The FCO claim that records of extraordinary rendition flights to Diego Garcia were destroyed by water damage is an insult to all our intelligence. The FCO is refusing to say where the records were at the time, or what else was damaged in the (presumed) flood. This is of a piece with, but much more serious than, the “accidental” shredding of all Tony Blair’s parliamentary expenses claims. It is not that they expect us to believe them – they just don’t care. They have the power, and we don’t.

Just as much an insult to our intelligence is the new scheme of security measures at airports. These are all to do with maintaining the fear levels that keep the population compliant, and nothing to do with aviation security. If you have some kind of bomb inside an electronic device, you need a power source to trigger it. The last thing a bomber wants is a flat battery.

It is over twenty years now since I went on a MI6/SAS hosted course at “the Fort” near Gosport. One of the things we were shown and had explained to us, was a laptop which had been converted into a very effective bomb incorporating a slim sheet of semtex. That laptop could switch on and work absolutely normally. The laptop battery was the power source for the detonator.

Explosives detectors at airports would today pick up the semtex. That a mobile phone with no power source could be a bomb, in a way not immediately spotted by x-ray or explosives detector, is a nonsense. If you want to cause real damage on a plane, buy two one litre bottles of 50% strength premium vodka in duty free and set fire to them. You would be surprised at the extreme heat that can produce in a confined space.

The BBC has … started its news broadcast as usual from Ashkelon in Israel, highlighting rocket attacks on Israel. There is no mention on the BBC – there has never been any mention on the BBC, or anywhere in the Western mainstream media – that for at least 4,000 years Ashkelon was an Arab town, until in 1948 the entire, Arab population of 12,000 was driven out by armed force, many being massacred. Doubtless some older inhabitants of Gaza are refugees whose home is Ashkelon.

Israel is exercising its right of self-defence in precisely the same sense that Hitler was exercising the right of self-defence in Normandy in 1944 – ie not at all. Why the world puts up with this blatant ethnic cleansing and prolonged, agonizing genocide of the Palestinian people, I have no idea. It is not just about bombs and rockets and deaths now. It is about the shepherds being pushed out of their village in 2012 as part of the same process as the massacre of Ashkelon in 1948, all a process of genocide of the Palestinians in which Obama, Clinton, Cameron and Hague, as two whole generations of western politicians before them, are actively complicit.

I blogged this on 21 November 2012. Today every single BBC News bulletin leads with precisely the same trick, from precisely the same stolen Arab village. There is evidently a BBC policy to bias coverage of massacre in Gaza by basing it in the stolen town of Ashkelon. Every single BBC news programme is led by a report of the terror of people in Ashkelon at the rocket attacks which have killed and maimed – precisely nobody. There is then a brief “balancing” mention of the continual bombing of Gaza, which sometimes does and sometimes does not mention that at least 25 people have been killed, and hundreds maimed. Of the five reports I have seen, not one has mentioned that many of the Palestinian dead are women and children (although I once saw it on the strapline underneath). Rather the BBC says that “the Israeli government states it is targeting militants and weapons factories”.

The time given to the attacks on Palestine is abut 25% of that given to the rocket attacks on Israel. The coverage is also very different – we see human interest coverage of Israelis hiding from rockets in cafes. There is nothing remotely similar of the Palestinians under infinitely more deadly attack. There was one showing of funeral footage from Gaza, not of any of the women or children killed but of someone the BBC told us was simply a “militant”.

It is so blatant it is absolutely sickening. There are decent people I know in the BBC. Why do they put up with this?

I shall again be running the bar – the Whistleblower’s Arms – at the Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival from 22 to 24 August at Cardross, Port of Menteith.

