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?

Adam Werritty’s friend and long term contact, the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, accompanied Greville Janner to visit a kindergarten in Israel in 2012, which was named in Janner’s honour. I wonder if the government of Israel will now change the name?

The irony of naming a kindergarten after Janner is extraordinary. But is it not strange that in 2012, when Janner’s activities had been known to the authorities for decades, Matthew Gould was accompanying him to a kindergarten of all places? Is the Foreign Office really that dense? It is also not normal for an Ambassador to accompany an opposition Lord around in this way.

I could not help but be struck by the link below the last linked piece, to an article by Greville Janner entitled “My Friend Michael Jackson“.

From the DPP’s Statement Today:

•In relation to the allegations investigated in Operation Enamel, the CPS considers that the evidential test was passed on the basis that the evidence is sufficient to have warranted charging and prosecuting Lord Janner in relation to the particular charges listed below; these relate to nine individuals:
•14 indecent assaults on a male under 16 between 1969 and 1988
•2 indecent assaults between 1984 and 1988
•4 counts of buggery of a male under 16 between 1972 and 1987
•2 counts of buggery between 1977 and 1988.

•In relation to the other three previous investigations, the CPS also now considers that the evidential test was passed. It follows that the CPS judges that mistakes were made in the decision making at the time by both the Leicestershire police in 2002 and the CPS in 1991 and 2007. Lord Janner should have been prosecuted in relation to those complaints.

It is, to say the least, interesting that the DPP states that police were unable to interview Janner on medical grounds after searching his offices in March 2014. Yet eight months later the Labour Peer was still able to attend the House of Lords and claim his £300 a day expenses.

How many more protected villains are still sat in the House of Lords – or Commons?

I am going to repeat this from my last post, as the implications are so appalling that nobody seems to want to face up to them. Some of these boys must still be alive: the Holocaust Educational Trust – Chairman, Greville Janner – should make a real effort to find them and ask what happened.

Given Janner’s later preying on boys from care homes, I cannot read this without a shudder. In publishing it, I in no way intend to demean the dreadful suffering of the child survivors of the Holocaust. It appears that Janner may have been preying on the most vulnerable of children for his own purposes, and there could have been a sick motive to his concern:

I was taken up to the Kinderheim, to the Children’s Home, where there were some sixty orphan children, most of whose lives had been saved by monasteries, by being out in the woods or by miracles in each case and they all spoke Yiddish and I didn’t speak Yiddish and it was very difficult to talk to them but we knew some of the same songs so we sang together in Hebrew they knew and I knew the songs and then one of them said to me the first Yiddish words I’ve ever learnt , he said “Gavreal”, which is Greville in Hebrew and (he) called me “Gavreal spishtie ping pong, ping pong” and he pushed back and forwards as though he was holding a ping pong bat so my first words in Yiddish were “ping pong” and I played Ping Pong with them and they taught me a few words of Yiddish and I found it such a moving experience that for the next eighteen months I went back to them every weekend.

I also list again the positions which Lord Janner still holds according to the parliamentary website.

Vice President – The Association for Jewish Youth
Vice President – The Jewish Leadership Council
President – The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women
Advisory Board – Community Security Trust
Vice President – The World Jewish Congress
Chairman – The Holocaust Educational Trust
Director – The United Jewish Israel Appeal

All of these bodies need to remove Janner from any position he holds – not allow him to gracefully resign. And they need to issue statements repudiating him, as most definitely does the Board of Deputies of British Jews, of which Janner was Chairman for a decade while he was committing these offences.

The Jewish institutions in the UK are acting precisely like the Catholic Church of twenty years ago on this issue. Where is the openness? Where is the angst? Where is the admission? Above all, where is the apology?

The Director of Public Prosecutions has decided that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute serial paedophile Greville Janner, for many years the leader of the Zionist lobby in the UK. I presume that his convenient senility is the reason for non-prosecution.

But the facts of Janner’s activities in Leicester care homes have been known for decades, and there was overwhelming evidence in one particular case. The failure of the state to act against Janner when he was a Labour MP and Chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is another example of the disgraceful impunity of the powerful in this country. In a pattern that has become familiar to us, police investigating the case were in 1989 warned off by their superiors.

