useless in the particular situation”. We should say it all the time. We are spending an inconceivable sum on a system which is no earthly use.

But bombing is just as useless. It can achieve nothing whatsoever except pointless death. It will make Cameron look macho and win some jingo votes, enabling the corporate and state media to whip up a frenzy of hate against non-militarists. I suppose that is a useful purpose for the establishment. There is no other useful purpose.

Bombing ISIS in Syria may now be legal. That does not make it useful or wise.

I did not believe the official story of Hasna Ait Buolacehn the moment I saw it. The official line was that she was a suicide bomber who blew herself up when the police stormed the apartment in St Denis where the alleged terrorist ringleader was hiding out. But that story seemed to me completely incompatible with the recordings on which she could plainly be heard screaming “He is not my boyfriend! He is not my boyfriend” immediately before the explosion. She sounded like a terrified woman trying to disassociate herself from the alleged terrorist. It was a strange battle cry for someone who believed themselves on the verge of paradise.

Then yesterday the truth emerged from forensics that she was indeed not a suicide bomber. None of the mainstream media appeared to find this in any way troubling. And just in case anybody did, the BBC (and I assume all the French and major international media) then immediately did an interview with an anonymous member of the French Police attacking squad, who stated that Hasna was:

“trying to say she was not linked to the terrorists, that she had nothing to do with them and wanted to surrender”.
But he said that due to prior intelligence, “we knew that she was trying to manipulate us”.

Unfortunately this would have been a very great deal more convincing had it been stated 48 hours earlier, rather than only after the original reports that she was a suicide bomber had been corrected on forensic examination. As it is, it looks very much like a post facto justification, a new story to cover the new facts.

Besides, it is very difficult indeed to see what prior intelligence could explain if someone was genuinely trying to surrender or not. There appears to be no information available to the public that gives the slightest indication that Hasna was an extreme Islamist; what public information there is paints the opposite picture. The best the media have been able to dredge up are quotes from friends saying “if she was, then she must have been drugged or brainwashed”. Google it yourself.

But even were she an extreme Islamist, that does not mean she was not attempting to surrender. All of which is a bit nugatory if she were then killed by an explosion triggered by the terrorists themselves. But the changing story about Hasna makes me less than confident that is what actually happened.

I have no difficulty with the principle that the police should shoot people who are shooting at them. I outraged many friends on the left for example by not joining in the criticism of the police for killing Mr Duggan. People who choose to carry guns in my view run a legitimate risk of being shot by the police, it is as simple as that. Jean Charles De Menezes was a totally different case and his murder by police completely unjustifiable. In Paris it appears plain that the police were in a situation of confrontation with armed suspects.

There are severe intelligence disadvantages to killing people with profound knowledge of terrorist organisations. It also cheats the justice system. Nevertheless I can conceive of situations where simply taking out by an explosion a terrorist cell might be justified. But only if you are quite certain of the situation. The case of Hasna is to me troublingly reminiscent of the case of Jean Charles De Menezes, in that it became obvious in the days after his death that everything the police and establishment had leaked to the media about him (leaping over barriers, running through the tunnels, heavy jacket, wires protruding) was a complete, utter and quite deliberate lie.

The media could help if they were in any way rational and dispassionate, or ever questioned an official narrative. It is an urgent and irrepressible question as to why the BBC journalist did not ask the French policeman “and why did you not say this 48 hours ago when you were content to allow the story to run that she was a suicide bomber?”

Similar media manipulation is at use here by the Guardian in telling us the police stormed a “terrorist apartment”. What is a “terrorist apartment”? Are the walls made of semtex? The intent of course is to assure us everybody inside was a terrorist. It is not just the Guardian. The phrase is all over the media. Again, google it.

I am worried in case Hollande’s Rambo impersonation is steamrollering justice. It may well be that Hasna was a dreadful and bloodthirsty terrorist. I do not know. It may well be she was killed by the terrorists not the police. All we know at the moment is she was in an apartment with people who allegedly were terrorists, and died in the “battle”. But I do not trust the changing stories of the authorities.

Robert Webb might well have been the only person in the Labour Party well to the right of Liz Kendall. In 2005 He told the Guardian in an interview the person he most admired was Christopher Hitchens (at a time when Hitchens was the lead propagandist for the Iraq War) and Webb characterised opponents of the Iraq War as “suicide bombers and their apologists”. Today the Guardian gives him an enormous puff for resigning from the Labour Party in protest against Jeremy Corbyn.