I find this festival, which is very much a lifestyle event and features mostly new talent, an extremely life-affirming experience. Last year it brought me back from a very dark place. Some of this blogs most active commenters and helpers have been among the volunteers over the last couple of years, keeping the event going. Personally for me the festival is necessarily centred around Williams Bros and Thistly Cross, but there is a tremendous variety of music:

The event is very family friendly, and also an amazing place to meet new friends. It does not have any specific political orientation, but I might fairly say that the vibe is very much in line with the kind of unconstrained intellectual space promoted on this blog. On top of which Cardross is an extraordinarily beautiful place. The variety of local food on site, ranging from vegan to game, is one of the things I really enjoyed. It is a not for profit event and nobody gets a salary.

Tickets are not expensive by festival standards, and certainly cheaper than a weekend break in a hotel. But there is also the alternative of working your passage – the festival still needs plenty of volunteers.

I am genuinely looking forward to it enormously. Hope to see you there.

We could have built 120,000 new homes, desperately needed. Instead we spent the money on a bloody big ship. To what purpose? An aircraft carrier is of no use to defend the British Isles – land based planes can do that much better. It is to enable our armed forces to operate elsewhere, far from here. In other words, it is not for defence, it is for attack. It was ordered in the Blairite era of enthusiastic invasion of other countries.

Look what that left us. The Middle East in turmoil, half the world hates us, a wrecked economy. Oh and a bloody great ship. Thanks for that.

Not only could 6.2 billion pounds have built 120,000 social housing units around the country, but doing that would have created 200,000 more jobs, and helped cool the housing bubble, as well as giving families nice places to live.

Next time a disabled person has their benefits cut, we can say “Aah, but look, we’ve got a really good boat!”

According to staff at the Dewar’s Centre in Perth – capacity 1,000 – the attendance at David Cameron’s “Rally for the Union” today was just 220. Even the ultra-Tory Dundee Courier only claimed 300.

That the Prime Minister of the UK cannot fill a hall, at least to not embarrassingly empty, at an event billed as a “rally” to “save” his country, at which he stated that to lose the referendum would “break his heart”, is astonishing.

Even more astonishing is the body language of his supporters. Look at the faces behind him in this BBC video. Have you ever seen a body of people look less enthusiastic about anything? Had they been instructed that they must at all costs look sullen and unpleasant? What on earth can be the explanation?

An independent Kurdistan is a difficult sell because it is supported by such horrible people – Benjamin Netanyahu and every far right Republican in the US you can think of. Tony Blair is probably holding back on his endorsement until offered a huge consultancy fee or preferential access to “commercial opportunities” in the country.

Nevertheless, I supported self-determination for the Kurdish people long before the Western attacks on Iraq and I still do so now. That is support for a Kurdistan uniting the Kurdish lands of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Western Iran.

(The exception is the isolated Kurdish population of North East Iran, who are geographically far separated from the other Kurdish lands. The North East Iranian Kurdish community were deported there by the Shah in the early nineteenth century to form a barrier against Turkmen incursion).

The history of discrimination and abuse suffered by the Kurdish people is best known as it applies to Turkey, but in fact has been true in all four countries both recently and historically. The independence of Iraqi Kurdistan would almost certainly increase pan-Kurdish sentiment. This would be an undeserved difficulty for the current Turkish government, which has done a great deal more than its military backed predecessors to reduce discrimination and persecution. Neither Iran nor Syria would ever peacefully accept the loss of Kurdish lands.

The neo-con dream is to create a pro-American little state out of Iraqi Kurdistan that provides American bases, oil contracts and pro-Israeli support in the Middle East. There is no doubt that both the current degree of Iraqi Kurdish autonomy and the new push for an independence referendum are American inspired. But the neo-cons are not nearly as clever as they think they are, and have started processes which they have no hope of controlling. I very much hope to see an independent Kurdistan, and I hope to see it grow. Once established I expect to see Kurdistan in short order kick out the Americans and declare support for the Palestinians.

There is another persecuted people in the region who are distantly related to the Kurds. The subjugation and persecution of the Baloch is a direct result of the British invasion of Kelat in 1839. I also hope to see a free Baluchistan, combining both the Pakistani and Iranian colonised Baloch lands.

There never was a liquid bomb plot. It was proven in court not to exist. It was a fabrication of the minds governing a Pakistani torture chamber.