Given Janner’s later preying on boys from care homes, I cannot read this without a shudder. In publishing it, I in no way intend to demean the dreadful suffering of the child survivors of the Holocaust. It appears that Janner may have been preying on the most vulnerable of children for his own purposes, and there could have been a sick motive to his concern:

I was taken up to the Kinderheim, to the Children’s Home, where there were some sixty orphan children, most of whose lives had been saved by monasteries, by being out in the woods or by miracles in each case and they all spoke Yiddish and I didn’t speak Yiddish and it was very difficult to talk to them but we knew some of the same songs so we sang together in Hebrew they knew and I knew the songs and then one of them said to me the first Yiddish words I’ve ever learnt , he said “Gavreal”, which is Greville in Hebrew and (he) called me “Gavreal spishtie ping pong, ping pong” and he pushed back and forwards as though he was holding a ping pong bat so my first words in Yiddish were “ping pong” and I played Ping Pong with them and they taught me a few words of Yiddish and I found it such a moving experience that for the next eighteen months I went back to them every weekend.

My emphasis. Indeed I wonder if this is where it all started for Janner?

Janner is on “leave of absence” from the House of Lords. But according to the parliamentary website, he still retains the following positions, and it appears that not one of these organisations has repudiated him:

Vice President – The Association for Jewish Youth
Vice President – The Jewish Leadership Council
President – The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women
Advisory Board – Community Security Trust
Vice President – The World Jewish Congress
Chairman – The Holocaust Educational Trust
Director – The United Jewish Israel Appeal

It is wildly inappropriate, in particular, for the Association for Jewish Youth and the Community Security Trust not to formally dissociate themselves from Janner, and I call on all these organisations to make a statement. The silence is deafening.

Julian Assange has asserted that MI5 are active against Scottish nationalists, as the independence movement is seen as a threat to the UK. Happily, Julian being Julian there is now some traction for this in the corporate media. When I posted on it last week I received nothing from the corporate media except dismissal and abuse over twitter.

I think it is worth repeating some of that twitter abuse for the benefit of anybody who has not fully appreciated the vitriol felt across the entire unionist media establishment towards anybody who queries the narrative they are paid to peddle.

If this doesn’t shake any residual belief in media impartiality, nothing will:

“Craig Murray is mad shocker.” James Bloodworth, The Independent
“Zooooooooooooooomer” Euan Mccolm, The Scotsman
“Craig Murray is obviously an MI5 plant. WAKE UP PEOPLE.” Kevin Schofield, The Sun
“Makes the X files look like Panorama” Rob Corp, BBC
“Cybernat bullying is an MI5 false flag operations, says former British Ambassador. Many Nats believe this stuff.” Iain Martin, the Daily Telegraph
“If you must tweet links to Craig Murray’s MI5 guff, take the SNP twibbon off your profile. That party rejected him as a candidate and rightly so.” Stephen Daisley, STV
“The comments under Craig Murray’s latest rant are really something.” Ross McCafferty, Daily Record

Is it not strange that such a broad spectrum of the mainstream media react with instant vitriol to the very notion that the security services are active against the Scottish independence movement, when we know for certain that environmental campaign groups have been heavily penetrated by agents and agents provocateurs? When such tactics have been used against the Irish Republican movement for decades? When our intelligence services were up to their ears in torture and extraordinary rendition and repeatedly lied about it? When Edward Snowden has revealed the massive scale of surveillance by GCHQ?

In the days when the corporate media had a monopoly on the dissemination of information, simply shouting “conspiracy theorist”, “tinfoil hat” and “lizards” at somebody, excluding them from corporate media access, would be enough essentially to prevent anybody from reaching the public with information. But that no longer works in the age of new media, and especially it doesn’t work in Scotland after the referendum experience.

The fact that my comments on MI5 dirty tricks were so instantly and so unanimously rubbished by the corporate media are more likely to make people realise there must be something to hide. None of the so-called “journalists” I have quoted above has ever tackled the fact that I blew the whistle on torture and extraordinary rendition, and that the government and security services lied about it then, with the support of establishment journalists. In fact I challenge all the named journalists above to say what they think about the sanctioning of intelligence from torture by Blair and Straw, and whether I was truthful in my whistleblowing. Perhaps some of you might be able to contact them to point out the challenge.

For the avoidance of doubt, let me spell this out. I have certain knowledge from an inside source that disruption of separatist activity in Scotland now features in MI5 tasking. The “tasking” of the security services – and that is what it is officially called – is a very formal written exercise conducted by the Joint Intelligence Committee on an annual basis, though it is possible (but very difficult) to insert new tasks in-year.