A genuinely unpleasant person. I confess to a personal grudge against Webb, but it is a justified one. he was deeply involved in plagiarising my memoir, Murder in Samarkand for the BBC Comedy The Ambassador. The production company involved, Big Talk, had actually invited me to their offices for a meeting to ask me to sell them the rights to Murder in Samarkand. I attended the meeting but I refused to sell them the rights. They went ahead and made the series anyway.

Having been brought up in Norfolk I am a Norwich City supporter, as explained in Murder in Samarkand. Webb’s The Ambassadors featured a Norwich City supporting ambassador to Tazbekistan (which he claimed was unrelated to Uzbekistan) and made fun of the dopey Ambassador’s concern with human rights. Numerous incidents were very plainly taken from Murder in Samarkand as well as the entire scenario, but I could not afford to take the crooked plagiarising bastards to court.

Robert Webb. One of the nastiest men in Britain. If Corbyn as Labour leader achieves nothing more than getting shot of Webb, that is still progress.

The right to self-determination of the people of Scotland is not in dispute. That right is enshrined in Article 1.2 of the Charter of the United Nations. Which peoples qualify to benefit from that right is a frequent subject of dispute, but the case of Scotland has been conclusively conceded by the government of the UK in agreeing to the 2014 Independence referendum and agreeing to abide by the result.

The people of Scotland thus have multiple citizenships. They are citizens of Scotland, and of two over-arching bodies, of the United Kingdom and of the European Union. Both UK and EU citizenship are very real, with EU citizenship in particular conferring a wide range of individual rights to the citizen enshrined in numerous international treaties. This dual citizenship is reflected on your passport. On both the cover and the inside page, it says European Union above United Kingdom.

This raises the question of what happens if the people of Scotland, with their right of self determination, experience an unwilling conflict between the two superior citizenships. This will arise if the United Kingdom votes to leave the European Union while Scotland votes to remain in. The situation of conflict will be that a self-determining people will have voted in referenda to retain two overarching citizenships, but by force majeure be able to retain only one of them.

The position in international law given this outcome is absolutely clear. Being unable to follow both results of referenda of the Scottish people, Scotland through its government will have the right to determine which citizenship to retain. EU citizenship is arguably the superior citizenship, conferring much wider rights.

There is in any event no requirement in international law for a referendum on Independence before you declare Independence. In fact, the majority of nations in this world only became independent in my own lifetime, and over 90% of those became independent without a referendum.

In the event that Scotland votes Remain and the UK votes Leave, the SNP government which I hope and expect again to see at Holyrood should immediately make a Declaration of Independence to maintain the individual citizenry rights of Scots to EU citizenship. This is perfectly legal in international law and will, beyond any doubt, be welcomed by the large majority of states of the European Union who will welcome the decision of Scots to remain members.

As somebody who worked professionally for nearly four years on EU enlargement, it always scunners me that it is so little understood that the entire political mood and dynamic of the EU is expansionist. It seeks as a matter of principle to incorporate all Europeans. That is why Romania and Bulgaria were accepted with an analysis everyone knew to be farcical that they conformed to the acquis communitaire. The departure of any country, even the awkward England and Wales, will be seen as a tragedy and the adherence of Scotland will be a matter of rejoicing. Even Spain will be reconciled because the circumstance of the UK leaving the EU gives a plausible unique factor that is not a precedent for Catalonia.

Within the SNP, perhaps understandably the focus tends to be on the internal UK constitutional and political scene. This is actually an error. The Independence of any Nation is above all a matter of international law, and the test of Independence is recognition of the world’s other states and acceptance into international institutions, above all the United Nations. The success of a Declaration of Independence will rest in its acceptance in Brussels and New York, not its acceptance in Westminster.

Cameron will get nothing substantive from his EU renegotiation. He is not liked by other European leaders. Eastern Europeans, in particular, can recognise a snob who looks down his nose at them when they see one. I speak from certain knowledge – more than one Eastern European minister involved has told me so. It shows how low Cameron has sunk, that a minute circulating yesterday in the Cabinet Office described the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks as an “opportunity” to gain concessions on freedom of movement.

