A Polish gentleman told me something profound last night. He said he had for months been determined to vote No, because he thought the United Kingdom had welcomed him in. Then he started to notice something very important indeed.

He had supported Solidarnosc as a young man, and he had lived through the overwhelming barrage of state media propaganda against it. All the newspapers, radio and TV had broadcast for month after month that if Poland left the Soviet orbit the economy would be destroyed, trading links would be severed, everybody would lose their pensions and housing, they would be invaded, the currency would collapse. Democracy campaigners were branded as right wing nationalist thugs. The people had no access to a fair hearing on the media, and communities had to organise alternatively through social networks.

A few weeks ago he had suddenly realised that precisely the same thing was happening in Scotland that he had witnessed in Soviet controlled Poland. A monolithic and all-pervading media was pumping out the same propaganda on a permanent basis, and even the arguments they were making were precisely the same arguments the Soviets had made. He had suddenly realised that democracy in the UK was an illusion – the apparatchiks of the main political parties and the entire media, both state and private, in fact belonged to and promoted the same ruling establishment. Only the methodologies were different, and raw power slightly better hidden in the UK than in the old Soviet bloc. But the truth was of hard rich men wielding power, in both cases, and keeping the people down.

I have immense respect for him, and will always carry that insight with me. He spoke to me after my talk in Linlithgow last night and it is a great example of the way we have all been learning from each other, in a new understanding of how a real democracy might look.

Inspirational meeting in Linlithgow last night. Wonderful people. Biggest applause of the evening for my suggestion that on the day of Independence, we seize the Trident nuclear missiles, dismantle them and refuse to give them back! A very bright audience, including some genuine undecideds. Everywhere I am especially cheered by the sheer determination of people to ensure they are not cheated by ballot-rigging, and their very wakeful understanding of the possibilities. It is not just a question of observers at the counts; there has been a groundswell to organise for ballot boxes to be followed from polling stations through to the count, which is essential but seldom done.

I confess to a boosted ego having been photographed and asked for my autograph frequently yesterday, something I am not used to! I have metamorphosised into “that man off youtube”, as the patronising BT woman would say, were she not living in the 1950s.

Despite the new media meme that all supporters of independence are evil Nazis, I really think we are going to win this. Communities are coming together to discuss how they wish to be governed, and an independent Scotland is going to bring a major change from current hierarchical political and economic structures. This truly is a revolutionary moment.

The Guardian have just published the most disgusting outright lies imaginable. I just got back from the St James Centre – I was literally just passing through on my way to change for this evening’s meeting. I saw Ed Miliband beetle in and beetle out again.

There was a prepared claque of Labour members with No signs, who had naturally attracted some curious Yes passers-by too. Miliband only does carefully controlled no opposition photocalls, so when there was some hackling and badinage he immediately scuttled away again. There was absolutely no pushing; shoving or threat. I have been in larger crowds at the chemists’ prescription counter. I personally called out “war criminal”, which I had every right to do.

To portray this as an angry mob denying free speech is so far removed from the truth that Severin Carrell should be sacked immediately. The man is a disgrace. He is of course only part of a deliberate effort to portray Scots as a violent group of intolerant nationalists. We are of course guilty of failing to show hushed deference to any Westminster trougher and war criminal they dare to send to address us.

I genuinely find it impossible to understand the gap between the opinion polls and what my eyes and ears tell me.

In Glasgow yesterday afternoon a small group of Better Together supporters were handing out material on Sauchiehall Street. Just fifty yards away on Buchanan Street a Yes stall was doing the same thing. The difference was so marked I wanted to quantify it to explain it to you.

I watched each stall for a timed fifteen minutes, immediately one after the other. These are both very busy pedestrianized shopping streets. The crowds going by on each were very similar in size and demographic.

In fifteen minutes the No team managed to give away 7 leaflets and one balloon (the latter to a child). I saw some of the leaflets immediately discarded. The No team were actively approaching people to hand out leaflets, and were shunned by the large majority of people.

By comparison the Yes stall was actively approached by large numbers of people. In the fifteen minutes, 56 people approached the stall and spoke and of those 42 took campaign material, while at least 11 made a donation. The final statistic is remarkable. I counted exactly the next 400 people I could scrutinise reasonably closely on Sauchiehall Street. Of these an extraordinary 52 – that is fully 13% – were wearing Yes badges. There were no large groups and no event in the vicinity that accounted for this. I saw only 2 No badges and one No balloon, again a small child.

