It is a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called western democracies, that Sy Hersh, arguably the greatest living journalist, cannot get this monumental revelation on the front of the Washington Post or New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net.
Hersh tells the story of the US destruction of the Nordstream pipelines in forensic detail, giving dates, times, method and military units involved. He also outlines the importance of the Norwegian armed forces working alongside the US Navy in the operation.
One point Sy does not much stress, but it is worth saying more about, is that Norway and the USA are of course the two countries who have benefitted financially, to an enormous degree, from blowing up the pipeline.
Both not only have gained huge export surpluses from the jump in gas prices, but Norway has directly replaced Russian gas to the tune of some $40 billion per year. From 2023 the United States will appear in that list in second place behind Norway, following the opening in the last two months of two new Liquefied Natural Gas terminals in Germany, built to replace Russian gas with US and Qatari supplies.
So Russia lost out massively financially from the destruction of Nordstream and who benefited? The USA and Norway, the two countries who blew up the pipeline.
But of course, this war is nothing to do with money or hydrocarbons and is all about freedom and democracy…
To return to Hersh’s account, particularly interesting are the series of decisions taken to avoid classification of the operation in various ways which would require it to be reported to Congress. In terms of United States history, this ought to be a big deal.
For the Executive to commit what is an act of war without the approval of the Legislature is fundamentally unconstitutional. But that is one of those quaint remnants of democracy that the neo-liberal elite consensus can quietly sidestep nowadays.
Hersh sets out the well known background in compelling detail, including the fact that, from Biden down, the Americans effectively announced what they were going to do, openly.
But what most worries me about the entire story is the unanimous complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring the completely obvious.
The media line, parroted here relentlessly by the BBC and corporate media, was that the Russians had probably themselves blown up the pipeline on which they had expended such great resources and three decades of intense diplomatic activity, and which was to be the key to Russia’s single most valuable source of income for the next 40 years.
This was always quite literally incredible. You would have to be deranged to believe it.
It actually taught me not just that we truly are in the realm of totalitarianism and the Big Lie, but I learnt something very important about how the Big Lie works.
The secret is not that people genuinely believe an outrageous claim. The secret is that people do genuinely believe that they are in a battle of good against evil, and it is necessary to accept the narrative being promoted, in the interests of fighting evil.
Don’t question, just follow. If you do question, you are promoting evil.
I am sure that is how it works.
State and corporate stenographer journalists are actually intelligent individuals. If they thought about it, they would realise that the narrative that Russia blew up its own pipeline is obvious nonsense.
But they are convinced it is morally wrong to think about it.
Which is why none of them challenged the equally mad claims that Russia was repeatedly shelling its own forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, and indeed is why none of them challenged the utterly risible official version of the Skripal story.
I previously told the anecdote from when I worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and asked a good friend if he really believed the misinformatioin on Iraqi WMD with which he was involved.
He replied by referring to the video game Championship Manager (now renamed Football Manager), which we used to play together. He said when he was in the game, it was immersive, he was manager of Liverpool, and it fully absorbed him.
Similarly, when he walked through the FCO gates, the world of the intelligence reports was immersive and Iraq did have these WMDs inside that world. He worked in the “reality” of the FCO. Once he left in the evening, he lived in a different reality, the world of us in the pub.
I do know of one or two journalists bright enough to detach their professional output from what they really think, in a similar way. (I once had a conversation along these lines with Jeremy Bowen in Tashkent.)
Most however don’t think like this. They simply think that all right thinking people support the historic struggle against the evil Russians, so it must be right to read out the propaganda without thinking too much about it.
Those of us critical of the aggressive promotion of war in Europe, are not only barred from all mainstream media and confined to corners of the internet, and even then heavily suppressed on social media (which is why Sy Hersh’s article does not have the scores of millions of readers it merits).
We can’t even obtain freedom of assembly.
Two established left wing venues have cancelled the No 2 Nato meeting I am addressing in London on 25 February. Conway Hall’s reasons for cancellation included threats to funding and fears for the safety of staff.
We are now reduced to a guerrilla meeting, the Central London venue for which will not be announced until the evening before.
Is this really a democracy, where it is not possible for dissidents to hold a public meeting without secrecy, subterfuge and hiding from supporters of the state?
I do urge you to come along on the day, whatever your views on the subject, to support the right to freedom of speech.
I have a different view from perhaps all of the other speakers, on the legitimacy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which I oppose.
But I also oppose NATO expansion which is an underlying cause of the war, and indeed oppose the existence of NATO itself.
NATO is a war machine which sucks resources from working people to benefit the military industrial complex, and unleashes devastating destruction on developing states which do not make their natural resources available to western billionaire elites.
It is also a fundamental node of the propaganda apparatus which manipulates and controls our society, particularly as counter narrative and dissident thought is now rigorously and systematically excluded.
There is no longer an Overton window of permitted debate. It has narrowed and should be renamed the Overton letterbox.
One of those small difficult ones right down at the bottom of the door. With a very fierce spring, and snarling dogs guarding it.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
How much of Shell’s record US $40 billion profit was due to the Ukraine war and freezing Russia out of the market?
If you apply the “excess deaths” methodology we became familiar with during covid, comparing profit against a running average of the previous five years, we get a figure of about $25 billion “excess profit”.
This is of course a rough technique, both with deaths as with profits, as neither covid nor the Ukraine war were the sole factor affecting the outcome, and “all other things” are not equal but in some degree variable.
But it is a good indication when a major new factor comes in to play.
If we simply remove Shell’s 2020 accounts, with their US$20 billion covid loss, from the equation as exceptional, we still have a figure of US$15 billion excess profit, arising largely from the war in Ukraine.
Isn’t it good to know that all those people have not died or been maimed in vain? At least Shell are raking it in.
Shell of course are not alone. We will see something similar from all the energy companies, including those that are billing you massive amounts to heat your home. It isn’t costing any more to produce the energy, it is simply vulture predation on market disruption.
Capitalism in theory works in free markets of trade flows. But in practice financial flows are manipulated by states to the benefit of the rich in numerous ways, of which war and sanctions are just the bluntest examples.
The United States blowing up the Nordstream 2 pipeline was a pretty significant state market intervention. Yet when the result of that kind of action is to cause super profits to western energy companies at consumer expense, market intervention to remove that super profit becomes “unhelpful”.
Arms manufacturers are also coining it. To December, investors in merchants of death BAE had seen an increase in value of their investment by 63% in twelve months. Now everybody with a finger in the pie is clamouring to send more tanks and planes to the Ukraine. Money, money, money.
The story is no different at Lockheed Martin etc.
We should also not forget that the military and security services are themselves a vested financial interest. Vastly rising budgets, more career opportunities, more second career jobs in the arms industries and the think tanks that pump out the propaganda for more war, war without end.
I have said this before, but J A Hobson’s short book, Imperialism: A Study contains analysis of how all this works that stands true over a hundred years on, is expressed with clarity, and fundamentally changed how I view the world, when I read it forty years ago.
There is yet more acceleration in the massive transfer of resources to the wealthy. Every world event – Covid, the war in Ukraine – is manipulated by states to increase inequality. Oxfam, who seem the most genuine of the large relief charities (admittedly not a high bar), recently published this:
Billionaires have seen extraordinary increases in their wealth. During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent, while $16 trillion (37 percent) went to the rest of the world put together. A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 percent. Billionaire fortunes have increased by $2.7 billion a day. This comes on top of a decade of historic gains —the number and wealth of billionaires having doubled over the last ten years.
In this western world, I am not sure what percentage of ordinary people have to reach what stage of desperation before we see the start of genuine revolt. Should things continue on this trend, we are going to find out eventually.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
It is nearly 20 years since I blew the whistle on British Government complicity in torture and the extraordinary rendition programme, under which thousands of people were deliberately tortured as a systematic act of government policy.
Many of them were killed.
I had, and I leaked, substantial documentary evidence to back my claims, of which this is but one example.
Yet the BBC never gave a spectacular, combat shot illustrated four and a half minute lead television news item to my revelations of official UK government involvement in mass torture, as they gave to junior Russian officer Konstantin Yefremov’s far less spectacular allegations.
My revelations were actually about the UK, not a foreign country. They came from a much more senior source than Lt Yefremov. They had undeniable supporting evidence. They revealed ministerially approved policy, not the possibly rogue behaviour detailed by Yefremov.
Yet to the BBC it was a much less important story.
Now I don’t actually doubt Yefremov’s modest testimony: he witnessed a single incident of torture and some looting. I am sorry to say I have no doubt, from close study, that torture and other crimes have always been committed by all armies in war.
Those who deny that Russian soldiers do it are as purblind and bigoted as those who deny that British or United States – or Ukrainian – soldiers do it.
But the massive propaganda punch given to Lt Yefremov’s testimony is in stark contrast to the treatment of domestic UK whistleblowers, or to the equally harrowing stories of the torture of Russian prisoners.
When have you ever seen Australian Major David McBride given four and a half minutes of BBC main news headline story to outline his allegations of widespread war crimes by allied forces in Afghanistan?
Of course you haven’t seen that. Such coverage would never happen.
On the other hand, when Public Interest Lawyers were closed down over irregularities in soliciting and pursuing the cases of victims of British atrocities in Iraq, the BBC gave that enormous coverage including on prime time news broadcasts, as though it proved no such atrocities ever occurred.
The BBC gives blanket coverage to a junior Russian officer, but gave almost none to New Zealand’s Operation Burnham, in which the Special Air Service killed a child, tortured an opponent and handed him over to further torture, and then systematically lied and covered up – all of which an official inquiry confirmed happened but declared “legal”.
Of course we know we live in an age of wall to wall propaganda. Of course we know that the BBC is an integral part of it. The really shocking thing about propaganda – as true of today’s BBC as it was of Goebbels – is that being massively unsubtle and obvious appears to magnify rather than diminish its power to sway public opinion.
The lesson of this current article is that it is not necessary to invent facts for propaganda. A completely false narrative can be built by extreme selectivity of what facts you amplify, and what facts you bury.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
I spoke at this meeting on Saturday and gave a broader overview than usual of the Assange case and its importance. I think it comes over fairly cogently, even though I was actually feeling pretty dizzy and faint.
Jonathan Cook is, as ever, particularly worth listening to closely, and it was great to catch up with Jeremy Corbyn again.
At the end of the event I was particularly honoured to receive from Jeremy the Gavin Macfadyen Prize for supporting whistleblowers, not for myself but on behalf of Julian Assange, and I say a few more words on that subject.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
A No to Nato rally at Conway Hall on 25 February, at which I was due to speak, has been cancelled after the venue received threats and abuse online that made them concerned both for staff safety and for funding.
This is just another symptom of the serious threat to free speech in modern society. In fact we are now at the stage where we might say free speech has already been lost.
Neither state nor corporate media would give any space to the views likely to have been expressed at Conway Hall. The war raging in Europe is not allowed to be discussed in any terms, other than as a straightforward conflict between good and evil, with the West as the good guy and Russia as the evil.
Social media posts saying anything else are rigorously suppressed. Because of the successful creation of corporate gatekeeper sites like Facebook and Twitter, the readership of this article will be at a quarter the level of a year ago, due to rigorous suppression of my posts linking here.
Now my position on the Ukraine war is a great deal more nuanced than most of the speakers at the No to NATO debate. I oppose NATO because it is an agent of neo-imperialism and a mechanism for the diversion of huge amounts of resources to the super rich, via the arms and military industries.
But I am plain that while provoked, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was nonetheless illegal in international law. I view those who regard Putin as a defender of democracy or of workers’ rights as seriously deluded.
Putin is a very bad man, and the West is only just achieving the levels of wealth inequality that Russia has experienced (with a push from the West) these last three decades. The oligarchs and military industrial complex rip off the ordinary man in Russia, just as in the West.
This is a disaster for the people of Ukraine, for the people of Russia and for the people of the World. It is going to end with Crimea absorbed into Russia and some kind of autonomous status inside Ukraine for the Donbass regions.
That outcome could have been agreed without war, before thousands had to die and millions be impoverished. It could be agreed today. All the death and destruction and weapons systems will achieve nothing – except massive profits for the wealthy.
Responsible politicians would stop the fighting now. But no politician sees a personal interest in doing anything other than escalating and pouring in more and more weapons systems to mince human flesh.
I worry hugely about the abysmal quality of public debate. I am not sure whether bad education, social media or a race to the bottom in broadcast and print media – which are mostly about commentators not about news – are most to blame.
But quality of thought and depth of understanding are abandoned almost entirely in what passes for public debate in favour of risible extremist positions.
Ukraine is one example, where we have an establishment view that NATO and Ukraine are perfect, that there was no constant pre-invasion shelling of Russian speaking civilians or banning of Russian oriented political parties or the Russian language and publications, and definitely no Nazi influence in the Ukrainian armed forces.
Then you have those brave enough to suggest a counter view, but who claim that Putin is perfect and Russia a workers’ paradise, that all Ukrainians are Nazis, that there are no Ukrainians in the Donbass, and that Russia is only prevented by self-restraint from total military victory.
These are both ideological positions which are self-evidently ludicrous, but the first is in fact adopted by Western governments and the entire mainstream media.
I find I receive continual abuse from both sides for not adopting one crazed narrative or the other.
The market for reason has become very small.
On three current major controversies – Ukraine, covid and trans rights, debate is extraordinarily polarised, and the slightest deviation from the official narrative is heresy. Those who see themselves as heretics despise all but their own, equally extreme, interpretation.
On Covid, the official narrative is that it was a uniquely devastating virus and that humankind was only saved from a serious disaster by a combination of ruthless lockdown and revolutionary vaccines.
On the other side we have those who believe Covid was an engineered virus designed to make a fortune for big pharma and to justify government measures to reduce civil liberties, and that the vaccines are themselves deadly.
Personally, I believe neither of these opposing narratives.
My own view is that covid-19 is a respiratory disease which, in its initial outbreak, was similarly lethal, or possibly a little worse, than one of the major flu pandemics. The “Hong Kong flu” of 1968/9 I vividly remember. I knew a healthy child who died of Hong Kong flu, and my whole family caught it.
The Hong Kong flu killed an estimated 1 to 4 million people worldwide. The famous Spanish flu pandemic from 1919 killed an estimated 25 million.
To say covid-19 was similar to a flu pandemic is not to downplay it: they are terrible things.
The Covid-19 pandemic killed, according to Wikipedia which is curated very close to the official line on these matters, about 6.7 million people – about a quarter of the number killed by the Spanish flu. According to the same source, without vaccines it would have killed about 17 million more, which would be about the same as the Spanish flu.
Although of course the Spanish flu still killed a much larger proportion than Covid-19 of the world’s then much smaller population. Indeed as a percentage of population killed, covid-19 is not out of the same league as the Hong Kong flu of 1968/9.
So Covid-19 is a very nasty virus, which also may have more debilitating long term effects than generally associated with a flu pandemic, but not dissimilar in its mortality rate.
There are difficulties in collating the statistics. The figures for historic flus are not very reliable. The practice of treating as covid-19 deaths anybody who died with the disease, when they actually died of something else, is also perplexing.
If you look at excess deaths (above the 5 year rolling average), it is undoubtedly true that at the minute excess deaths are as high in the UK as at the height of the covid-19 outbreak before the vaccine programme, even though only 5% of current deaths involve covid.
It is also true that they were this high in January 2015 and, in both cases, a severe winter flu paid a role. The official narrative to explain the current death toll features heavily health problems caused by lack of access to medical treatment during lockdown.
Some of my own views on covid-19 are these. The pandemic was comparable to a nasty flu pandemic. The panic caused went beyond the rational, and governments were involved in pumping that up. There was little danger to the young and to healthy mature adults, but real danger to the elderly and unwell.
Accordingly I believe lockdown was too severe and should better have focused on shielding the easily identified vulnerable, rather than placing harsh and unnecessary restrictions on the large majority in society.
There could have been massive infrastructure, physical, moral and psychological support offered by the state to those who needed to shield. Rather than lock down everybody else. Closing universities for example was completely unnecessary.
Just like all pandemics before it, the covid-19 virus is busily following its own self-interest by mutating into a less vicious form that can co-exist more comfortably with its host.
I welcome vaccines as long as they are voluntary. Medical science of course makes mistakes but in general has been a massive force for good. The argument that covid-19 vaccines are a fundamental threat to the world’s health seems to have as little evidence behind it as the argument that covid-19 was such a threat that economies had to be fundamentally harmed.
Vaccines should be voluntary and no sanctions imposed for not taking them. But I regard taking the vaccine, and sharing in any associated risk as well as any associated benefit from herd immunity, as the correct moral position.
I do not claim that I am uniquely right or particularly expect you to agree with me. But I am not in either of the two binary camps.
I am not in the camp that supported every authoritarian crackdown and wanted to put anyone in jail who did not wear a mask, nor in the camp that thinks it was all a sinister government plot.
As with Ukraine I urge you not to switch off your brain and join one “camp” or the other “camp”. Do not sign up to a pre-ordained set of opinions.
Forge your own opinions.
The other issue I want to explore today, on which what passes for “thinking” appears ridiculously polarised, is that of trans rights.
On the one side we have people who argue that it is an inalienable human right to live in the gender of your choice, and that all societal institutions and infrastructure must be organised around that individual choice, which may never be questioned or subjected to scrutiny.
On the other side we have people who argue that sex is immutable and determined at birth, that safe spaces and positive discrimination provisions for women are dependent on strict application of biological sex, and that much of the trans movement is motivated by sexual perversion.
A lack of any willingness to try and synthesise rights and obligations, and take account of the desires and motives of others, seems the defining characteristic of almost everybody actively engaged in this debate.
My own starting point is a libertarian one. I believe people should behave as they wish to behave and be treated as they wish to be treated, wherever possible, and that people should be kind to one another.
Therefore, if somebody presents themselves to me as male or female, I shall treat them as such in society. That seems to me polite. It is not for me to check their genitals, much less to make a judgment on their aesthetic appearance.
I am frequently challenged over this and asked, do I believe that a man can actually become a woman? The answer to which is, that I neither know nor care. It is a matter of human interaction. Life is not a science exam.
The debate is currently focused on Adam Graham aka Isla Bryson, a convicted double rapist who is currently held in a female prison in Scotland, having declared himself a trans woman.
It is worth noting that this has happened not under Scotland’s new Gender Recognition Reform legislation, which is not in force, but under existing UK wide legislation, as interpreted by the Scottish Prisons Service under Justice Minister Keith Brown.
I have to confess, this seems to me self-evidently ludicrous.
There are no absolute rights in our society, beyond the right to breathe. The state can incarcerate you and effectively remove all your rights, for criminal acts or if you are dangerously insane.
That rights are not immutable meets with general acceptance.
I see no reason why trans rights should be different. Anybody who chooses to rape women will lose a lot of rights. They will be incarcerated. Subsequently they will be on a register and unable to live in certain locations, and barred from certain employments.
It seems to me entirely sensible that a rapist or sexual assaulter of women should lose the right to transition in law to another gender. It should be amongst those societal rights they forfeit by their heinous act.
The problem is, this kind of practical approach is unacceptable to both extreme ideologies.
On the one hand, you have those that believe that some people have a right, that may never be gainsaid, to an inner gender identity only they can identify, and that their sincerity may never be questioned.
On the other hand, you have those who believe that everybody should be forced to live a gender role determined by their physical characteristics, whether they want to or not, and no matter if they never hurt anybody in trying to do the opposite.
I am very conscious that it is wrong always to discuss this matter in terms of sexual offence, and the very large majority of trans people are entirely peaceful and innocent.
But that itself is why banning rapists and other serious sexual offenders from changing gender does not affect the principle: a few serious criminals are nothing to do with genuine trans people.
I find some of the “debate” simply baffling. I am sorry I cannot find it now, but I saw one tweet from a lady who had used a unisex toilet and was horrified to have to walk behind the back of somebody using a urinal.
Has she never left the UK? What is offensive about a man’s back? The extraordinary thing is, there were scores upon scores of replies about how disgusting it was to walk past a urinal.
I find myself genuinely baffled by this and by what has become an entire sub-genre about potential behaviour by trans women in changing rooms and toilets, where all of the projected behaviours would remain criminal with or without a gender recognition certificate.
I don’t claim any expertise or genius on the subject. I reject the strange absolutism of both extremist positions.
I do not accept either that we are forced to live in a role according to our physical make-up, nor that a professed personal gender identity may never be queried for sincerity in a criminal.
In comments two articles ago I was called both a transphobe and a pro-trans hater of women, by gender extremists on either side over the same article.
Now on none of these three issues did I set out by looking at varying positions of different camps and trying to find a middle ground. I simply considered the arguments on Ukraine, on Covid and on trans rights on their merits, and came to my views as the best policies for achieving maximum human happiness in difficult situations.
In doing so I find myself at odds with public discourse on both subjects which revolves around clearly defined camps, holding sets of received opinions and arguments to which they stick, and intolerant of anybody who does not subscribe to the same set.
This is a sorry state of public discussion, made much worse by the fact that in each case the government, media and ruling establishment is entirely signed up to one of the binary camps, and itself refuses to entertain any debate or nuance.
Indeed, those who query the Establishment line on any of these issues are subjected to ridicule, ostracism and even legal threat. That may be one reason why opposition is itself so unsubtle in its response.
It is also the case that on all these arguments people become angry, exasperated or impatient that anybody should hold a different view to their own.
The idea that reasonable, well-motivated people need not agree on everything and may agree to disagree on certain issues, is a fundamental basis of a tolerant society. It is an increasingly rare value.
I find that the market for nuance is small, and diminishing.
I want to stress again I am not claiming I have everything right. But I am claiming I have thought through the facts and arguments for myself, as best I can.
I hope this is of some assistance to you in doing the same.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Scotland has no shortage of dreadful right wing judges, but as the very epitome of reactionary conservatism, one gobsmacking judgment from Perth Sheriff Michael Fletcher stands out.
In a major rowing back of Scotland’s right to roam legislation contained in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, Sheriff Fletcher ruled that plebs must not be allowed within many acres of rich people’s mansions, because the thieving commoners may rob the rich people.
That really is precisely what he ruled.
53] While I accept that it is quite possible that the average proprietor of Kinfauns Castle might not have the resources or the tastes or the interests of the pursuer in this case it is I think legitimate to infer from the nature of the premises and in particular its value and cost to run that any person using the premises as a private house would require to have very substantial resources. It is also legitimate to infer from the evidence that such a person would be likely to be the possessor of valuable objects of some kind be it furniture or pictures or jewellery or at least to infer that outsiders including those of a criminal disposition might think that the owner of the Castle would have valuable possessions. If that is so then any such proprietor would have concerns as to whether their premises were secure and thus the evidence relating to security assumes some significance. It may be that the reasonable proprietor of the Castle might not have the same finely tuned concerns about security that were offered in evidence on behalf of the pursuer and might not require elaborate precautions such as tamper detectors and other electronic devices, but I think it can be inferred from the evidence that any owner would have greater or lesser security concerns more highly developed than most other householders in the country.
….
[55] No one in my view would have their enjoyment of their private house ensured if they were concerned about the security of the premises either from the point of view of theft or some sort of attack. If I am correct that most inhabitants of such a house would be persons with substantial assets then I consider that all such persons would have some concerns about security and it would be expected that their enjoyment of the house would be able to be ensured only if they were happy that the security of the premises was taken care of.
“Taken care of” specifically meaning by excluding the public right to roam for many acres around their house. Because they have a big house and so are “persons with substantial assets”, and thus the law should treat them differently to the plebs.
He further ruled that, where there had been a fence erected before the passing of the 2003 right to roam legislation, that fence should be respected as the boundary where the right to roam legislation did not permit access, as that fence would indicate where the historic castle owners reasonably believed it was necessary to exclude the public in order to protect their own privacy.
Yes, he specifically stated that the Land Reform legislation could not alter the boundaries to public access previously set by estate owners’ fences, and it is historic estate owners’ opinion on where they should exclude the public, that is the only opinion that counts.