There is no gamechanger coming from Cameron’s “renegotiation” that will materially affect the dynamics of the EU referendum campaign, and opinion polls indicate that the UK leaving and Scotland voting to remain is a very probable outcome. The Scottish government should be starting now to make preparations for declaring Independence immediately in the event of such a result. Top priority in those preparations should be discussions in Brussels and EU capitals with all EU states to prepare them for such an event and garner discreet assurances. The Scottish Government is of course prohibited from such lobbying, but the SNP is not. I for one will offer my services without charge.

I just watched a recording of Westminster yesterday where Tory Minister Amber Rudd announced the government was rapidly dropping the subsidy for solar energy down to zero. Yet the government has just agreed to pay to the nuclear industry a subsidy that will dwarf, in real terms, all the subsidies ever given to the coal and renewable industries combined, and what is more will be paid to the Chinese and the French. I am lost for words.

Nor am I in any way pleased to be proved instantly correct, that Western governments view terrorist incidents like that in Paris primarily as a means to enhance their power and social control. The French government has immediately seized on the pretext to ban all demonstrations at the forthcoming climate change summit in Paris. Yet they have not banned gatherings of large crowds generically, for example at football matches.

Cameron’s announcement of 15% budget and staff increases for the security services was made immediately after the Paris attacks, but was plainly not something thought up in a few hours. The plans for mass surveillance had already been announced, and would have to be staffed. This kind of sickening political opportunism is the true disrespect to the innocent dead.

David Cameron relies on the complicity of mainstream media and the gullibility and disinterest of the British public to get away with an extraordinary switch. Two years ago he was strongly urging military action in Syria against the forces of President Assad. Now he urges military action against the enemies of President Assad. That includes against groups and individuals who were initially armed and financed by western intelligence agencies, and are still being financed by our Saudi “allies”.

Indeed one of the many extraordinary features of this fervid political period is that the neo-cons (be they Tory or Blairite) who are so actively beating the drum for war, are the ones who absolutely refuse to acknowledge that the source of the poison is Saudi Arabia. Cameron today told Westminster that the head of the snake is in Raqqa. That is plainly untrue. The head of the snake is in Riyadh. But if your God is Mammon, that is blasphemy.

It is also fascinating that the same people who triumphantly warned Putin he would get blowback from bombing the Islamists in Syria, deny that our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and bombing of Libya have any blowback effect or in any way cause terrorism in the West. The hypocrisy would be hilarious were it not so serious.

The French are pounding the city of Raqqa as I write and the truth is, whatever the propaganda, that they have already killed more entirely innocent civilians in their bombing than were killed in the horrible atrocity in Paris. The killing on both sides is mindless. The majority of those the French are bombing into oblivion in Raqqa are people horrified at being occupied by ISIL, just as the people killed by ISIL in Paris were ordinary people as powerless as the rest of us to affect the way the elite run our foreign policy. Those who believe that the random killing of bombing is the solution to random killing are crazy.

I was terribly, terribly sad for the victims of Paris and their loved ones. But I could not help but note that we did not fly flags at half mast or illuminate buildings in the rather lighter tones of red white and blue that could have marked Russia losing nearly twice as many dead in a related terrorist atrocity just a few weeks before.

For the terrorists themselves, I have no sympathy. To kill entirely innocent people is indefensible in any circumstances. To believe that religious kudos can be gained from killing the innocent is incredibly sick.

I have often argued that it is actually not difficult to commit a terrorist attack. If I wanted to kill people next week, did not care who I killed, and was prepared to die myself, I could most certainly do so successfully. The key point is of course that in reality there are very, very few people deranged enough to carry out such atrocious acts. Any rational analysis shows this is not an existential threat. Terrible as these attacks were, they killed 0.01% – that’s one in ten thousand – of the population of Paris. They increased the tiny chance of being murdered in France by only 20%. There are over 600 murders a year in France. Many more people die every year in traffic accidents in Paris than were killed in this atrocity.