I appreciate that this may seem strangely nerdish behaviour, but when I flatly tell you that I have been experiencing a revolutionary groundswell of popular feeling on the streets, that is a perception easily dismissed. The above are hard, statistical facts that in a small way quantify that feeling. The puzzle that remains to be solved is the extraordinary incompatibility between this evidence and the opinion polls.

I can accept that there is an exuberance about the Yes campaign – a belief that a better world is possible and the neo-con dominance of Westminster can be broken – that leads it followers to be enthusiastic and wish to share that belief. By contrast, the No voters to whom I have spoken have, in my own experience, never expressed any enthusiasm for the United Kingdom, but rather fear that an independent Scotland might fail economically – a fear with which they have been relentlessly programmed. Cowardice is not something you wish to display or tell people about. So I can see the psychology is different.

But if the opinion polls are right and the No vote is in the lead, then this psychological phenomenon must be extraordinarily powerful and universal, this behavioural difference so marked as to be in itself a quite extraordinary fact.

The alternative explanation is simply that the opinion polls are wrong. I discussed this with the Yes campaigners on that Buchanan Street stall. They had a considered view which seems prima facie eminently sensible. They believed that the people mobbing their stall were in the large majority people who had never been politically active before. They were not the kind of people who would ever have signed up to be part of online polling panels – the methodology of the vast majority of polls. Those who were on such online panels may give pollsters a reasonable reflection of how party support splits among the 60% of the population who might vote in a general election, but could tell nothing about the 40% who never vote or join online polling panels. Those people were the ones now taking badges and wee blue books. The other polling method was landline telephone, and that missed another great swathe of the Yes demographic – the younger voters.

I yet again saw the BBC baffled and fail to pick up on what was happening on the street as they could not find a man in a suit to interview. The No campaigners were al men in suits and the BBC team looked visibly relieved. For me this “man in a suit” media syndrome is the principal cause of the disconnect between media reporting and what is actually happening.

Tonight is my final set speech of the campaign – Linlithgow Bowling Club at 7.30 pm.

Sounds more romantic than the Finland Station!

http://new.livestream.com/IndependenceLive/BBCBiasV

I am heading for the train back to Scotland for the final, frenetic stretch of campaigning to achieve national independence. Rather strange feeling on leaving the house, because I know that if we succeed I shan’t be coming back here to live, but rather staying to help build the new Scotland, in however minor a way.

I receive far more email than I can possibly reply to, about which I feel somewhat guilty. But I both replied and obtained permission to reproduce this one from Fiona Mathieson:

I am sure you will be receiving hundreds of messages from so many in Scotland at the moment. I would just like to say how grateful I have been for the information you have provided. I have been able to direct people to your blogs and videos which have helped them to start questioning and delve further into unveiling the truth.

Last week at work a colleague who was undecided came to me and said that not only was she voting yes, but her entire family of 47 were voting yes. I gave her the wee blue book and some of your video links and they all went off and looked into it and discussed it. They decided that yes was the only way forward for a future of hope and positive change.

I was late in joining the yes campaign only becoming politicised in the last 2 months as the light bulb slowly went on. I have never in my life felt so engaged and enthusiastic and am amazed to be part of something that is making history. The sad part being that I went through the entire grief cycle in a week moving between stages quite erratically as I came to grips with the level of corruption and deception from the government and the media. I know there will be many others who have been dealing with the same issues as myself.

However, onwards and upwards as we continue to engage with our sense of humour, passion and creativity in these last few days of the campaign.

Thank you for sharing your experiences and knowledge as it has helped many of us to stay on course as the continued scare tactics are dropped down on us from on high.

I think the greatest achievement of the campaign has been that half the population of Scotland has awoken to the fact that the mainstream media, and the BBC in particular, pump out a stream of propaganda in collusion with the state and corporate interests, and that much of it is untrue. If I have contributed to that realisation, I am very happy indeed, but I am only one of a number of alternative sources of information now available on new media. The great triumph of the Yes campaign has been the united force of social media and community mobilisation.

Thank you, Fiona, for your kind message. I hope and believe that your account will encourage others to make the same journey.

You have probably all seen this already, but it made me laugh so much I just had to post it. The Labour Party brings up Jack Straw and 100 fellow troughers from Westminster to make a grand demonstration for the Union, and their efforts are negated by the brilliant mockery of two lads on a rickshaw.