[56] Another consideration arising from the characteristics of the house seems to me to arise from the evidence again unchallenged of Mr McCleary that the fence erected by the pursuer was erected following at least for some of the way but probably for most of the way a fence which was already in existence albeit in poor condition. Mr McCleary described it as what I think could be described as a stob and wire fence with perhaps two wires and about waist height. Such a fence could not be described in any respect as a security fence but it is significant in my view that the fence was not one which surrounded the whole of the property owned by the owners of the Castle but travelled at least part of the way through the property so that property owned by the Castle was both inside and outside the fence. Counsel for the respondents argued that there was no significance in the fact that there was a fence there partly because it was erected at a time when it was perfectly possible to own land privately. I consider that it is legitimate to take into account that the fence was built on the line of an original fence, or more precisely a previous fence. It is clear that the fence would not have prevented anyone who desired to do so from entering the premises but standing its condition it was probably erected at a time when the existence of such a fence would indicate to the vast majority of people that they were coming to land owned privately. When one is trying to assess what is sufficient land adjacent to the house to afford reasonable measures of privacy in the house and to ensure the enjoyment of the persons living there is not unreasonably disturbed it seems to me to be not unreasonable to take into account the boundaries established by persons not influenced in any way by the new rights created by Parliament in relation to access across private property at least as an adminicle of evidence. It is I think legitimate consider that such boundaries were placed there on the basis that persons considered that ground within the boundary would be required to secure their privacy and enjoyment of the property especially when the fence was not erected automatically on the boundary of the land owned by the house. For these reasons I have taken the line of the fence as being a pointer to what might be considered by persons occupying the house as reasonably required for the enjoyment of the house.
Sheriff Fletcher, in a ruling since quoted by estate owners all over Scotland, ruled that Ann Gloag was entitled to fence off 12 acres around her castle as “private garden”, and keep out the little people.
He did not stop there. In a pointer to roll back the Act’s victory over repressive rulings of criminal trespass, Sheriff Fletcher stated that Mr Morris of the Ramblers’ Association should have been charged by the police with breach of the peace when he entered the gates of the estate to check on compliance with the 2003 Act, and refused to leave when asked to by a land manager in a Land Rover.
Sheriff Fletcher plainly felt that for ramblers to disobey orders from people in Land Rovers is the first step to Marxist insurrection and the guillotine.
The case was brought in 2007 by Ann Gloag, owner of Kinfauns Castle against Perth and Kinross Council and the Ramblers’ Association, to stop walkers from transiting or just enjoying her estate of Kinfauns Castle, outside Perth.
Ann Gloag’s Perth home, Kinfauns Castle. (Please see Gordon Currie story 01738 446766). NO BYLINE TO BE USED WITH IMAGE. COPYRIGHT: Perthshire Picture Agency. Tel. 01738 623350 / 07775 852112.
Sheriff Fletcher also stuck the Council and Ramblers Association with £160,000 of Gloag’s legal costs. Probably as a result the case was never appealed – that was also a realistic assessment of the predelictions of Scotland’s estate weekending senior judiciary.
The Gloag judgment remains a huge bleeding hole in the intent of the 2003 Land Reform Act on public access to land.
Politicians huffed following this judgement about the need to amend the Act to make plain the precedence of public access –
As the Guardian reported at the time:
Yesterday, senior figures in the ruling Scottish National party, which has championed land access legislation, said the act must be reviewed and if necessary tightened, while the ramblers urged the Crown Office, which oversees Scottish courts, to issue guidance to clarify the legal position.
Roseanna Cunningham, a nationalist and the local MSP, put down emergency questions on the case at Holyrood yesterday. “If the Queen doesn’t require fences at Balmoral, I’m not entirely clear why they’re needed at Kinfauns. I hope we’re not going to sit by and watch this being eroded,” she said.
But nothing happened, in Scotland’s timid parliament of the bought. Instead we got the exact opposite, with the Scottish Government incoporating the Gloag judgment in its countryside access code, as a restriction.
That is just another heart-rending example of the gap between what the SNP claims to stand for, and how it behaves in government.
Anyway, “Dame” Ann Gloag, who detests human traffic across her property, has now been charged with human trafficking related to the operation of her African oriented charities, and persons brought to Scotland.
One effect, of course, of the extensive privacy and large right of access exclusion zone granted to Dame Ann Gloag, is that all domestic servants and other persons working at the castle, in whatever capacity and voluntarily or not, would be removed from the possibility of public view.
It would therefore be most interesting in terms of Sheriff Fletcher’s judgment if any of the alleged trafficking activity relates to the Kinfauns estate. Watch this space.
On the other hand I view the Crown Office, to which Police Scotland have handed the dossier, as entirely corrupt and shall be most surprised if there is a prosecution.
I ran across Ms Gloag’s interests when I lived in Ramsgate in Kent from 2007 to 2014. My home was under two miles from Manston Airport, at that time a struggling commercial airport on which many local jobs depended.
In November 2013, with the close involvement of Thanet District Council, Ann Gloag purchased Manston Airport for just £1, on the assurance that she would keep it running for at least two years.
Within a very few months Gloag had closed down the airport, with substantial harm to the local economy, and submitted plans for an extremely profitable scheme to build 1,000 homes – the first phase on just part of the massive site.
Gloag turned down a £7 million offer to buy the airport from a company willing to keep it open.
You can still find online this introduction to an ITN investigation into what happened:
Meridian investigation has discovered that after private meetings with senior officers from Thanet District Council, Manston Airport owner Ann Gloag believed there was the potential for large-scale house-building on the site.
Was that why she rejected a £7m buyout offer that would have kept the airport operational and saved 140 jobs? John Ryall has this exclusive report.
Sadly the investigation itself has disappeared. I wonder whether Dame Ann Gloag’s legal friends have been at it again?
You will gather I am not a fan of Dame Ann Gloag. But then why would she care what we think? We are not permitted within acres of her home.
Yet everything I have written above obviously is a complete fiction, because according to the BBC’s James Cook, the human trafficking charges against Ann Gloag are an incredible shock because she is the most saint-like and unimpeachable human being the world has ever known.
She is vouched for by Gordon and Sarah Brown, for goodness sake. (Gordon Brown not being at all a war criminal complicit in the awful deaths of millions of people in Iraq and across the Middle East). She is vouched for by lots of heads of charities who get six figure salaries for patronising Africans.
In fact James Cook could find nothing at all worrying or controversial to write about Dame Ann Gloag. Her cupboard is apparently full of Christ like charity and zero skeletons.
Dame Ann has been charged with human trafficking. Now I am not an expert on media contempt of court, except that I am the only living person in Scotland ever to have gone to jail for it. But now that Dame Ann has actually been charged, is it really OK for James Cook to publish that:
“A source close to Dame Ann told the BBC that the family were “victims of collusion” and had endured “a Kafkaesque nightmare for the last two years.”
The source added: “Everybody is bewildered by these accusations and the level of this investigation.
“It is deeply ironic that Dame Ann actually funds an Eastern European charity called the Open Door Foundation whose job it is to stop the trafficking of poor women into sex crimes.
“She is very attuned to the real dangers that are going on in this world.
“This is bizarre. We are dealing with technicalities.
“There are countless people who are stepping forward to support Dame Ann from around the world.”
Is that not material likely to influence a jury? And if James Cook is allowed to publish this, am I allowed to say that my position on Dame Ann Gloag’s saintliness is one of extreme scepticism?
Do read James Cook’s piece. It really is quite astonishing hagiography of somebody with so much controversy in their past, now charged with a serious crime by Police Scotland.
It is astonishing hagiography even coming from Scotland’s smarmiest sycophant and stager of false incidents.
Incidentally, I do not mean to make too much of this next as it is probably simply a muddle arising from Cook’s inability to make coherent sentences, but I did a double take on this sentence in his piece.
I give you Dame Ann Gloag. Fit to stand alongside Baroness Michelle Mone as exemplars of titled Scottish businesswomen.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Logic often appears in short supply in politics. This is because great decisions of state are not taken on the merits of the ostensible subject matter, but according to what best advances the career interest of the politicians with the power to decide.
Scotland has left the European Union against the will of a large majority of its voters, expressed in a referendum. The ridiculously “hard” Brexit has caused real economic damage to virtually everybody in Scotland.
Yet Brexit was not sufficient to motivate the SNP leadership to make any genuine move for Independence. Because any genuine move for Independence brings real risk to the political careers of the SNP leadership.
By contrast to Brexit, which affects everybody, gender reassignment affects only a very, very small proportion of the Scottish population. Unlike the EU, which remains very popular in Scotland, the measure to reform gender reassignment lately passed by the Scottish parliament is distinctly unpopular.
One sure sign of how unpopular gender self-ID is, is that Keir Starmer is rowing away from it at the speed of light. Starmer believes in nothing but power and wealth for himself. Having been told self-ID is not popular, Starmer has absolutely no care about throwing Anas Sarwar and Scottish Labour under a bus, and opposing a Scottish law that Scottish Labour voted for in Holyrood.
Starmer is simply following Starmer’s career interest.
My personal view, for what it is worth, is that the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill passed by the Scottish parliament is still better than the status quo ante, though I would have preferred some of the safeguarding amendments to have been passed.
But I realise I am not on the popular side of the argument.
So how can it be possible that, having failed to move for Independence over EU membership, which is popular and affects everybody, the SNP may move for Independence over self-ID, which is unpopular and affects a tiny number of people?
The answer is astonishing and, if you are not a very close follower of Scottish politics, I understand it may be difficult to believe.
The first and crucial point is that Nicola Sturgeon has always been much more interested in identity politics than in Scottish Independence.
I think that is generally accepted now. I claim the Cassandra Prize for reading the entrails way back in March 2015.
I had a counterbalancing doubt at the back of my mind about this enthusiasm for – as Nicola Sturgeon put it – “Improving” the UK. I don’t want to improve the Union, I want to end it. Power has a fatal attraction to politicians, and I think I detected that exercising power in the United Kingdom is today gleaming brighter in the dreams of some professional SNP politicians than is independence for Scotland.
The other thing I did not like was the machine politics and management of it all. The entire first day there was not a motion that was passed other than by acclaim, and there was not a single speech against anything, though there were a couple of attempts at referral back. The only item permitted on to the conference agenda, in closed session on day 2, that was in the least likely to cause controversy was the adoption of all women shortlists – and the only reason that was on the agenda was that the leader made it abundantly plain she wanted it. I incline to the view that as a short term measure it is justified, but I abstained because I did not like what I saw of the way it was managed.
It was the only debate the leader sat through, and it was very plain she was watching carefully how people were voting. There was a definite claque of paid party apparatchiks and organised feminists occupying front centre of the hall. There was a strong suspicion, voiced by Christine Graham, that deliberately weak and left field speakers had been chosen against women shortlists. And for the vote, party functionaries including Angus Robertson and Ian McCann stood at the side of the hall very ostensibly noting who voted which way and making sure that the payroll vote performed. I was right next to where Angus Robertson stood as he did this. He moved into position just before the vote, made it very obvious indeed what he was doing, and left immediately after. I found myself regarding the prospect of a whole raft of new MPs, their research assistants and secretaries providing 200 more payroll votes, as depressing.
All women shortlists of course became permanent, and other manifestations of identity politics followed. We have the SNP National Executive dominated by representatives of identity groups.
We also have the “gender balanced” cabinet, which is the only explanation for the idiot Shirley-Anne Somerville being a minister.
Actually I take that back, there is no possible explanation of Shirley-Anne Somerville being a minister. She would fail the interview for Deputy Manager of a branch of Superdry.
We have the appointment of a Lord Advocate on the basis that being the first female in this key role outweighs being a diehard unionist.
This deserves greater consideration in this discussion of politics and logicality.
It is a fascinating fact that Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain was prepared to certify the Gender Recognition Reform Bill as not in conflict with UK legislation and thus the Scotland Act, when it obviously is in conflict.
Yet Bain refused to certify a referendum bill.
The Lord Advocate was appointed by Sturgeon and sits in her cabinet. What is plain is that what is and what is not certified by Bain is, by happy coincidence, in line with Sturgeon’s political priorities.
Bain helped Sturgeon avoid the referendum she has been “promising” for seven years, and enabled the GRR legislation which is so very close to Sturgeon’s heart.
Is it not lucky that Bain’s entirely independent and sincere legal opinion always falls just as Nicola Sturgeon would wish?
Bain is also key to Sturgeon’s next gender identity moves which, together with GRR, Sturgeon believes will cement her legacy. They are the abolition of jury trials in sexual assault cases, openly pursued to increase the conviction rate rather than the just verdict rate, and the establishment of misogyny as a “hate crime”.
There have been many other defining “identity politics” features of Sturgeon’s rule, particularly “cutting edge” early age teaching on sexuality and gender in schools.
But the identity politics initiative which caused most publicity was of course the conspiracy of lies and liars, orchestrated from Nicola Sturgeon’s office, to harness the #MeToo movement to jail her heterosexual male predecessor, an inexorable proponent of Independence.
When that plot was foiled by an honest Edinburgh jury, the abolition of juries moved high up on Sturgeon’s agenda.
In using her position as First Minister to advance the identity politics agenda, the one thing causing stress to Sturgeon has been the existence of members of her own party who believed the party should rather be achieving Independence.
Sturgeon has famously kept party members following her for over eight years by continuing dangling the carrot of a referendum before them – a referendum she has never had the slightest intention of holding, and never will hold.
This extremely skilful feat of party management has been achieved by driving out of the SNP those members who were primarily interested in Independence. The tens of thousands who have left were the long serving backbone of the party.
For some reason I have never understood, there has been a peculiar alignment in Scottish Independence politics.
Those Independence supporters who support trans rights are strongly correlated with “gradualists”, those who are happy with devolution and see Independence as a distant aspiration.
Those Independence supporters who oppose self-ID on gender are strongly correlated with those who see Independence as an urgent need now. Hence the Alba Party.
By making support for trans rights, in the most uncompromising and ideological form, a flagship policy of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon drove out almost all the hardline Independence supporters from the SNP.
The remaining membership who are driven by anything resembling a belief, are driven by identity politics. But as the SNP has become firmly established as the font of political power and paid position in Scotland, it has also attracted a new membership, often ex-Labour, who are interested in money and career.
I have never understood why there was this correlation between trans rights and gradualism. I was one of the very few individuals you could point to who both supported trans rights and supported urgent Independence now.
Until now.
Suddenly Nicola’s shock troops, the trans activists who have dominated the SNP and Green parties, see Independence as urgent, following Westminster’s veto of Gender Recognition Reform.
In two months, the SNP will hold a special conference designed by Sturgeon and Murrell to vote to kick down the road for a few more years Nicola’s promise to hold a plebiscitary election should Westminster not allow the Independence referendum.
But since that conference was called, Nicola’s gender identity troops, who were happy with the devolution system that they believed had delivered what they wanted, suddenly find Independence is needed after the Westminster veto.
That fundamentally changes the equation. By a delicious irony, those people Nicola weaponised to get rid of the supporters of Independence, are now the ones pushing her to move on Independence.
This is hilarious.
Sturgeon is attempting to stave them off by her old trusty method of taking court action against Westminster; which as always she will lose when it finally reaches the Supreme Court in London.
Sturgeon held off parliamentary action on Gender Recognition Reform for years, while she used it as a wedge issue inside the party.
Now the legislation has finally passed, I very much doubt the committed activists into whose hands she placed her political future, will be prepared to wait for another couple of years while a doomed court case plays out.
The end for Roman Emperors generally came when their Praetorian Guards turned against them.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
UPDATE It is astonishing how many people are incapable of comprehending the following phrase from the article below:
The account still exists and is visible online
Yes, I know the account is still there. The problem is I am locked out from my account and bizarrely, when I try to recover it the process ends with an automated meassage saying there is no such account.
An extraordinary number of people in comments on Facebook, Twitter and below the line here are triumphantly posting that they can still find the account, with the implication I am not blocked. I know it is still there. I said that. I have been locked out of it.
END OF UPDATE
I appear to have been banned from Twitter. For over a week I have not been able to log in to my account.
When I enter the password it takes me automatically to the Help Centre, where an automated message tells me the account @craigmurrayorg does not exist. When I enter my email address and phone number it tells me it has no record of them.
All this on a 15 year old blue tick account with 110,000 followers.
The account still exists and is visible online, though very difficult to find because of extreme shadowbanning.
Although my account has been heavily shadowbanned for years, until now this has never shown up in the shadowban test sites.
The reason for this is that my account has been previously limited by twitter not showing my tweets to my followers, which the shadowban test sites cannot test for. It has not previously been shadowbanned from searches, which they can test for.
The additional shadowbanning on the account has come into place at approximately the same time Twitter locked me out, which seems to rule out the removal of my account access being a technical glitch.
The wordpress to twitter function has also been blocked, by which posts on this blog were tweeted out on my twitter account. That is an entirely different mechanism to the normal login, so again this is not a technical password glitch.
This was my last tweet before I was banned. With no other information from Twitter, I can only presume this tweet prompted the ban.
Every attempt to use the appeal mechanisms that exist when a twitter account is suspended or banned, are closed off by a message that the account does not exist and they have no record of my contact details, which is absolutely not true.
Over half the traffic to this website comes via twitter. On this website I express in mild and sometimes intellectual terms my dissent from the neoliberal world view.
In the past two years this has caused me to be jailed, to be interviewed about leaks on another matter by the Police, to be thrown out of the National Union of Journalists, to have two laptops stolen, to have my facebook account hacked and my twitter account blocked.
The warning bells for the freedoms of speech and dissent we took for granted in western society could not be ringing louder nor more clearly.
I cannot of course take to twitter to tell people I have been blocked by twitter. I should be most grateful if those of you with twitter accounts could tweet about this and link to this post. Please do the same on any other social media which you use.
May I ask if you have thought about subscribing to support this blog and my work, that you do so now? The efforts to cut off my social media reach and traffic to this site are also of course a threat to the income which supports me.
But the site will as always remain free and open, and the content is free to republish and repost elsewhere, including in translation.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
The next morning I stayed in the Aparthotel writing, while Niels went out to the airport, to pick up the BMW 4×4 he had hired. Our destination was Halle an der Saale, near Leipzig. It was, I think, our first – and overdue – foray into the former East Germany.
Hotel rooms in Halle were thin on the ground and again very expensive. But as we were now hiring a vehicle, there was no need to be in the city centre, and for a change I booked us in to the Schloss Teutschenthal, a hotel about 8 miles outside the city.
At just 75 euros a night it was a fraction of the cost we had been paying, and given the choice I much prefer rural surroundings.
About 11.30am Niels phoned and reported a problem. He had been unable to collect the car. Neither the firm he had booked nor any of the others had availability.
He had argued long with the agent, who had explained to him that the agencies are franchises. The brand name company itself is a separate entity and the online booking site is a third separate entity. Because the online site took your money did not mean there was a car in fact available. They frequently oversold.
At busy times like just before Christmas, cars were in very short supply. The railway lines were in crisis, which also increased demand. We were looking to hire in Bremen and drop off in Berlin five days later. But the Berlin drop off was to another company within the same franchise; each franchisee wanted their own vehicle back, they were not interchangeable. Arranging that at times of high demand was very difficult.
So, no car, and over 70 euros spent on a wasted taxi ride to the airport and back. We had to dash to the railway station, and the itinerary for 7 December was 12.33 pm RE82022 Bremen to Hamburg, 14.04pm ICE1007 Hamburg to Halle (Saale) arriving 17.16pm.
Without a car, having booked in to Schloss Teutschenthal was a mistake, because it meant we would arrive in the city centre at 17.16, then have to get a taxi out to the Schloss to check in, then come back in again, while the event started at 18.00.
Our normal format was for me to do an introduction, then Ithaka would be screened, then Niels and I would take questions and lead discussion after the screening.
Today our trains ran to time, which was fortunate as we really needed them to. As we pulled in to Hamburg where we had to change, I observed an incident through the window of a carriage on the opposite side of the platform.
A stout Muslim lady, heavily swathed in grey hijab, was being escorted off the train by a female police officer. Two other police officers were waiting on the platform for her.
The Muslim lady had a child in a pushchair and another, about four years old, clinging to her skirts. Her pushchair was festooned with bags looped around the handles. None of the police were assisting her with children, pushchair or bags as she got off the train.
It was a small incident, but crystallised a sense of unease within me.
Germany is not a country at peace with itself. The closure of Dusseldorf Christmas market, the guard yelling at the young man with the wrong ticket, the aggressive begging everywhere, the man scouring the litter bins in the first class carriage for deposit bearing bottles, the heavy police presence on every station, the complete lack of surprise at the theft of my two laptops. You can add in to that the substantive dysfunction in the railway system.
I was just passing through everywhere, seeing nothing in depth. But Germany did not feel as I expected it to feel – tolerant, efficient, prosperous and content. It felt like a society under real stress. No doubt I am reading too much into a succession of small incidents, and my mood was rattled by the loss of my laptops. But such was my sense.
Hamburg station was very crowded, and the first escalator we came to where we could change platforms was blocked off by police, for reasons that were not plain. We walked along to a further escalator, up which was a concourse with a row of shops.
Niels spotted a car hire agency and went in to speak to them, but again they had nothing available. So we got on the ICE to Halle, which went right through Berlin, and arrived there after darkness had fallen.
The taxi driver had never heard of Schloss Teutschenthal, and entered it dubiously into the satnav on his telephone, which he proceeded not to follow very often, as we headed out of Halle and on to unlit country roads.
It was a dark night and there were no other vehicles around. A surreal picture unfolded. We were surrounded on all sides by red lights in the air, like fields of magic giant poppies.
At first I thought we were amongst the airport landing lights, but there were too many of them, and they were the wrong colour – all the same deep red – and far too widespread. As the car sped along and parallax took effect, I realised that, although on all sides, they were further away, and thus much larger, than I had realised.
The driver got hopelessly lost, largely because he kept deviating from his satnav route on lanes that he thought looked to be shortcuts, but kept turning away in the wrong direction.
We eventually arrived in Schloss Teutschenthal, checked in, left our baggage and dashed back to the car. We meandered back through the giant poppies, and then as we hit Halle heading to the cinema we again became lost, this time in the city itself. I noticed more than once we passed back the way we had come.
I do not think the driver was taking us for a ride, to increase the fare, I think he was lost. The atmosphere in the cab had become rather tense. Niels had texted the organisers who had put back the start time from 18.00 to 18.15, but when we were still not there at 18.20 it was decided to start the film and do the speaking afterwards.
Generally, this does not work well. If you get to speak before the film, you can convince the audience you are interesting and informative enough for it to be worth staying for the discussion afterwards. Otherwise they tend to rush for the door at the end of the film.
Niels and I were chatting to the taxi driver to defuse the tension in the cab, which was affecting the driver as well. He had switched the meter off. He came from Bosnia, and had only been driving the taxi a few weeks. He said apologetically that he knew Halle well but not places outside the city. We were too polite to point out his deficiencies in Halle itself.
The film having started, I have no idea why we felt the urge to arrive as soon as possible to make our apologies to the organisers, but we did. The cinema was in an imposing Gothic building at the top of quite a steep hill, which we dashed up as quick as we could.
Arriving breathless, we found a very pleasant young woman from Amnesty International, the organiser, standing outside the cinema. She was a little testy at our delay, exacerbated by the fact that Amnesty had booked and paid for a hotel for us in town, which message had not got through to us.
She asked, in a wondering rather than accusatory way, why it had still taken us another 20 minutes to arrive when Niels had said we were in a taxi 5 minutes away. I found myself explaining that the taxi driver had got lost repeatedly and that he was new to the city, having just arrived from Bosnia.
It just came out wrong. I realised immediately I must sound like some kind of horrible racist. I tried to disentangle, explaining that the problem was not that he was Bosnian but that he did not know Halle, but it was one of those situations where anything you say just sounds unconvincing and digs deeper.