I have personally taken part – often – in Cabinet Office meetings of JIC sub-committees determining tasking, though in my case more for MI6 than MI5. It is a system I know very well. None of the “journalists” abusing me above has ever sat on a JIC committee. None of them actually know anything about it. None has contacted me to ask me why I have stated there is an MI5 anti-SNP operation. It is so much easier to collect your pay packet, quaff another Merlot and drunkenly catcall “zoooomer!”

“J K Rowling’s always been batshit insane, this is nothing new”.
“Why are people just surprised about J K Rowling now – she has been this mental for years.”
“The, I presume, mentally ill, J K Rowling”
“J K Rowling should get F back to England”
“Don’t feel too bad for that lunatic J K Rowling” – followed by a sexual reference to her partner.

The newspapers would be full of stories tomorrow about this dreadful cyber-abuse. But that will not happen because all those tweets were about me, and all sent within the last twenty minutes, from identifiable unionist tweeters, some well known. Substitute Craig Murray for J K Rowling and they are verbatim. Just do a twitter search on craig murray and see for yourself.

I have never much been into Twitter. When I post here it is automatically tweeted, that is all. It is only today I realised how much you can see of twitter conversations and the interesting links between people. I had not realised that the execrable Carl Gardner, former very junior government lawyer and anti-Assange campaigner, has such warm links with anti-Muslim pro-torture campaigner Douglas Murray of the Henry Jackson Society, Vice President Jim Murphy. And how very interesting to see Blair MacDougall, Ross McTernan, Allan Massie, Euan Mccolm and numerous others from Scotland’s corporate media, all tweeting each other about how absolutely ridiculous it is to believe that the UK state would ever be involved in anything nefarious.

The same people were, of course, tweeting each other euphorically about how fantastically Jim Murphy had demolished Nicola Sturgeon in the leaders’ debates. It subsequently turned out nobody in the country saw it the same way as their smug little gang. I fear they will find the same is true now. Indeed, in the two hours since I posted, over twice as many people have already read about the false flag schemes, as the entire membership of Scottish Labour. That is more than the circulation of the Scotsman. There’s a thought.

The same people, of course, told you I was lying when I blew the whistle on torture and extraordinary rendition in 2004. The security services and the British Government would never do such a thing, they said. I was insane, they said.

Everybody now knows that I was telling the truth about torture and extraordinary rendition, and the Labour Government and the establishment shills were the liars. I am telling the truth again now and they are lying again now.

I warned that the security services will turn to false flag events to discredit the SNP. I said this in my talk to Edinburgh SNP Club on 6 March, and repeated it on this blog last week. Well, it is starting.

The reporting specifically blames nationalists. There is something delightfully old fashioned about MI5. Is spraying Q for Quisling not rather an obscure reference to today’s generation?

[UPDATE: I had not taken on board that the racist comments made allegedly by an unidentified SNP supporter to Faisal Islam of Sky News occurred in the same town on the same day. That indicates to me a coordinated security service plan was in progress, and gives some idea how they are operating, probably in a mobile team. That two such improbable and unusual “nationalist outrages” should occur the same day and the same place confounds belief.]

A sweeping SNP victory on May 7 is considered enough of a threat to the United Kingdom for the security services to use up some assets. Long term sleepers within the SNP will now be activated, so expect to find one or two such events traced to apparent bona fide SNP members.

More importantly, a major thrust will be agent provocateur activity. Security service agents within the SNP will be trying to initiate and to egg on (yes, that is a deliberate and relevant Jim Murphy reference, think about it) impressionable members to vandalism or violence. Be very, very wary of such people and do not be tempted.

There are, 100% for certain, MI5 agents online posing as “cybernats” who will be quoted in the media saying outlandishly unpleasant and threatening things. We will also see more incidents like the Murphy eggs or the complete set-up of the “mob” jostling Miliband in the St James Centre, which by chance I witnessed.

The ridiculous “violent nationalist” meme worked well for the unionists in the referendum campaign, and influenced some older voters who trust the BBC and corporate media. So they will play it again for all it is worth. The worry is of course that some manufactured incident will go wrong and somebody will get hurt. The still bigger worry is that, as the security services get increasingly desperate as polling day approaches, they will manufacture a false flag incident in which people deliberately get hurt.