A great example of the nimbleness and popular authenticity of the Yes campaign on the street, outwitting the Noes ponderous and expensive efforts.

Interesting to compare this to yesterday’s genuinely spontaneous scenes in precisely the same location yesterday. See the last thirty seconds of the first video – that No “demonstration” was given massive coverage by the BBC. Now look at this yesterday, which was not shown on the BBC at all.

Finally that full Jim Sillars interview on the BBC. I agree with every single word he said. The BBC only showed a 30 second extract after the live interview, and presented it as a “blunder”. Plainly not only were the BBC shocked at Sillars’ lack of neo-con orthodoxy, they could not understand that others might actually agree with him too.

The Telegraph has a pro-union piece by William Dalrymple. The byline says his ancestor signed the Act of Union; it fails to mention he organised the Massacre of Glencoe.

David Folkerts-Landau, Chief Economist of Deutsche Bank, who has claimed that Scotland would have a “Great Depression” if independent, has a second home he bought for US $11.6 million dollars. His first home is in London – where he would have been well-placed to notice that Deutsche Bank was at the very heart of the LIBOR interest rate fixing scandal. Naturally neither Folkerts-Landau (he and his wife are friends of the Camerons) nor any other senior banker was jailed for that long term criminal illegality.

Folkerts-Landau must, you might assume, have great powers of economic prediction to have accumulated a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars from banking salary and bonuses. Yet he failed to notice that Deutsche Bank was running up 92 billion dollars of US sub-prime mortgage junk that would be written off in the actual great crash, in which Deutsche Bank was again in the centre. Why a man who failed to notice that his own work was contributing to an actual great depression, should be taken seriously in ridiculous prognostications of a new one, is rather beyond me.

It is interesting that Folkerts-Landau states that Winston Churchill’s return to the gold standard was a major cause of the great depression. From the German Deutsche bank, that dismissed its Jewish directors in 1933 and denounced Jewish employees, and received expropriated Jewish assets through direct cooperation with Hitler, this criticism of Winston Churchill might be thought culturally insensitive.

Folkerts-Landau is just another example of the super-rich who realise that the people-based movement for Scottish independence is currently the most potent threat to the neo-con hegemony that has resulted in the destruction of social-democratic society and the massive gap between the super-rich and real people. If you look at the other boards on which sit members of the board of Deutsche Bank, it reads like a catalogue of corporate dominance:

Coca Cola
Pepsi Cola
Microsoft
Accenture
IBM
Bayer
Daimler
EON Energy
Thyssen
XL Group
Alliance Trust
Bilfinger
BMW

That is an illustration of the fact that mega corporations are not really competitive, but part of an interlinked web of capital interests all sharing directors. Those interests have bombarded Scotland with apocalyptic threats the last few days. There will be a great depression, major businesses will leave, energy bills will go up, interest rates will go up, oil will run out, shopping bills will go up, call charges will go up, terrorists will run round unimpeded, Russia will invade. These nonsensical claims have been hammered home relentlessly in perhaps the most concentrated stream of mainstream media propaganda in history.

The extraordinary resilience of the Scottish people, in face of these ludicrous levels of threat and intimidation from “authority figures” like Folkerts-Landau, is something of which I am very, very proud.

No declaration of interest from Rusbridger in Guardian pro-union editorial over Benshie estate he stands to inherit through his wife, daughter of Lord Mackie.

Standard Life’s Far Right Board needs exposing:

Keith Skeoch, Executive Director of Standard Life, is on the Board of Reform Scotland, the neo-conservative lobby group which wants to abolish the minimum wage, privatize the NHS and pensions, and still further restrict trade unions.

It is difficult for Tories openly to campaign against Scottish Independence as everyone in Scotland hates them, so they do it with their corporate hats on. This is most of the board of Standard Life:

Garry Grimstone, Chairman, “lead non-executive” at the Ministry of Defence, London

Keith Skeoch, Executive Director, right wing political lobbyist

Crawford Gillies, Non Executive Director, Chairman of Control Risk Group, of London, the “security consultancy” of choice for ex MI5 and MI6 officers

Noel Harwerth, non-executive Director, Director of “London First” – [Honestly, I am not making this up]

David Nish – Chief Executive, Member of the “UK Strategy Committee” of “TheCity UK”. “TheCity UK” being a body of the City of London.

