I am off to get very very drunk!! Hurray!!!!

Wow! If the exit poll is right, Independence is a nailed on certainty. New Labour a total busted flush, and a Scotland firmly behind the SNP being ruled by David Cameron and a Tory, UKIP and Democratic Unionist coalition. Get down the bookies tomorrow and put your house on independence within five years. We won’t need a referendum. Put your mum’s house on UDI.

We are getting to the time when the postal ballots are mixed in unidentifiably with other ballots before counting. This is on the instruction of the electoral commission. This destroys all evidence of fraud – if you get batches of hundreds of postal ballots all for the same candidate, or if the balance of postal votes is vastly different from the balance of secret ballots, there is no way of observing it.

I have tried again and again to discover any rationale for this mixing in, other than the facilitation of fraud. I asked the Electoral Commission when I was a candidate, and was told it was an additional precaution against individual votes being identified. That is complete nonsense – there is no way that counting the postal ballots separately would enable you to identify individuals.

Undoubtedly some readers of this blog will be observers at various counts. Ask the returning officer or their staff at what stage the postal ballots are mixed in unidentifiably, how, and why. I should be most interested to see reports of the responses. If we see a substantial difference between Labour’s performance in Scotland and the opinion polls, this is how it will be achieved.

I have lived my entire life under governments dominated by either the Labour or the Tory Party. When I was young, there were genuine differences between them – over public ownership of transport, utilities and strategic industries, over the rights of workers in their workplace, over Britain’s attitude to its Imperial legacy.

However in the course of my lifetime the political agenda shifted fundamentally to the right, as the Labour Party under a series of opportunist leaderships shifted its ground to the agenda favoured by the corporate media. So even our drinking water had to be privatised, the maintenance grants that had enabled me to go to university were abolished as the very principle of free education was abandoned, the NHS was increasingly given over to private provision and PFI introduced the opportunity for bankers and financiers to take the large majority of the total taxpayers’ money allocated to any public investment project. Council housing was sold off and not replaced. Foreign policy became entirely subservient to the United States and a neo-con model of continued armed attacks on poorer countries abroad.

What is worse, the scope for expressing policies that lay outside the increasingly convergent views represented by the main stream media and the Tory and Labour Party narrowed, to the point where dissent disappeared. The opposition to the Iraq War of the majority of people was reflected in less than 2% of total UK TV coverage of that war. The fact that consistently a substantial majority of British people want to see railways renationalised never has any corporate media reflection.

Both “main” parties supported giving over £60,000 per British household to bail out the bankers, which is why we are in this debt mess. Both parties support the fact that 99% of the bankers have maintained the same ultra-opulent lifestyles and income, with no price paid for their failure. The corporate media gave no voice at all to the policy alternatives around allowing bad banks to go bust. It would have been 8% as expensive for the taxpayers just to give to the public and companies the amount they lost in UK bank deposits with failed banks.

When Nicola Sturgeon spoke in the televised TV debates, it was the first time in a decade that I had heard opposition to Trident missiles – a view held by over 40% of the population – even mentioned on television. It had become that bad.

And that Nicola Sturgeon moment was an indication that something really has changed. The electorate have twigged that the Red Tory and Blue Tory parties offer no real choice at all. Whether you want the same Thatcherite cuts spread out over a slightly longer timescale is not a choice.

The political system has quite rightly fallen into disrepute. A pretend choice and charade of democracy is not going to fool the entire population. It is not just that Labour and Tory cannot get over 35% of people who vote. It is also that so many people don’t bother to vote through disillusion. They are not apathetic, they justifiably don’t see how it helps them whose nose is in the trough. Combined with the appalling FPTP system, you end up with a circumstance where Tony Blair’s “triumph” of 2005 was won with 22.5% of eligible voters. The system is bust. The legitimacy of government already does not exist – what is newly in doubt is the ability of illegitimate government to foist itself upon the people.

This is the first election of my lifetime where there is a chance really to give the rotten structure a substantial kick. Any human construct, including the SNP, is imperfect, but that Trident moment on TV represented the truth that the SNP is a real danger to the comfortable untouchability of the neo-con UK state. I urge everyone to vote SNP in Scotland as the surest way to start to force change. Many of the SNP candidates whom I know personally – Mhairi Black, Phil Boswell, Chris Law, Michelle Thomson, Tommy Sheppard – are definitely going to bring fresh air to parliament.

