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.

Just been working on this section of Sikunder Burnes:

The only evidence for Pottinger’s heroics was allegedly in his journals, which were the basis of the account of “The Hero of Herat” by the doyen of British Indian historians Sir John Kaye. But this evidence disappeared in one of those infamous Victorian study fires, in which papers potentially embarrassing to the Imperial narrative were apt to vanish.1 It seems likely that this fire is where Alexander Burnes’ private diaries disappeared too, with their evidence of religious scepticism (and perhaps sexual adventure). Kaye published that “the journals and correspondence of Sir Alexander Burnes were given to me by his brother, the late Dr James Burnes”2, but there, to my extreme frustration, the trail ends. The same conflagration took private papers of those martyr icons of Victorian India, Henry Lawrence and John Nicholson. This almost certainly destroyed evidence of homosexual relationships among some members of the circle including those two and Herbert Edwardes, known as “Henry Lawrence’s young men”, and paedophile relationships with the young boys in their charge.3

It was a continual process. I just came across this, written with apparent naivety in John Lawrence’s 1990 biography of his ancestor, Henry:

“The papers collected by Herbert Edwardes came to my grandfather and were passed down to my father… Unfortunately some of them were lost in a fire while they were with Macleaod Innes, who had known Henry in his youth.”

“Known Henry in his youth.” I bet he did. The most tragic of the study fires was of course Isobel Burton’s destruction of Richard’s papers, though that was rare in being avowed. I was wondering if there is not an interesting little book in Victorian study fires and the bowdlerisation of history.

This great British tradition continues of course with the loss of paedophilia dossiers in the Home Office…

For the footnotes you’ll have to buy the book!

Can anybody find me a text of Jan Prosper Witkiewicz’ suicide note in the original language? I assume it was Russian, not Polish.

Given that the absolute maximum share of the UK vote Labour might conceivably get is 36%, it is extraordinarily arrogant for Miliband to insist on the right to impose his full manifesto. Tactically, of course, he is trying to panic Scottish voters into supporting Labour lest they lose the chance to have him as PM. I can see no reason why this would suddenly become more successful than it has been so far.

Unionists have plainly twigged that next time we have a referendum, they will lose, even if it was next week. The near hysterical focus of unionists on not allowing another referendum, almost to the exclusion of all other argument, is very heartening. Independence is not only inevitable, it will be with us even sooner than the unionists fear.

Vessels have the right of freedom of navigation through straits, on “innocent passage” under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. As it sounds, that amounts to a right to pass straight through on normal business. Territorial waters do not affect innocent passage. The coastal state has the right to establish sea lanes for maritime safety purposes.

So whether the Marshall Islands flagged Maersk Tigris was in Iranian territorial waters is not relevant to its right to pass through. If, as Iranian sources have indicated, it really was impounded for commercial debt, then that would have to be in territorial waters. But for that the crew could not be detained, and the debt would have to be immediately stated and the ship released if paid. Iran is not acting as though this really is for debt.

The Maersk Tigris is however a good example of why the shipping industry is an absolute disgrace. It is flagged in a country with which neither the vessel nor its owners have any connection. It is owned by Maersk, leased to a renting company in Berlin, and then rented back by Maersk. The purpose of the flagging arrangements is to avoid proper safety, crew qualification, wage and trade union regulations which go with a genuine state flag. The leasing is an international tax fiddle. For reasons nothing to do with Iran or the US, I have no sympathy with the owners or insurers.

I rather expect the Iranians are lying about the commercial debt. Iran and the US are playing a pointless, massively expensive hawkish game in the Gulf. At least the Iranians have the excuse that they live there.

Just as Iran should not have stopped the passage of the Maersk Tigris, so the US Navy had no right at all recently to threaten Iranian cargo ships which may or may not have been on the way to Yemen. Even if those ships had entered Yemeni waters, the US would only have had the right to intervene if asked to do so by the government of Yemen. While that government is a Saudi and US puppet, they are not keen for all their people to know that. Giving permission for invisible blasts from the sky is much more deniable than for huge warships.