John Paynter, non-executive Director, was vice chairman of JP Morgan Cazenove until the 2008 crash

Amazing that lot oppose independence, huh?

Standard Life also threatened to leave at the time of the devolution referendum and gave out No campaign materials to staff. “Leave” of course is a relative concept – the above bunch just pop up from London from time to time to check on how the serfs are doing.

I published this information on 27 February when they last tried to influence the independence debate. Standard Life is again trying today to influence the referendum campaign by a press release claiming it will move key departments to London in the event of independence, enthusiastically amplified by the BBC, Guardian and all the other reactionary media.

Well, here is an opposing press release, from me. If anybody thinks that an Independent Scotland will be a place where major strategic companies can still be controlled by swivel-eyed right wing ideologues, they may get a very nasty shock from the people of Scotland.

“It’s not often you see me and Gordon Brown in complete agreement” says Cameron.
Voting to invade Iraq?
Voting to Bomb Libya?
Bailing out the fatcat bankers with 60,000 pounds from every family in the UK?
Supporting Trident missiles?
Opposing curbs on bankers bonuses?
Supporting the security state?
Supporting the Private Finance Initiative?
Supporting “Private Provision of Services” in the NHS?
Supporting deregulation of the financial services industry?
Supporting cuts in corporation tax?
Supporting privatisation of railways and utilities?
Supporting arms sales to Saudi Arabia?

etc. etc. etc.

Get rid of the Red Tories and the Blue Tories. Vote for independence.

Like many men, I shed tears very seldom and hide myself away when I do. But I had salt water on my keypad when I read this brilliant piece of writing from Wee Ginger Dug this morning.

Paul Kavanagh has been an essential node in the vast and sprawling social media network which has outwitted, out-thought and out-communicated the mainstream in the Scottish independence referendum. The Wee Ginger Dug’s particular contribution has been not just clarity of thought and a canine nose for bullshit, but beauty of expression.

The deftness of touch, wit and penetrating humour of today’s piece is inspired. But what is so great about it, is the spirit that can achieve these heights of writing, when Paul has so recently suffered the heartfelt loss of his partner Andy. Paul’s account of Andy’s death was itself very evocative; but it his unquenchable spirit today that made me cry.

Cameron, Miliband and Clegg. Just typing the names is depressing. As part of their long matured and carefully prepared campaign plan (founded 9 September 2014) they are coming together to Scotland tomorrow to campaign. In a brilliant twist, they will all come on the same day but not appear together. This will prevent the public from noticing that they all represent precisely the same interests.

Nobody in Scotland feels the slightest warmth towards these people, except for those paid hacks whose income depends upon their feeling such warmth (and there are too many of those, but still only a few hundred). One thing I can guarantee is that this rush of “superstars” will not meet my challenge of seeing 300 Better Together supporters in the same place.

The truth is of course, that if the range of potential political policy alignments lay on a two dimensional scale from 1 to 100, then Cameron, Clegg and Miliband occupy the range from 82 to 84. They offer no actual policy choice to voters.

They all support austerity budgets
They all support benefit cuts
They all support tuition fees
They all support Trident missiles
They all support continued NHS privatisation
They all support bank bail-outs
They all support detention without trial for “terrorist suspects”
They all support more bombings in Iraq (and are planning to launch British raids there before 18 September to ramp up jingoism – you read it here first)
They all oppose rail nationalisation
They all oppose free prescriptions
They all oppose free personal care
They all oppose rent controls
They all oppose bankers bonus cuts
They all oppose legalisation of cannabis

The areas on which the three amigos differ are infinitesimal and contrived. They actually represent the same paymasters and vested interests.

It is hilarious that after a campaign of hammering away at the fact that nobody can guarantee every last detail of what will happen in a an independent Scotland, the Three Amigos are now trying to convince us we should vote No in exchange for some powers, which nobody has the slightest idea what they will be, except they will not include Scotland being allocated any of its oil revenue.

Meantime Gordon Brown, the man whose banking liberalisation almost crashed the world, and who then gave 60,000 pounds from every family in Britain straight to the bankers as a gift, is undertaking another invited audience only tour of Scotland. He has secured a commitment to debate new powers after a No vote; a debate in which Brown has opposed powers for Scotland his entire political career. The Brown suggestions consist of an increased right to vary income tax, but only upwards, and with extra revenue balanced by cuts in the amount of Scotland’s own revenue which London hands back to Edinburgh. Scotland might also be able to vary slightly the rate of housing benefit and attendance allowance (only).