I retreated to cover my confusion, saying (truthfully) that Niels and I had eaten nothing since breakfast and needed to find something before the speeches. We went down the hill again to a very good local restaurant.
I felt a bit better after a very good schnitzel and a few glasses of wine. It was possibly the only occasion I have been glad that Ithaka is almost two hours long.
Which is a good place to mention that even modern electronic copies of films have frames – it seems capturing motion still works the same way, a series of still images not a seamless whole, even without physical film.
The length in time of a film differs depending on the frame rate at which it is played, and the convention on this differs from country to country. Therefore Ithaka was about seven minutes shorter in Germany than in the UK.
At least, I think that is how Niels explained it.
There was a very good audience, notably with many young people and happily they fairly well all stayed for a very lively discussion. Niels spoke particularly well that night.
I had noticed that German audiences seemed to warm to Niels more readily than they did to me. I seemed to have a difficulty forming that empathetic connection with German audiences that is so essential to good public speaking.
Feeling the response of your audience, which presumably comes largely through a process of interpreting and aggregating signals of body language, and then adapting to it, is an ability I have prided myself on my entire adult life.
Any experienced political speaker will tell you there is an intuitive element – the emotional reaction of the audience communicates itself back to the speaker in a way that we do not always understand.
This is not just projection. When the audience is feeling intense personal sympathy towards Julian and his young family, or anger at the way he is treated, you pick that up as you face them.
I know it is not just projection of my own emotion onto the audience, because occasionally you pick up that you are failing to carry the audience’s feelings in the direction you wish. It is also not just visual, because my eyesight is awful.
When I speak to a Scottish audience about the clearances, and about the need for land reform today to return the land to the people, I feel this sentiment strongly reflected, emotionally, back to me from the audience. On other subjects, such as gender reform, I have felt emotional barriers come down and resentment of me from the audience, although nobody else is speaking but me.
It is intuition. I have found it best expressed in fiction by Isaac Asimov in the character “the Mule” in his Foundation trilogy.
You may, if you like, take this with a pinch of salt purely as an expression of the way I feel about audiences and public meetings, and just more evidence that Craig Murray is eccentric.
But the feeling I got back from our audiences in Germany was one of rather austere respect, as though I were at a remove, some exhibit generally acknowledged as valuable, rather than a warm human being with whom you might interact.
Niels on the other hand appeared effortlessly to be on the same wavelength as the German audiences, and they seemed to warm to him instinctively. His speaking style is much more intellectual than my own, but he also was very effective at conveying the pain of the family he witnessed while filming Ithaka, and the inhumane and degrading treatment of Julian in Belmarsh.
In Halle, Niels gave a simple description of the terror of Julian’s infant children at being subjected to internal oral inspection while visiting Belmarsh, and sniffed and pawed by Alsatians taller than them. He delivered it in a quiet voice and low tone, and it has stayed with me.
This photograph after the talks rather nicely captures Niels as the star of the show that evening.
I did however come away with a great deal of chocolate given me as presents. I am very easy to cheer up.
After chatting with activists and being photographed in an excellent reproduction of Julian’s Belmarsh cell, complete with authentic harsh prison soundtrack, we returned to the very comfortable Schloss Teutschenthal.
The hotel was completely dark and apparently deserted, so we went to our beds for an early night.
Daylight the next morning and I found that the Schloss reminded me very much of the von Trapp family home in the film of the Sound of Music.
We had breakfast in the magnificent dining room. We were the only guests in the hotel, although it was quite busy with staff preparing the ballroom for a banquet that evening. The hotel functions chiefly as a conference centre and wedding and events venue, though you can just check in as we did.
In that dining room in November 1943 the estate’s owner, Carl Wentzel, had hosted a grand dinner for leading German industrialists. The discussion centred on the urgent need to get rid of Adolf Hitler.
Wentzel went on to be actively involved in the Wolf’s Lair assassination plot of July 1944, and he was hung by the Nazi regime on December 20, 1944. Most, possibly all, of the participants in that November 1943 dinner were also executed around that time.
The hall was hung with a painting of Wentzel referencing his fate.
The estate and mansion, now hotel, is back in the hands of the Wentzel family, having been in communist East Germany during the cold war period.
In Germany, restitution of lands confiscated by both Nazis and communists has been patchy post reunification, but seems to have been achieved in this case; presumably Carl Wentzel’s history helped the case.
In neighbouring Poland I had visited many such properties in the early 1990s, and there they had generally been turned into party rest and recreation centres or sanitoria during the communist period.
There were no accessible staff in Scholls Teutschenthal who spoke English, but it appeared to me this had been the case here too. Two large hostel blocks had been built in the grounds, by the look of them in the 1970s, and were now derelict.
In Poland in the early 90s there had been complete and full scale restitution to property owners, in those parts of the country which had been Polish pre-1939.
I supported this as part of my job in the British Embassy, but privately I viewed it as disastrous. Massive tracts of country were restored to the same hopeless and bickering aristocrats who had made Poland unviable for centuries.
The current elegant “Schloss” dates from about 1880 but the original medieval castle still stands in substantial ruins and looked fascinating, but was blocked off. After a walk in the grounds with Niels after breakfast, I went to do some writing – I later learnt he had then climbed a wall into the old castle. I fear my wall-climbing days are behind me.
In taking a taxi back into Halle station in daylight, the mystery of the giant poppy lights was revealed.
We were in the middle of a vast wind turbine plantation, by a long way the largest I had seen in Germany. Each of the huge turbines was topped by a red warning light for aircraft. They were indeed much bigger and much further away than it had seemed in the dark, while the sails had been completely invisible – Niels’ picture near the top of this article conveys the illusion rather well.
We were now heading back into Berlin. Our itinerary for 8 December was 13.06 Halle ICE800, Berlin HBF 14.25.
As this was a short hop, I decided this was the moment to save a day on my Interrail pass and buy a ticket. Much to my surprise, it was 85 euros for a first class ticket. German trains are not cheap.
This train returned to the tradition of being very late, and it behaved oddly. It came into the station faster than you would expect, and seemed to have difficulty stopping, ending up much further down the platform than the marked positions indicated. It seemed to have difficulty stopping at subsequent stations too.
In Berlin we were staying at Viktor’s Residence, a very grand but slightly quirky establishment we had chosen as very close to the cinema. Our rooms had kitchenettes, but a notice sellotaped to a cupboard door stated that they were only equipped with cookware, crockery etc for guests who stayed over two weeks.
There was not so much as a kettle or cup. In fact, almost none of the hotels I stayed at in Germany provided kettles. They all had those little Nespresso machines or equivalents, which provide you with a thimbleful of lukewarm gunge.
Viktor’s Residence did not even provide one of these. Perhaps unless you were staying a fortnight.
The event that evening was in a venue with the intriguing name of “musikbrauerei”. The first challenge was finding it.
The hotel reception kindly gave me a map, together with an explanation that the musikbrauerei was not actually at the location marked, but on the next street. Google Maps had another idea completely.
When I arrived at the general area, in the back streets of some flats amongst some unlit commercial buildings, I could find nothing indicating the musikbrauerei and no signs for the event.
One building had some structured red uplighting which made it stand out, so I went there. I walked around it, but it appeared deserted. Just as I was about to about to leave, a basement door opened and a man walked to the top of the stairs to have a smoke. He confirmed it was the musikbrauerei and let me in through the basement door.
Once inside, a very large doorman was difficult to convince I did not have to pay. He was in a room with rows and rows of very industrial looking coat racks, all empty. I then was shown to a flight of stairs leading down from the basement into a series of chambers even further underground.
This was becoming surreal. The rooms were equipped for exactly the kind of strange party you see in films (at least that is the only reference I have). The bachelor party scene in Succession comes to mind.
It was a very strange and wonderful space. I could post a dozen photos, but these two give you the idea:
Well Toto, I said, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
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It was 2.30am in Bochum before Niels finished setting up his security and self destruct mechanisms on my new laptop, as we sat in my gloomy little box of a room in the Mercure Hotel.
About a decade ago, chain hotels universally abandoned the idea of a central bright light to illuminate a bedroom, in favour of scattered little lights at bedsides, desk and in an odd corner, all of which require separate switches to be tracked down, and each of which struggles to reveal objects within a two foot distance. They mostly act to accentuate the overall murk.
At least it led my colour changing keyboard to feature sharply, brightening my mood. When Niels had locked within a passworded box, within a passworded box, on a passworded Wikileaks server, somewhere inside an Icelandic volcano, the ages long password to the last of my programmes he was protecting, he finally got up with a Nordic huffy noise and went off to his own bedroom.
I then spent until about 6am going through all my accounts for signs of intrusion and sending warning emails to key contacts. It felt like I had just put my head down on the pillow when the door was ruthlessly banged and the telephone simultaneously shrilled, to tell me it was 11am and I should have checked out.
Bochum railway station was not a very welcoming place that morning. It was about minus 5 degrees, the snow was whipping into my face and I was regretting still more keenly the loss of my gloves.
At least we had a very simple trip that day, to Münster. The itinerary for 3 December was 12.42 RE89719 Bochum to Hamm, 13.20 RE89978 Hamm to Münster arriving at 13.47. It was to be our first day riding on regional trains in Germany.
Since we had started the tour, new dates had been continually added and rest days been wiped off, so that it seemed likely the 15 travel days on my interrail pass would not be enough. You cannot extend the pass. I considered saving a day by buying a ticket for this short journey, but decided my brain was too frazzled by events of the past 24 hours for any extra complication.
Niels had a solution. It is fair to say that my determination to do the journey to the continent and the whole tour by rail, to help save the planet, was regarded by others involved as somewhat eccentric. From the start, Niels had been looking up hire cars and lovingly showing me pictures of BMW or Mercedes SUVs and describing their comfort levels.
Freezing in the driven snow on Bochum station and watching the board announce ever increasing delays, it was impossible not to have a certain sympathy for this view.
It is time to say something about German station clocks, as I was spending so much of my life staring at them. Germany has magnificent analogue clocks in its railway stations, but they have a most peculiar mechanism.
The minute hand does not glide smoothly and continually. The second hand goes round until it reaches the top of the dial, at which point the minute hand clicks forward one notch.
But there is a correction involved. The second hand evidently travels slightly fast, so when it reaches the top it pauses and there are a couple of seconds when no hand is moving, until the minute hand jerks its notch and the second hand starts its journey again.
I am almost, but not quite, certain there is another peculiarity. The second hand appears to glide smoothly rather than jerk, but in fact pauses momentarily at every second mark before gliding on to the next one.
At first I thought this was an optical illusion caused by the black tip of the second hand becoming hard to discern as it passes in front of the black second mark on the dial, but after acute observation from a variety of angles I think this momentary pause is really happening.
I am not sure what is the purpose of this observation, other than to illustrate that Germany’s horribly unpunctual train service can drive you nuts.
As we waited on the platform, we were approached twice by beggars. This happened on almost every station. Niels commented that they were much more aggressive than in the UK.
This is true, not in the sense of threatening physical violence, but in the sense of intruding forcefully into your personal space and being unapologetic in their demands. It really was not very comfortable.
Anyway, eventually we had one of those hurried last moment platform changes and caught what was supposedly an earlier train than the one we were booked on, which was running over an hour late, but with no change needed for Münster.
This particular privatised train service was run by the UK bus company National Express. It was a double decker train, clean and comfortable. We did not bother to go upstairs to first class.
I was not paranoid about a third laptop getting stolen on the train in the slightest…
The journey was uneventful save for an incident where the guard was arguing with a passenger over his ticket. The thin young man, who was wearing jeans and a hoodie, was thrusting his ticket forward towards the short, bull-necked guard who was refusing to look at it, alternating between shaking his head and yelling ferociously.
It was very noisy and the levels of anger on both sides seemed wildly disproportionate to the subject. I could not understand anything said, but even assuming the passenger was indeed trying to cheat on his fare, the level of aggression from the guard, who was attempting to corral the passenger against a door, was extraordinary.
In the end the passenger pushed past the guard and moved to the back of the short train. The guard seemed to be looking around for support, while the other passengers were pretending nothing was happening. I do not know how this confrontation eventually played out.
Stella was joining us again in Münster, having been lobbying in Berlin and elsewhere in the interim. It had been very difficult and very expensive to book hotel rooms in Münster. In fact, Stella, Niels and I were all in different hotels, as we could not find rooms together.
I was in the Mauritzhof hotel, another building of stunning ugliness on the outside. It looks like a fortified police station in a particularly incendiary area of a troubled city.
In fact the hotel was very warm and pleasant inside, with a big open fire in a cocktail bar with a wide range of malt whiskies, and particularly friendly and helpful staff.
By contrast Niels was in one of those self-catering places where you get in through a combination for a key safe and discover nothing is clean, nothing works and there is nobody to talk to for assisatance.
Stella was in the impressive sounding Kaiserhof hotel, which somehow managed to be even more expensive than the Mauritzhof, but which was staffed by people who all appeared not only to be on their first day working in a hotel, but to be entirely unbriefed on what a hotel is.
Niels and I had a late lunch at the cinema with our hosts, who included the university branch of Amnesty International, several of whom were students of public international law.
I was able to discuss with them the international law aspects of Julian’s case, and particularly the judgment in Julian’s case affirming that the UK is not bound in law by international agreements or treaties not incorporated into UK domestic law.
In Julian’s case, political extradition is specifically forbidden by Article 4 of the 2007 UK/US Extradition Treaty. However the courts have ruled that the Treaty has no effect in UK law as it has not been incorporated in UK domestic legislation.
The British courts argue that the Treaty depends for its force on the 2003 Extradition Act, which does not exclude political extradition. But the 2003 Act is an enabling act on which subsequent treaties depend. It does not dictate the provisions of those treaties and it most assuredly does not say those treaties may not exclude political extradition.
The argument is extraordinary that the extradition is only taking place at all under the UK/US Extradition Treaty, but that Article 4 of the Treaty is not operative – but all the other articles are.
The rest of the Treaty is no more incorporated in UK domestic law than Article 4 is. It is a nonsensical argument, tying knots of legal sophistry to justify the extradition.
What interested the German students even more than the individual instance was the extraordinary general claim that the UK is not bound by provisions of international law in treaties it has ratified.
The accepted procedure in international law is that there is a two stage process, signature and ratification, for accession to international treaties.
A treaty is signed by the governmment of a state, as a statement of agreement and intent. Only when all necessary approvals have been obtained – which generally means when the Treaty has been through approval by the legislature – is the ratification stage then completed.
The UK, however, ratifies agreements on Crown prerogative without its legislature having passed them as domestic law. It then argues that because of the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament, the ratification by the Crown does not bind the UK to abide by the provisions of the Treaty it has ratified.
This bizarre situation really is true. I am not making it up.
This is known by lawyers as a “dualist system” (“dishonest” being too straightforward a description) and is the subject of an immense academic literature – one of many possible starting points is here – and a large number of UK legal judgments.
That the UK government does not consider itself legally bound, not only by customary international law but even by treaties it has actually ratified, was astonishing to the German students.
I later received an email from one of them saying they had found it hard to believe, so had asked a lecturer who confirmed it for them.
The cinema seemed everything an independent cinema should be, with a really good slate of arthouse and documentary films and a quirky, very busy cafe bar full of interesting people. The next screenings were shown on an old railway departure board that clicked over noisily. In fact the cinema is part of a chain owning much more conventional multiplexes.
On the top shelf of the bar, high up amid some very obscure liqueurs, was a glass globe about twelve inches high with a glass looped valve on top, containing a startlingly clear liquid with an ultra violet tinge. We asked what it was, and the barman did not know, so we ordered two of those.
It was some kind of grappa, but extremely smooth, though highly potent as it burnt the back of your throat. It was immensely satisfying so we had another two. There was no label of any kind on the glass globe, which sat in an iron stand. Perhaps most strange of all was that the barman said he had been there two years and nobody had ever asked for it: it looked irresistible.
The large cinema was full for the screening, and Stella spoke passionately and well, particularly on the obscenity of sending Julian legally to a state which had tried to kidnap and assassinate him. It was a good, full audience and a lively discussion that left me feeling warm and useful. The gladhanding afterwards felt especially heartening all round.
We then went out into Münster and walked around the Christmas markets, which are particularly famous. We were told that a million visitors come to Münster for these markets, primarily from the Netherlands. This explains why a night in a hotel costs as much as a car.
While the fairy lights and wooden huts were again all very pretty, it still all boiled down to huts selling sausages and gluhwein. At every large church, crowds shuffled round the outside in a circuit, forming knots around the alcohol stalls which had long queues. We braved these a few times for gluhwein, which we all enjoyed.
St Lambert’s church tower is decorated with three cages, in which were hung the tortured corpses of the Anabaptist leaders after the revolution and siege of 1534/5.
When I was 14 years old I read with great relish Norman Cohn’s great book, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Cohn’s life work was to try to understand the phenomenon of Nazism in the context of other historic movements that practised mass extermination in the name of ideology. His riveting account of the siege of Münster has stayed with me for half a century.
The great city walls of the siege were demolished and are now a promenade, the Church of St Lambert was substantially rebuilt in 1901 and again after World War II, and the dangling cages don’t look nearly old or crude enough, but still I was now there, on the spot I had visualised so clearly in my teens.
The Anabaptists preached equality of wealth as well as religious iconoclasm, and looked to divide the property of the very wealthy city of Münster with all who joined them. They practised ardent polygamy; sexual ecstasy was an important part of their revolution.
However they had no qualms about executing those who did not accept their adult baptism, and they did not care about the wild impracticability of most of their governance, as they believed the second coming of Christ to be literally imminent.
What is perhaps truly extraordinary is not just that the Anabaptists gained full control in Münster, but that they came close to doing so and held real influence in broad swathes of Northern Europe. It is important not to be seduced by their professed communism into overlooking the fact they were extremely violent, religious nutters.
The revolutionary millenarian wave that swept Europe in the early 1530s was the product of the usual famine and disease, but also fueled by the economic dislocation caused by emergent nationalisms disrupting the free trading of the Hanseatic network. I throw that in for you to draw your own modern parallels.
History is one long roll of ironies, one of which is that it was the genuine tolerance of Münster’s Catholic Prince Bishop Waldeck which had allowed Anabaptist doctrine to spread and made Münster an international haven for dissenters. It was the same ex-tolerant Waldeck who later hung the Anabaptist leaders in those cages (or their originals) after their slow execution by red hot shears.
The whole is a fascinating story. I recommend Cohn’s book. I was told by the hotel that there was a German TV mini-series thirty years ago of the Münster uprising, starring a young Christoph Waltz. I would love to see that. But for now it was good to walk through the holiday crowds in the snow and take in the town, imagining those events, in good company and with brandy-laced gluhwein.
The next day, Sunday 4 December, we left Münster for Dusseldorf on the 10.25 RE10212 which went direct. Again it was a two decker National Express local train and it was actually on time.
We went up to the very comfortable first class upper deck, where we were alone. The only incident of note occurred when a burly man came down the train, flicking something at each table with a metallic clang. Niels explained the man was opening the metal bin covers, on the lookout for discarded bottles which might have a deposit he could reclaim.
That seemed a lot of effort for little reward for a middle aged man. He made no attempt to disguise what he was doing, and presumably ought not have been in the first class carriage. It led me to recalculate the odds of my laptops having been simply taken as opportunistic thefts on the train.
It is worth noting at this point that all the trains now had parties of men in vests marked “security”, patrolling up and down to ensure that everybody was wearing a face mask. Their general demeanour was not very friendly.
Stella would be leaving to fly back to London and her children, after the early evening screening in Dusseldorf. Niels and I were staying in the Stage 47 Hotel, which again was really delightful.
The hotel has been carved out of space from the adjoining theatre, and the reception is crammed into the narrow entrance corridor in a way that looks very unpromising indeed on first arrival. But the rooms are beautifully planned and all different, each one named after and containing a massive photographic portrait of, a star who has appeared in the theatre.
My room had the bed on a mezzanine level and loads of space, which was great but not designed for a man with bad eyesight likely to need to fumble his way down the tight spiral staircase from the mezzanine in the dark for a 3am pee, whilst not entirely sober.
The hotel was very much in a Turkish area. A Turkish travel agent was next door, a Turkish shop the other side, then a kebab shop, and there was a substantial looking Turkish restaurant just opposite. Leaving Stella’s suitcase in Niels’ room, we repaired to the Turkish restaurant for lunch.
They did not seem very pleased to see us. It was again very cold, and after some humming and hawing as to whether we could have a table at all, they seated us at the first empty one, right next to the front door.
We were constantly subjected to a vicious icy blast when the door opened, and a persistent very cold draught when it didn’t. Several times other tables emptied and we repeatedly asked if we might move, but were always waved back down.
The food was very good but the service terrible. I do not know whether this was because we seemed to be the only non-Turkish customers, but we all agreed we had the feeling of not being welcome. I have always found Turkish people extremely hospitable, so it seems strange.
I hurried back from lunch as at 2pm I was giving a Zoom talk from my hotel room to Alba International, on the subject of the way forward to Scottish Independence.
The background to this was the UK Supreme Court decision that the Scottish Parliament had no right to hold a referendum on Independence, which you may recall I had attended the Supreme Court to hear, the day before leaving on this European tour.
The discussion was also informed by the excellent work of Salvo, and of Sara Salyers in particular, in defining Scotland’s own historic constitution as an independent state and its continuing legal persistence.
I felt time and distance had given me a useful clarity in considering the Supreme Court decision and its consequences, and in brief, this is what I outlined.
The UK Supreme Court was quite right within the narrow confines of UK domestic law. Plainly the Union of England and Scotland is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act of 1998, and the Scottish Parliament could not hold a referendum on it in terms of that Act.
But UK domestic law is entirely irrelevant. The Kosovo Opinion of the International Court of Justice makes crystal clear that the domestic law of the state being seceded from, is not the determining factor as to whether a secession is illegal.
Whereas the reliance by the UK Supreme Court on the criteria of the Federal Court of Canada in the Quebec judgment, over fifty years old and superseded by the cold hard fact of over 23 non-colonial secessions since, is simply laughable.
But while the right of self-determination of peoples in international law is crucial in the case of Scotland, and while Scotland undoubtedly qualifies as a “people” because it is a long established historic nation with its own legal system, culture and institutions, there is one overwhelmingly important criterion for recognition grounded in pure realpolitik.
It was long accepted as the only criterion for recognition that a state had factual, practical control of its own territory. That position has become softened by more principled considerations since the second world war, but the actual control of the territory claimed remains the most important factor in gaining international recognition.
Why did Catalonia fail where Slovenia, Kosovo and the Baltic states succeeded?
Because realpolitik rules in practice, and the Slovenians, Balts and Kosovans had obtained actual control on the ground of the land they claimed. The Catalans had not.
Physical control is not a sufficient condition for recognition – see the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus – but in effect it is a necessary condition.
The UK Establishment will never agree to Scottish Independence. Scotland’s resources are far too valuable to them. Scotland has to declare Independence unilaterally, and take it.
It is no use doing this like Catalonia, where the Spanish civil guard and judiciary effectively wiped out the nascent state before it could breathe.
A Scottish government, whether arising from the Scottish Parliament or from another body, needs in declaring Independence to ensure it has practical control of Scotland.
That means that the organs of the state have to acknowledge the Scottish state. All taxes collected must go to Edinburgh, not to Westminster. The judiciary must apply Scottish laws and not Westminster ones, where they conflict, and specifically apply all new laws post the Declaration of Independence. The police must answer only to Scottish authorities. Ultimately so must the military stationed in Scotland.
At the time Independence is declared, immediate action must be taken to ensure all civil servants, judges, police and military take an oath of loyalty to the people of Scotland and its new government, and renounce any previous loyalty to Crown and to UK political institutions. Anybody refusing must be summarily dismissed from their positions.