I was sorry for the two American hostages who were killdied in a drone strike, but sickened that given all the hundreds of innocent women and children he has murdered in drone strikes, Obama finally got all sackcloth and ashes over two American men.

A classic example of BBC mock balance on the news tonight as James Cook devoted apparently equal time to Douglas Alexander and Mhairi Black in Renfrewshire East.

Of Mhairi we were told by Cook that her opponents say that her youth shows, and that she carries fighting talk too far. Well, of Douglas his opponents say that he is a war criminal, and that he stabbed his sister in the back. That was not mentioned.

Whereas the “equal time” allowed the SNP candidate included BBC commentary giving direct personal criticism of her, there was no critical note in the Alexander side of the coverage. An interesting example of how the state propaganda system works.

Students of irony may enjoy this one.

The only time in the entire last parliament where the Lib Dems actually stood up to the Tories and whipped their MPs to vote in the opposite direction, was not to protect the poor and needy from vicious cuts. It was to protect their own jobs. They voted down the Boundary Commission proposals to amend constituency boundaries to account for population shifts and make them more equal sized, and to cut Westminster from 650 troughing MPs to 600.

A general cut of 8.5% in the number of MPs was not the only problem for the gravy train Lib Dems, who were particularly concerned that they could suffer a net extra loss of half a dozen seats from boundary changes in rural constituencies with small populations. There was no hint of principle in their decision, merely a desire to keep their snouts in the trough.

The wonderful irony is, their arses will now very possibly be booted from their ministerial limousines by their own actions. Because the large majority of over-small population constituencies are in the centre of declining post-industrial cities, the beneficiaries of the Lib Dems action will be mostly the Labour Party and secondly the SNP.

Indeed if the total number of votes cast in the UK for Tories plus Lib Dems is equal to the total number of votes cast in the UK for Labour plus Scot Nats (which is more or less what the polls are showing), then Labour plus the Scot Nats will win approximately 35 more seats than the rival bloc for the same total votes, entirely because of the Lib Dem veto on the Boundary Commission proposals.

It’s convoluted, but delicious irony once you get your head round it. What an arse Clegg is.

Gordon Brown and wee Dougie Alexander once bestrode the world, bombing much of it. Now these mighty egos are confined within Elderslie Village Hall.

The problem is, the average member of the population does not have a high opinion of the dynamic duo. So it is essential that they are kept away from average people, and instead paraded only before vetted audiences of Labour activists. There are not very many of those; so the venues are tiny, with a small number of carefully bunched people holding silly placards, photographed by a compliant media only from carefully prepared angles.

Now I plunge happily into politically incorrect ground. As normal people have abandoned it and Labour has come down to the core of its core support, it is truly striking how remarkably ugly its hardcore activists are. I don’t mean that in any metaphorical sense. I mean that they are an aesthetic disaster. It is not a product of poverty, as the core support are all well employed as research assistants or doing pretendy youth work jobs for Labour councils. Other parties do not have such challenging physiognomy. It is very seldom you can look at a room and say Gordon Brown is one of the best looking people there. Perhaps Blair’s crimes have been written on the faces of all the complicit.

Douglas Alexander not only facilitated the use of Diego Garcia for torture and extraordinary rendition, in an act of extreme hypocrisy the evil little shit also declared a “marine conservation area” around it. In the 1960’s Britain forcibly deported the entire population of the islands to make way for the US Air Base. Faced with a continual political and legal fight for them to return, Alexander sought to make it impossible with his “marine conservation area”. There is nobody who better represents Scottish Labour’s loss of its soul than Alexander. If Mhairi beats him I shall be extremely happy.

Full on neo-con philosophy underpinned Miliband’s “speech” to the Royal Institute of International Affairs yesterday. Miliband acknowledged that our bombing of Libya back to the stone age was the root cause of the boat people crisis.

But Miliband was not admitting that the Guernica style massacre was wrong – he voted for it. No, he was going the full Henry Jackson and arguing that what had been needed was neo-colonial occupation of Libya in order to reform its institutions – precisely as had been done in Iraq. And we all know how that went.