The idea that the popular exuberance at taking sovereignty back into the people, can be swept away by the three amigos and Brown’s “offer”, is ludicrous. Nevertheless the BBC, Guardian and other paid unionist hacks are pushing this unpalatable mess down the throats of voters in the hope something might work. It won’t.

Now tell me Labour or Westminster can be trusted with Scotland’s interests. This is the answer to the frenzied pledges from London, as the entire UK Establishment and mainstream media faces humiliation on 18 September.

YouGov stood to have its reputation shattered if it continued to put out polls showing ten point leads for No, when Yes is very obviously headed for a majority.

Those massive YouGov leads for No were all part of the Unionist tactic of making independence appear both uniquely impossible to Scotland, as opposed to any other small nation state you can name, and an unattainable dream. Too poor, too wee, too stupid and politically isolated. YouGov are known in the trade as “You Can Have Any Result You Pay For Gov”. For months, James Kelly on the Scot Goes Pop blog has brilliantly analysed the methodologies they employed to give those large No leads – asking prior leading questions, a large preponderance of Labour voters in their panel, and the “Kellner Correction” – an assumption that lies or faulty memory about how people last voted, would penalise Labour unless corrected for statistically. The result was YouGov polls that were great reading for the No camp, but made no sense whatsever to anybody who had talked to voters.

My own view is that there has not been an extraordinary 12 point swing in a fortnight, as illustrated by YouGov’s last two polls. What there has been is a continuing stead swing and a realisation in YouGov that, having helped the No campaign for over a year by trying to make a Yes vote seem hopeless, to be over 12% out on this vital vote might damage YouGov’s share price fatally. So they have had to start publishing something close to the truth.

As I have been reporting, the truth has been very obvious to people on the ground for weeks. And the truth is not only that independence is coming, but that the entire political class, BBC and mainstream media has been rejected, and a new form of popular power, based on community democracy and social media, has taken over.

I received an invite from the National Library of Scotland to a post-referendum debrief at 9am on 19 September. Anybody sober at 9am on 19 September (unless having medical excuse) is not part of the New Scotland. But more crucially, the panel includes Henry McLeish and Michael Moore – and they want people to pay 35 pounds to listen to their words of wisdom.

They really haven’t got it yet. Nobody will ever care what Moore and McLeish and their like have to say again, and the kind of democracy we will have will not involve paying substantial sums to hear pearls of wisdom drop from troughers on a pedestal. Nor will members of the old political establishment have a future in that career. It was a good tactic for Alex Salmond to say that Darling and Carmichael will be on the negotiating team: the people will not allow it to happen.

There is at last some understanding that Yes will win: the penny has not yet dropped that this is a revolutionary moment, not a polite constitutional shuffle.

I am available again for Yes meetings on 15, 16 and 17 September. Invitations welcome through the contact button above. Happy to go anywhere I can do good. My St Andrews speech a week ago has now had 75,000 views on Youtube.

It is symptomatic of the way this campaign has gone that I can find nothing online from the No camp which has had one fifth as many views, with the solitary exception of the PatronisngBTWoman video, which has massive views from people making fun of it.

Miliband was in Blantyre yesterday where his every bodily function was breathlessly reported by Severin Carrell in the Guardian – but even the Guardian could not pretend his audience in the “Labour stronghold” amounted to more than “dozens”. I am told it was under fifty. Better Together support on the ground has simply evaporated. What they rely on is that the massive output of mainstream media and the authority of the Westminster parties will have sufficient impact on their key demographics – pensioners, and housewives in a 1950’s sense – to shore up a residual no vote of the easily scared. My challenge to people to identify any Better Together gathering of more than 300 has been met with resounding silence.

Television has been wall to wall Miliband lately, and the BBC in Scotland seem to have simply abandoned their obligation to give equal broadcast time and treatment to both sides. Presumably many of the New Labour hacks who control Pacific Quay realise that their behaviour has made a Yes win a career threatening situation for them, so at this stage they see nothing to lose.