I am not trying to mitigate the evil or atrocity, I am trying to put it in context. The drama of the incident is used vastly to exaggerate its impact and to justify those moves which the Establishment had up their sleeve anyway as the vast and growing disparity between rich and poor calls for more weapons of social control. These include massive surveillance of the population, larger and more intrusive security services, aggressive policing, an institutional system of informers in education, a new crime of “non-violent extremism”, and of course yet more wars in the Middle East –

The sad thing is of course that the terrorists are so stupid as to increase the powers of the very forces in society whose policies they purport to be fighting, while the only people they kill are also those getting the short straw of society’s gross inequality. I suspect the leadership knows this. Of course, if you are a Saudi prince, then right wing, highly authoritarian western governments hostile to economic equality are exactly what you want too. It makes your lifestyle in London, Paris and Monte Carlo so much easier.

Meanwhile David Cameron thrashes about. The only way he can see to look credible is to go and bomb someone, even if it is the opposite side he wanted to bomb last time. It won’t stop terrorism, but it will be good for the arms manufacturers and security industry. It will help stoke the jingoism that is so useful in enabling the wealthy to maintain their firm grip on political power.

Actually stopping terrorism would of course do none of those useful things for the Establishment. I do not claim that the Establishment deliberately employs a Middle Eastern policy that promotes and exacerbates terrorism. But their policy has that effect, and they use its consequence in their own interest in retaining a firm grip on political power. It helps further ensure that political power will not be employed to reorder society upon more egalitarian lines.

Dear President Ahtisaari,

I had the pleasure of meeting you on a number of occasions over the years, including when I was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and I recall your genuine concern for democracy and human rights in a region where they are sadly neglected.

Like a great many people in Scotland I was shocked that CMI is employing Jim Murphy. Of course, in a democracy there are always losers as well as winners in elections, and both are genuine and valid participants in public life. It is not the fact that CMI employs a politician who has been so recently, comprehensively and humiliatingly rejected by his national electorate that will do any damage to CMI. In a sense I think it does you credit.

What shocks many people here is that Mr Murphy is by any standards a dedicated warmonger. He was a major and important proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and is the strongest of supporters of the massive increase of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, in breach of the Non Proliferation Treaty.

Mr Murphy is a member of the Henry Jackson Society, which as you know is a body which exists to promote United States neo-conservative foreign policy in its most aggressive sense, and openly and actively supports and condones extraordinary rendition and the use of torture by the CIA. It has supported every single military action by the USA since its formation, and defends United States exceptionalism in international law, including US non-membership of the International Criminal Court.

Mr Murphy’s belief set is therefore fundamentally at odds with the stated aims of CMI. Indeed, his employment by you can only lead to the suspicion that CMI’s stated objectives are not its real objectives, and that like Mr Murphy and the Henry Jackson Society your overriding goal in the regions where you operate is to promote the interests of the United States.

As you are funded by charitable donations and by governments, I think some explanation of your employment of Mr Murphy is in order, particularly when you have employed him as a conflict resolution expert in the Caucasus and Central Asia when he has no relevant experience of conflict resolution at all, virtually none of the Caucasus, and absolutely none of Central Asia.

I was the Head of the UK Delegation that negotiated the Sierra Leone Peace Treaty, and certainly under no circumstances would I let Jim Murphy anywhere near that kind of negotiation.

With All Best Wishes,

Amb (rtd.) Craig Murray

…on the day that they expel every last war criminal from their ranks and write formally to the Hague to request the prosecution of Blair, Straw, Campbell, Dearlove and Scarlett – just to start the prosecutions.

Thank you for all the very kind enquiries following my last post and the subsequent silence. I came back from West Africa with a fever and absolutely exhausted, and have been recovering my strength. I can see why some of you guessed I was going to join the Labour Party from my last post, but no that is quite wrong. Scottish independence remains my overriding priority.

I had been spending the last few days living here in Avatime district while visiting Ghanaian friends nearby. Away from internet, TV and any other distraction, it has given me a chance to ponder what next to do with my life.

This has been a real problem. Have submitted Sikunder Burnes to the publishers, and while there is still editing and proofs, a huge amount of time is now free. My determination to dedicate myself to working for Scottish independence led to my comprehensive rejection by the SNP. This left me confused as to what I might usefully do with my life. I suppose the question I have been pondering is, what good am I?

I have come up with a potential answer, and will out it later this week.