This is a blow to those who believed that Miliband was different from Blair, Brown, Murphy and his brother. In fact, the entire “speech” could have been written by the Henry Jackson Society. It bemoans the decline of the authority of international institutions like the UN and International Court of Justice, but states that this is because they had failed – and failed in particular to back western military intervention everywhere. Miliband argues that the solution is for individual states to take unilateral armed action abroad, but bemoans that this is more difficult because of cuts in western defence budgets. He wants increased defence spending to fund increased military intervention abroad. He does not acknowledge that it is precisely unilateral western military action in attacking other states which has destroyed the authority of the UN in the first place.

The “speech” is in fact a series of slogans, loosely connected. Both the content and the style say a huge amount about the depths to which our civic society has sunk. The prospect of this intellectual midget and neo-con lickspittle becoming Prime Minister is frankly appalling.

The RIIA, better known as Chatham House, does not normally hear lectures written by somebody incapable of constructing a paragraph of more than ten words. It would give me great pleasure if you would be so kind just to glance at the lecture I gave to Chatham House eleven years ago. Of course it is on a much more specific subject than Miliband’s neo-con declaration of faith, but I still feel I come rather well out of the contrast.

Rather like those Soviet parade photos where the nomenklatura got airbrushed out after execution, all trace of my lecture has disappeared from the Chatham House website.

We are directly responsible for the disasters in the Mediterranean. The bombing of Libya into failed state status is now coming back to haunt us. The ludicrous idea, propounded by Blair, Robert Cooper and the Henry Jackson Society, that you could improve dictatorial states by massive bombing campaigns that targeted their basic infrastructure, is now a total bust. Sadly so are Iraq and Libya, to the permanent detriment of many millions of people. We caused both the Islamic State and the Mediterranean boat disasters, and we caused them with bombs.

But the lack of any effective policing is only part of the problem. What makes people so desperate that they are prepared to give all of the small amount they own, to ruthless gangs, in exchange for a dreadful sea crossing with a one in ten chance of drowning? Most of the refugees are sub-Saharan African. We only see the European end of the saga, not the terrible conditions on the cross Saharan journeys that they start with.

There will be no security anywhere if the world does not address the terrible scourge of African poverty and under-development. That is a huge subject on which I have written extensively and worked much of my life, and I do not wish to open it here. But what it does show is the utter stupidity – inhumanity yes, but also stupidity – of UKIP in thinking that cutting development aid will increase the economic security of the UK.

Lord Carlile is amazingly unobservant. An excellent article in today’s Observer by Jay Rayner gives details of the establishment cover-up of Janner’s long continued child rapes. The silence of the Vaz draws most attention. But let us think about Alex Carlile.

Rayner states “The establishment, in the shape of his fellow MPs, men such as Labour’s Keith Vaz, Tory David Ashby and the then Lib Dem MP now Lord Carlile, closed ranks.” In the 1991 House of Commons debate deploring accusations against Janner, Carlile played a prominent part, describing Janner as a man of “integrity” and “determination”. Carlile should have known Janner fairly well. They were both MPs, both QCs, both members of Friends of Israel, both patrons of UK lawyers for Israel. The appear still to both be patrons of the Friends of Israel Educational Foundation. They were regulars on the same parliamentary committees dealing with legal affairs. They were both to leave the Commons at the same time and both to join the Lords only slightly apart.

Still, Carlile’s stalwart defence of his friend is understandable. You can’t expect him to have picked up on Janner’s secret life. Nor that of Cyril Smith. Carlile shared a small Commons office with Cyril Smith for many years. Oh dear. He really isn’t good at noticing things, is he?

Carlile’s mistress and eventual wife was a senior legal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Cosy world, Westminster, it it not?

Carlile went on to be a stunningly illiberal “Independent” Reviewer of anti-terror legislation, where he demonstrated his independence by agreeing to absolutely everything the security services told him. 42 day detention with no charge? No problem. In fact there was no period of detention without charge posited so extreme that Carlile did not support it. Secret courts hearing intelligence evidence the defence were not allowed to see? Fine by Carlile. Control orders? Great. He is a fantastic bastion, protecting the public, is Carlile.