It is only a week ago that, as the terrorist industry sought to terrify us with the idea that jihadists from Syria would attack the UK, I wrote that:

“The patent absence of any genuine Islamic terrorism in the UK to fight is an obvious threat to the funding of this huge industry. Hence the current hype about the threat from Birmingham school governors or British residents fighting in Iraq and Syria. We have the usual propagandists for this threat thrust upon the airwaves again – Frank “Goebbels” Gardner and even the utterly discredited “Quilliam Foundation” who have been back on the BBC. At the moment they are peddling the utterly untrue line that 9% of those who travel from the UK to participate in fighting abroad, on return get involved in terrorist activity in the UK. Frank Gardner has been repeating this ad nauseam”

Now the terror industry has moved to ramp up this entirely false fear with worldwide headlines about a new threat of bombs on planes. The BBC and Sky both link this to the great “liquid bomb plot” of 2006. Everybody remembers that massive story that dominated the headlines for weeks. It was described by the British security services as “Bigger than 9/11”. Today BBC News described it as a “plot to bring down seven airliners simultaneously”.

22 people were arrested in Stasi style raids conducted on their hones at 2.30am. These included a 22 year old woman with a young baby. The Home Office proudly proclaimed that the Home Secretary, Dr John Reid, had been awake all night and personally directed those raids on sleeping families with children.

You may recall that the tabloids – directed by Rebekah Brooks and Coulson – ran front page stories about the evil Islamic mother and the liquid explosive in her baby bottles. These evil Muslims are so heartless they are prepared to blow up their own babies!! John Howard, Australian Prime Minister, said “That would be an appalling reflection on the lack of humanity of that child’s parents.”

Except it was all untrue. The chemical traces the police claimed to have found on the baby bottles proved to be Sodium Dichloroisocyanurate, normal baby bottle sterilising solution, from Boots. The woman was found not guilty on all charges. Neither the tabloids, the police, nor Dr John Reid and John Howard have ever apologised. Of the 22 people arrested in those darkest night raids, only eight were ever charged – fourteen were released without charge, there being no evidence against them. Of the eight who were charged, five were found not guilty. Three were convicted as terrorists – but there was nothing in their plans about blowing up aircraft. I am not personally convinced of the safety of their convictions anyway. They may have been unpleasant fantasists, but not much else. These three certainly had no practical plan or method to bring down seven aircraft, despite the BBC repeating that lie continually at the moment. The recent death of Gerard Conlon reminds us all of the horrifying willingness of English juries to convict the demonised other, be they Irish Catholics or Muslims.

This is what I blogged just three days after the story broke. Everything I wrote here proved to be true:

“None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year – like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes – which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.

The gentleman being “interrogated” had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.”

Despite the fact I was right and the entire mainstream media was wrong, I was directly attacked by highly paid alcoholic warmonger Nick Cohen in the Observer as a “conspiracy theorist”.

The famous “liquid bomb plot” was used by both the UK and US governments to drive through yet more anti-civil liberties legislation, despite the fact that the plot did not actually exist and the technology of home made portable and easily deployable binary liquid explosives is a myth.

The mass hysteria whipped up by the mainstream media and appalling neo-con politicians over the “liquid bomb plot” did a huge amount to boost the massive budgets of the terrorist industry. The media never carried the news of the non-existence of the plot, so there was never any downward pressure on those budgets as a result. The patent lack of Islamic terrorism in the West is becoming a threat to those budgets now. But, Hell! The liquid bomb myth worked last time, didn’t it? Why not use it again?

That the BBC can recycle as fact the “liquid bomb plot to blow up seven airlines” is sickening enough. But then they did something that was so jaw-dropping as to be unbelievable, even given the total lack of ethics at the BBC. To make sure the “fear” really sunk in, they showed a “reconstruction” of the liquid bomb plot. A section of aircraft fuselage was mounted on the ground, and then an explosion blew out a big hole in it. Text labelled it “reconstruction” underneath.