If independence is achieved it will be down to a popular movement and not to any politician. Indeed, if one person has to be singled out, I would say the Rev Stuart Campbell has made the most decisive individual contribution in the campaign. If Social media has beaten the mainstream media, the central rock around which millions of flowers have bloomed has been the Wings over Scotland website. This has a significantly larger daily readership than any newspaper in Scotland. The Wee Blue Book I found everywhere, including copies already available in pretty well every pub I entered, as I toured the East Coast. Over 400,000 downloads of the PDF have been made and 250,000 copies centrally printed, as well as a number of private initiatives which had already obtained professional printings from the PDF. Conservatively, there are over half a million hard copies out there, as well as all the reads online. In a population of 5.2 million, that is a major impact.

When we close down BBC Scotland and create a new citizen based, cheaper and more arts-oriented organisation in its place, let’s put Stuart Campbell in charge. Some state-funded drama and arts output seems to me commendable. State funding of pap entertainment is not needed – the private sector can do that perfectly well. State funding of “journalism” which investigates nothing and never challenges the establishment must be stopped.

The Guardian’s Michael White is a revolting liar. He writes today in The Guardian:

Why so few “no thanks” posters or union flags? “Because we don’t want our windows smashed or tyres slashed,” some no voters reply.

That is a plain lie, Michael White. No “No voters” said that to you. You made it up. Nor has there been a single instance reported of any No voter having their windows or car trashed.

White also retails a story that a woman allegedly told him on hearsay about somebody else who was “seized by the throat” on canvassing because of their English accent. Well I have lived more than eight years of my adult life in Scotland and never once had any adverse reaction of any kind to my very English accent, including while canvassing in some very deprived areas. This incident is also an invention.

White has always been revolting, his constant snide support for Tony Blair and his wars, covered by that horrible false bonhommie, is repulsive. But the move into straightforward lies disguised as reportage to please his New Labour masters (and their creature Rusbridger) cannot be allowed to pass. Michael White is a disgrace to the profession of journalism.

In the past dozen years, the armed forces of NATO countries, whether operating under the NATO banner or in related ad-hoc coalitions, have killed many hundreds of thousands of people. Of those hundreds of thousands of people, only a few hundred at most ever had any connection to any attack on a NATO country.

Whatever modern NATO has become, a defensive alliance it is not; that fact is beyond rational dispute.

It is also the case that the situation in countries where NATO has been most active in killing people, including Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan, has deteriorated. It has deteriorated politically, economically, militarily and socially. The notion that NATO member states could bomb the world into good was only ever believed by crazed and fanatical people like Tony Blair and Jim Murphy of the Henry Jackson Society. It really should not have needed empirical investigation to prove it was wrong, but it has been tried, and has been proved wrong.

The NATO states as a group have also embarked on remarkably similar reductions in the civil liberties of their own populations during this period. NATO to me is symbolised by the fact that its Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as Danish Prime Minister blatantly lied to the Danish parliament about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. When Major Frank Grevil released material that proved Rasmussen was lying, it was Grevil who was jailed for three years. In the United States, no CIA operative has been prosecuted for their widespread campaign of torture, but John Kiriakou is in jail for revealing it.

NATO’s attempt to be global arbiter and enforcer has been disastrous at all levels. Its plan to redeem itself by bombing the Caliphate in Iraq and Syria is a further sign of madness. Except of course that it will guarantee some blowback against Western targets, and that will “justify” further bombings, and yet more profit for the arms manufacturers. On that level, it is very clever and cynical. NATO provides power to the elite and money to the wealthy.

But what of Putin’s Russia, I hear you say? I am no fan of Putin – I think he is a nasty, dangerous little dictator. But little is the operative word.

Russia is not a great power. Its GDP is 10% of the GDP of the EU. Its economy is the same size as Italy’s. The capabilities of Russia’s armed forces are massively exaggerated by the security industry, including the security services, and by arms manufacturers. The entire area of Eastern Ukraine which Russia is disputing has a GDP smaller than the city of Dundee.

Russia is only any kind of “military threat” because of its nuclear arsenal. The way forward to peace is active international nuclear disarmament – and the existence of NATO is the greatest obstacle to that. The idea that almost the entire developed world needs to encircle and contain Russia with massive military threat, is as sensible as the idea that it needs to encircle the UK or France – both of which have substantially larger and more diversified economies than Russia and much larger and more technologically advanced arms industries.

NATO is by far the largest danger to world peace. It should be dissolved as a matter of urgency.