Even better, of course, at protecting his associates.

Nicola Sturgeon is to be congratulated for refusing to back off from the goal of independence, and the right of the Scottish people to self-determination, under pressure from Andrew Marr today.

The truth is that the SNP’s potential for a stunning electoral result in Scotland is based on our success in holding together the Yes coalition under the SNP umbrella. All of the recent Scottish opinion polls put the SNP vote in precisely the same range as recent opinion polls on Scottish independence, up from September 2014. Given the very low polling for other pro-independence parties, it is beyond any doubt a myth that there is a significant vote for the SNP which does not want independence but is voting SNP to ensure Devo-Max. There is simply no evidence of that. The opinion polls show the opposite, and anecdotal evidence from canvassers shows the SNP vote overwhelmingly an independence vote.

In fact, I suspect that the SNP will get less unionist votes in this election than ever before. In Dundee East, which I know extremely well, there is no point denying that historically the SNP benefited from Tory tactical voters wanting to keep Labour out. That is no longer happening, due to the polarising effect of the referendum. Dundee East SNP voters are now all committed nationalists.

In fact what we are now seeing, quite openly, is the Unionist parties advocating tactical voting between Red, Orange and Blue Tories against the SNP throughout Scotland and even Labour Party activists in places canvassing for the Tories. This is of a piece with the Labour tactic of pitching its austerity policies to southern English Tory voters: Miliband’s message today is that he will be the Tories’ champion.

All the SNP have to do is continue to hold together the overwhelming bulk of the Yes coalition and, due to FPTP, we can sweep much of Scotland. That is why Nicola’s stance today was not only right in principle, but wise in preventing seepage to the Scottish Greens. That does not make FPTP a better system. And we should not allow the media to build up expectations of the SNP taking every seat, so they can claim Murphy has triumphed if he hangs on to a dozen.

But one thing we should say, loud and clear. An SNP vote is always a vote for independence, and it is absolutely a myth that there is now any significant swathe of unionist SNP voters out there.

The SNP vote is an independence vote, end of.

Miliband promises tougher immigration controls than Tories, after his promise of triple lock guaranteed austerity. How much more right wing can Labour get? Having alienated the Scottish people, are Labour now trying to alienate everybody outside London and Surrey? It seems Labour policy is made by a focus group of hedge fund managers infiltrated by Farage.

In my diplomatic career I refused three UK honours:
LVO (Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order)
OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire)
CVO (Commander of the Royal Victorian Order)

On two occasions the Queen personally handed me presents instead. One was a silver armada dish, and one a letter rack made by Viscount Linley. I donated the latter to an auction for Julian Assange’s defence fund. The silver armada dish must be packed away somewhere. If I can dig it out, I shall auction it to raise funds for the SNP! Impeccable provenance.

I turned down the honours because I am a republican and believer in Scottish independence, and explained that to the Queen on one occasion when she asked. To be fair, she was perfectly fine with that.

I was thinking about honours in contemplating:
Lord Janner
Lord Brittan
Sir Peter Hayman
Sir Cyril Smith
Sir Jimmy Savile

That list could be expanded by a great many. I cannot help but think I made the right decision.

Yet another election is about to be held under the UK’s dreadfully insecure postal ballot system, which an English judge who presides over electoral fraud cases has said “would disgrace a banana republic”.

In a single case, Judge Mawrey had come across postal ballot fraud being committed in 14 different ways. There have in fact been many convictions for postal ballot fraud. Some of these are of Labour councillors in Blackburn, where I personally came across a boarded up empty flat containing fifteen registered postal voters, and we chased Labour councillors from street to street as they collected bagfuls of uncompleted postal ballots. In that election, won by Jack Straw, at 37% Blackburn had the highest percentage of ballots cast by post in the UK. There have been numerous convictions for postal ballot fraud throughout the UK, but that is the tip of the iceberg and most of the time, they get away with it.