How can you have a “reconstruction” of something which never happened, and was shown in court not to have happened? I should love to believe that this BBC ploy is so ludicrous it did not work; but I have a sad feeling that 90% of people probably believe the “liquid bomb plot” did exist, as Tony Blair, George Bush, John Reid, John Howard and the entire media told them it existed, and nobody has ever told them it did not.

There is a huge amount of dancing on eggshells going on today in the media about the dossier on paedophile activity with which Leon Brittan came in contact in the 1980s. It is pretty plain there is a subtext here.

A number of people have contacted me for some years over the Elm Guest House paedophile ring. Frankly I did not particularly believe it, or thought it was exaggerated. But I confess my eyes have been opened by the Jimmy Savile, Cyril Smith and Rolf Harris affairs and the extent of complicity and even protection which they received from the establishment.

I have blogged before that, in the Savile case, as his behaviour was apparently compulsive and constant, I found it hard to believe it was not known in the very senior societal circles in which he spent so much of his time. I am convinced that perception was right.

Savile is not linked in to the Elm House paedophile ring, as far as I know, but Cyril Smith is. So were the then head of the Royal Protection Unit and of Special Branch. That to me raises all sorts of queries about whether they were not just participating themselves but protecting someone very senior indeed. I have been convinced that it is true that social workers interviewing child victims were indeed threatened with guns by Special Branch to drop it, and that paperwork has been confiscated and destroyed.

On Cyril Smith, Channel 4 Dispatches on 12 September 2013 reported that:

‘Speaking for the first time, former CID officer Jack Tasker tells the programme that Special Branch officers arrived at his office, told him to halt his investigations and demanded that the file be handed over to them,.“They made it quite clear that anything that was kept by us would bring repercussions if we didn’t hand it over; that as far as we are concerned, the inquiry is finished … you will take no more inquiries into Cyril Smith

Compare that to what happened to child protection officer Chris Fay in his Elm House investigation, as reported in the Express:

Mr Fay, 67, of south London, said: “It became very dangerous. People seem to forget that Special Branch could do what they liked, they were a law unto themselves.

“At one point they had me up against a wall by my throat with a gun at my head telling me in no uncertain terms that I was to back away if I knew what was good for me.

“A colleague of mine had the same treatment, as did a number of the volunteers. Victims who were actually abused at Elm House were also physically stopped from coming to speak to us at the NAYPIC office in north London.

“I witnessed Special Branch officers manhandling them and turning them away with a warning to keep their mouths shut. It was blatant, it was open, they were acting like gangsters.

In both Rochdale and in North London, Special Branch intervened to block the appropriate authorities on the ground from investigating what was a genuine paedophile scandal. I can see no other possible explanation than that the scandal involved figures a great deal more senior than Cyril Smith. From the Elm Guest House we have a pointer who some of those people were.

I really don’t want to blog any more about this, and I recommend you to have a search online. That involves trawling around some of the less pleasant parts of the internet, and I have seen material that is horribly anti-Semitic and anti-gay. But after years of dismissing the stories, on the grounds that they are promulgated by unpleasant people, in unpleasant newspapers, or cannot be true, I realise I was wrong.

I had an impeccable source that Obama’s anti-Scottish statement was orchestrated not only with him, but with the BBC who planted the question. I have no doubt it is true. I want to take this further with the Electoral Commission and the BBC Trust, but to do that I need confirmation of my whistleblower’s account.

On 6 June I therefore contacted No. 10 through their official website and asked whether any government official or adviser had previously briefed the journalist who asked Obama the question on independence. On 10 June I received the reply:

“Your message has been forwarded to the appropriate Government Department so that they may reply to your concerns directly.”

Another three weeks later, still there has been no contact from the “appropriate government Department”. I therefore went back to the Prime Minister’s Office to complain about the lack of a reply.

Answer came there none.

Derek Bateman has posted the reply to the BBC’s curt rejection of the academic study documenting its extreme bias in the Scottish Independence referendum debate. It is lengthy but well worth reading.

