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Transcript of the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKDT1OXj9FM
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Happy St Andrews Day!It’s the happiest St Andrews Day I’ve ever known!
And congratulations this morning to the Republic of Barbados, who have finally shaken off the British monarchy!
Well, it’s been a hard four months. I’ve learned a lot. One thing I’ve learned is that dignity comes from inside. Nobody can take dignity away from you if you don’t allow them to do so.
And those in the Scottish establishment who attempted to humiliate and degrade me only succeeded in humiliating themselves, and sadly bring shame on Scotland internationally.
It’s fairly horrible in there. You know, prison is not a pleasant place at all, and Scotland should be ashamed of its antiquated, old-fashioned, and retrograde justice system … and the fact that Scotland has the highest prison population per capita in all of western Europe. I’m going to say a little bit more about that in a few minutes.
But first I want to thank everyone for their support. I should say that having my wonderful family – my wife, Nadira … Sorry … [CM chokes up and is embraced by his wife and children] … my children, Jamie, Emily, Cameron, little Oscar who’s not here at the moment, my grandson Ossian. Having the support of my family was amazing. And having the support of you wonderful people kept me going through it.
And I should say that more than two thousand people wrote to me in jail to say they didn’t think I should be there. More than two thousand people … in fact it was two thousand halfway through my sentence (we haven’t done a count since – might well have topped three thousand) and those two thousand people came from pretty well every country in the world you can think of. Just yesterday I got four letters from unconnected individuals – all of them in New Zealand – writing to me to say they were appalled at this attack on freedom of speech and at this miscarriage of justice.
One thing I prized very much was: I received support from hundreds of people who wrote to me saying that they often do not agree with me politically – that they don’t necessarily support Scottish independence; they don’t necessarily share my left-wing political analysis – but they do think that journalism should be free, and people should be free to publish facts without fear of being put in jail.
And I might add that although I, today, am delighted to be free, I shall never really feel free until my friend and colleague Julian Assange is also free; and of course until, as a nation, Scotland itself is also free from domination by an alien political culture.
[“Shame on Keith Brown!”]
… a lot to answer for, a lot of those people. And I must say I’m not at all surprised to discover that, after being locked away for four months, the SNP has not made a scintilla more progress towards independence than they had on the day I went in. I’ve decided that if anybody is voting for Nicola Sturgeon in order to get independence and in order to leave the Union, you are sadly deluded. Nicola Sturgeon is pursuing what I call the “Hotel California strategy” – you can check out, but you may never leave.
We have to fight this judgement that put me in. I am out and I am free; but we still have now, from a higher court – written into the Law of Scotland, the whole of the United Kingdom, and able to be quoted in Commonwealth courts all around the world – a judgement that says that bloggers and mainstream media should be judged by different standards … a judgement that said that a blogger can be jailed for publishing the exact same thing the mainstream media published, for which they should not be jailed. A judgement which says that new media can be jailed, where mainstream media would be fined. That is appalling, and unfortunately our legal fight is just starting; we have to take this further, and this is going to end up at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
I want to say something you might find surprising. I want to say that the Scottish Prison System is broken in many ways – and I’ll talk about a few of them in a moment – but I will say that working within that prison there are a great many very good people, and that I found kindness and respect and friendship in there, both from prisoners and from staff. And many of the staff in that jail, working within a system which is fundamentally flawed, do their very best to correct the flaws of that system by effort and kindness … and they’re actually very good people. I was very, very pleasantly surprised; and I think (on the grounds there are too many of them for them all to get in trouble) I might add that every single one – every single one – of the dozens of prison officers with whom I had dealings said to me that they did not think I should be in jail. And a couple of them went further and stated straight out they did not sign up to join the prison service to keep political prisoners. And that, I think, is very important.
But I also want to talk about the men I’ve left behind in there – the prisoners. I said earlier that Scotland jails more of its population than any other western European country. And a very large number of people in that prison should not be in prison. Over a third of the people in that prison are there on remand; they haven’t been convicted of anything. It is common for people to be on remand for 18 months before their trial, and the norm is over 9 months. The fair proportion of those who serve a year or more on remand are then acquitted and another proportion of them are given sentences of less than the time they served on remand. That’s one reason why Scotland’s prisons are terribly overcrowded.