The best defence against that is for ordinary people to be wise to how the real world works. Social media is key. Tweet, facebook, blog, instagram or whatever else you can do to spread this.

The BBC is now joining in the propaganda for tactical voting against the SNP, quoting an Andrew Skinner from United Against Separation as saying: “They won’t say it publicly, but be it a Labour or a Tory area they are happy to vote the other way to keep the SNP out.” Err, you just did say it publicly, Mr Skinner, and thank you for the confirmation that the Red and Blue Tories are all in it together.

It is hardly a coincidence that the BBC did this piece to promote unionist tactical voting centred on Dundee West, just after the Guardian did exactly the same thing , not only promoting Labour/Tory tactical voting, but about the same constituency. The unionist media really are absolutely determined to try to keep my friend Chris Law out, aren’t they? No chance.

Tactical voting is not all on the unionist side. Tommy Sheridan, Carolyn Leckie and Pat Kane are among the diverse figures, not SNP members, who have called on supporters of independence to vote SNP in this FPTP election. All of those are much more substantial figures than Andrew Skinner. Yet strangely the BBC and Guardian have felt no urge to interview any of them, or discuss pro-independence tactical voting. The shameless bias of the unionist media appears to have no limits.

Michael Fallon’s comments on Miliband and Trident this week also brought a welcome reminder that the Red/Blue Tories are no different, as the Labour Party hastened to affirm their love for weapons of mass destruction and their earnest desire to spend unlimited sums on ever greater potential to destroy mankind. Thanks for the clarification.

I should however like to see clarification from the SNP. Labour and Tory can of course combine to vote Trident replacement through. If that happens with Labour in office, the SNP should make plain that would mean the withdrawal of support for that government. For the SNP to allow Labour to push Trident through with Tory support, and then the SNP revert to supporting the Labour government in office, would be a betrayal of the Scottish people. To me, there has not been absolute clarity in our response on this issue. It must be given.

A UKIP candidate has been obliged to report to the police for breaking the law on “treating” for providing sausage rolls at an event. Yet Jack Straw at elections in 2005 and 2010 held rallies for the Muslim community in Blackburn at which the Labour Party provided hundreds of voters with full sit down meals, free of charge, and Police refused to take any action – indeed they were protecting the event. This is yet another example of the political elite being above the law.

This is what I posted on this blog seven years ago:

On 24 April 2005, in an election rally in Jack Straw’s Blackburn Constituency, over one hundred Blackburn electors were given a full free meal by the Labour party, with Jack Straw present, having just made an election speech to the lucky partakers of this generosity.

Every reader involved in electoral politics will know that this is a criminal offence under the Representation of the People Act, formally known as “Treating” – the provision of free food and drink to electors in an attempt to influence their vote. Conviction leads to forfeiture of the election, banning from public office and a prison sentence of up to two years.

It is also an offence of strict liability – a candidate is liable even if it was organised by someone else on his behalf. A candidate is viewed in law as responsible for his campaign. But in this instance, Jack Straw was actually present.

There was no shortage of witnesses – protestors were ringing the hall. The police were actually providing protection for this criminal event, and showed no interest in the fact that the proceeding was illegal. Jack Straw runs Blackburn as a personal fiefdom.

I therefore went to a police station and made a formal complaint. This obliged the police to investigate, and to do them justice, the detectives of Lancashire Police did a very good job, establishing the facts of the incident. They then sent a file to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The Crown Prosecution Service returned the file to Lancashire Police, saying that the offence was “Trivial” and there would be no prosecution. As this was one of the worst examples of large scale electoral treating since it was made a criminal offence in 1832, presumably this means the CPS has decided that the law on treating has fallen into desuetude, and candidates may now provide food and drink to electors.

Or only New Labour ministers?

I have no sympathy for UKIP. But if action is taken against UKIP where none was taken against Jack Straw for an absolutely blatant example, on a far greater scale, of the same offence, then that would be sickening, and yet a further example of the fact that the law is in no sense applied equally in the UK.

The Guardian has published an open appeal to Tory and Lib Dem voters to vote Labour in Dundee West. I think that tells you all you need to know about the Red Tories and their priorities. It is also a new low in journalism even for the fanatic and increasingly desperate Severin Carrell, who is a total disgrace to his profession. The costs of publishing the Guardian ought to be counted against Marra’s election expenses: this is not journalism in any sense, merely a puff piece for a candidate.