A couple of days ago, posting the video of Peter Cook’s wonderful satire of the judge summing up the Thorpe trial (which performace was itself a twenty year on reprise) I calculated that, to a student today, the reference was as distant as a joke about an event in 1938 was to me as a student. Yet I remember, vividly, the detail of Norman Scott crying as he bit the pillow and poor Rinka getting shot. That made me think I am very old indeed.

This was reinforced by reading a review of the current Monty Python Live revival. Again, to me as a student, the Goons seemed ancient history, so irrelevant and distant that I found older people’s nostalgia for them a part of the gulf between me and their different world. Well, to today’s students, Monty Python is two decades more removed than the Goons were from me.

I got into Monty Python a couple of episodes in to the first series, as word got round the school. There was something slightly illicit about it. There was a divide between those who could watch it and those whose parents refused to have it on (families only had one TV in those days). I seem to recall – and it may be a false memory – that it was even quite difficult to find, subject to strange time changes in the schedule, but I may just be building on a recollection of one night’s disappointment.

I wrote above that it made me think I am old, quite deliberately. I don’t feel old at all. Emotionally, I don’t feel significantly different to how I felt at eighteen – despite an extraordinary collection of life experience, I feel love and compassion in just as consuming a way as I did as a teen. I certainly don’t feel a great deal wiser, and I don’t seem to have become more cautious, and certainly not more right wing. But I make absolutely no effort to be young, What I have not done is adapt my tastes – I do not try to be trendy, (and that word perhaps is itself dating).

When I see my reflection, I always have a moment of disconnect as to who that heavy, fat, lined person is. I wonder how I got trapped in here. It is not that I am in denial about how old I am or how I look. I don’t have a different image of my physical self in my head. It is just that I can’t imagine that stolid and respectable person being moved or wracked by the emotional storms inside me or the radical thoughts on society. Than I realise I must misjudge others, daily, on the basis of their appearance.

An “independent” all-party commission set up by a lobby group funded by NATO, the FCO and Qatar, consisting of eight of the most right wing establishment figures in the universe, supports keeping Trident. The joint chairmen were “Lord” Browne of the Labour Party, “Sir” Malcolm Rifkind of the Tory Party and “Sir” Menzies Campbell of the Lib Dems. Over three years of deliberation, the Commission did not have, or consider, one single original thought not approved by the Westminster Establishment, and demonstrated that there is no difference at all between the three neo-conservative parties.

Why “Establishment figures endorse status quo” is news beats me. The only news is that the estrangement of ordinary people from the moribund political establishment means nobody cares what these old troughers and sycophants think. In Scotland the referendum has given an impetus to a popular will to take back the power kidnaped by an unrepresentative political class. These old fogeys may need to have the power (with American permission) to kill billions of their human beings, in order to feel potent and important. But if they want to keep these appalling devices, they are going to have to look for somewhere new to keep them. The Pool of London?

We do not know who kidnapped and murdered the three children in Palestine. These murders are terrible and need to be investigated. You cannot investigate a murder with bombs and tanks. Tony Blair’s immediate bandwagon-jumping and rush to blame Hamas is typical of a man who has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands through his urge to fix the facts around the policy.

Six Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in the past three weeks. That did not get lead headlines in the mainstream media. I should note in fairness that the BBC World News at 9.00 am this morning did mention it, but on standard form that will quickly get censored out of future bulletins.

I don’t recall Tony Blair rushing out press releases as a result if the deaths of those Palestinian children. How exactly does Blair believe his ghoulish publicity seeking on the back of this terrible tragedy is helping anything, except perhaps his long term money-making potential?

I doubt that Hamas killed the children. It would make no sense given its strategy of joining a unified Palestinian leadership and entering the diplomatic dialogue. It must be possible that the children were murdered by a Palestinian individual or group outraged by the recent killings of Palestinian children. It also must be possible that they were killed by an Israeli individual or group eager to undermine the Palestinian unity process and promote the settlement agenda.