Climate change deniers should come to Ghana. Not only have changing rainfall patterns devastated the hydro-electric system, life has become extremely hard for farmers. The last decade has seen the highly predictable wet and dry seasons become wildly unpredictable. It has been unseasonally raining heavily on me all over Ghana. The situation is extremely difficult for farmers. Mango farmers are now praying for relief from the rain for the next six weeks or the mangoes won’t flower. The continuing rains may already have adversely affected next year’s harvest. Meeting cocoa farmers today. Am now in Kumasi.

The House of Lords broke no constitutional conventions in referring back Osborne’s vindictive tax credit cuts. The Tories and their media supporters are talking utter garbage on the question. Taking Britain’s appalling “constitution” for what it is, the arcane rules of procedure were not breached.

Ever since David Lloyd George and Herbert Asquith forced, by threat of massive creation of peerages, the 1911 Budget through and with it the start of National Insurance and the demise of the workhouse, there has been a convention that the Lords do not oppose or amend Finance Bills.

But the tax credit cuts were not in a Finance Bill. Osborne instead tried to sneak them through by statutory instrument. This is secondary legislation whereby a Minister signs off laws under powers delegated to him by primary legislation. Secondary legislation gets much less parliamentary time and committee scrutiny. If Osborne had put the tax credit proposals in a Finance Bill, as they certainly should have been – it is Osborne who was breaking parliamentary convention here – rather than sneak them under the table as secondary legislation, the Lords would indeed not have been able to stop them without breaching constitutional convention. Which just goes to show it doesn’t always pay to be a weasel.

Osborne is hoist by his own petard.

Aah, Tories say. But there is another convention that the Lords do not block secondary legislation.

They are making that one up. There is no such constitutional convention and there are plenty of examples of the Lords blocking secondary legislation. There is a huge quantity of secondary legislation, thousands and thousands of laws – ministers continually are signing off legal changes.

But the entire basis of the secondary legislation is that parliament has delegated to ministers, in Acts, powers to sign off uncontroversial matter. This can be, for example, the detail of regulations needed technically to enforce primary legislation, and the occasional updates needed. Only a very low percentage indeed of secondary legislation ever gets queried by the Lords, but that is not because of a constitutional convention. That is because most of it is dull stuff. But when the government abuses its authority and tries to smuggle vital changes through secondary legislation, the Lords not only has the constitutional right to challenge this abuse, it has the constitutional duty to do so.

I wish they would do it more often. For example, when the Labour Party used Westminster secondary legislation to cede 6,000 square miles of Scotland’s sea to England without parliamentary scrutiny.

Finally, there is a constitutional convention that the Lords do not oppose manifesto commitments on which a government has been elected. But the Tories rather carefully did not put tax credit cuts in their manifesto, and indeed in campaigning said they would not do it.

The British constitution is appallingly undemocratic. The fact that an undemocratic chamber has fended off a proposal from an undemocratic executive which gained the votes of only 37% of the voting electors, is not a blow struck for democracy. It is however a temporary victory for human decency in mitigating an attack on the poor.

It is also an achievement for Jeremy Corbyn. Nobody can truly believe that Labour peers would have been organised to do this under Yvette Cooper or Liz Kendall.

UPDATE Wings Over Scotland has a very different take on the Labour Party performance. That the Labour Party was not radical enough to go for the “fatal” option I am afraid I find unsurprising. It remains a deeply conservative institution. But I had not previously encountered the argument that 90% would lose the money from universal credit anyway, and it is stunningly cynical. But on close consideration, I cannot work out what it means. Either there must be some additional cut to universal credit, or that those who lost tax credit could have regained it on universal credit anyway. If anybody could explain that one further, I should be grateful.

Been rather busy in Ghana and Sierra Leone, hence not posting. Still much removed from the world of thought, but wanted to get one frustration off my chest. This laptop came with the really horrible Windows 8. I upgraded to the slightly better Windows 10.

I have now picked up a computer virus, as I am afraid happens very frequently when I visit West Africa, must be through the local servers or hotel wifi connections. I had not previously noticed that in upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 10, my Kaspersky Pure Crystal anti-virus programme had disappeared.

I therefore went to the Kaspersky website and found a helpful page indicating this was normal, and giving decent instructions on how to update Windows 10, remove all vestiges of the Kaspersky Pure Crystal Product, and replace it with Kaspersky Total Protection 2015. Only when all was completed did I notice that the replacement Kaspersky product is a one month free trial of a limited version, after which I have to pay for the thing.