We have the example of Catalonia before us. We also have the example of Egypt’s only ever democratically elected leader, President Morsi, who died horribly in jail after being overthrown by a CIA coup because he failed to take the elementary precaution of dismissing and imprisoning all the military regime’s corrupt judges. He should have learnt from Fritz Bauer.
Let us not make those mistakes.
Ultimately, it boils down to this.
1) Westminster will never agree to Scottish Independence.
2) Scotland therefore has no option but to declare Independence unilaterally.
3) Any independent state must be prepared to defend itself by physical force from foreign attack. So must a newly declared Independent Scotland.
4) All who refuse to serve an Independent Scotland must then be removed from all organs of the state.
5) Once an Independent Scotland has physical control of its territory and resources, international recognition will soon follow. Brexit has completely changed the political atmosphere with regard to the crucial attitude of the European Union to London’s government.
Not to mention that London’s government is an international laughing stock.
Interestingly enough, in the discussion that followed my talk, nobody fundamentally queried the radicalism of this approach. Most of the questions revolved around what I might call the determinism of Salvo’s approach.
To put this another way, no matter how many irregularities there might be in the 1689 Act of Settlement, no domestic or international court is going to annul it now. It is realpolitik again – no state exists whose form and institutions would survive re-examination of all their historic foundations under modern criteria.
I further clarified that while I support the notion of registering a Scottish liberation movement at the UN, it is going to take a lot of evidence of liberation struggle to achieve this. The notion which has somehow got abroad that it just needs 100,000 signatures, appears to me without foundation.
It was a really good 90 minutes discussion with excellent people, after which I had do dash to the cinema and turn my head back towards rescuing Julian.
The cinema had the interesting quirk that to get a big wide screen, the projector was separated from the hall by a number of corridors and offices, with glass windows that the picture passed through. This lent itself to a variety of interesting photos.
Stella was on excellent form. In Dusseldorf she concentrated particularly on the extraterritorial jurisdiction the United States was claiming, in its effort to imprison an Australian journalist for acts of publishing, carried out entirely outside the United States.
Stella also expressed the relief we all felt that finally the Australian government was living up to its responsibilities and directly asking the United States to end the persecution of Julian Assange.
I was not on the best of form, and was perhaps a bit tired. But as usual there were inspiring activists on hand to give me a real boost afterwards. All over Germany, groups are out every weekend for Julian, demonstrating, manning stalls, collecting signatures and bearing witness to the truth.
After the meeting, Bibi gave us a lift back to the hotel, demonstrating in so doing that her definition of “a short walk to the car” was fundamentally different to my own. She then took Stella on to the airport.
I had a sudden and improbable rush of common sense, refusing Niels’ offer to go for a drink, in favour of an early night in my comfortable mezzanine bed.
The next day was a rest day, so we stayed again in Dusseldorf. Not only was it a day off, but the hotel did laundry – the first time since this adventure began!
In the morning I discovered that nobody sold gloves in a six block radius, except for a motorbike shop at astonishing cost, which I declined. I spent the rest of the day reading the Fritz Bauer biography.
About 4pm Niels called and we went out. The receptionist had recommended the winter market on Konigsallee, so we headed there.
We had walked a few metres when a great stream of fire engines and police vehicles came blaring past us. As we approached traffic lights, a number of ambulances came charging down from another direction and for a while there was a veritable traffic jam of emergency vehicles. The cacophony was awful.
New sirens continued to join in from all around us, apparently converging towards us. When we got to Konigsallee it was largely deserted. While the shops all remained open, all of the wooden Christmas market stalls were closed and the shoppers had disappeared.
We wandered around the empty stalls trying to work out what was happening, until policemen started yelling at us in a most threatening manner.
It appears there had been a phoned in terrorist threat of an attack on a Christmas stall, to which the police had overreacted by closing down all of the hundreds such stalls, placed on every shopping street and square in Dusseldorf, and calling out all the ambulances and fire appliances.
It was of course a hoax. It was also another example of my continually landing in unlikely drama on this trip. Niels, who had spent weeks photographing anything that moved, managed to capture almost nothing of the massive security presence closing down the Christmas market. He said he had previous experience that German police do not like cameras.
He did however manage to capture umpteen shots of me looking cold and miserable. My voluminous luggage was well prepared for the winter, except for a lack of boots. The streets were covered in ice and my leather-soled shoes felt distinctly insecure.
From Oxford Street to Princes Street, the UK’s flagship shopping streets have collapsed into tat and squalor, but Germany has maintained its high end shopping districts without apparent loss. So much so that the first shop I entered had no viable boots below 700 euros.
Round the corner I found a more practical shop and bought a pair of Skechers. This troubled me, as I recall my brother Stuart taunting my brother Neil that possessing Skechers was the first step on the road to adult diapers. They were however cheap, waterproof and had deep treads, so I got them and am now a convert.
While the shops had all stayed open, the restaurants appeared to have all been closed by the police alert and we went around for a while before we found a fancy burger restaurant, one of a franchise chain with a rustic, birch tree decor.
This seemed marginally better than starvation, so we ate a couple of burgers, which had a small nugget of meat drowned in various treatments of vegetable, from pickled, through mayonnaise-covered to caramelised, the whole shoved between vast mounds of bread.
The restaurant was very full indeed, being the only place open, and the excitement of the police closures gave the venue a vibrant buzz. We struck up a friendly chat with the manager, who was working the floor because it was unexpectedly busy.
We worked our way right through the cocktail menu and then had the Johnnie Walker Black Label brought down from a high top shelf. It was the worst fake Black Label I have tasted in decades, like cheap vodka with added Bovril, but we drank it all anyway. We had a rollicking time. The drinks bill came to six times the food bill.
We both had horrible hangovers the next day, almost certainly from the fake Black Label. Fortunately we had the morning to recover, then it was up and off again, and our itinerary was 6 December ICE 714 Dusseldorf 13.33 to Bremen, arriving 16.15.
The train was comfortable and more or less on time, and I was able to write up some of the journey for my blog.
The large cinema was very full, I felt I spoke particularly well, and we had a good talk with activists afterwards. Bremen seemed a delightful city and the cinema was in a district surrounded by really good restaurants and bars.
Niels spoke particularly well. He outlined Julian’s vision of responsible, scientific journalism, where references would always be given with links to the original source material which should be made available to the public.
This of course had not happened, and even as mainstream media had been forced to move largely online, they had not taken the opportunity this offered to present the public with links to the actual source materials their journalists were discussing. This level of transparency was expected of bloggers but largely eschewed by the media, despite all their resources.
It was a good point and well put over. It is continually important to think of the work Julian can take forward on his release from jail, not only to think of him as a victim or a symbol.
This was one of the first meetings where the audience had required sequential translation into German. It is always very difficult, given the need to split up your argument into short cadences for translation. But it did not seem to spoil the evening or the enjoyment and interest of the large audience.
We had booked in Bremen into the Aparthotel Adagio. I was by now fairly sick of restaurant food, and wanted to be able to cook myself something very plain and simple. I called in to a local supermarket and was able to make myself a basic tomato and bacon sauce to eat with spaghetti and a baguette. It felt like a great relief.
One thing I liked about Germany was that the ambient soundtrack was much more to my taste than I generally heard in the UK. The taxi taking us to the cinema was playing Bachmann Turner Overdrive. The taxi taking us back was playing Fleetwood Mac. The supermarket where I bought the spaghetti was playing Supertramp. None of which was very German.
I had finally relented. The next day we were off to Halle, which was a complicated journey by rail but simple by road, so I had caved in and agreed Niels could finally get his hire car.
As I drifted off to sleep I was sure I could hear him making vroom! vroom! noises in the distance.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Having entirely unexpected cause to become acquainted with the subject, I learn that all main railway stations in Germany have their own police stations. At Bochum, you have to walk round the outside to find a door with a buzzer, which nobody answers.
Heading back into the station, I approach the first pair of policemen I come across (the visible police presence on German stations is also remarkable). I explained to them I had a bag stolen and they walked me round to the police station which, once inside, is full of policemen, all carefully ignoring the buzzer.
I am ashamed by my lack of German and very impressed by the police language skills. But unlike his colleague in Frankfurt, this policeman made no pretence at all of interest in actually finding the thief.
He laughed nervously at my suggestion I was being targeted, having had two laptops stolen in four days. He looked at me suspecting I was not quite sane, and said it happens all the time. He just shook his head when I suggested the CCTV on Duisburg or Bochum stations might show the thief with the laptop bag.
He very quickly completed the theft report and gave it to me. I think he suspected I was engaged in a repeated insurance fraud he could not be bothered investigating, and just wanted me out of his hair.
We were staying in a particularly barren Mercure Hotel in a high block just opposite the station. I was on the 12th floor. Once checked in I decided that despondency would not help, and that I should turn the situation around by embracing the chance for laptop shopping.
Bochum is a city with dreadful problems. Leaving the next day we passed on the train a vast Opel plant which extended for miles and was in varying stages of decay. It closed down five years ago. Shortly before that Nokia closed a major plant in the city. Before that the mines closed.
If you go back further, three quarters of all the buildings of Bochum were destroyed by allied bombing in the Second World War. This was ironic because the city was predominantly Polish, one of those isolated populations left stranded by the tides of European history.
Large numbers of Poles were sent to the concentration camps alongside the Jewish population (many of whom were also Polish) and the rest put to forced labour. Additional slave labour was brought from Poland by the Nazis to keep the industries going.
As a centre of Ruhr heavy industry, Bochum was largely obliterated by the allies but most of the victims were Polish. With this horrible history, it seems churlish to note that the current shopping centre is just horribly modern and ugly.
I went to a large chain shop called Cyberport near the hotel. It had a great range of laptops but the prices were very inflated. Every laptop was marked not just with its price but with an interest free credit offer and the price of monthly instalments.
This explained the prices – it was a rip off, never never shop for computers. It was also an indicator of Bochum’s economic woes.
I next went to a flashy store called Gravis, where a very keen and polite assistant was all over me, but sadly they only sold Apple. I explained to him politely that I didn’t use Macs and was too old and tired to want to learn new systems. He replied they sold accessories not specific to Macs, like mouses and keyboards. I politely declined this rather random offer, and went in search of my next shop.
The streets of the centre were closed off for the Christmas Market, with little illuminated wooden kiosks everywhere and crowds it was difficult to get through.
These were in every city we visited, and great fun. But they had changed since I first saw them in Germany in the 1990’s, with much less selling of handicrafts and decorations, and a much higher percentage of alcohol and sausage stalls.
Bunches of people stood around in the freezing temperatures for hours eating and drinking. Bochum was a bit rowdier than most. It was snowing, and I was very much regretting that the thieves had got the Gore-tex gloves that had been a Christmas present from my sister.
Call me a grinch, but half an hour below zero with the Gluhwein is enough for me. Give me a nice warm pub.
Anyway I pushed my way through to Saturn, Germany’s big chain computer store. It was a huge shop, but the actual range of product surprisingly limited and customer service almost non-existent.
They had no model like the one just stolen. Then my eyes were drawn to a laptop with a glowing back and illuminated keys which constantly changed colour.
Colour-changing keys! I had to have it! It was a brand I had never heard of – Captiva – and it was half price because you were buying the display model.
Niels had helped me set up the Laptop of the Four Days with massive security, so I couldn’t even start up the damn thing. (The first stolen laptop had once been secured by Julian Assange with a process involving a gold plated USB stick. That too had been totally beyond me to get into, and much of that had to be removed).
Niels was horrified by my choice. It was a gaming laptop, he said. The money had all gone into graphics. It absolutely was not what I required.
If you can imagine somebody saying “Colour changing keys” in the voice of Homer Simpson saying “Donuts”, that is how I replied. We bargained them down further from a half price 790 euros to 750 euros, and here I am! The keys were a sexy turquoise when I started that sentence and now they are the deepest ocean blue. What bliss.
Orange! They’ve gone orange!
We then had to get a taxi to the cinema, which was right on the semi-rural outskirts of the city, a lovely little independent venue in an old railway station building. It was a joint screening with Amnesty International, the cinema was full and the audience was not only comprised of committed activists.
I was also pleased to meet Bibi, who had been coordinating these events, and with Irmtrud Wojak, a local campaigner who has written a fascinating biography of Fritz Bauer. He was a great prosecutor who went after not just Eichmann, but the “respectable” Nazis and their enablers, particularly in the legal profession. She gave me an English copy which was to make train journeys pass faster.
The only problem with the location was that it was a long walk to the nearest restaurant and very cold and snowy outside. Niels and I had eaten no lunch or dinner so we were keen to eat while the film was showing, and we ordered pizza delivery.
I was just tucking in to my Hawaiian pizza, amid general comments on my bad taste, when my phone started pinging incessantly. There was a whole stream of codes for two factor identification. They were from my various email accounts, from Facebook, Twitter, my bank, shops – a plethora of accounts. All coming through almost simultaneously.
This meant that somebody had got past the password and fingerprint protection on one of the two stolen laptops, and then got through the passwords on the individual accounts (which had all been changed after the first theft).
The question was, had they access to my phone?
I will confess this put me in a state of some shock. I had been trying very hard not to let the laptop thefts get to me. On the first laptop, I had convinced myself some random thief may have just pinched it when I was in the toilet, even though it was obviously outdated, filthy, cracked and in poor condition.
But the theft today was inexplicable. We had changed into that train at Frankfurt airport station, and that first class compartment was absolutely heaving with expensive luggage.
There were many choices to steal that looked much more potentially valuable than my twenty year old, large and very battered laptop bag. The luggage racks right by the exit doors were overflowing with expensive bags of all shapes and sizes.
The risk and technique required to lift my old bag from the overhead rack right above our heads in the middle of the carriage made no sense as a random theft, when many almost risk free thieving options were available.
At the micro level my bag was next to Niels’ camera bag. The contents of that were ten times more valuable and the bag looked like that would be the case. But it was not taken.
When I blew the whistle in 2005 on extraordinary rendition and torture, I was for a time subject to the very close and obvious attentions of the security services. That died down, but at times flared up again, particularly around interactions with Wikileaks.
In the Spanish case against UC Global for spying on Julian, on his lawyers and on others in the Ecuadorean Embassy, which included spying on me and hacking my phone, and following and burgling several people, Julian’s Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez has told me that the evidence shows the CIA were “obsessed with” me as a target.
So none of this was new to me. Let me put it this way.
I am an admitted whistleblower of Top Secret information (to compare, nothing Chelsea Manning disclosed was above Secret). I collaborate with Wikileaks. I am at the most hardline end of supporters of Scottish Independence. I reject NATO, nuclear weapons, Israel and neo-liberalism. I have high level friends and contacts across the globe. If the security services are not targeting me, what are they doing?
I know the capabilities of the security services, and I have always assumed that they have access to the entire contents of my laptop anyway. Encryption may work for avoiding some mass surveillance, but not for individual targets when the state are prepared to put in the resource.
I also choose openness to my fellow man. I have no desire to view the world through a fug of suspicion. I have read the comments on previous instalments from the wise people who tell me that they never travel without a moneybag around their waist and their laptop bag tied to their legs.
Well, that is simply not who I am. The seven year laptop that was first stolen had been with me everywhere for hundreds of thousands of miles. It had traveled over much of Africa several times. It had been to the United States more than once. It had been simply all over Europe.
I had left it unattended while going to the loo on a train or in an airport lounge, many scores of times. I had left it sitting in hotel rooms in Washington DC. Once or twice I have checked it in to a flight. It had sat at the back of a bar at Doune the Rabbit Hole. It has hung from restaurant coat racks. It has sat in the back of a pick-up in Ghana.
That was just that one laptop. I have used a succession of laptops for around thirty years and always acted in the way I describe. I have lived in Russia and Poland and Ghana and left my laptop bag on seats when I go dance, or on a table in a conference while I have some lunch. None had ever been stolen.
I could have spent thirty years with my laptop tied between my legs, but that would not be me.
If you choose to live that way, do what makes you feel happy and safe. But let me point out the logical fallacy that because you obsessively tie yourself to your laptop, it does not follow that anybody would have stolen it had you not done so.
Anyway, while two random thefts of laptops in four days was not impossible, I do not believe it was that, particularly given the quite extraordinary circumstances of the second theft.
This was also particularly annoying because of the loss of the other contents. The gloves I have noted. I had also lost my reading glasses, which are very essential, my phone charger, my bank verification machine, all the receipts from my trip and a variiety of other letters and documents.
With all those two factor verification notices coming through, I needed to get back to the hotel, set up my new laptop and change every password I have. But the audience was now waiting to hear me speak.
I am nothing if not an old trouper, so I went on. I believe it went very well. But frankly my mind was so frazzled I do not remember anything that evening after the phone started pinging.
Back at the hotel, Niels started setting up my new laptop with dizzying layers of disc encryption and self-destruct mechanisms.
Everything now had passwords of enormous length and complexity, containing characters I had no idea existed, from an external random generator.
Presumably, like the monkeys, if you kept it going infinitely you would get the complete works of Shakespeare.
It was 2am before I could actually start getting into my accounts.
There was no evidence that anybody had got past the two factor identification and actually been inside anywhere. As I say, I had always assumed they can remotely anyway, and I suspect most likely the whole thing is just an attempt at intimidation.
Most importantly of all, none of Niels’ security installations had stopped the keys from changing colour.
Merry Christmas Everybody.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
After a two year process, the NUJ Executive have finally rejected the renewal of my NUJ membership based on social media posts I allegedly made which they refuse to show me and of content and subject of which I genuinely have not a clue.
But apparently these social media posts make me not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ.
Murdoch employees are fit and proper persons. The Guardian journalists who produced the front page of lies about Manafort meeting Assange are fit and proper persons. The security service mouthpieces at the BBC are fit and proper persons.
The NUJ even accepts for membership copywriters for corporations working in PR companies. All these people are fine.
But I am not a fit and proper person because of some things I allegedly said on social media, which I am not allowed to see or to explain.
I am also not a fit and proper person because I published the NUJ’s incredibly deceitful handling of my renewal application, when apparently the NUJ believes it should have been secret (why?).
Finally I have failed to produce evidence of my income from journalism. I provided them with a download from Paypal of my monthly subscription totals. Apparently this was not sufficient, but they refuse to say what would be sufficient.
I have appealed against the decision, but given it is plainly politically motivated I do not expect much joy. There appears to be a universal effort across the political establishment to deplatform and isolate anybody who queries official narratives. Given that mainstream media are such a large part of that, it is perhaps not as surprising as it should be to find the National Union of Journalists an enthusiastic part of the process.
I hardly dare to imagine the long-suffering readers of this blog would support yet another legal case, but in the New Year we may need to try.
Craig Murray
Edinburgh
18 December 2022
Thank you for your email of 18 November informing me that my application for renewal of my NUJ membership has been refused, on the grounds that I am not a fit and proper person to be a member, and that I have not provided sufficient evidence of income from journalism.
I wish to appeal this decision.
Point 1 – The Evidence Against Me
The first test of natural justice has been failed by the NUJ. I have no idea at all what are the social media posts and correspondence which you state render me not a fit and proper person to renew my NUJ membership.
I have never seen these. You have never put them to me. I have been given no chance to check if they are genuine nor to explain their context. There are two sides to every story and you have made no attempt at all to hear my side.
I have been very active on social media for 15 years and I have never been suspended nor, to my knowledge, reported for inappropriate content. I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about.
I believe the “fit and proper person test” may here be being used as a tool for an exclusion actually based on difference of political opinion.
I am myself continually subject to unprovoked attacks on social media by mainstream media journalists, many of whom I presume will be members of the NUJ. One that I know is a member is Mr David Leask, because you name him as one of the complainers against me.
Here is a link to just Mr Leask’s latest unprovoked rant against me on twitter, in which he casts aspersions on my linguistic skills for no other reason than to malign me (in fact I passed the FCO’s extremely difficult operational level exams in both Polish and Russian).
I am really not certain why Mr Leask remains a fit and proper person if he attacks my output, but it makes me not a fit and proper person if I attack his? I should be grateful for an explanation on this point. To be plain, I see no reason why sharp disagrrement should bar either of us from the NUJ.
I am equally often subject to unprovoked attack by mainstream media journalists in their publications. Here is a link to one one by Mr Paul Hutcheson of the Daily Record, in which he published a photo of my home next to an article inciting against me, and put me in fear for the safety of my wife and infant children.
It is highly probable that either Mr Hutcheson or some of the editorial chain who approved doing this to me are members of the NUJ. Why does that behaviour not call into question their fit and proper person status, and how is my alleged behaviour – and I still do not know what it is – worse than that?
Again, that is not rhetorical, it is a question to which I should like to see an answer.
Point 2 – Proper Procedure Wilfully Ignored
The NUJ rulebook is perfectly plain that when an application is received, it should be sent to the applicant’s own branch or chapter for comment by members.
This rule was breached in my case. My own branch, Edinburgh Freelance, has still never had sight of my application, plainly contrary to the rulebook. I was a member for three years quite happily, with zero friction or adverse comment.
Instead what happened was that NUJ officials politically hostile to me circulated my application for comment, not to my own branch as the rules dictate, but only to a secret selected cabal of colleagues of similar political persuasion, in order to generate objections.
The chronology is important here – objections were generated before I published the fact of my application.
Point 3 – Publicising My Application
When an organisation is behaving deviously, maliciously and not in accordance with its own rules, it is of the essence of good journalism to publish it – even when that organisation is the NUJ.
I can see no reason at all why a NUJ membership renewal application should be secret if the applicant does not wish it to be. To claim my publicising the NUJ’s extraordinary handling of my application, as in itself evidence I am not a fit and proper person to be an NUJ member, is self-serving nonsense of a particularly devious kind.
Point 4 – Earnings From Journalism
I am really at a loss here. I do get more than 50% of my income from journalism, from subscriptions and donations to my blog. I have provided you with a printout from Paypal showing a year’s monthly subscriptions.
In response your membership department stated that you need to see payment per article, rather than payment by subscription. Is it really the case that journalists in new media who receive their income by subscribers are excluded from NUJ membership? If so, what is the legal basis for excluding this particular method of payment? It is the most common form of new media operation.
My last letter to your membership department specifically asked what further evidence was required, and volunteered to pay my membership fees based on gross subscription income rather than net if that were easier.
I never did receive any reply to my offer to provide whatever proof you need, provided it is also what is asked of others. To simply state I have failed to satisfy, while refusing to advise what would satisfy, is yet further evidence this has been a politically motivated process aimed at justifying refusing renewal.
Point 5 – The Purpose of the NUJ
The NUJ does not exist purely to provide those with comfortable berths in corporate media, the BBC or PR firms with their press cards, It has a particular responsibility to support journalists with views that are disliked by the political establishment, and to uphold their freedom of speech.
The sub-committee agreed that my output of articles does meet the criterion of journalism. I therefore have a right to join the union. The “fit and proper person test” is not meant to exclude people some members dislike or disagree with.
To pretend that I am in any way more aggressive in dialogue with those members objecting than they are with me is a fake made possible only by the outrageous device of the sub-committee never putting the allegations and evidence to me.
Point 6 – Health
It is true that very occasionally I have made social media posts I subsequently regret. I generally apologise very quickly. It is fairly widely known that I have been diagnosed bipolar my whole adult life, and can therefore sometimes be intemperate. That puts me in a class the NUJ should particularly seek to protect. It may well be relevant to the evidence before the committee – I do not know as I was not shown it. Nor was I given the chance to make this, nor any other, point to the sub-committee.
Point 7 – Late Appeal
I hope you will accept this appeal which is just beyond the 28 day cut-off point due entirely to force majeure. My laptop was stolen two weeks ago while on a month long tour of Germany, Austria, Slovenia and France with the Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign – a cause the NUJ supports.
I lost my draft reply to you when my laptop was stolen. Astonishingly, five days later my replacement laptop was also stolen in extraordinary circumstances. At that point I also lost access to my email accounts, including your email and the sub-committee report. I only recovered the material on return home this weekend .
May I conclude by wishing all the best to you and yours in this the festive season.