The five million questions project was a Labour front headed by Marra and merely one of numerous fake “independent” bodies set up to provide the corporate media with disguised sources of unionist propaganda during the election campaign. It was based in the University of Dundee. It is seven years ago that I published a piece headed Dundee University – A Tool For New Labour. The hosting of the fake five million questions “research” for the Tory-friendly Labour candidate for the University seat is yet further evidence. This Labour/Dundee University scheme linked in to the Daily Record. Dundee University administration have a close relationship with this rag. When I stood for election as Rector against the administration’s candidate, fervent Unionist Andy Nicol, the University administration arranged for the Daily Record in Dundee to come out on election day with a full front cover picture of Andy Nicol and the single banner headline “I Was Born to Lead Dundee Students”.

Naturally, I beat the conniving bastards anyway.

I can today reveal from an inside university source that it was Dundee University Principal Pete Downes who fed Alistair Darling with the nonsense about loss of funding for medical research, which Darling used against Salmond in televised debate. All of which fires my determination to stand for Rector of the University again next year and put a stop to these shenanigans.

My good friend Chris Law is an excellent candidate and a truly interesting and dynamic individual with a quick, analytic brain. He is very much his own man. I am happy to say that despite Severin Carrell, Labour have as much chance of stopping Chris Law’s election as they have of turning back the River Tay.

It feels its like the referendum all over again. The STV debate had a very peculiar audience, where the Labour and Tory all join together warmly to applaud unionist points, and Jim Murphy got an enthusiastic round of applause before he even started speaking.

I wondered how on earth they got an audience so completely unrepresentative of Scottish opinion, and the answer was not hard to find. The audience has been selected “based both on current opinion polls and the last general election result.”

Not the Holyrood election, not the referendum, but an election five years ago where about 75% of the electorate voted for the Unionist parties, and where the Labour Party was polling twice as well as it is now. On top of which, STV do not reveal what relative weighting they have given to the last general election and to recent opinion polls. It certainly looks like the greatest weight was placed on the last election result.

So we have a stitch-up where Nicola is responding to an audience completely unrepresentative of Scottish opinion today, and where unionism, Labour and the Lib Dems are all vastly over-represented. Do not think this is accidental.

I spent a few hours with Julian today in the Ecuador Embassy. It was the first time I had seen him since moving back to Scotland, so it was good to catch up and a great deal to talk about.

We had some good ideas for future projects, on which you will be seeing more as things develop. You will be pleased to hear that Julian himself is optimistic and very sharp, with sense of humour surviving, although obviously this close confinement, with no access to fresh air and exercise whatsoever, is becoming very wearing. It seems to me impossible to argue that the response to Julian is not disproportionate, especially the ludicrous waste of money paying so many policemen to stand around doing nothing 24 hours a day. How would it hurt the British government to agree to a protocol for daily exercise? Their position is vindictive and inhumane in the extreme.

I had not realised that Julian had so much Scottish ancestry or quite so recently. After independence, he will definitely be entitled to a Scottish passport!

The Guardian reports that today Blair “did not pretend to be Miliband’s biggest fan, and he was notably more enthusiastic about Jim Murphy, the Blairite whom he described as the “great new leader of the Scottish Labour party”.”

How the right wing shill Murphy – a man well to the right of Thatcher on both economic and foreign policy – came to be chosen as Scottish labour leader will be a fascinating chapter in historians’ discussions on the strange death of that party.

I gatecrashed Murphy’s acceptance speech on becoming leader, at Surgeons Hall in Edinburgh, a few months ago. I discovered that his entire audience were paid apparatchiks of the Labour Party. I interviewed several as a journalist (I am an NUJ member – and none recognised me). Of the eleven I spoke to, not a single one had ever heard of the Henry Jackson Society. Which says something about the level of political education of Labour functionaries.

It also explains how we came to the remarkable situation that the result from Eastwood on May 7 will be awaited with much more anxiety in CIA HQ in Virginia and Mossad HQ in Tel Aviv, than it will anywhere in Scotland. That says something very remarkable about what has happened to the Labour Party.

I see that in “journalists” questioning Blair, nobody asked the obvious question, which is who was paying for this particular speech. Hitachi, my guess. He was asked why he is not sharing a platform with Miliband in this election. The answer is of course that not even Miliband is quite that stupid.

It is peculiar timing for the unionist rag The Scotsman, to declare it had solved the mystery of Willie McRae’s death – just when security service tasking on the SNP returns to the levels of 1975-86.