All deaths are tragic, and the deaths of younger people always feel more tragic still. Parents are mourning in Israel and Palestine. The answer is not to create more mourning parents and shattered children. All violence in Palestine must be condemned unequivocally.

Spot the Cuckold Competition

A jury has been unable to find that, beyond a reasonable doubt. Rebekah Brooks was a party to the industrial scale phone hacking that was going on all around her. A 5 million pound legal team did its job. Such things happen.

But take a considered view of what that means. While she was Editor, and while she was Chief Executive, numerous people who reported directly to her were engaged in an active criminal conspiracy, the results of which she was seeing almost every single day, and to which hundreds of thousands of pounds of company money were diverted without her noticing. The leader of the criminal conspiracy, Coulson, not only reported directly to her, but she was shagging him too. She still noticed nothing.

If we accept that as true – and the jury did – it makes her one of the most incompetent managers and company executives in corporate history. Her negligence and complete lack of grip, over years, on what those immediately beneath her were doing, wiped off billions in shareholder value and lost a major commercial asset in the News of the World title. It also tarnished the company’s image irredeemably. On top of which she was given to shagging people for whom she had line management responsibility – if she were a man the feminists would be screaming from the rooftops about that.

In a rational world she would never be employed in any position of responsibility again. If Murdoch really did not know about the phone hacking, if he were genuinely disgraced and sorry, he would be furious at her for her gross negligence. Instead he has given her 10.8 million pounds.

Outwith the gilded circle of the stinking rich Brooks would never work again, having destroyed the News of the World and the image of News International. But the gilded circle will close around her.

The ultra-rich are not like you or me. They are treated by totally different standards. They also behave differently. They have no problem with being cuckolded. Charlie Brooks sent his best wishes to Coulson in jail. If I were Brooks, I would be sending money in to pay very large men to help him find the soap in the shower. Although presumably like Aitken and Archer, Coulson is going to one of those jails for posh people where you can play golf and go home at the weekend. I never understood Brigadier Parker Bowles either, though apparently his wife’s shagging was good for his military career. Funny people, toffs.

Being a right slapper seems not to have harmed Brooks’ career (feminists please note, I here apply the term slapper purely in the technical sense that she gave Ross Kemp a good slapping). That particular asset of hers has faded fast. But I think we can be quite certain that her future will be very different from that of anyone outside the top 1% of earners who had totally failed in their employment. It rather removes the argument that the disgusting wealth gap in the country relates to achievement and risk.

Various unionist nutters have tried to claim that the outrageous BBC/MOD propaganda lie of 35,000 people at Armed Forces Day in Stirling is true. This picture was taken at 1.30pm when the crowd was largest.

There is a lot to give scale in this photo. Look at the vehicles. Look at the marquees.

Look at the marquee closest to the top on the left. There is a van parked right in front of it. From that van, we can measure that it is a sixty foot by forty foot marquee.

Using simple measurement techniques, it is easy to see that the entire crowd could fit into three – or at most four – of those marquees. Perspective is on the side of crowd overestimate as the marquee is further away from the camera than any of the crowd.

If you observe rationally, and look at the clues as to scale, it is not difficult to work it out. That the MOD can claim 35,000 people is a lie by a factor of about twenty times. That the BBC repeats this state propaganda is worse than anything I have seen recently on Russia Today or Chinese state CCTV.

And here is the crowd by the climax – the Red Arrows fly past at 5pm. I have seen more people at a garden fete.

Disappointing Crowd for Open Air Gilbert and Sullivan

1,600 people attended British Armed Forces Day in Stirling. 20,000 attended Bannockburn Live, 1 mile away. Guess which the BBC covered?

The unionists have long been obsessed by the fear that the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn would remind Scots that their ancestors were prepared to die for their national freedom. I have never seen any Yes campaigner even mention it, as the case for independence is nothing to do with the early medieval period. But the British state was so concerned, that it waited until the dates for the Battle of Bannockburn event had been set and all the permissions given by Stirling Council , and then announced they were holding National Armed Forces Day at the same place and same time.