Yours,
Craig J Murray
Journalist
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Dear Mr Murray,
Further to you application for membership of the NUJ I wish to advise that the application was considered directly by the National Executive Council in accordance with Rule 3 (b) of the union’s rules.
At a meeting on Friday 11th November the NEC accepted the report of the panel set up to consider your application.
The panel found that you do not meet the membership criteria in relation to proven earnings from journalism.
The committee also considers objections to the application based on published material in the public domain and your conduct towards NUJ members.
The NEC accepted the recommendation that:
you should be considered not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ within the context of Rule 3 of the NUJ Rule Book, specifically the NUJ Code of Conduct and the obligation under Membership Responsibilities.
If you wish to appeal the determination to the Appeals Tribunal you may do so in writing within 28 working days of the decision.
Please address your appeal to the General Secretary by email to [email protected]
For reference I attach a copy of the report to the NEC.
Membership Application: Craig Murray
Background: The NEC appointed a subcommittee to consider the membership application of Craig Murray comprising the Honorary General Treasurer, the Chair of Finance Committee, and the NUJ Vice President. The committee held two meetings and reviewed substantial material relating to the application.
Mr Murray’s previous application, in March 2020 was the subject of a number of objections. It was not processed because the application form was not complete, in accordance with the NUJ Rule Book.
Context: Mr Murray applied for membership on 5th March 2020. In May 2020, the General Secretary appointed the Assistant General Secretary (AGS) to carry out a preliminary investigation into objections to Mr Murray’s application.
Two objectors confirmed that they wished to proceed with their objection in accordance with the provisions of Rule 3 (iii): Chris Diamond and David Leask.
A third applicant had confirmed that they wished to proceed with their objection but
following the decision of the applicant to publish details of private correspondence between himself and the AGS, and the comments made by the applicant in his post and subsequent comments on his social media blog, the third complainant advised the AGS that he wished to request anonymity due to the perceived risk of social media abuse.
Two other members sought to raise objections but requested anonymity.
The objectors raised concerns that their objections and personal details could be posted on social media and that they may be the subject of online abuse or harassment.
An NEC panel was established to review the applications and to consider the complaint.
Since the application did not meet the membership criteria the complaints were moot and not considered at that time.
It was recommended that the complaints be noted and, in the event of a future application by Mr Murray would be considered by the NEC.
New application: A fresh application by Mr Murray was received in February 2022. The application was referred directly to the NEC.
The NEC established a sub committee comprising of the Vice President, Chair of Finance and Hon Gen Treasurer.
The subcommittee considered a significant volume of correspondence between Mr Murray and the Membership Department relating to his application.
The committee also noted correspondence from third parties relating to the application.
It was also obliged to consider previous objections.
The subcommittee was satisfied that, subject to proof of income, Mr Murray would satisfy the requirement for membership in terms of membership criteria.
Mr Murray did not provide sufficient information regarding his earnings from journalism to satisfy the panel as to his entitlement to full membership. On that basis Mr Murray was deemed ineligible for membership.
The subcommittee then reviewed the objections to the original application and the material cited in the complaints, including social media posts and Mr Murray’s blog.
The committee noted with concern Mr Murray’s behaviour towards NUJ members and office holders.
The subcommittee viewed his behaviour towards NUJ members as being inconsistent with the NUJ Membership Responsibilities and the NUJ Code of Conduct.
The committee felt that those who sought anonymity were justified in doing so, given Mr Murray’s published comments and his decision to publish correspondence relating to the investigation while the process was underway.
The committee recommends to the NEC that Mr Murray is not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ within the context of Rule 3 of the NUJ Rule Book.
November 11, 2022
Yours sincerely
Jackie Clark
Head of Finance and Membership
It perhaps goes without saying that this fight to keep alternative media going in face of universal onslaught really does need your financial support, no matter how small your contribution. My work is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going.
This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
It is good to be joined by Niels Ladefoged on this tour. Niels was the Director of Photography on the film Ithaka, and as such a fly on the wall of the Shipton/Assange family for two years. But his commitment to Wikileaks goes back much further. He is a very helpful and calming influence to have around when facing a crisis like a stolen laptop.
It is a crisis. I have much important data stored on a copy hard drive, but that was made some time ago and much else has been lost. I do not maintain sensitive material on the laptop. But the risks of identity theft and the danger to my own access to all kinds of different accounts is very real.
Fortunately Sunday 27 November is a rare day off on the tour. The hotel does not do laundry at the weekend, and Germany allows workers a rest day on Sunday in a way that has been forgotten in the UK – so laundries are shut, and so are laptop shops.
There is another peculiarity. The laptop appears to have been taken out of the laptop bag, but the fairly large sum of cash in the bag was not taken. However what has also vanished is my heart medicines (Apixaban and Digoxin for the medically minded), which were in their boxes and kept in my laptop bag in a ziploc sandwich bag.
By one of life’s peculiar little coincidences, Niels, who arrived on a different train from Erfurt, found his vital prescription medicine had disappeared from his luggage the very same day. So we both need to sort out our prescriptions.
The day is spent in several return trips to the railway lost property office and in making a police report. The lost property office counter alternates between a man in a peaked cap who ignores you, and a woman in a peaked cap who yells at people to go away.
In the police station I am taken upstairs by a very earnest young policeman with a fashionably sparse beard, who speaks excellent English. He takes all the details and determines exactly where I was sitting, which door I exited the train by, what I was wearing and what route I took to the hotel. He says he will look at the station CCTV cameras. There were none on the train.
I tell him I am dubious that a thief would target such an obviously old and cracked laptop. He said he was not at all surprised. Thieves board the train at the station just before Frankfurt and walk up the train. They would take the laptop from its bag in a second, without looking at it.
He said it was not unusual for thieves to take the laptop and not the bag. He smiled at my concern about identity theft, saying that was not their level at all. The policeman seemed genuinely eager to get on to the CCTV footage and start lookiing for the thief.
This left me more open to the idea it was just a random theft, but I had seen nobody moving through the train as he described, and the very few people left in the first class compartment all looked entirely respectable.
In the evening Niels and I went to the old town of Frankfurt, of which there is not a great deal. It is not a good city to spend a Sunday. Everything seemed to be closed. Eventually we found a very local restaurant, where the waitresses wore what looked like football socks over their jeans.
The restaurant was splendidly decorated for advent, with what seemed like half a forest festooned in great boughs all over the place, through which peered the light of big chunky red candles. The place had plainly already survived hundreds of christmases without burning down, but I have no idea how.
I ate roast ham hough with sauerkraut and pan fried potatoes, washed down with a shared litre flagon of local wine. The crackling on the ham hough was superb. We felt a lot better after this, and asked the waitress for a local schnapps. She brought something really sweet and horrible with an alcohol soaked apricot in it. We drank it for research, and even ate the apricots, but I don’t recommend it.
Niels (at this point I shall blame him) then asked if they had a schnapps more like Danish schnapps. They brought us a couple of glasses of Korn. We knocked them back and agreed they did not seem like spirits. No burn and we guessed 20% alcohol. They were only 40ml measures, not 50ml.
So we thought we should have two more. That went quite well so we decided to repeat. After we had knocked back six each, we looked at the bottle and saw it was 32% alcohol. We thought it might be sensible to stop at this stage, but unfortunately the waitresses started to give us free schnapps.
It would have been rude to refuse.
This did not really help with the aim of forgetting my troubles and relaxing. I slept very badly, fretting over my missing laptop. The next morning, I had still lost my laptop and I now had a headache.
I also felt a terrific guilt – which I do most days here – at enjoying myself whilst campaigning for Julian, while he is in terrible conditions in a maximum security prison.
I got up, showered and shaved and went laptop shopping. This was quite fun. It soon was obvious to me I could not afford one as good as the one I had lost.
In the end I chose an Acer Aspire 5, with Intel i5 (the stolen one had i7), 8GB RAM (compared to 16GB) and 512GB SSD (compared to 1TB HDD). Even so this cost me 770 euros. But it is a slim and elegant thing of beauty.
It is a 17 inch, like my old one, but when I slotted it in to my old laptop bag it really came home how radically slimmer it is, taking up far less space. It is also a great deal lighter.
Having got through the dash to Slovenia, I was now hoping for a period of much more sedate rail journeys. Our itinerary today 28 November was just 11:53 ICE 623 Frankfurt to Munich, arriving 15:09.
The train left on time and sped along at great speed. Nothing seemed untoward, until a man in red uniform walked through the train announcing that the cafe was closed due to a power failure in the kitchen.
Then about 20 miles after Wurzburg the train slowed to a crawl, before finally coming to a complete halt, next to a yard full of rusted excavation equipment. There it stayed for about 45 minutes. An announcement was made that the line was blocked.
Fifteen long minutes later came another announcement that we would go back to Wurzburg, before proceeding to Munich by a different route. So we headed backwards, very slowly, for about ten minutes, before stopping in front of a different yard, also full of rusting excavation equipment.
It was like watching Scrapheap Challenge without the contestants.
Eventually we started to crawl along again, through Wurzburg station and out the other side without stopping. We picked up speed, heading away from Munich. Then another halt for ten minutes, then the train started running in its original direction once more.
Reaching Wurzburg for the third time, the train halted in the station and everybody was told to get off. Another Munich train was expected the other side of the same platform in five minutes.
A platform change, to one substantially further away, was announced just as the train pulled in to the station. Everyone went running off down the stairs with their luggage.
The last second platform change is the favourite game of German Railways.
We had come in on a huge train – two ICEs joined – while the one being changed to was a great deal smaller and arrived already full. We therefore decided to let it go, as there were now three more Munich trains showing as queued up over the next twenty minutes. We got on the first of these, which was comfortable, and arrived in Munich about three hours late.
Ithaka was being shown in the quirky little Werkstation Kino in a courtyard basement. The local organisers were very enthusiastic, and all sixty seats were sold out. People were being turned away. I introduced the film with two brief observations.
Firstly, I pointed out that the CIA had the spy videos of Julian’s meetings with his defence lawyers. Secondly they had all his legal papers, seized when he was removed from the Embassy. There are two parties to the extradition proceedings, the USA and Julian Assange. In any genuine legal proceeding, where one party had stolen the legal documents of the other and spied on their legal conferences, the case would be instantly dismissed.
Plainly the so-called judicial process is a farce, a piece of political theatre.
Niels and I then adjourned to dinner in another very local restaurant in the same building. One of the peculiarities of the “cinema” was that the public entrance was sealed by a very heavy steel door. It was completely blank on the outside and could only be opened from within. This is locked shut during performances, to the bemusement of latecomers.
One lady had driven from Austria to see the film but arrived too late. She joined us for a pleasant meal, and absolutely insisted on paying. Niels knew her as a long term supporter.
Niels is Danish and therefore very low maintenance – give him a plate of rotting fish with a couple of raw eggs on top and he will be happy for days. He explains to our chairpersons that you pronounce his surname, Ladefoged, by not sounding the d’s or the g. If you want to try it at home, I suggest you try making the noise of a vacuum cleaner blocked by a sock.
Niels is a compulsive photographer, as a fortunate result of which this narrative is now superbly illustrated.
Talking to activists after the film, we learnt the inevitable cause for the ruination of Germany’s once legendary railways – privatisation.
Privatisation has been carried out on the British model, with the track run by a private entity and different operating companies running their rolling stock on the track. This has been an unmitigated disaster from day one.
In a refinement of exquisite stupidity, the private network company is responsible for rail maintenance, but the government pays for any rail replacement needed – which is an incentive not to maintain. The activists in Munich explained this as the root cause of the increasingly frequent line closures and derailments.
We were staying in the Moma1890 hotel in Munich, which was really pleasant. We had two days there, which gave me a day to set up my new computer, and to go and see a doctor for a new prescription, as did Niels. Unfortunately the hotel did not do laundry, and an unpleasant odour was beginning to emit from my luggage.
We visited a small winter market behind our hotel. It was delightful, with lights twinkling brightly in the bitter cold and little santa clauses on bicycles zipping around on cables stretched between the trees.
The gluhwein was very welcome, sweet and strong and tasting as though the wine was drinkable per se. It was a very resonable 3.5 euros for a 200ml glass, and for just 1 euro more you could add an extra shot of spirits.
Niels has a theory that adding enough shots of rum to his gluhwein would counter the sugars. I have a theory that adding enough shots of brandy to my gluhwein will counter the sobriety. We both test this.
You pay a 3 euro deposit for a delicate frosted glass with an etching of a stag. I would like to keep mine, but the thought of carrying anything else in my luggage dissuades me.
We found a nearby tapas restaurant for dinner, and discovered such a very good wine that it is best to draw a veil over the rest of the day: El Canto de la Alondra, Ribera del Duero. You can’t say that after you drink it. Lots of forward fruit for a Ribera del Duero but still very soft and full.
The next day 30 November was a straightforward journey, EC114 at 13:32 from Munich East to Stuttgart, arriving at 15:59. The train arrived about one hour late in Stuttgart.
All but the facade of Stuttgart station has been demolished and the entire railway area is being “redeveloped”. Currently you leave the station on a snaking elevated runway above the building site, with MDF floors. It is a 800 metres walk along this from platforms to taxis.
As I was trying securely to balance my laptop bag on top of my wheeled luggage, Niels pointed out to me that there was a velcro strap on the back of the bag, specifically for that purpose. I was amazed. I have had that laptop bag for seventeen years and never noticed that strap. It has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles with me, all round the world.
The bag was given to me by Alex the Geek, a supporter of my anti-war candidacy against Jack Straw in Blackburn in the Westminster general election of 2005. Alex had a little computer sales and repair store in the town.
The bag was already second hand in 2005. It is very well constructed with industrial strength zips, clasps and fabric. It has about eight separate compartments, and the main area for the laptop is enormously wide, because in those days laptops were enormously wide.
Often on short journeys I use it just as a travel bag. It has an airline luggage label flapping from the handle, which for years has resisted all attempts at removal. It now had my slim little Acer tucked safely inside.
And it has a velcro strap to attach it to my luggage handle!
Niels has taken upon himself the role of Passepartout, having plainly been briefed that I am hapless. Even with his help, having to cart the luggage over the vast redevelopment was a real struggle.
We are very often not seeing the best of the cities on this tour. We arrive at the railway station, usually about dusk, and generally stay close to the station. The cinemas tend to be in the same central area.
Certainly in Stuttgart, from station to hotel to cinema was just horrifyingly ugly. Neither poor nor derelict, quite the opposite. Brash, tasteless. and soulless.
Plainly the railway area buildings just demolished all had to die, as they committed the unforgivable sins of not being of grandiose scale, and of being designed for human use. Nothing else I saw in Stuttgart fits that description.
There was an excellent turnout in Stuttgart and very active hosts in a very good cinema. We were buoyed by the news that five major international media groups, the original publishing partners for the cablegate leaks, had come out strongly calling for an end to the persecution of Assange, in the interest of protecting press freedom.
The real joy of this trip is the people we meet. In every venue there are fantastic local activists, who organise vigils, petitions and other actions for Julian. Many have street stalls on a weekly basis.
I am sorry we will not be visiting Aachen, where a lady held a “Free Craig Murray” banner in the town centre, every Saturday of my own imprisonment. That banner was given to me by German activists at the “Hands around Parliament” event for Julian. But I am meeting hundreds of equally doughty souls.
In Stuttgart the event is hosted by Pax Christi and die AnStifter. They were organising a major human rights festival, “30 days in November”, and this was the closing event.
After the screening and talks we went for drinks and snacks with the organisers. All the events have different local organisers and we do this almost every day. I apologise for not noting and acknowledging every one individually.
The next morning we journeyed on to Wiesbaden. I post this picture of the Stuttgart station departures board to illustrate what I have been saying about German Railways. You can see from the station clock top right the photo is taken at 11:23. So every single train on that board is late – the departure times range from 10:51 to 11:11.
That is absolutely typical of Germany’s privatised railway.
Our itinerary this day, 1 December was 11:37 IC 2312 Stuttgart to Mainz then 13:29 SBA35836 Mainz to Wiesbaden. Hurray! We were on time!.
The train to Mainz was not busy, and very comfortable to write on. Here I am working, with my elegant new laptop and my beloved old laptop bag:
The train from Mainz to Wiesbaden was a little commuter hopper, full of young women and their children, and a great deal of laughter. Wiesbaden appears effectively a suburb of Mainz.
Wiesbaden is very lovely. A spa town, it has natural hot springs bubbling up in various parks and hotels. It is difficult for a British person to criticise German cities for ugliness, the UK having been involved in their destruction, but much of Wiesbaden either survived or has been sympathetically restored.
The facade of my hotel, the Schwarzer Bock, had been restored with studious attention to grim ugliness, but there were some surviving details on the lower two floors from the original hotel, including much of the spa pool area.
Goethe had stayed in this hotel for a cure, and so had Dostoevsky, who had lost all the money for his European tour in the casino. He wrote up the experience as a novel “the Gambler”, in which Wiesbaden in Hesse is called Roulettebad in Hesse.
I am afraid the hotel is now run by Radisson Blu and is pretty prosaic. But Wiesbaden had plenty of evocative architecture, and is plainly very wealthy. Wilhelmstrasse and the streets off it are full of very expensive shops selling top range products.
There are designer furniture shops, designer curtain shops, designer handbag shops. I saw a shop selling nothing but very expensive garden furniture, and another just selling those kind of stupid and pointless objects interior designers love to shove down next to coffee tables. Driftwood painted gold, peacock feathers in improbably shaped vases, roller skates painted electric blue with crystals round the top.
Plainly Dostoevsky was not the only person in Wiesbaden with more money than sense.
It is not generally recalled that, when Cumberland won at Culloden, most of the cities of Scotland were held down for the English by garrisons of mercenaries from Hesse. Cumberland actually disliked the Hessian officers for treating their adversaries according to the rules of war and refusing to commit atrocities.
Almost certainly, all of the Hessian officers occupying Scotland would have been familiar with Wiesbaden and would have walked around the very streets and buildings I walked around now. Doubtless some of them had stayed at the Schwarzer Bock.
I wondered how seriously Hessian archives had been searched for letters home or diaries on their time in Scotland, or what published memoirs there might be. I made a note on my new laptop to pursue the idea next year.
The cinema was beautiful, an art deco marvel. It was also very large, holding over 500 people, so though around eighty came, they did rattle around a bit. It did get fuller than this picture taken before the start, but not enormously. Now you get to see what Niels looks like.
There was a dead air around Wiesbaden after the meeting, occasioned I think by Germany being knocked out of the World Cup that evening.
I had bought a new wheeled case at Niels’ suggestion, to replace the rucksack I had been struggling with. I found two wheeled cases much easier to manage, and with my laptop bag now velcroed to the handle of one of them and Niels to assist with lifting when needed, my luggage problems appeared to be over.
2 December we had a comparatively easy itinerary. 12:26 ICE 1651 Wiesbaden to Frankfurt Airport, 13:09 ICE 610 Frankfurt Airport to Bochum arriving 15:09.
Bochum was the first destination on our tour that I had not previously known even existed!
The trains were on time. The change at the airport station went smoothly, but the train from there was very packed. The luggage racks by the door at the carriage ends were overflowing with expensive looking bags and suitcases. We squeezed our luggage into any available bit of vacant floor, and then put my laptop and Niels camera bag into the overhead rack above us.
The rack was made of glass, presumably purposely so that you could look up and see your bags through it. Given recent experience, I repeatedly looked up and saw the comforting sight of the green and white baggage label attached to my laptop bag, pressed against the glass.
And then I didn’t.
Shortly before we arrived at Bochum, I looked up again, and it just was not there. It was gone.
I was stupefied. Niels went running down, collecting together our other bags, then looking for my laptop. I started asking everyone on the coach if they had seen the bag, or seen anybody take the bag.
To be fair, this got a much better response in Germany than it might have done in the UK. Virtually everybody stood up and started rummaging around. One large man was particularly helpful and started moving off and getting people searching in adjacent carriages. But all for naught; nobody could find anything and nobody had seen anything.
We pulled into Bochum. Niels stood preventing the door from reclosing while we searched, which got the railway staff involved. In the end he got off with the luggage while I stayed on the train and continued the search until the next station.
At Dortmund I had to give up. A second laptop in five days had been stolen from me.
I returned on a local train to Bochum. I had lost not just my laptop, but a lot of important tickets, receipts and documents in the bag, plus – and this is crucial to me – my reading glasses.
When the first laptop disappeared, I concede it was possible a thief had quickly taken it from the bag, not noticing how old and beaten up it was.
But I had not removed my new laptop from the bag during the journey, and there was no way of knowing a laptop was in there at all. It was next to Niels’ much more valuable camera bag, which was untouched.
The whole carriage was flooded with luggage, presumably because it came from Frankfurt airport. The racks at the carriage ends were overflowing with expensive luggage, right next to the doors, away from their owners and very easy to steal at a station.
Why would a simple thief instead take my beaten up bag, from right over the head of its owner?
It plainly makes no sense at all.
We headed into Bochum as the night closed in.
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When I agreed to do the tour of Germany, I stipulated that I would need to break off to honour a speaking commitment in Maribor, Slovenia. This turned into a crazy epic.
The straight line distance from Berlin to Maribor is 425 miles, not very different from London to Inverness. Unfortunately the entire Alps are in the way and Maribor is much better connected to Eastern than Western Europe. The distance by road is given at exactly 600 miles. I can’t find a distance calculated by rail, but I think it is well over 900 miles. (I can’t find a site which gives rail distances except on a crow flies basis).
My route on for 25 November was 06:01 ICE 1001 Berlin to Munich, 10:17 EC 217 Munich to Graz, 16:27 RE 157 Graz to Spielfeld-Strass, 18:04 RE 4443 Spielfeld=Strass to Maribor.
I should arrive at 18:20 to give a speech immediately. My talk with Stella had finished around 22:30 in Berlin and my talk the next day in Maribor began at 19:00. Then the following day it was back over the Alps and across the German plain again to speak at Frankfurt at 18:00. If my many political adversaries ever needed hard evidence I must be quite nuts, I guess this is it.
But I had said I would go to Maribor, so I did.
I had hung around after the talk in Berlin to chat with those attending – this is important both to motivate and to recruit activists. Because I knew I had a very early start, I had chosen the Intercity hotel, right next to the railway station. This was a mistake. It was very expensive (260 euros the night) and dreadful value for money. The mattresses were very thin, I have had thicker handkerchiefs than the towels and heavier towels than the carpet. There was nothing but water to drink in the room.
After checking in, I walked to the railway station so I would know exactly where to drag all that luggage in the early morning. I am not in general a fan of modern architecture but I simply loved Berlin Hauptbahnhof and spent a rapt half hour wandering around inspecting it closely. St Pancras is always called a cathedral to rail, and this is the modern equivalent. It is breathtaking in both scale and ambition and in quality and detail.
It speaks the same architectural language as some of London’s newer projects like the London Bridge Station rebuilding or some of Crossrail, but with much more assurance and verve. In London the great glass lift columns would have been square not round, because it is cheaper. The multiple levels of trains are dizzying and, reflected in acres of glass, sometimes illusory. There is just so much of it, all designed precisely to function but with an exact role in the aesthetic scheme.
Returning to the mundane, I was very hungry, having eaten nothing since breakfast on a wildly difficult and tiring day (and that breakfast had been mostly champagne). I found the last food outlet open and bought their last cheese baguette, which had reached the stage that sweat fell from the cheese and the bits outside the bread were many shades darker.
And so to bed.
5am; up, shower, shave, off to the station. Finding it difficult simply to lift the luggage. It is very cold. Pass a long queue of homeless people outside the door of a soup kitchen. Get to the platform on the station’s lowest level.
There is a deeply held belief in the UK that German trains are very efficient. I held it myself.
The Munich train arrived seven minutes after it should have departed and left 13 minutes late. First class had the old fashioned system of six seats in a closed compartment, two banks of three against the walls facing each other, with a sliding door and a single corridor running down one side of the train. But it was a very new carriage, and the traditional design was rendered in attractive light wood panelling and with curves in the large glass walls.