In Wales, vote Plaid Cymru. In England, I think Green is the way to go in general, and I wish all the best to Rupert Read in Cambridge. But if you have a good Independent candidate, consider giving them a vote. Citizen participation against the parties deserves encouragement. There are good people in all parties, and there are some sitting MPs – Jeremy Corbyn, Paul Flynn, John Hemmings, David Ward – who I would vote for; they transcend the moral stunting of party politics. Despite profound differences on Scotland, I do urge people in Bradford to vote for George Galloway, who has done so much to oppose neo-conservative wars, and been an obstacle to the cynical exploitation of Islamic communities for machine politics by the Labour Party.

But above all, today will be remembered as a day when Scotland took a giant stride towards achieving national independence. A vote for the SNP is a vote for Scottish independence and for the break-up of the UK state. It matters not what attempts are made to obfuscate that fact, opinion poll after opinion poll post September 2014 has consistently shown no statistically significant gap between the level of support for the SNP and the level of support for Scottish Independence.

This is a great historical trend which the SNP are surfing rather than controlling. The fundamental answer to the political malaise which I described at the start of this article is the break-up of the UK as the sovereign political institution. A vote for the SNP today is part of an inexorable progress towards that break-up. You would be nuts to be a convinced unionist and to vote SNP, and whatever the propaganda the truth is that almost all SNP votes are nationalist votes, and I for one am claiming every SNP vote as a vote for Independence. The utter panic of the entire Westminster political and corporate media establishment is in itself sufficient evidence that this really counts (I loved the description Scotterdammerung). Freedom is a great thing – get out there and vote for it.

This is the one day that we are all independent, in that whoever we choose today controls us tomorrow. I have lived my life under a rotten system which has got more rotten, more corrupt, more intellectually narrow, and more divided between rich and poor. Today is a great chance to shake that system. Get out there now and shake it!

OK, purely for fun, here is my prediction of the General Election result. This is not in any sense a reflection of what I want to happen. It is rather what I think will happen, my best guess. Anyone want to see if they can get closer?

Conservatives 283
Labour 259
SNP 51
Lib Dem 31
DUP 9
Sinn Fein 5
Plaid Cymru 4
SDLP 3
UKIP 2
Green Party 1
Independent 1
Speaker 1

It is interesting that those who have no qualms at all about extreme surveillance of citizens by the state, are outraged at the idea that citizens may monitor the state in the conduct of its election.

Severin Carrell is of course under instructions to come up with a “crazed violent Scottish nationalists threaten Scotalypse” story. But the best he can come up with is the story that a very small group are planning peacefully and legally to try to follow, so far as they can, their own ballot paper within the process to ensure it is counted fairly.

But really instructive in that Guardian article are the howls from Labour supporters that dominate the comments section. They are absolutely frothing at the mouth with rage at the idea that citizens may wish peacefully to check on the activity of the state. But these Labour supporters are perfectly OK with the fact that GCHQ collects millions of communications of ordinary citizens, including a database of tens of thousands of perfectly law-abiding individuals taking part in online sex chats with their partners. They had no problem at all at lengthy detention without charge, or the murder of Jean Charles De Menezes for looking a bit Middle Eastern . They had no problem with bombing children to pieces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. They have no problem with CCTV continually monitoring them as they go about their daily lives.

But a Scotsman with a mobile phone following a ballot box? That is an outrageous threat to society.

UPDATE: Dermot Murnaghan has tweeted it wasn’t him. Quite possible it was another Sky correspondent, as I have no idea what he looks like. There was a caption up with Murnaghan’s name on it at the time. It was whoever was reporting for Sky from Edinburgh just after 13.10 today.

Just after 13.10 Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News, speaking in Edinburgh, told us that the success of “Labour’s fightback” in Scotland was due to Gordon Brown, Labour’s “most vocal campaigner alongside Jim Murphy of course.” He had been speaking at a lot of rallies and visiting a lot of constituencies, wooing voters back to Labour.

I had to play it back to make sure I had heard it correctly. There is absolutely no evidence for the success of the Brown “fightback”, despite the frantic promotion efforts of the corporate media. Was Murnaghan just wittering, or was he seeding a narrative to prepare the ground for a counter-intuitive result once the thousands of fake postal ballots get mixed in?

You may not expect me to endorse a man standing in front of a Union Jack, but I do hope voters in mid-Bedfordshire will show some appreciation for Tim Ireland, who is standing to highlight a variety of examples of corruption and cover-up by the Conservative Party. Tim has done more than anyone to expose the lies and aliases of Grant Shapps.