As a result, due to police fears about the overcrowding, Bannockburn Live was forced to slash capacity from 40,000 to 20,000.

Stirling Council should never have agreed to hold both events on the same day. In fact, it is a secret how they did agree. Stirling Council officials, called before a Scottish Parliament inquiry to explain, stated they could not say who at Stirling Council had given the permission, as because the process was irregular it was subject to an independent inquiry.

Only the Labour Party in Scotland could come up with that one – “because we have done something extremely dodgy, it is therefore secret.” Stirling Council is in fact run by a right wing Labour-Tory-Lib Dem coalition aimed to keep the largest party – the SNP – out of power. Stirling Labour Party is therefore the absolute epitome of just how disgusting Labour are.

So today the BBC News lead item was the Stirling Armed Forces Day commemoration, with David Cameron parading about with his soldiers in front of every Tory in Scotland (1,800 people). The BBBC had three crews at the Armed Forces Day plus two radio crews. Not one of them managed even a mention of the ten times larger Bannockburn commemoration just down the road.

On top of which the BBC coverage was as appalling a bit of state propaganda as you could ever wish to see. A fine old retired soldier, they reported, told David Cameron that he did not wish to see the country he fought for broken up. It really was, straight out, as crass propaganda as that. Evidently the BBC were unable to find a single ex-soldier who supports independence.

But for me the piece de resistance was the BBC’s conclusion. It showed that when the BBC really puts its mind to it, the BBC can try to be completely biased in a more subtle way – by use of body language, inflection and expression. In September, the female presenter opined, Scotland would have to choose between what it has to [spoken lightly, trippingly, frivolously high pitched voice] gain, and what it has to [stentorian, serious, loud, low pitch, serious expression] lose.

To explain Bannockburn, I feel the Declaration of Arbroath coming on. This is an astonishing document which predates Locke and Hobbes by well over three hundred years. It is the first declaration in history that puts forward the idea of the sovereignty of the people. It praised Robert the Bruce for defending Scots from the dreadful atrocities of English armies, but then goes on to say:

Yet if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

The document is signed by named nobles but is in the name of the “freeholders and whole community of the realm of Scotland”. There is no document anywhere near it temporally that describes the idea of a nation state like this. Unionist historians have done everything possible to denigrate this very plain sentiment, making the obvious point that the signatories were nobles and clerics. Well, neither Locke nor Hobbes were refuse collectors. The appeal to the Pope was of course to be expected in the early XIV century. It cannot be denied, except by those who hate the Scots, that these sentiments encapsulate the “social contract” and an idea of the nation that was a major advance in European civilisation.

Good grief!! This is absolutely beyond parody!! There is yet another terrible puff piece in the Guardian – the fifteenth in the last month now I think – about how Gordon Brown will save the union and what a great and respected sage Brown is. This one claims that Brown is the only man to have perceived that the independence referendum must be about the future of Scotland.

No, really, it does, read it through.

I think Rusbridger must be on heroin. Of course I realised something is seriously wrong for anybody to wear that bad a wig in public, but I really had not quite understood just how bad things actually are at the Guardian. I do now.

Freedland is at his most execrable in this piece in the absolute lie that Brown is speaking to packed out halls up and down Scotland. Completely untrue. Actually they might be less empty were it not for the fact that these meetings are strictly no entry except by invite. Not to mention that – and the fact no questions are allowed – shows as if we did not know that Freedland has no claims at all to journalistic integrity, and is just writing pure propaganda.

Ed Miliband: Labour will close the land border with independent Scotland lest black people and other foreigners get in.

There was never the slightest chance that David Cameron will achieve any significant “renegotiation” of Britain’s EU membership terms. This fictitious “renegotiation” is the fig-leaf with which Cameron has sought to appease euro-sceptics, promising an in-out referendum once the non-existent “renegotiation” is completed.

When a non-existent process can be deemed complete is an interesting question.