I was in the end compartment in the carriage. Germany has re-instituted the compulsory wearing of masks on trains, which specifically have to be heavy PP2 masks. In flying (unwillingly) from Cologne to Berlin I had not had to wear a mask. They are compulsory on trains in Germany but not on planes, which makes no sense whatsoever.
Whether for fear of covid or because I look like a crazed axe killer, the lady who was also in the compartment where I had my reservation plainly was not happy with my being there. She scowled as I came in, made a fuss about moving her luggage (which was in no way needed), and finally demanded I show her my ticket and seat reservation. She then looked daggers at me for 15 minutes.
As I was obviously spoiling her day, I got up, smiled and said goodbye, and went and found another seat.
After a while I went up to the restaurant car to see what could be done about breakfast. I am embarrassed not to speak any German, but the lady there spoke English. I asked her what was available for Breakfast. She told me I had to choose from the menu, and passed me one. There were a range of options from the Kaiser breakfast, including ham, eggs and cheese, to the Wien breakfast, just a pastry and a coffee.
I asked for the Kaiser breakfast. She shook her head, took back the menu, and put a big cross in red biro through the Kaiser breakfast. So I chose the next breakfast down, and she did exactly the same thing. We worked our way down to the Wien breakfast, and finally she crossed that one out too.
So having eliminated all the breakfast options I switched to the other side of the menu and ordered a plate of ham and sausage. The lady said I could not have that either as they had no bread.
I gave up and asked for a latte. She said they had no milk. I went back to my seat clutching a black coffee.
I had been through exactly the same situation in Poland immediately post Communism, where restaurants would not tell you what they had and insisted you order from a menu of non-existent choices, until you chanced upon something available, like a game of culinary battleships.
Apart from that, this was a very pleasant train. The station indicators in the corridor also had a speedometer, and most of the time it hummed along at a highly impressive 260 kph (160 mph). It actually caught up on time before it got to Munich, which was fortunate as it was a short connection to Graz. This change involved humping the luggage quite a way, but I made it.
This also was a train organised in compartments, but the carriage was much older. I shared a compartment with a delightful and friendly lady, traveling with her partner, who was going back home to Salzburg for a break. She is a chef and has her own Michelin listed restaurant in Munich, doing Austrian cuisine. The restaurant only has 23 covers and you currently need to reserve three weeks in advance.
She had survived lockdown by starting to do takeaway food, and in fact had achieved a bigger turnover, and profit, on takeaway than the restaurant ever had before. But she was pleased to be back to normal and stop the takeaway, which was all of the drudgery and none of the pleasure of being a chef.
We had a long and friendly chat about families and life. It made the journey go very quickly.
It is surprising how quickly the Alps came into view after leaving Munich, and you hurtle towards them for a very long time without their seeming to become appreciably closer. Once we reached the Austrian border an announcement was made that we could take off our masks, which we all did.
We were travelling in coach 12. The guard informed us that at Salzburg we had to change from coach 12 to coach 10, as one of the outside carriage doors would not open. This was not a problem in Germany, but meant the coach could not be used in Austria.
The two ladies were only going as far as Salzburg, but once there they insisted on carrying my luggage for me – all of it – and installing it and me safely in coach 10. They instructed the young gentleman sitting in the compartment that he was to look after me.
The line from Salzburg to Graz was extremely beautiful. My new young travelling companion worked for the Austrian rail network and he was very proud of it. He pointed out to me all the landmarks on the way, particularly mountains, castles and waterfalls, of which he had an encyclopaedic knowledge.
He kept telling me to take pictures and was most disappointed with my lack of photographic skills – with some justice. I took lots of pictures of myself reflected in windows and a variety of different passing poles and gantries. Here instead is Interrail’s picture advertising the route.
It is at least this pretty the whole way.
Austria and Italy will shortly be opening a massive tunnel under the Brenner Pass, 34 miles long. The Semmering tunnel, 17 miles long, will complete in three years time. There has been an incredible burst of tunnel building through the Alps which is revolutionising connections between central and western Europe with northern Italy and the Adriatic.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel, 35 miles long – which is longer than the Channel Tunnel – was finished in 2016. The Ceneri Base Tunnel, also in Switzerland, opened in 2018. Further West a major new tunnel under the Alps between France and Italy is nearing completion.
The reason for my companion’s journey was that he was working on a route for a new over 30 mile tunnel that will replace the highest area of the Salzburg to Graz line. This is still in development stage, and even that fact he said is “hot news”.
This day’s journey of 260 kph trains and information of a whole complex of gigantic rail projects, stood in the starkest of contrasts to the impoverished and neglected infrastructure of the UK. We cannot construct even a single and short high speed line; the road between London and Edinburgh is still not fully dual carriageway and parts of Scotland still suffer appalling communications deficits.
Arriving at Graz I again had a change of platforms to negotiate with all that luggage. Fortunately Graz has mid-platform lifts down to the interchange level, and I made it to an adequate little local chugger. I really can’t tell you much about this, except that it was dark outside and I fell asleep more or less immediately.
A friendly man woke me with a shake of the shoulder at Spielfeld-Strass, which is basically countryside with a shed in it. Here we had a remarkable change of trains, all the more peculiar for taking place in the dark.
We descended on to a normal platform and then walked over a footbridge, where I struggled mightily. The other side of the footbridge led not on to another plaform, but down on to the tracks. Half the people were hurrying off to a train in front of us and on our left, which was alongside a conventional train platform, and half of the people to a train front right, which involved crossing the lines and climbing up from a low wooden bench.
Everybody was running. I stopped a bearded man amongst what seemed like a party of young people and asked “Maribor?”. He pointed to the train on the right. I picked up my pile of luggage and ran after the disappearing crowd, again with an aerobic burst I simply would not have thought I could produce. I threw the luggage piece by piece up into the carriage and climbed up after it. The doors closed and off we went.
We had of course just scrambled across the Austrian/Slovenian border and changed from an Austrian to a Slovene local train, although it is astonishing that these two EU states have not devised a more elegant way of doing it by now. The Slovene train was clean and new, one of those low slung designs with three internal steps up to a raised level at each carriage end above the bogies.
We made a couple of small stops on the way to Maribor, at stations – one very illuminated new and steel glass shiny, and one an old weedy unlit platform next to a cowshed. They had in common that neither had a sign saying where it was. A single person hopped on in each instance. Then we came into Maribor, the lights of which appeared very extensive.
Emerging on to Maribor station, which seems made of precisely the same concrete, glass and steel components as Austrian stations, I contemplated wearily that the short train had stopped as far from the exit on an extremely long platform as it was possible to stop. As I prepared for one last battle with the bags, I was delighted to see a huge bearded man stride forward to greet me. They had come to pick me up, and the man, who introduced himself as Matic, lifted my large suitcase as though it had no weight at all.
We drove to the self-declared autonomous zone of the Pekarna Centre, which was hosting me. This is an alternative culture commune which occupies an extensive site stretching over several former military buildings. It is very active in painting, film and the plastic arts, and functions as a very vibrant music venue and youth centre. It also holds a variety of events aimed at social consciousness and well-being. I had been invited in the context of an annual political teach-in to explain the Assange case.
The commune has rehabilitated several of the buildings on the derelict army base, and like many such groups has been through a process of varying relationships with the state. Originally declared by its founders to be self-governing and free from state law, gradually state regulation and state funding for aspects of the commune’s work crept in. This includes subsidies from various state creative arts funds, local council funding for the modernisation of one of the buildings, and eventually the insertion of an “official” NGO and local authority control of the hostel accommodation.
This process has led to the inevitable conclusion – the state now intends to close the centre down entirely and take over the land and buildings for other purposes. There have been two formal attempts to do so in the last few years, and both candidates in the current mayoral election are pledged to shut down the centre. The council always propose ostensible public sector schemes of popular appeal as their aim.
The latest wheeze is to use the site for a dental hospital, although the local university hospital which will purportedly own it has no knowledge of the plan and no funding for it. The commune of course believe this is all fake and the aim is profit making private housing.
A luta continua.
I had been asked in advance what I eat, and had replied pretty well anything. I have to confess I meant Chinese, Italian, Indian etc, and had not expected to be presented with a bowl of rice and lentils. I had eaten nothing since the old cheese sandwich at the midnight before, so I ate my way through it with surprising gusto. It was very nicely cooled and spiced and would have been perfectly fine on the side of a few lamb chops. There was very decent Slovenian wine to wash it down.
After dinner I had a very quick tour of the grounds, mostly very dark but stumbling upon large groups of young people in surprising places. We also went in to the second hand bookshop, which they claim to be the largest in Europe. I doubt this, but it is certainly very large, over two open floors. While they have a great deal of shelving, there are also great rotundas of books simply stacked from the floor, spines outward, though taking out a lower one might be like a game of giant Jenga. This certainly allows a much higher book density than if everything was shelved.
I had a very few minutes but enough to realise there was an extremely productive Slovenian language publishing industry even during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Upstairs included the English language section, most of which was the worst kind of potboiler fiction. Indeed I wondered how on earth these many thousands of light and romantic fiction titles had found their way to Maribor. Sadly I had no time to find out.
I was equally surprised that the upper floor could support what must have been a great many tonnes of books. Passing back downstairs, I could inspect if from below as there was no plaster ceiling and beams and floorboards were exposed. Both were massive – the beams were about 24 inches square.
It was now time for me to give my talk, and we went over to one of the concert halls, which was gratifyingly full. I hope that I will be able to find a video link so you can watch it if you wish. The format was just me speaking for about forty minutes, and then taking questions and inviting discussion. On this tour I am mostly making a short introduction and then taking questions after showing the Ithaka movie. That is very effective, but personally I always prefer giving longer talks where I can expand, explain and explore my views. I felt very at home doing this before the Maribor audience.
You are going to get very bored if I recount to you twenty very similar talks I am giving on this tour. But each has unique aspects, often in response to questions. I recall in Maribor giving the example of the Panama Papers as illustrating what happens when a whistleblower goes the traditional mainstream media route rather than going for full exposure through Wikileaks.
When the papers were leaked of a law firm representing many thousands of people and enterprises hiding their assets in parliament, the western media filtered the information and hid everything connected to prominent western companies and individuals. Instead they deliberately gave the entirely false impression that the bulk of money laundered through Panama is Russian, and made the headlines entirely about Russian and Russian-linked individuals, including a chef with tenuous connections to Putin as an official caterer.
Out of 10 million documents leaked, about 120 were actually made available as documents by the journalists, and about a number 200 had their contents referred to by mainstream media journalists – how fully and how honestly we have no way of knowing.
We live in a world of fake investigative journalism. Access to the Panama Papers was strictly controlled by a Washington-based entity, the “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”. Their funders include
Ford Foundation
Carnegie Endowment
Rockefeller Family Fund
W K Kellogg Foundation
Open Society Foundation
Is it surprising they hid all the evidence about corporate America in the Panama Papers? The contrast to the Wikileaks model of giving the citizen access to unfiltered source material could not be clearer.
I was very warmly received by the audience in Maribor, and afterwards we had a party. The following is what I picked up from many conversations. There may be other contrary or balancing information. I am just reporting the views of those I met.
Maribor was Slovenia’s major industrial centre and the main textile manufacturer for the whole of Yugoslavia, integrated into other Eastern European markets. It went through rapid deindustrialisation in the 1990s and had never really recovered. There remains high unemployment, though things have improved a little since EU membership as there is greater integration with Graz in Austria – a city which has been through similar problems. Graz currently has a Communist Party local administration.
Maribor feels cut off from Ljubljana. It is only 70 miles away but transport infrastructure needs upgrading. The train takes two hours and twenty minutes and the road is poor. There is a strong feeling that money from the EU and other international bodies never gets further than Ljubljana. The capital is booming and has significant funding for renovation, the arts and tourism. I encountered a lot of resentment towards the council.
I was very flattered to meet a couple who had journeyed from Graz just to hear me speak having read my books, and that two others had come with copies of Murder in Samarkand for me to sign (one in the US edition, Dirty Diplomacy).
I also took the opportunity of being in Slovenia to discuss the route they took to Independence, where I believe there are vital lessons for Scotland. I shall be discussing this in a Zoom talk to Alba International on 4 December, which I hope will be made more widely available afterwards.
I spent the night in the hostel, which is not a phrase you will hear from me very often. The next morning it was off to talk in Frankfurt.
The train schedule was 26 November was very slightly more forgiving. 07:19 INT 311 Maribor to Graz, 08:26 RJ 74 Graz to Wien Meidling, 11:22 ICE 26 Wien Meidling to Frankfurt.
This arrived in Frankfurt at 17:36 for a 18:00 talk, so there was no room for error. The big worry was a 4 minute change in Graz, with all the luggage. If I missed that, there was no way to make the talk in Frankfurt.
Matic arrived in a car to get me to a very cold Maribor station in plenty of time. Unfortunately, the train arrived 13 minutes late. It was a Ljubljana to Budapest direct train, which underlined the fact Maribor is very much in Eastern Europe. It consisted of only three rather tired carriages, of which the back one was first class, in which I was the only passenger.
Fortunately this train went straight through the border at Spielfeld-Strass without our having to change trains, but the train did change from a Slovenian to an Austrian crew, which took 15 minutes.
I have no idea how, but leaving the border 15 minutes late it still arrived in Graz bang on time. The next train was straight across the platform, so I made that four minute change with the luggage, in two swift trips.
I was now on the train from Graz to Prague. The carriage was Austrian Railjet and it was my favourite so far. Spacious and light, with plenty of tables, and a really helpful attendant who served at the table from a good menu of food and drink that actually existed. I had Goulash soup and a bottle of beer.
The train journey from Graz to Vienna was even more spectacularly beautiful than that from Salzburg to Graz. Not as high and the valleys were a little gentler, but the villages, castles and valleys were like an ever unfolding stream of picture postcards.
At Wien Meidling I changed to the train to Frankfurt. Here I was in an open first class carriage, mostly airline seating and quite full. Seats were three across, two one side of the corridor and one the other. I was in a single seat.
I slept for a couple of hours, and then I folded down the airline style table in the back of the seat in front. I was just about able to balance my bulky old 17-inch laptop on it and started to type this article.
It is a lovely old laptop of a very high spec. It had been all round the world with me for seven years. It has Intel i7, 16 GB RAM and 1 TB HDD. But it looks like rubbish. Far thicker than a newer version, it made a very significant contribution to the weight I was carrying, was very dirty indeed and the case is cracked.
The train wifi being pretty useless, I was using my phone as a portable hotspot. I was confused to note that the phone was displaying “two devices connected”. I tapped on this and found that one was the pairing name I had set for my laptop, and one was a succession of numbers and symbols. I had never seen this before.
(UPDATE I thought it went without saying, but the portable hotspot was protected by a password – I had not changed the strong random one generated by the phone. That is why I was surprised).
The carriage was about half full. Everybody seemed normal. There was one young man, athletic looking with neat short hair, who had been already on the train when I boarded. He was working concentratedly on a small laptop on the table in front of him, and he continued to do so without a break for the entire six and a half hours from Vienna Meidling to Frankfurt.
He never looked at me and there was nothing strange about him other than his levels of concentration. But he was the only passenger near me who went the whole distance from Vienna to Frankfurt.
Indeed, rather to my surprise by the time we approached Frankfurt the carriage was very nearly empty, as people got out stop by stop. As Frankfurt is a huge place I expected the opposite.
As we neared Frankfurt, I packed up my laptop, disconnected the charger, and put both in my laptop bag which I left on my seat after putting the table back up. I then went quickly to the toilet (in a wooden cabinet actually inside the carriage) for a pee.
I came back just as we pulled in. There were only four of us getting off this first class carriage at this final stop. I got down with the bags, put the rucksack on my back, balanced the laptop bag on the wheeled suitcase, and set off down the platform.
At some stage another ICE train had joined us and I was sixteen carriages from the end of the platform. I was panicking a bit as my talk started in half an hour, although both hotel and venue were close.
Hurrying, I dropped the laptop bag from the top of the wheeled case. In picking it up I noticed the zip was partly undone. It just crossed my mind as strange, as I knew I had not left it that way. But I did it up and hurried on.
The Metropolitan Hotel is right next to the station. I checked in and hurried up to my room. Something was nagging at me and I opened the laptop bag. The laptop was gone.
I raced back to the station, but the train was as gone as the laptop. I went to the information desk, and they directed me to lost property. I went to the lost property desk, where a man in a red peaked hat was studiously unhelpful, and told me to go online and fill in a form.
Niels was filling in at the talk. I joined him and it was a disastrous attendance – only twelve people. They seemed subdued by the simple fact of being such a small gathering. I could not understand what had gone wrong.
It was good to see Niels. Given that we had been meant to travel together ever since London, and had not even managed to set eyes on each other these first three days, it was a happy reunion and he cheered me up.
But you lose a huge amount of information when you lose a laptop – including a lot of research for my book on George Murray. You then start to get into all the perils of identity theft. There was a huge task ahead, in warning people, in blocking and securing, and then recovering accounts.
Then on top of this, the comparative failure of the Frankfurt event (and I say that with due respect to the dozen great people who did show).
Oh well, I said to Niels. Things can only get better.
I was very wrong.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
When asked to do a three week speaking tour of Germany in conjunction with the Ithaka movie, I was delighted to finally get an Interrail pass after 50 years of unrequited longing. Hoary old followers of this blog will recall I love trains and used to write about them from time to time.
So it was my intention to do a bit of old fashioned, internet diary blogging to recount the virtues of the Interrail card and how much better European railways are than British. The best laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley.
Let me say now, if you find travel blogs and trains boring this will annoy you in parts. You are not obliged to read further. I warn you that I get very annoyed by people telling me what in their view I ought to be blogging about and not blogging about. Start your own blog and choose your own content.
Having bought my senior Interrail card – the 15 days over two months Global Pass – I was astonished at the value. 591 Euros, first class, and including the trip down and back to London from Edinburgh and the Eurostar. With unlimited travel around Europe on 15 days in the middle.
So I used my first journey on 22 November from Edinburgh to London. The conductor scanned my pass ticket on my phone, and made no comment at all, leaving me comfortably ensconced in first class and eating food from the ever worsening LNER menu (although the wine was good).
The system for using an intermittent days pass like this one is different from using a continuous days pass. There you have just one ticket to show. With the intermittent days pass I had to download against the specific journey and activate on the day I used them 15 effectively separate tickets.
I just had time to check in to my hotel and dash to Stefania Maurizi’s talk at SOAS for her steamroller of a book on the Assange case, called Secret Power.
There was a sparkling panel, including Ewen MacAskill, John McDonnell and Estelle Dehon, so I was rather flattered to be asked to speak too and take questions. The speakers rightly highlighted Stefania’s dogged pursuit of Freedom of Information Act requests as a useful journalistic tool.
Two particular threads are worth serious consideration. The first is that it was Stefania who discovered that the Crown Prosecution Service had been insisting to the Swedish prosecution service that the allegations against Julian must be continued, when the Swedes had wished to drop them for lack of evidence.
She also found that the Crown Prosecution Service had deleted almost all the relevant emails – allegedly because the staff member working on the case had retired.
The CPS had claimed that when anyone retired their records were deleted, even on continuing cases. That is utterly false – government archives are not personal to the individual and case files do not belong to one person.
As a lie it is particularly desperate. It is of course the case that once Julian was actually in custody, the Swedish allegations, which never had any real foundation, simply disappeared.
Three things are being hidden – how far the CPS knew the Swedish allegations were dead meat; how far there was discussion with the Swedes on coordination with the United States over the planned extradition to the USA for which the Swedish fake extradition was a placeholder; and the involvement of the Head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Keir Starmer.
There is no doubt at all that Starmer would have been involved in decision making on his Department’s highest profile case. All the records of emails and critically of internal meetings have been conveniently deleted.
This deletion has happened while Starmer has been an ostensibly an “opposition” MP, embarked on his career of being promoted as the Establishment’s safe “alternative” neoliberal to the Tories. The deletion of these records to protect an “opposition” leader tells you an enormous amount about how the British state really functions.
Watching John McDonnell try to skate round the question of Keir Starmer’s involvement was quite amusing, but in general John spoke well. As did Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian. He credited Stefania with freely sharing with other journalists the results of her research, which had resulted in two excellent Guardian articles. Ewen ran into some audience reaction when he denied the Guardian had become too close to the security services and claimed Luke Harding as a personal friend.
The second strand of information requests that Stefania had pursued were for the records the Metropolitan Police held on Wikileaks journalists including Kristinn Hrafnsonn and Joseph Farrell. She never obtained any documents, but the key point is that initially the reason the Metropolitan Police gave for not producing the documents was the FOIA exemption for “terrorism”.
Which tells you a lot about how the state views real independent journalism.
The next morning I was up at the Supreme Court for the judgment on the Scottish Independence referendum, on which I blogged immediately. I promised you a more detailed critique, which will follow when I get the chance. I spent the evening going through a lot of personal admin. I was then ready to launch on my European adventure – and the problems began.
To be fair, they began three days earlier when I tried to book the Eurostar.
I discovered that Eurostar only allow a limited number of passes to Interrail ticket holders on each train – and there were no places available at all on the 24 November. I needed to get on the 08:16 to be able to get to Berlin in time for my talk, but not only was this impossible to book on Eurostar, no train on 24 November was possible. Nor was there any availability on 23 November straight after the Supreme Court judgment.
So you need to book more than four days ahead, even at this lowest of low seasons. If you do get the Eurostar pass, there is a 45 euro surcharge on top of your Interrail pass (each way). You can get an actual Eurostar ticket for almost the same price if you book well ahead.
The ever excellent Your Man in Seat 61 blog explains here how the system works. Interrail passes count as in the third pricing “Bucket” for ticket availability, with prices going up as each “bucket” sells out. I can only say that the higher priced “buckets” must be enormous, because there were vast swathes of empty seats, but no Interrail passes for sale.
At this stage I also discovered that I could not have used my Interrail pass anyway, even if there had been places available and I paid the supplement.
The Interrail card allows you one journey domestically to your port of exit from your home country and then from the UK on the Eurostar (and same on return). So I can travel from Edinburgh to London and then by Eurostar from London (if available). But it turns out this all has to be on the same day. You cannot overnight in London and then use the Eurostar.
The one journey to port of exit is explained in the Interrail blurb, but I had not seen the regulation that this has to be the same day you leave the country. Perhaps it is supposed to be obvious, but I only learnt it from Eurostar after I had booked the first Interrail ticket from Edinburgh.
So I had to buy a whole Eurostar ticket. My itinerary for 24 November was Eurostar from St Pancras 08:16, Thalys 9423 from Bruxelles Midi to Cologne 11:25, and ICE 951 from Köln to Berlin 13:42, arriving Berlin 18:10. My friend Graham told me that this would not be possible unless I went Business Premiere on Eurostar. I could not quite understand why, but complied, at a cost of £280.
The next morning I was at St Pancras in good time to check in, but had not allowed for one Brexit “benefit” – enhanced passport checks and passport stamping. Most passengers were being waved away from the electronic gates to join a long snaking queue in front of a very unfriendly French passport officer, who was either working with the world’s slowest loading computer, or pretending to.
Security checks had been a breeze, with Eurostar not enforcing any stupid security theatre over laptops being in bags or your toothpaste in a ziploc. I am delighted to say that the government is proposing finally to end the War on Toothpaste nonsense at airports in a year or two.
I recall that I once got over-enthusiastic with pouring whisky over our Christmas pudding to light it, after several glasses too many of Chateauneuf du Pape with my turkey. The drenched pudding sat there on its elegant Minton plate in a veritable puddle of spirit, and it fired with enthusiastic blue flames. In fact it was so enthusiastic I lost some eyebrow, and it was a rather hurried procession to the dining room.
Once put down, the children cheered. A few seconds later the place mat underneath it started to singe, and then that beautiful and expensive Minton plate cracked rather explosively.