The Scotsman claims that the police had first removed the vehicle and then replaced it, and this explains the mystery of why the gun was so far from the car after McRae’s remarkable two shot “suicide”. For me, that adds just another level of improbability to so very many. How, inside a car, you shoot yourself in the head in such a way that the gun falls out of the window, seems problematic. The car was crashed over a burn; how you order that with the suicide is peculiar.

The case is a notorious one in Scotland. There was never any indication of McRae having suicidal tendencies. He was driving to a destination – his cottage – where he was expected and he had phoned ahead for the fires to be lit. A briefcase of documents went missing from his car. Several retired policemen have affirmed he was under police and security service surveillance, which since his death the authorities refuse to comment on. He was not only a leading member of the SNP, but an effective anti-nuclear activist. All that I already knew – what was new to me was that he had also been investigating a senior paedophile ring. It is tempting to put that together with his having been ADC to Louis Mountbatten, but I confess that is mere speculation.

Establishment lackeys have been trying to ridicule my assertion that the SNP is a major security service target. Many know they are lying, and deliberately are trying to distract. But for those who are actually naïve, is it not extraordinary that anytime anybody mentions anything the security services do, it is dismissed as “conspiracy theory”. GCHQ, MI5, MI6 and SO15 employ over 50,000 people between them. What do you actually think they do all day?

A gentleman in a dark trenchcoat has just handed me this minute. I am not going to check the veracity of its contents at all, but I am rather going immediately to publish it.

Mr Carlton-Browne,

I had a phone call from that Peruvian Johnny. No idea what he was saying, some kind of foreigner talk apparently. Anyway it turned out that young Olga the cleaner could speak the language so she translated for me. She is a marvel, Olga. She even takes copies home of everything for me so that if I lose something she’ll have another copy safe and sound.

Anyway, apparently this Peruvian chap had been in Scotland and met up with Alex Salmond, who used to be some sort of local official. He thought that I would like to know that Salmond said he wasn’t big on canapes and despite his name didn’t like smoked salmon. Rather wry that, I thought.

He went on to say that Salmond said he had enormous respect for Nigel Farage, who was very macho, and he would be delighted to see a UKIP government in power after the general election, preferably in coalition with Pegida. Salmond added “thank God nobody knows about this, or they would lynch me. Of course I haven’t told anybody, but I feel perfectly safe revealing it at random to a passing Peruvian I just met.”

The Peruvian chap said before he hung off that of course he was telling me as everybody knows that all foreign ambassadors must by protocol give details of all their transactions to their host governments and that anybody who denied this was a dirty liar, particularly smart-arsed ex-diplomats from Edinburgh. He also added clearly that nobody at all should believe him if he himself denied these conversations had ever taken place.

I thanked him very much for this information. This is a very proper and official government memo, oh yes. It even has acronyms – we shall have to tell R2D2 and SPECTRE before the meeting in Rio about climate change because we are all genuine government people doing important government business, oh yes.

I shan’t put my name on this as it is all jolly secret. If anyone catches us out, just say Olga got lost in translation.

The Foreign Office has denied the existence of any such memo as that allegedly leaked to the Daily Telegraph, which has now published the full text. Reading it, I can say for sure it is not an FCO memo. That has led some to assume this means it is a Scottish Office memo. But there is a problem here.

Firstly, if the Scottish Office – or any other government department – made a record of a conversation with the French Consul-General, they would undoubtedly have copied it to the FCO. Particularly as the FCO is mentioned and a number of overseas visits and an international negotiation are discussed. If this were a genuine minute, the FCO would undoubtedly have a copy. If the FCO denies it exists, that means there was no such memo made in the Scottish Office and distributed in the ordinary channels.

Secondly, as I stated, the media’s claim that it was a protocol requirement for the French Embassy to report such conversations to the FCO was a complete fabrication. Not only is there no such requirement, it would be contrary to normal diplomatic practice. That is even more true with the Scottish Office. It is unthinkable that the French Consul-General would report those kind of confidential comments from Nicola Sturgeon to the Scottish Office.

If Embassies reported everything people told them to their host governments, nobody would tell the embassy anything. Indeed this episode has already damaged the French Embassy, because it casts a slur upon the discretion and confidentiality which is essential to operate as a diplomat. It may well be that driving a wedge between the SNP and the French Embassy was part of what the security services sought to achieve.