Given I had paid a lot of money for the Kaspersky Crystal Pure protection quite recently (and I think it was on an automatic renewal) I feel pretty ripped off. Am I being reasonable, or is it my fault for changing the operating system?

The dreadfully stultified pageantry of the British state has been on full display the last couple of days, all mouldy ermine, fraying gold braid and musty velvet. But forms which evolved as a vibrant display of Imperial might have transmuted into rituals of obeisance, as the nonogenerian Prince Philip stumbles behind the Chinese President along lines of men wearing decaying bears on their heads. The sickness of Britain’s monarchical system was never more bluntly revealed than by the rictus grins of the aristocratic clowns balancing their tiaras at the state banquet.

The Chinese are the imperial masters now. Cameron begs them to build a nuclear power station for which the British state guarantees it will pay double the market price for electricity produced, for twenty years. And a government which has just announced the extension of thought crime to the expression of non-violent or anti-violent thought deemed “extreme”, has no locus to talk about human rights, a concept at least as alien to Teresa May as it is to the Chinese Communist Party. Britain has its own war criminals like Blair and Straw running around, immune and very wealthy.

The British state is an immoral entity which I view with disgust. That is what drives for me the imperative to early Scottish Independence to be rid of it. Every day as a British citizen is like bathing in sewage.

I have enormous respect for the work of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. They work in conflict regions to teach the basic principles of journalism to local journalists, including citizen journalists. They really do get right in to the most difficult situations, and have access to knowledge on the ground that western media organisations often lack. I worked closely with their office in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where Michael Andersen did a great job.

The fact that IWPR accesses direct first hand knowledge of what really happens during conflicts, almost certainly holds the key to the death of Jackie Sutton. She was killed for something she knew. The official Turkish story that she killed herself in the airport in despair at missing a connecting flight, is risible.

I cannot claim to any idea at present what it was she knew that caused her to be killed. It follows from that I do not know who killed her. But the speed of the Turkish authorities to promote a suicide narrative must in itself raise suspicions.

As readers know, in general I am opposed to the lazy characterisation of Ukrainian nationalists as Nazis, fascists or racists, because in general it is untrue. But some of them are, and one who undoubtedly fits the bill is the anti-Semite Andriy Paribiy, founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine.

Paribiy will be speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall on this Friday, 23 October, at 11am. The meeting is described as open to all. I do hope people will be able to express their opinion of him freely.

This is the party symbol of Paribiy’s Social National Party, in case anybody doubts me. It is perfectly clear what Mr Paribiy stands for. That the Royal United Services Institute invites him to spread his views in the heart of Whitehall, says a great deal about the position of the right wing British establishment. Today, the British government proposes new legislation to close down mosques and bookshops deemed extreme, even if they advocate against violence and do not break the law. These are dangerous times – and the danger is from the right.

It is my birthday! I had a celebratory dinner last night in the home of very dear friends from student days. whom I had not seen for decades. We regaled each other with stories of those long ago times, and for a while were young again.

I heard again how I forgot about one of my finals and had to be helped, too drunk to walk, into the examination room but still got a first. Absolutely true but I had forgotten it until reminded. I did remember the tales of Clement Freud’s sleaziness while Rector in his advances on female students. There was one story in hearing which I took a shamelessly big-headed delight, of when we were at a Clement Freud speech in a formal university occasion. Rather pompously, he said: “You know when you are doing the job of Rector properly when the University Court thinks you are on the students’ side, and the students think you are on the Court’s side”. I interjected loudly “Two-faced bastard” and brought the house down.

If you live long enough you will make some jokes worth retelling.

But I haven’t changed in one respect. Just as I managed to miss the start of a final exam, I managed today to miss my speech to SNP conference by not being in the hall when called. I simply misread the programme, though to be fair to myself the programme is not plain whether the resolution would be in the 10am resolutions session or the 11.30am session. I am annoyed with myself nonetheless.

The motion was on the BBC Charter and I had wished to move a reference back on the grounds that it was not radical enough in its treatment of the BBC. SNP activists are continually accused in the media of being against journalistic freedom in their “attacks” on the BBC. I intended to say that, after a great deal of professional experience monitoring state propaganda organisations around the world, I know one when I see one. To oppose the propaganda output of a state propaganda organisation is not to oppose media freedom, it is to promote it. I missed out on the applause this would have got in the hall. You can applaud now.