Now after they have checked your toothpaste and taken away your water at airport security, you can waltz into duty free and buy several such bottles of spirits. Soak the airplane seat and carpet and set light, you will pretty quickly bring the plane down.
But at least your toothpaste was in a separate plastic bag.
By the time I finally got through passport control, they had been flashing last call for the 08:16 for a long time. I should explain I can hardly carry my luggage. The three week itinerary of constant traveling has no obvious opportunities for laundry, so I am traveling with 20 shirts, 20 pairs of underpants and 20 socks, as well as jumpers, trousers etc and a lot of books. I had a rucksack on my back, a heavy suitcase and a bulging laptop bag.
I had to make a lung searing run to get on the train before the doors closed. I was genuinely amazed I could still do that.
Niels Ladefoged is traveling and speaking with me. Niels was the brilliant cinematographer on Ithaka and had me wired up for sound literally for hundreds of hours during the shooting of that film. He shot huge amounts of footage of me, including in my home, none at all of which was used.
Niels is still permanently filming everybody in Wikileaks as they go about their business and campaigning; I have no doubt he will be filming me as we travel round Europe. I have no idea why. I don’t like to ask him in case there isn’t actually a reason, and he is just living life under the comforting delusion he is shooting another film.
Niels had booked Standard Premier class on Eurostar, unable to believe I was so extravagant as to book Business Premiere. This meant he was in coach 1 and I was in coach 16. We both made efforts during the journey to walk the 15 coaches inbetween, but both gave up fairly easily.
I got the world’s tiniest cooked breakfast. It was squeezed into a little plate the size of the average mobile phone. All the normal things were there – sausage, bacon, omelette, mushroom etc; only in bonzai. It was very pleasant. Six of them would have been breakfast. Still worse, it was served with mango and banana juice. Bloody middle classes. Suddenly the charm of traveling was diminished.
So I wandered into the kitchen and asked if they were not serving champagne at breakfast. They looked at me as though I had just asked for crack cocaine, as opposed to something which was literally on the menu. But they directed me back to my seat and, two minutes later, a very substantial glass of champagne arrived.
The attendant said that as they had needed to open a bottle, I had better drink all of it. I certainly did my very best. I sent photos of each glass down to Niels. It’s my way of sharing.
That may be why I did not really notice we were running a few minutes late – and with a short connection in Brussels which we had to make to be in Berlin on time. When the Eurostar empties, a huge scrum develops around the single escalator and two lifts at the exit. It takes quite some time to funnel through.
I was again back in that gut busting run with the rucksack, laptop bag and suitcase, down to the below ground level interchange, charging along to platform 8 and rushing up the ramp to the Cologne train. I just made it literally as the door was closing, and threw myself onto the first carriage I came to, ignoring the protests of the chap checking tickets.
Unfortunately Niels did not make it. Being in coach 16 I had arrived right at the exit gate and got out before the crowd developed. Having to walk 13 carriages further, Niels got stuck behind the impenetrable crowd.
So I was now on a Thalys train. This had been my next disappointment with Interrail. Thalys trains also require you to buy a supplementary pass, which had cost 27 euros, which I suspect is not too different from a Brussels to Cologne fare anyway. Certainly the guard only wanted to see my Thalys pass and did not care about the interrail ticket.
What is more annoying is that Thalys trains will only allow you to buy a second class supplementary pass, even if you have a first class Interrail pass. So I was trying to squeeze my mass of luggage into a totally stowed out carriage.
I remember first being on a Thalys train decades ago and thinking it the epitome of French travel chic, with Virgin Atlantic evoked in the high broad backed velvet seating and red lights. It has not aged well. All that red velveteen seems very tawdry, like something taken out of a Turkish brothel – Bransonesque, in fact. The airline style seating is too closely jammed, the broad seat backs block the light. A peculiar air of Stygian damp pervades the train.
Fortunately this did not last too long. Getting down at Cologne – and by now I was struggling just to lift the suitcase – I was delighted to see that the Berlin train ICE 951 would arrive the other side of the same platform, in 25 minutes. Not having the strength to move the luggage further, I decided to stay there and wait. An elderly French couple who I had noticed since St Pancras were also waiting on the same platform.
Hundreds of people had got off the train from Brussels and I had felt surprise not more of them were going on to Berlin. With about three minutes to go, it was plain something was wrong. There were only about 6 people waiting for the express to Berlin. But it was plainly advertised both on the main board and platform board.
Then, with two minutes to go, an announcement came in German and English saying the train was cancelled due to a line closure. Neither the departures board nor the platform board showed it cancelled; they never did, the entry just disappearing after departure time in the normal way.
Niels was still stuck in Brussels. The next train to Cologne from Brussels had also been cancelled because the toilets had failed. So he was in Brussels, I was in Cologne, but had no means of getting to Berlin to give my talk. I phoned Adrian at our Cyberterrorism HQ. He found a flight from Cologne Bonn airport to Berlin that would get me there on time.
I raced to the taxi rank, running with my back bowed horizontally under the luggage. An inexplicable 60 Euro taxi fare (it didn’t seem far) and I was at the German Wings counter being ripped off an amazing 470 euros for a one hour budget flight. That mountain of bags was largely to blame again. So half way through day 1 I was already 530 Euros over budget.
I was still fuming on the plane, made worse by being charged 5.70 euros for a cola after paying so much for the ticket. The seat was a strip of curved plastic with a thin bit of nylon rug glued on top. It was uncomfortable enough to keep me awake to hear the captain announce “Berlin airport has been closed. We could circle here but we shall instead land at Dresden due to our fuel situation”.
“Due to our fuel situation” are not words you ever want to hear from the captain of your plane. But we made it to Dresden, where we sat on the tarmac. The day had taken on an entirely nightmarish quality. It seemed astonishing that the Berlin rail line had been closed and then, after a hectic dash to the airport, the plane had been diverted in mid-air. In a lifetime of flying I had never been on a diverted plane before.
After an hour on that uncomfortable seat waiting on the tarmac at Dresden, I finally managed to doze off a bit. I was awakened by the captain saying that Berlin Airport was closed by an invasion of climate activists. I was a little cheered by this, but the layers of irony were extraordinary. I was doing the whole trip by rail in order to keep down the carbon footprint of this Assange campaigning. The trains had then failed me and I was forced to take to the air anyway. Only to be thwarted by climate activists.
Musing ruefully on the unfairness of life, I managed to doze off again. I must have been exhausted because I was next awakened by our touching down at Berlin Airport some hours later.
Berlin is a large airport and we seemed to be at the furthest possible gate. The dream-like quality of what had become a surreal day was enhanced by the night-time lighting of what was an eerily empty airport – I assume we were the first plane in on re-opening. Long moving walkways stretched out into the distance towards blocks of electronic glass doors across the corridor, which were vividly lit with what seemed to be square shafts of a glaring white light, while all else was pretty dark.
You walked through those doors which snapped open before you with a surprising speed and force, and immediately mounted onto another identical moving walkway that stretched out towards another set of light portals in the distance. Then you went through the same experience again, and again. The whole thing had taken on this dreamlike quality in which my mind had disengaged from the strange world it was being carried through. I was in a trance-like state I find very difficult to explain.
It ended after eight walkways and sets of bright doors, then there was a long actual walk until the luggage carousel. The disruption had of course thrown the airport’s baggage system completely, so there was now another long wait amidst a lot of angst and shouting. Finally I was in to a taxi – also 60 Euros despite seeming about three times as far as the Cologne drive – and straight to the venue for my first talk.
I arrived at the venue and through to the back of the stage area at precisely the second Stella walked on to the stage. I could join her in the walk literally without breaking stride. That seamless quality added to the feeling that somehow this was all not really happening.
Stella spoke brilliantly, outlining Julian’s achievement in making real source material available to citizens so they could make up their own mind, rather than receiving only that information filtered by corporate and state media organisations that pointed you in the direction they wished. Wikileaks was therefore an alternative model to corporate media that threatened their power. Wikileaks gave you the material to form your ideas, it did not tell you how to think. This explained the sometime reluctance of the corporate media fully to engage in defending Julian, despite the fact that the use of the Espionage Act against a journalist and publisher was plainly also a threat to the mainstream.
I did not speak well. Partly for obvious reasons, and partly because the very good moderator unexpectedly (to me) asked me questions about my own whistleblowing rather than about Julian. I explained my history of exposing torture and extraordinary rendition, and was enthusiastically applauded, but it wasn’t really why I was there.
I did make the point that in any other case, the fact that the state requesting extradition had spied on the legal meetings of Julian and his counsel, and had stolen his legal papers after he was removed from the Embassy, would in itself be sufficient to have the case dismissed, even without my recounting the dozens of other glaring legal inconsistencies in the extradition hearings.
Stella said it had become plain there was no genuine legal process here. This was a political process not a legal one, and the answer was political, including by popular action.
There was an excellent audience, mostly very committed people. I had a quick – and excellent – beer with several of them afterwards.
I learnt one fascinating thing from a trade union activist. The Cologne to Berlin line had been closed for a couple of weeks after a major incident. That is why there were almost no people waiting for the train. The extraordinary thing was the trains were still showing on all the departure boards and I had been able to make a seat reservation the day before travelling. The route had never been a possibility.
This had been supposed to be an easy day of travel – my itinerary was about to get much more complicated. I had also intended to blog this as a same day diary, and here we are five days late. I hope to catch up over the next couple of days, when the reason why the delay (for which I apologise) will become clear.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
My laptop was stolen from me on the Vienna to Frankfurt train on Saturday.
I had been working on a blog article on the train. Approaching Frankfurt I packed up ready to get off, and went to the loo. When I returned the laptop had vanished from the laptop bag. The charger was still there and so was about 500 euros in cash.
I am on a speaking tour around Germany for the campaign to free Julian Assange. Yes, I am thinking the same as you about who would want a battered and dirty six year old laptop with a cracked case and very little retail value, and not the money.
That laptop had literally been all round the world with me and I think for six years had never left my side except when I was in jail.
My life was on it. Have spent 24 hours cancelling everything and now have to spend a week recovering anything.
It was a monster 17 inch screen because of my awful eyesight and a replacement of the same capacity will probably weigh about a quarter of the kilos. But I feel the absence of the weight on my shoulder like the loss of a limb.
For a while look out for fake communications of any kind from me. This is not one!
I live in the capital of my country. I had to travel hundreds of miles to the capital of a foreign country to hear a bunch of unionist judges, the majority from a foreign country, declare that my country has no right to existence, indeed my country only exists at all in so far as it was incorporated by a foreign parliament in the Scotland Act of 1998.
It was cold and wet, walking to the Supremes Court his morning from Albert Embankment. Londoners were hurrying to their jobs with heads bowed, collars up and gloved hands clutching umbrellas against a driving rain. It was mundane. There was no sense of excitement and no indication anything in particular was happening at the Supreme Court. Arriving at 9am there was no queue, and I was the third person into the courtroom.
The former Middlesex Crown Court is one of the heaviest and most plodding examples of Victorian Gothic architecture in existence. It looks like a set from a 1930s Errol Flynn film of Robin Hood. Courtroom Number One of what is now the Supreme Court has a mock medieval vaulted ceiling, designed to echo that of the ancient Westminster Hall across the square (which is one of the architectural marvels of the world). But the Victorian version fails to soar like the medieval one. It is massive and clumpy and the bosses are like vast excretions of pointless wood. Rather than marvel at its lightness, we fear it will fall on our head.
In Westminster Hall, a pain-racked William Wallace stood his trial before a foreign authority he did not acknowledge, but which insisted it ruled him and had the right to condemn him to death. That same foreign authority was about to come down on our heads again. 700 years later not much has changed; the venue had just shifted three hundred metres.
Inherent in the judgment of the Supreme Court is the proposition, incredibly advanced by Scotland’s Lord Advocate, that Scotland effectively ceased to exist as a nation in 1707 and the Scottish legal principle of the sovereignty of the people was completely replaced by the English legal principle of the sovereignty of the Crown in parliament. Thus Scotland has no authority, power or recourse, in any situation, beyond what is handed down to it by Westminster.
That is in no sense an exaggeration. It is what the ruling is.
It is fair to say – and I published this at the time, long before the judgment – that Scotland’s unionist Lord Advocate got precisely the result her entire presentation of the case was designed to achieve. She did not turn up in court, doubtless having been sent the judgment in advance and perhaps not wishing to be seen to smirk in public.
The Court itself was extraordinarily subdued on an occasion that will be written into every history of the Scottish nation. The public gallery was not crowded, and mostly filled by law students with zero interest in the outcome wither way, turning up as part of some assignment. There were a few gloating members of the state and corporate media. I was there with an old friend from Sinn Fein.
A few of the very best of Scotland’s MPs turned up – Angus Brendan McNeill, Douglas Chapman, Tommy Sheppard, Neale Hanvey, John McNally and Anne McLaughlin (apologies to any I missed). There was a remarkably high correlation between MPs who bothered to turn up to the case, and MP’s willing to be seen to be friends of Craig Murray in public, which I think is not coincidental. Or to put in another way, there was no sign of the troughers who don’t care about Independence beyond the effectiveness of the slogan in getting them elected.
I shall do a proper analysis of the judgment later. It was notable that Reed – whose Scottish accent had once again become almost entirely imperceptible – addressed the international law aspects of the case which had been wrongly and totally omitted by Lord Advocate Bain, but submitted separately on behalf of the SNP. Reed relied heavily on the completely outdated Quebec judgment of the Federal Court in Canada – which is of course apposite because it is a parallel instance of the colonial authority denying democracy. He also very selectively misrepresented the Kosovo Opinion of the ICJ.
So Reed ended up in a situation where this was quite literally the argument of the court.
Scotland is not a colony, Scotland has meaningful access to the political process. No, Scotland certainly does not have the right to hold a referendum.
That he cannot see the glaring contradiction in this is a sign of the effectiveness of Unionist blinkers.
This outcome is precisely what Nicola Sturgeon and her Lord Advocate aimed for. She can now claim she tried to hold an Independence referendum and was blocked, when she plainly never had the slightest intention of holding the referendum in the first place.
We now come to what is known in Scottish politics as “Plan B” – a plebiscite election, which she announced would follow if a referendum is blocked.
A plebiscite election on Independence can only mean an election which, if won by the SNP, will be a mandate to declare Independence. Plebiscite is virtually a synonym of referendum. A “plebiscite election” cannot be an election which will lead simply to a renewed request for permission from Westminster to hold a referendum. A “plebiscite election” is the referendum.
I am pretty confident we will see Surgeon again squirm towards the off ramp and simply try to turn the “plebiscite election” into a demand that we re-elect the do-nothing troughers for a further five years with a new “mandate”. I do believe this ploy is now wearing thin.
We now know Westminster will not grant Independence; we have to take it. We have to take it whatever UK law or the London Supreme Court says. We have to assert the Sovereignty of the Scottish People as an authority that stands, in Scotland, ineffably higher than any parliament in a foreign land.
Independence must be declared in Scotland by Scotland’s people, preferably through Scotland’s government.
Any politician who still argues we must be constrained by Westminster law and bow our heads to London diktats is a unionist. Please see that.
(Correction – I typed Tommy Sheridan for Tommy Sheppard. Both excellent men. Now corrected).
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Here is the detailed argument we submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg:
IN THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS:
CRAIG MURRAY
Applicant
v
THE UNITED KINGDOM
Respondent Government
SUPPLEMENTARY STATEMENT UNDER RULE 47(2)(b) OF THE RULES OF COURT
INTRODUCTION
1. This supplementary statement sets out the relevant domestic law and practice, and then makes supplementary submissions on why there have been violations of Articles 6 and 10 in this case.
2. The following abbreviations are used: (i) the Crown’s petition and complaint regarding the applicant (Additional Document No. 3) is referred to as “the contempt petition”; (ii) the High Court of Justiciary’s Opinion of 25 March 2021 (Additional Document No. 13) is referred to as “the High Court’s Opinion”; (iii) the applicant’s petition to the nobile officium (Additional Document No. 20) is referred to as “the nobile officium petition”; the High Court of Justiciary, Appeal Court’s Opinion dated 25 March 2022 (Additional Document No. 25) is referred to as “the Appeal Court’s Opinion”.
I. FACTS: RELEVANT DOMESTIC LAW AND PRACTICE
a. The Contempt of Court Act 1981
3. The Contempt of Court Act 1981 is a UK-wide statute. Section 11 gives the courts the power to prohibit the publication of information that has been withheld from the public in court proceedings. It provides:
“Publication of matters exempted from disclosure in court
In any case where a court (having power to do so) allows a name or other matter to be withheld from the public in proceedings before the court, the court may give such directions prohibiting the publication of that name or matter in connection with the proceedings as appear to the court to be necessary for the purpose for which it was so withheld.”
4. Section 11 is an ancillary power. The ordinary rule is that court proceedings and documents are public. The courts, however, have various powers, particularly at common law, to withhold names or other matters from the public. When a court orders that a name or other matter should be withheld from the public, it may make a section 11 order so that its order withholding the information is effective (that is, would not be circumvented by the press reporting the information that has been withheld): A v BBC [2014] UKSC 25 per Lord Reed at paragraph 59. Section 15 provides that, in Scotland, the maximum penalties that may be imposed for contempt of court shall be 2 years’ imprisonment or a fine or both.
b. The nobile officium
5. The nobile officium is an extraordinary, equitable power vested in, inter alia, the High Court of Justiciary. It gives the High Court of Justiciary the power to provide a remedy in circumstances where no other remedy or procedure is provided by the law: see Beggs v. the United Kingdom, no. 25133/06, § 178, 6 November 2012; and Mackay and BBC Scotland v the United Kingdom, no. 10734/05, § 15, 7 December 2010. A petition to the nobile officium is, in practice, the standard route of appeal for a person who seeks to challenge a finding of contempt made by a High Court bench of 3 judges: Express Newspapers, Petitioners 1999 JC 176 at 180; Murray v HM Advocate [2022] HCJAC 5. In that sense, while the jurisdiction is described generally as an equitable one, it is, in the context of contempt proceedings in the High Court of Justiciary, a standard domestic remedy. The nobile officium procedure is invoked by presenting a petition for its exercise to the High Court of Justiciary.
c. The Prisoners and Criminal Proceedings (Scotland) Act 1993
6. The Prisoners and Criminal Proceedings (Scotland) Act 1993 regulates the early release of prisoners in Scotland. Section 1(1) provides that a short-term prisoner (defined in section 27 as a person serving a sentence of imprisonment of less than 4 years) must be released as soon as he has served one-half of his sentence. Section 3AA(1) and (2) further provides that the Scottish Ministers may release on licence, among others, any short-term prisoner who is serving a sentence of imprisonment for a term of 3 months or more, after that prisoner has served a quarter of his sentence. Generally, when prisoners are released under section 3AA they are made subject to home detention curfew (or ‘tag’), requiring them to remain at their home address for a specific period each day. However, section 5 of the Act provides that section 3AA does not apply to, among others, those serving a sentence of imprisonment for contempt of court. Thus, while a prisoner serving an 8 month sentence of imprisonment, in relation to a criminal conviction, will generally be released on licence after 2 months’ imprisonment (and will be released unconditionally after 4 months), the earliest a prisoner serving the same sentence for contempt of court can be released is after 4 months.
II. STATEMENT OF VIOLATION OF ARTICLE 6
a. The applicability of the criminal limb of Article 6
7. It is settled in domestic law that the criminal limb of Article 6 applies to contempt of court and thus that the respondent in a contempt case enjoys the protections of Article 6 § 3: In re Yaxley-Lennon [2018] EWCA Crim 1856, [2018] 1 WLR 5400 per Lord Burnett CJ at § 66; Robertson and Gough v HM Advocate 2008 JC 146 per the Lord Justice Clerk (Gill) at §§ 41, 64 and 65; Re K (Children) (Contact: Committal Order) [2003] 1 FLR 277, [2002] EWCA Civ 1559 per Hale LJ (as she then was) at § 21.
8. This is compatible with the Court’s own approach that the criminal limb of Article 6 applies to contempt of court when, applying the third of the Engel criteria, there is a risk of a custodial sentence: Gestur Jónsson And Ragnar Halldór Hall v Iceland [GC], § 83, nos. 68273/14 68271/14, 22 December 2020. That applies a fortiori to cases where, as here, a custodial sentence is in fact imposed: Kyprianou v. Cyprus, no. 73797/01, § 31, 27 January 2004, where the criminal limb of Article 6 was found to apply, when the applicant was sentenced to 5 days’ imprisonment. For these reasons, it is submitted that it is uncontroversial that the criminal limb of Article 6 applied in the present case and the Court is respectfully invited to find that it does.
b. The applicable standards in relation to the applicant’s Art. 6 claim
9. The nub of the applicant’s Article 6 complaint is stated in the application form: in finding him in contempt of court for his article of 18 March 2020, the High Court of Justiciary went beyond the terms of the Crown’s petition and, in effect, convicted him of something that he was not charged with.
10. The general principles that apply in such a situation are clear:
(i) The particulars of the offence or the indictment against an accused play a crucial role in the criminal process, in that it is from the moment of their service that the suspect is formally put on written notice of the factual and legal basis of the charges against him: Pélissier and Sassi v France [GC], no. 25444/94, § 51, 25 March 1999; Kamasinski v. Austria, no. 9783/82, § 79, 19 December 1989.
(ii) Information concerning the charges made, including the legal characterisation that the court might adopt in the matter, must either be given before the trial in the bill of indictment or at least in the course of the trial by other means such as formal or implicit extension of the charges. Mere reference to the abstract possibility that a court might arrive at a different conclusion from the prosecution as regards the qualification of an offence is clearly not sufficient (I.H. and Others v. Austria, no. 42780/98, § 34, 20 April 2006).
(iii) Sub-paragraphs (a) and (b) of Article 6 § 3 are connected in that the right to be informed of the nature and the cause of the accusation must be considered in the light of the accused’s right to prepare his defence (Pélissier and Sassi, cited above, § 54; Dallos v. Hungary, no. 29082/95, § 47, 1 March 2001).
11. These are principles that the United Kingdom courts have recognised must apply in contempt of court proceedings. In Yaxley-Lennon, cited above, the Lord Chief Justice (Lord Burnett) observed (at paragraph 29):
“Procedural fairness has always been a requirement in contempt proceedings, including the need to particularise the alleged contempt at the outset. An alleged contemnor must know what it is he has done which is said to amount to a contempt of court so that he can decide whether to accept responsibility or contest the allegation. Whilst that is a common law requirement, it chimes with article 6.3 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms…”
His Lordship went on to observe at §66:
“In contempt proceedings, touching as they do on the liberty of the subject, there is a need for the contempt in question to be identified with precision and the conduct of the alleged contemnor identified with sufficient particularity to enable him, with the assistance of legal advice, to respond to what is a criminal charge, in all but name.”
12. The same principle applies in Scottish contempt of court proceedings. As Lord Hope observed in Byrne v Ross 1992 SC 498, at 506:
“[I]t is necessary in the interests of fairness that the alleged contempt should be clearly and distinctly averred and that the proceedings for contempt be confined to the averments.”