Tim was the midwife of political blogging in the UK, not just on his Bloggerheads website but for the help he gave aspiring bloggers of all political persuasions. This blog would not exist without him.

I have just sent the following email to the SDLP media office. I am genuinely puzzled as to how they reconcile their purported desire for uniting Ireland (which I strongly support) with their support for the aggressively unionist UK Labour Party. The only explanation I can find is that the politics of Northern Ireland are so parochial that they are oblivious. I don’t imagine they will reply, but the questions seem to me worth asking. Were I a voter in Northern Ireland, the answers would determine my vote.

My name is Craig Murray. I am a freelance journalist, a member of the NUJ, mostly working in new media including my own blog, which has approximately 300,000 unique visitors monthly.

Could you kindly give brief responses today to the following questions?

The UK Labour Party party has now firmly described itself as a unionist party committed to the integrity of the United Kingdom. How will that impact on your historically close relationship?

Will your MPs continue to receive the Labour whip? The website Labour List and very many media outlets state that your MPs “unofficially take the Labour whip.” Is that a fair categorisation?

Do you support the Labour Party decision not to enter any kind of deal with the SNP or Plaid Cymru? Will your MPs take the same line?

Thank You

Craig Murray

The Guardian reflects the metropolitan London world of New Labour, and nothing else. Its coverage of the referendum, particularly by Severin Carrell, achieved the remarkable feat of being even less fair and containing even more lies than the Scotsman. But if you want really to get inside the mind of Labour, the Guardian remains the place to go to know what the Labour elite – London’s Balls, Cooper, Miliband, Harman, Umunna, Jowell etc. are thinking.

Right now they are thinking of how to take power after they lose the election. And the Guardian’s article on this subject indicates exactly how they are thinking in the illustrating picture. The Labour Party’s ideal political world is a world without Celts.

Not just no SNP and no Plaid, but not even the SDLP. There has been a remarkable silence from the SDLP while the party whose whip they follow has wrapped itself in the Union Jack, declared that nationalism is totally incompatible with Labour, and refused even to speak to Plaid Cymru and the SNP. What does the SDLP make of this renunciation of nationalism? Do they go along with it?

On Twitter, a bunch of Labour activists led by one Duncan Hothersall are having a hilarious time tweeting and retweeting their incredulity that I should have been both in the St James’ Centre during the fake nationalist “scuffle” with Miliband during the referendum, and at St Enoch’s in Glasgow during the fake Murphy Riot, or that I can be called an “impartial” source.

Well, I was in the St James Centre but I wasn’t anywhere near Glasgow. Nor am I impartial. The Labour numpties are incapable of distinguishing between a blog, and comments on a blog. What they are aiming their hilarity at is a comment left by a lady named Anne Keay at 7.38pm yesterday:

I was there. I am in the photo. I did not plan to be there. I was shopping and heard the crowd and went to watch. I saw nothing except healthy democracy in action – a politician goes walk-about and people gather passionately to protest, call out, crowd in and generally make a lot of fuss and noise, as is their right.

I had read on sites such as yours about these Labour rallies and watched in disgust at the stage managed event unfolded. There was no passion, no attempt to reach out to voters, no attempt to engage with the people of Glasgow. It was a press event, purely and simply. P

I also saw and heard around me, from the few people who watched, only bemused indifference and/or dislike of Labour then, gradually, disgust at the pointlessness of the whole event.

If I had ever believed that Jim Murphy cared one whit about the ‘ordinary’ men and women of Scotland, I would now know better. Neither he or any one of the Labour activists with him had any interest in talking to, engaging with or convincing anyone. It wasn’t about us – it was about tonight’s news and cheap headlines.

I was revolted by the whole thing and, pardon my ignorance, astounded at seeing for myself what depths modern politics Labour style has sunk to.

So far as I am aware I have no connection to Anne Keay, who seems a very reasonable witness. By demonstrating their typical Labour Party stupidity @dhothersall, @stuart_w64 (who has a strange interest in my sexual preferences), @kb32904, @rnzhdad, @BrianSpanner1 have given me reason to highlight Ms Keay’s testimony. To be fair to Hothersall, he has as many followers as there are members of the Scottish Labour Party.

I am so much looking forward to reading their tweets this time on Friday.