On Cameron’s side, it has only ever been a fig-leaf to buy time, though I do not entirely discount Britain’s extraordinary capacity to delude itself about its ability to “punch above its weight” diplomatically. The book of modern British diplomatic triumphs would be a slim volume indeed.

But the Emperor has made the mistake of pointing to his dangling naked penis. Cameron stated starkly that the election of Jean Claude Juncker to head the European Commission would be evidence that Europe would not adopt Cameron style reform.

Yes, David. Exactly. Thanks for pointing it out. Personally I never thought you were wearing any trousers anyway, but if anyone did you have now dangled it right in their faces.

Cameron has made it even more plain by linking Juncker’s election directly to Cameron’s thesis that national governments must always be paramount in Europe. Juncker’s election is in accordance with an agreement that the leader of the largest party in the European Parliament will head the Commission. Thus, as Cameron pointed out, the very process itself is an advance of Euro-federalism and Euro-democracy, irrespective of Juncker’s views. Absolutely. Cameron’s thesis that national governments must be paramount over European institutions has already been defeated in what Cameron himself made a symbolic fight. The complete fatuity of Cameron’s re-negotiation claims is exposed.

Personally I am very pro-EU. But whatever your stance on the EU, the outright dishonesty of the Cameron approach must be condemned.

I published a couple of weeks ago that Juncker does not share Barroso’s hostility to Scottish independence: as a former Prime Minister of Luxembourg he does not see the problem with small nations. The British media has been extremely keen to puff up the opposition to Scottish independence by foreign leaders. Cameron and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have invested huge diplomatic capital into persuading Barack Obama and Li Keqiang to make statements against Scottish independence, while standing next to Cameron for the cameras.

The media failed to pay the same attention to a much more significant occasion – Angela Merkel refused to do it. Standing right next to David Cameron at a press conference in Sweden, Merkel rebuffed intense British diplomatic lobbying when she refused to back the continued existence of the state the man next to her was representing. It was a stunning slight, as Merkel knocked back the same question fed to Obama and Keqiang with the sensible (though entirely untrue) reply that she never answers hypothetical questions. Cameron stared at the floor, discomfited.

There was never the remotest chance that an independent Scotland would be excluded from the European Union. And the two people who are most important in that decision – Jean Claude Juncker and Angela Merkel – have not been amenable to the FCO’s frenetic anti-Scottish lobbying. They both are in positions much more vital to Scotland’s future than Barack Obama and Li Keqiang – both of whom will change their tune post-independence anyway.

Cameron’s headaches are multiplying.

Alan Rusbridger, by royal appointment destroyer of hard drives, astonishingly has yet again given space to Gordon Brown’s witterings on Scottish Independence. That is at least twelve articles puffing Brown in the last month.

This one is quite probably the most stupid yet. Brown opines that Scotland will not be a more equal or progressive society after independence. It is a great shame that these Cassandra like powers of predicting the future were not working when his own policies of creating an economic bubble, based on massive boosting of irresponsive speculation in the City of London, led to a crash which has impoverished us all for generations.

Brown’s prognostication is based on his analysis that Alex Salmond’s policies are not progressive. The evidence that the SNP is to the left of the Labour Party is overwhelming. Leaving that aside, Brown makes the presumption that the SNP will be the government in an independent Scotland. It is much more probable that, independence settled, there will be a realignment of Scottish party politics. It will certainly not be a one party state. Pretty well the one thing we can be sure of is that a Conservative government is unlikely – and as that is what the UK is heading for in 2015, I think we can expect an independent Scotland to be at any rate less regressive.

Tuition fees, Academy schools, PFI, NHS prescriptions, bedroom tax – these are all areas where Gordon Brown and New Labour advance the full neo-con agenda and which have been stoutly resisted by the Scottish government. Genuinely left parties and the Greens have consistent representation in the Scottish parliament and are listened to, not openly mocked and abused as Caroline Lucas is when she speaks in parliament.

This nonsense from Gordon Brown is perhaps to be expected. But why on earth does the Guardian keep publishing it?