The system was introduced by Blair and I have no doubt that party advantage was in mind. There have been Tory convictions for postal ballot fraud in Birmingham, but Labour have been by far the biggest beneficiaries. To the extent that I had been puzzled why on earth the Condem coalition had not repealed this awful legislation. The answer is, of course, that they are willing to sacrifice a little ground in the fake battle between red tories and blue tories, in order to retain the postal ballot against the necessity of large scale vote rigging in the effort to keep Scotland under Westminster rule.

Party political activists know this next point to be true, but it is almost unbelievable. There is an electoral commission regulation which specifically facilitates postal ballot fraud. Postal ballots must be physically mixed in with other ballots before counting, so that it is impossible to tell if the postal ballot result differs markedly from the voting in person result. I can quite understand why they must be counted at the same time as other ballots, but physically mixed in?

The 800,000 postal ballots registered in Scotland are one major reason why we cannot be complacent about the opinion polls. This is wide open to fraud. Multiple voting or voting by non-existent “ghost” voters, or people living elsewhere, is perfectly possible at the ballot box but much more difficult and time consuming and much more open to detection.

The rationale for the abandonment of the classic secret polling booth ballot as the basic method of voting, was that postal voting would increase voter turnout. In fact, voter turnout has steadily fallen since its introduction. I predict in England – where there is no realistic prospect of change from the old trougher tory parties – it will fall again. In Scotland, where there is a vision of real change, turnout will be up. But if anybody thinks the British state is going to let Scotland move closer to independence without fighting dirty, they are extremely naïve.

In future, there should be a return to the principle that normally your vote should be cast in person at the secret ballot. To get off your arse to vote is not too much to ask for maintaining democracy. Postal votes should again be provided only to those who have medical certification that they are unable to attend the polling station, or evidence of living abroad. I favour tax certificates from a foreign country as the norm for the latter.

The Lord President of Scotland’s judges, Lord Gill, has made a complete fool of himself by leading British judges in a walk-out from the Commonwealth Law Conference. The action is in protest against Julian Assange’s participation by video-link in a panel discussion on surveillance and the role of the security services.

The walk-out happened after Julian’s talk, not before it, which rather gives the impression that what Lord Gill and his fellow judges objected to was the content of Assange’s talk, rather than the fact of it. Assange stated among other points that nationalists were right to believe that MI5 were active against them in the referendum campaign.

The Assange talk proved extremely popular with lawyers and judges from all over the Commonwealth. In fact it had to be shifted to a larger room to accommodate them all. So it seems Lord Gill’s disinterest in the concept of freedom of speech is not widely shared in the Commonwealth.

What Gill and his Scottish and English colleagues could have done – and I presume actually did – was to boycott the Assange panel and simply attend other panels on at the same time. What they have now done is to boycott all the panels happening after the Assange talk is gone, at some of which some of the boycotters were due to be talking or chairing, as an attempt to mess up the conference as some childish kind of spiteful revenge.

The members of the English Supreme Court who took part in this action have demonstrated their extreme prejudice against Assange – who has exercised his right in law to claim political asylum and who has never been charged with anything.

Julian has today told me that he is concerned that their action is also prejudicial to the cases currently before the Swedish Supreme Court and the UN Committee on Arbitrary Detention. Quite why the English and Scottish judges were moved to this peculiar display of prejudice is not immediately clear; I suspect they were pushed. Lord Gill is an interesting example of the self-made lackey. If you always promote the interests of the Establishment, even a man of talent but humble origins can get to the top, provided he is an entirely unscrupulous character.

STOP PRESS

In an effort to make Lord Gill and the judges look less like asses, it is being assiduously put about that they did not know Julian was going to speak before his appearance, and he unexpectedly appeared at the session. That this is a blatant lie is easily proved. Julian’s appearance was at short notice – a week. His name was in the conference programme, and the event was announced in the Scottish Legal press the day before it happened. Everyone at the conference knew Assange was appearing, that is why the room had to be changed for a larger one.

That our judges are not just asses but lying asses ought to be the source of some concern. Where is Lallands Peat Worrier when you need him?