I am not going to apologise for not being profound. Have just reduced book from 212,000 words (originally 243,000) to 197,000. About to tackle footnotes which I want to get down from 1,480 to 800. But have a parting thought from David Hume, which points the way forward for the UK: “Let us therefore lay aside all Anger, shake Hands and part Friends.” Somebody might want to leave a comment explaining who David Hume was, for the benefit of Labour Party members.

This is how you make a speech outdoors. It doesn’t involve starting a row, getting scared and running away. And the circumstances were much scarier that anything Murphy faced. Here is a clue – all those police aren’t protecting me.

Is this the world’s worst photoshop?

Mr Clerkin appears to have a shrunken head. And the light cannot be shining on Mr Clerkin from top right, and on Murphy from the opposite direction.

The Herald headline is that political leaders are lining up to condemn the six anti-Labour demonstrators for being noisy. Are political leaders also lining up to condemn the total lack of journalistic ethics of the Herald?

I phoned the Channel 4 Newsdesk to report a story. It went like this:

Male Voice: Hello Newsdesk
Me: Hello is that Channel 4 News?
Male Voice: Yes, how can I help you
Me: I want to report a story
Male Voice: Well there’s not much time left the news is about to go out
Me: It is quite a big story
Male Voice: Well run it by me
Me: It’s about a totally corrupt journalist named Alex Thomson who claimed there was a riot in Glasgow today when no such thing happened
Male Voice: Oh
Me: Are you interested?
Male Voice: Well, obviously I know who Alex Thomson is
Me: Are you interested?
Male Voice: Well I can put you through to viewer complaints….
[Click – goes to answerphone]

I phone back
Female Voice: Hello
Me: Hello. I was talking to someone about Alex Thomson invention of a completely untrue story, and I seem to have got put through to an answerphone
Female Voice: I can put you through to viewer complaints
Me: No, that’s the answerphone
Female Voice: Well, then the editor will hear what you say
Me: Really? Does the editor listen to the answerphone?
Female Voice: Yes
Me: The editor listens to every comment left on the answerphone
Female Voice: Yes
Me: So how many comments per day are left on the answerphone?
Female Voice: The editor doesn’t listen to the answerphone, they get the comments typed out
Me: So each and every message is typed out separately and the editor reads them all
Female Voice: No it’s a summary
Me: Alex Thomson was lying about events in Glasgow to try to influence an election. I want to talk to your superior.
CLICK put to answerphone

This is a picture of the actual scene, exactly as I described it earlier today. Alex Thomson should be sacked. he is a disgrace to journalism.

Thanks to Wings Over Scotland for the picture.

The Mainstream Media are anxious to invoke the “violent nationalists” meme at every opportunity. Today Jim Murphy and Eddie Izzard ran away in Glasgow because evil nationalists shouted back when he was haranguing them. That’s what they did – shouted back. Nobody punched anyone. Nobody shoved anyone. Nobody threw anything. But people had the gall not to listen in hushed silence to Murphy.

The idea is that Murphy with a massive media pack turns up and speaks in front of two dozen Labour activists, who huddle behind him with placards, and the media then show only cropped close shots which make it look like there was a crowd of pro-Labour people. The media do this obligingly several times a day for all the unionist parties, and it works well with closed halls with heavy security. But of course it doesn’t work on the streets, where evil people can have the gall to shout back instead of doffing their caps.

So then a different narrative kicks in, that of evil nationalist violent thugs. Now we have a news story about Murphy and Izzard “escaping” nationalist thugs. But look closely at the video clip in the Guardian, which has gone into unionist orgasm on the story. All the people with the multi-coloured placards are the planted Labour supporters. (Scottish Labour placards have now to be not only red, but also blue and orange, for obvious reasons). At the time Murphy “escapes”, there isn’t anybody apart from the vetted Labour posse within twenty yards of him. And the horrible people who dared to shout back don’t total more than half a dozen.

The Guardian claims there were “minor scuffles”. Watch the video at 11.42 on this Guardian feed. There are no scuffles, except for Jim pushing past people to run away and pretend he was in danger.

It is a trick they have pulled before, and doubtless will pull again.

The essence of Conservatism is that people doing quite nicely out of the current system do not want anything to change, in case the consequences are not good for them. That is why John Stuart Mill said the Conservatives would be better named “The Stupid Party”. Conservatism does not require a thought process. Generally it does require a callousness towards those not doing well out of the current system.

Radicalism is more diffuse. Its essence can be a cold certainty of the rationalist ability to calculate risk and consequence. Or it can spring from romanticism, the gambler’s instinct, or plain having nothing to lose. (In my case, all of the above).