I was fortunate in that for the whole of my twenty years in the FCO I had staff working for me who could organise me. Tell me where I was supposed to be, take me there, and make sure I didn’t forget my coat, briefcase or wallet. Without this structure around me, life is a constant struggle against my own impracticality.

Oh well, I have got through 57 years of this. If the next forty are even slightly as enjoyable, I have much to look forward to.

I am of course immediately proved wrong 🙂 The Conference just remitted back a motion supporting the Scottish Government’s land reforms on the grounds they are too timid. There is life in this Party after all.

Am now blogging direct from the Conference Hall. We just had a fascinating insight into party management. The proposer of the motion on fracking, on behalf of Leith constituency, stated in her speech that their motion as submitted called for a complete ban on fracking, but that the text had been amended by the Standing Orders Committee to delete a ban and insert support for the Scottish Government’s temporary moratorium. She added that many constituencies then submitted amendments for a complete ban, but they were all rejected by the committee. Nonetheless, she stated we should support the bowdlerised motion to “show trust for the Scottish Government”.

A remit back was proposed on the grounds that the resolution was insufficiently radical. This was defeated 550 to 420. There could be no clearer illustration of the grip of the party leadership over the conference and the unswerving loyalty, even in plainly indefensible circumstances, of the bulk of the delegates.

I see that we are not to have a referendum in the next five years, but we are likely to have unconventional coal gas extraction or some other variant on fracking.

I thought I would give you the high and low points of the SNP Conference for me on Thursday. The high point was the debate on nuclear weapons, and the unanimous vote on show of cards for unilateral nuclear disarmament. That was all heartwarming enough. But what really made my day was watching at close quarters the facial expression of arch Blairite Andrew Rawnsley of the Observer during the debate. He went from incomprehension, as though everyone were speaking Gaelic, to a kind of rictus of disgust, and then his corded neck and cheek muscles started positively twitching in hatred. I feared for a moment it was apoplexy. Priceless, and well worth the cost of the rail ticket.

To say something nice about the media for a change, after that debate I saw Jon Snow helping his crew by carrying some of their very heavy equipment the considerable distance from the hall. Can’t imagine Gavin Esler, Laura Kuenssberg or any of the “stars” at the BBC doing that.

My next highlight was listening to Phillippa Whitford talking about the NHS. She radiates confidence and competence, and it is sadly unusual to hear a politician who really does know the subject on which they are talking.

I greatly enjoyed a chat over a Guinness with the new Ecuadorean Ambassador, Carlos Abad. We discussed the prospects for Scottish Independence and, both being diplomats by profession, agreed heartily with each other that the key to eventually achieving Independence is recognition by other states.

The SNP really could and should do more in promoting the cause to the wider international community. The group of broadly socialist countries of Latin America (Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua) is called ALBA, an acronym of the Spanish name of the group. We should definitely cooperate with ALBA!

Which brings me to the low points of the day. The Ambassador had never been to Scotland before, and he had come straight from Aberdeen airport to the conference centre. I was ashamed and desperate to convince him what a lovely country Scotland is. The AECC is the ugliest building in Scotland – genuinely world class in the ugly buildings league. It is even more horrible inside than out. Whoever designed a conference centre with no bar is exceeded in stupidity only by whoever decided to hold the SNP conference in a centre with no bar. There is a bar in the adjoining Holiday Inn, itself as drab and dispiriting as a cheaply built hotel can be, but the hotel bar is far too small to serve as a social hub for the conference. And as the conference centre is outside the city in the middle of nowhere, there are no nearby bars to pile into – the conference lacks any kind of social heart.

Equally annoying, the rooms available for fringe meetings are too small. I tried to attend fringe meetings on TTIP and on excessive executive pay, but simply could not get into either.

The fringe meeting on the timing of a second referendum was cancelled, without explanation. There can be no doubt whatsoever that Nicola Sturgeon has moved decisively in the last 48 hours to kick the next referendum further into the long grass. She was ten minutes ago on BBC Breakfast doing precisely that and positioning the SNP as a party of governance within the Union. Delegates here including me, have no opportunity at all to express our opinions on this. That is not a good feeling, and I suspect in the long term not good party management, however smart it may feel to the leadership at the moment.