It damages the French Embassy, it damages the SNP, and it damages Miliband by repeating the meme about his being weak and unfit. Those would all seem good results to the security services. Only Miliband has been stupid enough to go along with it.

It seems to me the overwhelming probability is that this document, whether it purports to be a FCO or Scottish Office document, was originated by the Security Services, possibly with the active collusion of someone in the Scottish Office, or equally possibly without their knowledge. Whatever it purported to be, it never entered the normal civil service distribution systems, as the FCO would have a copy, and it would have raised alarm bells all over the place as seriously weird and improbable. It is in that sense a fake, even if it were physically produced inside the Scottish Office. Its purpose was to be leaked to the media and influence the election.

The fake FCO memo has MI5 written all over it. This is the worst example of British security services influencing an election campaign since the Zinoviev letter.

For those whose history is a bit shaky:

The Zinoviev letter – one of the greatest British political scandals of this century – was forged by a MI6 agent’s source and almost certainly leaked by MI6 or MI5 officers to the Conservative Party, according to an official report published today.[4 Feb 1999]
New light on the scandal which triggered the fall of the first Labour government in 1924 is shed in a study by Gill Bennett, chief historian at the Foreign Office, commissioned by Robin Cook

Ever since Treasury Permanent Secretary Nicholas MacPherson stated that civil service impartiality rules do not apply in the case of Scottish independence, I have been warning the SNP that we are going to be the target of active subversion by the UK and US security services. We are seen as a danger to the British state and thus a legitimate target. I spelled this out in my talk to the Edinburgh SNP Club on 6 March, of which more below.

The FCO “memo” reporting that Nicola Sturgeon would rather have a Tory government, is a remarkable document. Firstly, its provenance is very strange. It has been leaked ostensibly by the FCO to the Telegraph. According to the Guardian:

“The leaked document was drafted by a Whitehall official after Coffinier called the FCO, as protocol requires, to pass on a confidential account of several of the ambassador’s meetings in Edinburgh, which included a meeting with Alistair Carmichael, the Scottish secretary.”

The extraordinary thing is, this is just a lie. As someone who worked in the FCO for over twenty years and was an Ambassador myself, I can assure you there is absolutely no protocol requirement on the French Ambassador to give the FCO the content of the meetings she, her Consul-General or anybody else from the French Embassy held in Edinburgh. That claim is absolute nonsense.

Look at it from the Embassy’s point of view. If you repeated everything Nicola Sturgeon told you to the FCO, do you not think she would shortly stop telling you anything at all interesting? That is why diplomats absolutely do not retail such conversations to their host governments.

The second quite extraordinary thing is that both sides of the alleged conversation categorically deny it was said. Nicola Sturgeon denies she said it and the French Embassy deny she said it. So we have a leaked account of a conversation which all the participants say is untrue, yet the unionist media all feel this evidently untrue account is worth splashing as their lead story? The collusion of security services and corporate media is terrifying.

Timing is all. I was wondering how the security services would react to the seemingly unstoppable SNP momentum, following Nicola Sturgeon’s brilliant performance in the leaders’ debate. When I gave that talk to the SNP club, I warned that, as the main threat to the British state, we would suffer the full panoply of dirty tricks from MI5 and CIA. This would include increased penetration, communication interception, agent provocateur activities, forgeries and eventually might include false flag violence blamed on nationalists.

We are at a crisis in our constitutional history. I believe the momentum towards a Scottish exit from the UK is unstoppable. The British state is seeking to appear on the surface to agree to give Scots a free and democratic choice, while using every dirty trick to subvert that choice. Those tricks range from complete control of state and corporate media to the darker arts of the security services.

As I also stated to the SNP club, the USA has decided it is in their interest for the Unionists to prevail, not least so Scotland remains a base for the American controlled Trident missiles the UK taxpayer so obligingly funds. A large part of the CIA’s existence has been and is dedicated to covert activity to keep the forms of government it wants in power in the world. It does not want the SNP.

That the attempt to destabilise Nicola Sturgeon originates with the UK government and the Telegraph should give everyone pause. It is very obviously a security service effort. How otherwise is an account which the French Embassy says is completely false, contained in an official memo to be leaked?

This episode raises very serious questions. But they are not questions about Nicola Sturgeon. They are questions about the subversion of democracy by the security services, and the willing complicity of the corporate media.