The First Past the Post electoral system is a historic relic not fitted to a modern society. But by definition elected politicians have done rather well out of it, so have no incentive to change. With the neo-conservative consensus embracing all the main Westminster parties, it doesn’t make any difference who governs us apart from the question of which particular snouts are in the trough, which is no help to the man in the street.

Then along we come in the SNP and challenge some of the pillars of neo-conservatism, like the possession of vast hordes of nuclear warheads, the utility of ever increasing wealth inequality, a pre-Keynesian, Thatcherite attitude to public finance, and trying to get our way in the world by bombing poorer peoples. The SNP has managed to gather enough support for a radical agenda to pass the FPTP tipping point and for the system to work massively in our favour in Scotland. Cue massed panic in the Westminster establishment, including the corporate media. For the first time in a generation, people have appeared on a main television channel arguing that possession of weapons of mass destruction by the UK is not a good thing.

Whole sections of the Establishment have therefore woken up, for all the wrong reasons, to the fact that FPTP is a bad system. Yet neither the Blue nor the Red Tories are likely to embrace proportional representation.

The Blue Tories will not embrace PR because they are the Stupid Party. There is a right wing majority in England. If you separate Scotland, then UKIP and the Conservatives have about 48% of the vote in England compared to about 42% for Labour plus the Greens. I have left the Lib Dems out, though post Clegg they might fairly be added to the conservative total. Because of this right wing majority outside Scotland, PR would keep the Tories in government almost all of the time, though generally in coalition.

By contrast the Red Tories would be stuffed by PR. There just is not enough support for them, even after five years of a very unpopular coalition government. The reason there is not enough support for them is that they do not offer any kind of real alternative in policy. More austerity, more nukes, just fronted by an even less appealing set of neo-con “personalities” than the Conservatives in Miliband, Balls, Cooper, Murphy and Alexander.

What the SNP have shown is that there is a real public hunger for a more radical politics. PR would be the death of the Labour Party because the large majority of its voters lend the party their support purely to keep the Tories out, not because they are enthused by the policies or the line-up. PR would give the chance for a genuinely radical alternative to grow. There are legions of Labour supporters who would love to vote Green but fear it would let the Tory in. Under PR, other left alternatives besides the Greens would soon blossom. The Red Tories don’t actually have a unique offering to the public. There is not really a market niche for another set of Tories. They are maintained entirely by the inertia of the FPTP system. And they know it.

Expect a lot of angst about FPTP following major SNP gains. But do not expect the Establishment to do anything about it – the status quo suits them fine.

Every single accusation against the Mayor of Tower Hamlets, I witnessed being done by Lord Patel’s enforcers on behalf of Labour in Blackburn. My thoughts are today with those, particularly women and young people, in the Islamic community there who are now under terrible pressure. They are obliged to show their completed postal ballots before sealing to community elders, often themselves Labour councillors. They are not allowed to vote other than by post. The heads of household who have to enforce discipline on their families are themselves sometimes not happy, but tied in to mostly Gujerati tribal structures of subservience. That this still happens in the United Kingdom in 2015 is disgusting. What is worse is that it happens with the knowing connivance of Labour Party officials and of Blackburn Council.

Remind me again. What precisely qualified Patel to become a member of the House of Lords?

Were the Union to last long enough, doubtless they would send this girl too to join the Unionist classes at Murrayfield, dressed in tartan as a kind of insurance policy against our ditching the firstborn. Fortunately neither the union nor the monarchy in Scotland will last long enough.

Another over-privileged right wing little tosspot is born to live off our taxes. I wish harm to no baby. But every one of the babies the UK killed in bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya was worth just as much as this one. If the murder of one of those babies by the British state had received a ten thousandth of the attention of the birth of this baby to live high on the British state, the world would be a slightly fairer place.

During the course of this campaign, a quarter of Tories in East Renfrewshire have switched to voting Labour to back Jim Murphy against the SNP.

Polls by Ashcroft of the constituency at the beginning and end of April shows the Tory vote dropping by 25 to 20%, and the Murphy vote increasing from 31 to 36% – a direct transfer of Tory tactical votes to Labour.

The Tories willingness to back the leader of the Scottish Labour accounting unit is the starkest possible illustration of the collusion of Red Tories and Blue Tories. It comes on top of Miliband’s preference for a Tory government rather than a deal with the SNP. As I have been saying for almost a year, I view a Tory-Labour “grand coalition” as perfectly possible.