The other point is the vast majority of the people in that jail come from the poorest housing schemes in Scotland. The vast majority of people in that jail were born into poverty and born into addiction. One thing I didn’t realise before I went in, is that one of the reasons why paedophiles are so hated by prisoners is that a very high proportion of prisoners suffered abuse in their own childhood, often in institutions. And a very high proportion of the people in that jail have never known normal family life, have known nothing but institutional care since childhood on … growing up through foster care, through young offenders’ prisons, ending up in prison. I was kept throughout … because I was a civil prisoner, they decided to keep me on the new arrivals hall, where people spend their first two nights in prison. And I saw people come into prison – again, in one case, three times in the time I’ve been in there – having been released/offended, released/offended. And prison is doing nothing to rehabilitate these people. The vast majority of people in jail need health treatment for addiction, not imprisonment, and they are not getting it. It is a shame on Scotland; it is a shame.
Like most middle-class Scots, I had believed we were a progressive nation – until I saw the people left behind and realised how poor our educational and social policies are and how they fail the poorest. And how then we cover it up – by sending them, and locking them, away.
Scotland has great potential. Scotland can be a great country, but we need a much more radical approach to social policy. There’s no point … there’s no point in acting for independence if we don’t run our society on fundamentally different grounds to the Tory policies we’ve inherited.
I have three last things I want to say – and forgive me because I have quite literally said, on average, about eight sentences a day for the last four months, so I haven’t been around and able to blog. I look forward to getting back and writing again. I want to make a couple of points on events of the last month or two that I would have commented on if I could, just to give you my take quickly.
On COP26 I think what we saw was the, if you like, the global super-wealthy working out that green-washing can be very profitable … and all this story that the answer is massive amounts of private capital to go into various state-guaranteed schemes for making money. When you think about it in the days when they used to subsidise people to put solar panels on their houses, that reduced energy bills. If they spent lots and lots of money on putting insulation into everybody’s home, that would reduce people’s energy bills – but it would be labour-intensive, not capital-intensive. It would employ a lot of people, but it wouldn’t give nearly the opportunity, for massive profits to a few, that building a lot of nuclear power stations will do. And then you will still have to buy the energy, and your power bills won’t go down.
So what do they go for? Are they into insulation? Are they into solar panels on people’s roofs? No, they’re into nuclear power stations, and I think at COP26 with all this talk of trillions of private sector hedge-fund money ready to go into green investment … we saw the moment when the global super-rich think “Oh, we can make money out of climate change!”
The second thought I want to give you is on the terrible instance of the migrants drowning in the Channel. Two weeks ago, the New York Times published a big exposé – a front page exposé – on an American bombing and drone strike in Syria which killed over 70 people, the large majority of them women and children. This happens all the time, every week there are western attacks by drone and they kill many more civilians than they kill targets. And whether the targets deserve to be executed, is – again – a further question.
But if you look at where these migrants who are trying to cross the Channel are coming from: they are from Iraq. The ones who drowned were mostly from Iraq; they are from Syria; they are from Libya; they are Afghanistani. They are from countries where we have bombed them back to the Stone Age and destroyed their infrastructure. Then, having devastated their countries, we call them economic migrants because they’re trying to escape from the terrible circumstances which we created. And I’ve been waiting – I have a television … I had a television in my cell – I’ve been waiting to see somebody say that on the BBC for the last three weeks. And you could wait forever before anyone said that. Which is why we need new media, why we need bloggers, why we need people who can talk about what is really happening in our society.
I thank you so much for coming. I see so many faces I recognise; I see so many I don’t, but of people who very probably have written to me, sent me so many books and magazines, so many of which have been donated – hundreds have been donated – to the library. Saughton Prison now has the best library of radical thought in the United Kingdom … which is rather lovely.
I thank you all for coming. Now for the next couple of days – I hope you’ll forgive me – I’m going to spend time with my family. I’m not immediately going to career into blogging or whatever. I’m going to go home now and perhaps have the odd … the odd glass of Lagavulin, have a nice steak, and relax.
[“The beard”]
Yeah, I know. I’m also … I’m looking for a job as Santa Claus. I’ve got my own padding and beard.
[“Here’s a Lagavulin for you!”]
Thank you very much indeed, everyone. Thank you.
Well, I’m going to get home. Bye!
————Thank you For this Sam.. A Pleasure to read.
Craig, I am so pleased you are free. Your speech reminds of Oscar Wilde, a great man whose tender soul was anguished by his time in Reading gaol, but whose glorious ballad subsquently woke up so many – even today. Your free presence will no doubt do the same.