I am at the SNP Conference in Aberdeen and you may not be surprised to learn that I find myself in immediate and fundamental disagreement with the party leadership.

Nicola Sturgeon in her opening address, as in media interviews yesterday, made a point of stating that she did not only want Independence supporters to vote SNP in the Holyrood elections, she wanted unionists to vote SNP too, on the grounds that the SNP were the most competent Holyrood government.

I disagree fundamentally. When we have the clear mandate for Independence of overwhelming election victories at Westminster and Holyrood elections, why muddy the waters and undermine the mandate for Independence by arguing that a vote for the SNP can also be a unionist vote? It is stupid tactics.

It is also nonsense. There is no significant unionist vote for the SNP. Ever since the referendum, opinion polls have without a single exception found support for the SNP and support for Independence to be almost identical, within the margin of statistical error. There is no well of unionist SNP supporters.

Furthermore, analysis of numerous Scottish council by-elections (see Scot Goes Pop passim) shows that unionist voters will happily transfer preferences between the unionist red, blue and orange tories but not to the SNP. Unionists will not vote SNP in significant numbers.

But assuming I am wrong and unionists flock to Sturgeon’s call and start to vote SNP, that raises major questions about the whole purpose of the SNP. If the SNP is a party which unionists can support, then plainly Independence must, by definition, no longer be the defining purpose of the SNP. That is the route Sturgeon is taking.

This is the danger of managerialism, about which I have written before. The SNP becomes so convinced by our own propaganda about the unique competence of our administration and the unique beneficence of our paternalism, that we come to believe that just having the SNP in charge in Holyrood and representing Scotland in Westminster is a good in itself. The fact that this also leaves the SNP establishment in very comfy high paid jobs with their feet well and truly under the UK establishment table is no disincentive to believe this.

Thus the motion after Sturgeon’s speech was about non-delivery of The Vow and called for the Smith Commission to be fully delivered in the Scotland Bill. I do not give tuppence for whether the Smith Commission is implemented in full, in part or not at all. It still leaves Scotland subservient to Westminster, without a voice in international organisations and subject to being dragged in to illegal war, not to mention the new cold war with Russia and renewed arms race which the UK establishment is preparing.

If Sturgeon gains more unionist votes, and in consequence the SNP had 55% rather than 51% of the Holyrood vote, and thus 65% rather than 60% of the Holyrood MPs, what precisely has been gained other than more jobs for the boys and more feet under the establishment table, at the price of abandoning a clear platform of Independence. A terrible trade-off.

If we abandon the idea of a referendum within the next five years, on the stupid grounds that we might lose, then the chance of Independence may vanish. At the moment we have a hated Tory government in Westminster, a Labour Party in utter disarray and SNP dominance in Scotland. There will never be a more favourable conjunction. Why mess it up by starting to spread doubt about the SNP’s commitment to Independence – which is suddenly less important that its commitment to Having Power.

It was the realisation that Scottish Labour cared more about Having Power than principles that put paid to that party. Sturgeon seems to want to replace Scottish Labour in every sense. The SNP may be dominant now, but if we put Power before Independence – as any analysis of Sturgeon’s speech today can only conclude she does – then we should not be surprised if many for whom Independence is the primary objective start to look at other vehicles to attain it.

I am watching the debate on Osborne’s Fiscal Charter live on the Parliament Channel. The barracking and baying at Caroline Lucas by roaring Tory MPs making that weird public school hawing noise was quite astounding. She was making an entirely sensible point about the viability of government borrowing to fund productive investment.

Listening to George Osborne speak, I find it hard to believe that it is seriously expected by the commentariat that this man will win the 2020 election and become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. If ordinary people find him an acceptable human being, let alone leader, I really do not understand what has become of society.

I hardly know where to start to deconstruct his speech, but one fact stands out. Osborne purported to give an overview of Britain’s economic crash and “recovery”, without making a single mention of the banking crisis or bankers’ corrupt and greedy practices as the cause of the crash, of vast banking bailouts by the taxpayer and the rapid contraction of the economy. That banker behaviour was of course accelerated by Gordon Brown’s extreme banking deregulation, but that was Brown’s great blunder, not the levels of public spending.