13. The High Court of Justiciary recognised this, in terms, at § 62 of the High Court Opinion, where it rejected the Crown’s submission that articles published by the applicant before the section 11 order could amount to contempt, even though the Crown had not made that assertion in its contempt petition. The High Court of Justiciary quoted Lord Hope’s dictum in Byrne v Ross with approval and itself observed that:
“The petition is the basis upon which the Crown makes its assertions that the respondent has been guilty of contempt, and by which it provides notice to him of the way in which that contempt has been effected. The court, and more pertinently the respondent, is entitled to expect that the basis for the allegations of contempt will be set out clearly and specifically in the petition …”
14. It is submitted that these principles are correct and, as the Lord Chief Justice observed in Yaxley-Lennon, they chime with the requirements of Article 6 § 3. In Scottish contempt of court proceedings, the petition functions as the indictment does in a normal criminal process. Its averments set out what are, in effect, the “charges” against the alleged contemnor. As such, the petition has the same crucial role that an indictment does in that, at moment of its service, the alleged contemnor is formally put on written notice of the factual and legal basis of the charges against him or her (see Kamasinki,supra), and the court deciding on the question of contempt is limited to the allegations set out in the petition.
c. The Appeal Court’s approach to this issue
15. If the High Court of Justiciary had applied those principles, there could be no complaint under Article 6. However, what happened was that the High Court of Justiciary simply did not apply those principles to its examination of the 18 March 2020 article. Instead, it erred in finding that this article amounted to contempt of court by identifying Women A, B, F/J and H: High Court’s Opinion §80-84. That is so notwithstanding that the Crown in its contempt petition made no such allegations and only alleged that the article identified Woman D: contempt petition at §38. The consequence of that error is that the applicant has been convicted of something he was not charged with and, applying the clear and well-established principles set out at paragraph The general principles that apply in such a situation are clear: above, there has been a violation of Article 6 § 1 read in conjunction with Article 6 § 3 (a) and (b) of the Convention.
16. The Appeal Court deals with this aspect of the applicant’s case in §§71-73 of the Appeal Court Opinion. While superficially acknowledging the importance of fair notice at §71, the tenor of the Appeal Court’s decision is that the summary nature of the proceedings against the applicant justified an abridged approach to the issue of fair notice:
[71] The process of petition and complaint is intended to be a summary one, requiring a swift determination of the court. It is not one in which extensive written pleadings are desirable, since the process is not an adversarial one between the Crown and the alleged contemnor but a method by which the Crown can bring to the court’s attention instances of possible contempt.
…
[73] In the context of a summary process, in which the article was not found to be a contempt per se and, as the court explained in its opinion on permission to appeal, the court was not confined to the specific averment involving Ms D, it could look at the article as a whole and determine, as it did, that it did constitute a breach of the order when read along with the other articles.
17. The approach of the Appeal Court is misconceived. There is nothing within this Court’s jurisprudence to suggest that the requirement for charges to be carefully and clearly set out to an accused is curtailed by the fact that the proceedings take place in the context of a summary procedure. In the domestic criminal context, it is necessary for the charge to fully set out with sufficient notice the allegations that the accused requires to meet: Renton & Brown’s Criminal Procedure (6th ed) §8.01-8.02.1. It is an essential of any criminal verdict that its terms must be consistent with the charge as set out in the indictment or complaint: Renton & Brown’s Criminal Procedure (6th ed) §8-85. Indeed, as noted above, the case of Byrne v Ross 1992 SC 498 (which was referred to in favourable terms by the Appeal Court), is clear that in contempt proceedings “the proceedings for contempt must be confined to the averments”. To the extent that the Appeal Court relies upon the summary nature of the proceedings before it, such a reliance is entirely novel, unsupported by authority and inconsistent with the applicant’s right to fair notice in terms of Art. 6. (3) of the Convention.
18. The only other justification relied upon by the Appeal Court is a general averment in § 39 of the contempt petition, which states:
It is respectfully submitted that the details included in the Articles of 12, 16 and 18 March about the complainers could lead to their identification as witnesses in the criminal proceedings, contrary to the section 11 order imposed by the Court.
19. Such an averment is plainly insufficient to give notice to the applicant of his alleged contempt. At its best, the averment amounts to a warning of “the abstract possibility that a court might arrive at a different conclusion than the prosecution” as was described as insufficient in I.H. and Others v. Austria, no. 42780/98, 20 April 2006 at §34. More reasonably, it can be interpreted as a peroration in relation to the preceding paragraphs which ought to be seen as summing up the position already set out in §§ 33-38 of the contempt petition. In such circumstances, it is plainly devoid of any independent meaning and cannot amount to fair notice that the applicant could be found in contempt in relation to the 18 March 2020 article on a basis other than as set out in §38 of the contempt petition. The Appeal Court Opinion notes at §72 that “it is odd that the respondent did not make specific reference in the petition and complaint to A, B and F but the article as a whole was before the court”. It may or may not be odd but it is the approach which the Crown had taken in its pleadings. It is not the role of the court to fill in any perceived blanks in the contempt petition by, in effect, alleging (and then finding proved) further charges against the applicant. To do so would blur the necessary distinction between prosecutor and adjudicator.
20. By, in effect, convicting the applicant for something which he had not been charged with, the High Court of Justiciary’s finding is plainly contrary to Article 6 § 1 read in conjunction with Article 6 § 3 (a) and (b). The applicant invites the court to make such a finding.
III. STATEMENT OF VIOLATIONS OF ARTICLE 10
21. The applicant makes 2 complaints under Article 10: (i) that the finding of contempt was not prescribed by law because the test used by the High Court of Justiciary in deciding whether there would be a breach of s. 11 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 was imprecise and unforeseeable and gave rise to arbitrariness; and (ii) that the restriction on the applicant’s freedom was not necessary and proportionate in a democratic society, for a number of reasons.
a. Interference with Art. 10 ECHR
22. As a preliminary issue, it should be uncontroversial that the applicant’s actions fell within the scope of Art. 10 of the Convention. This is implicitly acknowledged both in the High Court’s Opinion at §§ 48-53 and the Appeal Court’s Opinion at §70 and §76. Similarly, it ought not to be controversial that there has been an interference with the applicant’s Art. 10 rights; he was found in contempt of court as a result of articles he had published and was sentenced to an 8 month sentence of imprisonment. Such conduct plainly amounts to an interference with his right to freedom of expression.
b. Prescribed by law
23. The High Court Opinion at §58 found that, to breach a s. 11 order, it was not necessary that the material published would be likely to identify a complainer to the public at large; rather, it would be sufficient for a breach of a s. 11 order if the material published were likely to enable a “particular section of the public” to identify a complainer. This test was expressly upheld in §67 of the Appeal Court’s Opinion.
24. It is well established in this Court’s jurisprudence that for an interference to be “prescribed by law” it must be adequately accessible, sufficiently precise, and foreseeable (see, in the context of contempt proceedings, The Sunday Times v. the United Kingdom (no. 1), 26 April 1979, § 49, Series A no. 30 and, as more recent, general authority, Satakunnan Markkinapörssi Oy And Satamedia Oy v. Finland [GC], no. 931/13, §§ 142-145, 27 June 2017). A norm must be formulated with sufficient precision to allow a citizen to regulate his own conduct. The purpose of the lawfulness test is to avoid all risk of arbitrariness: Medvedyev and others v France [GC]. No. 3394/03, 29 March 2010 at §80. The test of “a particular section of the public” is too imprecise and unforeseeable to meet the prescribed by law requirements of Article 10 § 2.
i. Lack of precision and lack of foreseeability
25. The phrase “a particular section of the public” is imprecise. A “particular section of the public” can be of any size or complexion. It need not be fixed or stable in membership. It need not be confined to any defined geographical area, nor to any defined social group, nor to any defined category, community or class of persons. It is thus impossible for any publisher to know what “particular section of the public” the court will have in mind when assessing whether published information will identify someone and thus place the publisher in contempt of court, with all the penal consequences that may have. The Appeal Court Opinion notes, with some irony, at §69 that “there is nothing difficult to understand in this”, without providing any assistance in interpretating what is plainly an imprecise test. Although it is not for this Court to interpret domestic law, it is noteworthy that none of the authorities discussed by the High Court of Justiciary at §56 of the High Court’s Opinion support the test being a “particular section of the public”. In each of those cases, the terms used were the “community” or “the local community”, not a particular section of the public: A Woman v Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser, IPSO Ruling, 9 May 2019 at §9.
26. The phrase “particular section of the public” is also unforeseeable. Without any further definition, a “particular section” of the public could be so small that it is no longer “the public” in any meaningful sense. There will always be someone who knows a complainer. For instance, when an accused is convicted of sexual offences against a series of ex-partners, particularly over a long period of time, the reporting of the case will often name the accused and report that he has been convicted of offences against his ex-partners. Many people may know the accused and his ex-partners, through social networks, work, and so on. On the High Court of Justiciary’s test, that information would be sufficient to allow people who know the accused to know, with a high degree of likelihood, who the complainers are. In those circumstances, no media organisation could report the barest details of the case without risking identifying a complainer to someone who might know her or the accused. That is too slender a basis to find a breach of a s. 11 order and thus to interfere with the freedom of expression that the media enjoys. It is also too broad a test to meet the foreseeability requirements of Article 10(2). Finally, this is a step too far from the necessary link that a s. 11 order must have to making effective any order to withhold information from “the public”.
27. Such an imprecise and unforeseeable test gives rise to 2 key concerns: (i) arbitrariness; and (ii) a chilling effect on reporting of matters in the public interest. The test promotes arbitrariness because its parameters are unclear. Contempt proceedings may be taken against some individuals and not others in relation to reporting on the same matters. That is because those who take the decision to initiate proceedings may have different understandings as to the scope of the test. It appears to the applicant that this arbitrariness has arisen in practice: Affidavit dated 25 August 2020, Additional Document No. 10, at §117-119.
28. The approach of the High Court is also conducive to create a chilling effect on the reporting of matters which are plainly in the public interest which relate to trials regarding sexual offences. Faced with an imprecise, ambiguous test in relation to contempt proceedings (and the prospect of a prison sentence if one falls on the wrong side of that test), it is natural for journalists to adopt a low-risk approach to reporting matters such as this and to, in effect, “under-report” to protect their own interests. In doing so, the approach of the High Court deprives the public of fearless reporting, which is necessary for the press to play its role as a public watchdog. This Court has previously warned against such a chilling effect: Cumpana and Mazare v. Romania [GC], no. 33348/95, § 114, ECHR 2004-XI. That chilling effect is likely to be all the greater on journalists in new media who: (i) might be thought to have a greater level of independence in their reporting, without the vested interests of large media companies; but (ii) do not have access to the same level of legal protection or advice as those in the traditional media.
ii. Jigsaw identification
29. The imprecision and lack of foreseeability of the High Court of Justiciary’s test become particularly acute in cases, like the present case, of “jigsaw identification” (that is, cases where someone is not directly named, but where the information published, when pieced together with other “pieces” of information, could lead to their identification). If the test is a “particular section of the public” rather than the public in general, it will be impossible for a publisher to know what the other pieces of the “jigsaw” might be and whether a particular section of the public has those pieces..
30. That is all the more so when the particular section of the public in question is a small one such as a complainer’s immediate personal or professional circle. The consequences of the test established by the High Court of Justiciary is that a publisher will breach a section 11 order if he or she publishes information that would not allow a member of the general public to identify the person, but would nevertheless suggest the person’s identity to people in her immediate circle or confirm that person’s identity to those who already know it. On that test, the publication of any new information allows a section of the public to identify a complainer —however small that section of the public is and however much other information that section of the public already holds — would be sufficient to establish a breach of a s. 11 order. That does not meet the foreseeability requirement of Article 10(2). The journalist in question also cannot be expected to know all of the other pieces of the jigsaw which may have been published in disparate articles across a variety of publications. To punish the journalist who inadvertently publishes the final piece of the puzzle is, again, to promote arbitrariness in the law.
31. For all these reasons, it is respectfully submitted that the test that the High Court of Justiciary applied in the applicant’s case does not meet the prescribed by law test in Article 10(2).
c. Necessity and proportionality
32. It is further submitted that the High Court’s approach is contrary to Art. 10, for the following additional reasons with regards to necessity and proportionality:
i. The failure of the domestic courts to balance competing interests in the application of the s. 11 order
34. The Alex Salmond trial and the alleged conspiracy on which the applicant reported were undoubtedly of great public significance and interest. It attracted unprecedented levels of domestic and international publicity. The trial, the Scottish Government’s handling of the allegations that came to be at the centre of it, and the manner in which the prosecution was brought and conducted were all matters of legitimate and considerable public concern. They have been the subject of an inquiry by the Scottish Parliament in which Mr Salmond, his successor as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and the then Lord Advocate (the head of public prosecutions in Scotland), the Crown Agent (the executive head of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service) had to give evidence. The trial and its wider political context featured prominently as issues in the most recent Scottish Parliament elections, held in May 2021, for which Mr Salmond formed a new political party. The trial has had, and continues to have, ramifications for the Scottish National Party and for the Scottish independence movement. That remains so, thirty months after the end of the trial. Reporting on the trial, and on the details of Mr Salmond’s defence, was undoubtedly in the legitimate public interest.
33. The applicant does not dispute that protecting the privacy of individuals who claim to have been the victim of sexual assault also serves important legitimate interests. The High Court’s opinion at §50 quoted a passage from this Court’s inadmissibility decision in Brown v United Kingdom, No. 44223/98, of 2 July 2002, in which the Court “recognises that the relevant provisions of the [UK Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976] are designed to protect alleged rape victims from being openly identified”; that “[t]his in turn encourages victims to report incidents of rape to the authorities, and to give evidence at trial without fear of undue publicity”; and that “[t]he Court considers that it must pay special regard to these factors when examining the proportionality of the restrictions at issue in the present case.” However, the High Court’s approach to this issue was incomplete. It failed to have regard to the passage in Brown immediately following, where the Court noted that “the prohibition under the Act against the identification of alleged rape victims is not absolute. In particular, section 4(3) requires trial judges to lift the prohibition in certain cases where the public interest so requires”; that a defence of unintentional disclosure was in place; and that the applicant had only been given a small fine.
34. By contrast, the High Court at §§51-53 accepted the submission of the Crown that “anonymity may be viewed as necessary in a democratic society” without apparent qualification, and apparently took the view that therefore any order imposing anonymity was always compatible with the Convention, as was enforcement of the order in all circumstances. Consequently, “[i]f the material in question is found by the court to breach the order, any specific circumstances, including the assertion that a breach was unintentional, may found [i.e., be raised] in respect of a decision as to any potential sanction, but not in our view otherwise”: High Court Opinion at § 53. Implicit is the suggestion that the public interest in reporting can never be relevant in relation to whether the s. 11 order has or has not been breached, or the test which ought to be applied in determining whether there has been a breach. The Appeal Court Opinion falls into the same error at §§ 27 and 28.
35. This refusal of the High Court to balance the competing legitimate interests in its application of the s. 11 order is incompatible with the Convention. The need to balance competing legitimate interests in freedom of expression cases is firmly established, especially in defamation cases and/or when the issue that is reported on is a matter of legitimate public interest: cf., e.g., Thorgeir Thorgeirson v Iceland, no. 13778/88, 25 June 1992, which concerned alleged police brutality. In such a context, it is not required that the reporter proves that the alleged public interest facts are true; it is sufficient that there are credible underlying facts to the story, and that the reporter acted with integrity and due diligence.
36. The answer to this issue does not lie in the fact that the court had already balanced the competing interests in making the s. 11 order, as suggested in the contempt petition and in the High Court’s Opinion at §17. The Appeal Court Opinion also relies on the applicant’s failure to attack the s. 11 order itself, to suggest that there was an acceptance that the order reached the correct balance in relation to the various interests: Appeal Court Opinion at §67. However, this court’s jurisprudence is clear that an interference with the right to freedom of expression that takes the form of a criminal conviction requires detailed judicial assessment of the relevant conduct and of whether sanction is necessary in the circumstances. It is not sufficient that the interference is imposed because its subject-matter falls within a particular category or is caught by a legal rule formulated in general terms; what is required is that it is necessary in the specific circumstances: Perinçek v Switzerland, no. 27510/08, 15 October 2015, at §275.
37. The High Court and Appeal Court fell into the same error as warned against in Perinçek. The s. 11 order was a rule formulated in general terms, addressed to the world at large. The domestic courts ought still to have considered whether a finding of contempt was justified in these specific circumstances, where: (i) there was no specific identification; (ii) jigsaw identification was only likely to identify to an imprecise, hazily defined, section of the public; (iii) and where there was a significant public interest in the reporting of the Salmond trial. Had it done so, it could not have failed to conclude that a finding of contempt was not necessary when balancing the various interests. That conclusion is further vouched for in the submissions below. The approach taken by the domestic courts is incompatible with the applicant’s Art. 10 rights.
ii. The test of “jigsaw identification” as applied in the applicant’s case breaches the substance of Article 10
38. The way in which the “jigsaw identification” was applied in the applicant’s case was not only unforeseeable, it also breached the substance of Article 10, in that it substantially curtailed the applicant’s ability to report on the salient details of Mr Salmond’s defence.
39. A review of the High Court Opinion is sufficient to indicate that even reporting of Mr Salmond’s defence at a relatively abstract level was sufficient, in the High Court’s Opinion to fall foul of the s. 11 order. In particular, the applicant was held to have breached the order by suggesting: (i) that a complainer CENSORED (that position not having actually been identified), §74; (ii) that a complainer was closely involved in CENSORED, §74; (iii) a complainer was CENSORED, §75; (iv) that a complainer had CENSORED, §77; (v) that a complainer CENSORED.
40. Of very significant relevance, the substance of Alex Salmond’s defence during his trial (and of the applicant’s reporting in relation to that trial) was not simply that the complainers had coordinated their accusations against Mr Salmond. It was relevant – and a matter of great public interest – that those individuals included high-ranking members of the Scottish Government and the SNP. In preventing the applicant from reporting even the relatively oblique details referred to above, the High Court rendered it effectively impossible to report on this matter in a manner which would be intelligible to the general public.
41. This was obliquely acknowledged by the High Court at §62 of the Appeal Court Opinion:
He states that in writing the Yes Minister Fan Fiction article it had been a challenge to work out how to tell the public of the identities without being in contempt. It was not a challenge, it was an impossibility, since doing so would be a breach of the plain terms of the order.
42. The Appeal Court’s paraphrasing is not an accurate representation of the applicant’s statement at §54 of his first affidavit: Additional Document No. 10. No reference is made to an intention to tell the public of the identities. Read in context, it is plain that the applicant was seeking to be careful to avoid being in contempt while revealing the alleged conspiracy. As apparently accepted by the Appeal Court, it was indeed impossible to report details of the alleged conspiracy and of the involvement of high-ranking members of the Scottish Government and the SNP without falling foul of the excessive application of the “jigsaw identification” doctrine by the domestic courts.
43. Accordingly, the s. 11 order, as excessively broadly applied in this case, violated the substance of Article 10.
iii. The granting of less protection to the applicant as a new media reporter than the courts granted to what they deemed to be “bona fide” mainstream journalists
44. The applicant accepts at the outset that journalists and others who exercise their freedom of expression have duties and responsibilities, and that they cannot be released from their duty to obey the ordinary criminal law on the basis that Article 10 affords them a cast-iron defence (Pentikäinen v. Finland [GC], no. 11882/10, § 91, 20 October 2015). Those duties and responsibilities apply equally to those using the internet to disseminate news and ideas, and the potential impact of the medium of the internet will be an important factor in considering those duties and responsibilities (see, for instance, Delfi AS v. Estonia [GC], no. 64569/09, §§ 133-134, 16 June 2015; Magyar Tartalomszolgáltatók Egyesülete and Index.hu Zrt v. Hungary, no. 22947/13, § 56, 2 February 2016).
45. But the corollary of that principle is that if journalists using the internet have the same responsibilities as those in the print or broadcast media, then they also have the same rights. That is now the clear and established case-law of this Court: see Delfi AS and Magyar Tartalomszolgáltatók Egyesülete and Index.hu Zrt, both cited above; Magyar Helsinki Bizottság v. Hungary [GC], no. 18030/11, § 168, 8 November 2016; Ahmet Yildirum v. Turkey, no. 3111/10, §§ 49 and 50, 18 December 2012; Cengiz and Others v. Turkey, nos. 48226/10 and 14027/11, §§ 51-52, 1 December 2015). That case-law makes clear that just as internet bloggers and other popular users of social media have the same duties that the established press has, they also enjoy the same protections under Article 10. The protections afforded to the freedom of expression of journalists apply even in circumstances where the publication expresses “hard-hitting criticism”: Sürek v Turkey, nos 23927/94 and 24277/94, 8 July 1999, §61. Equally, expression is protected if it is made in a “polemical and even aggressive tone”: De Haes And Gijsels v Belgium, no. 19983/92, 24 February 1997, §48.
46. Notwithstanding this clear jurisprudence, the High Court of Justiciary held that the applicant was not entitled to the same protections as “mainstream” journalists (whatever that may mean in the contemporary media landscape): Statement of Reasons for Refusing Permission to Appeal to the Supreme Court, Additional Document No. 17 at §4. The Appeal Court Opinion adopts the same approach, noting at § 77:
The petitioner attempts to portray himself as a journalist “in new media”, thereby securing what may be thought to be the added protections afforded to the press where a contempt of court has occurred. This is unconvincing. A journalist is a person who writes for or edits a newspaper or periodical; whether in hard copy or on-line. The petitioner is not such a person, nor is he an NGO or campaign group. An individual does not become a journalist merely by publishing his or her thoughts on-line, whether by operating a website, running a blog or tweeting. If it were otherwise almost everyone would be a journalist. That is not the case.
47. The distinction drawn by the court between “bona fide journalists” and those such as the applicant who are “purporting to be journalists” is entirely inconsistent with international human rights standards. As the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion noted in their Report on Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression (11 August 2010) at §65, those in new media, who lack the formal protections afforded to those in the mainstream press by their employers, require greater not lesser protection by the law:
As citizen journalists are by nature more isolated, they are more vulnerable to attack than professional journalists. However, citizen journalists enjoy less protection than their counterparts in traditional media, as they do not have the support of media organizations and networks, in particular the organizational resources, including lawyers and financial resources, which can help shield them from harassment.
48. The granting, by the domestic courts, of less protection under Article 10 than is accorded to mainstream journalists, is a further violation of Article 10.
iv. The diligence of the applicant’s research and his acting in good faith
49. Having taken a descriptive, rather than functional approach to the question of the applicant’s status as a journalist, the High Court did not consider it necessary to assess the nature or extent of the applicant’s journalistic work. Had it done so, it should have concluded that the works in question amounted to responsible journalism, carried out in good faith and on the basis of diligent research, which is subject to the protections afforded by the Convention. In particular:
(i) The applicant has in fact published a substantial body of so-called “traditional journalism” in the mainstream press (a representative sample of his journalistic work is produced as Additional Documents Nos 26 – 31);
(ii) The applicant gave unchallenged evidence in his affidavits (Additional Documents Nos 10 & 11) of the information which he had obtained relating to the circumstances leading to the Salmond trial and the reasons why he considered it to be in the public interest to publish that information. His research was clearly detailed. He sought to verify matters as between different witnesses and assessed their reliability in accordance with UK Foreign Office criteria. The court ought to give weight to the diligence with which the journalistic work was carried out, whether or not the court agrees with the conclusions reached by the applicant: Braun v Poland, no. 30162/10,4 November 2014 at § 40. On the basis of this research, the applicant’s articles cannot be said to be completely without foundation: Timpul Info-Magazin And Anghel v Moldova, no. 42864, 27 November 2007, §36;
(iii) The applicant had made attempts to verify much of his research during the contempt proceedings by seeking an order for the Crown to disclose copies of messages between various high-ranking officials in the SNP which spoke to the coordination of witnesses in relation to the Salmond trial and which he had seen or the content of which he had been told from reliable witnesses: Additional Document No. 6. That application for disclosure was refused by the High Court: Additional Document No. 8;
(iv) The applicant also gave unchallenged affidavit evidence that his intention was to make this information available in a manner which did not fall foul of the s. 11 order by identifying any complainers.
50. The applicant’s reporting of the trial was motivated by his genuinely held belief that the prosecution of Mr Salmond was unwarranted and by his awareness of the wider political context in which the trial took place. As this Court stated in Cumpana and Mazare, at paragraphs 113-114:
Investigative journalists are liable to be inhibited from reporting on matters of general public interest … if they run the risk… of being sentenced to imprisonment or to a prohibition on the exercise of their profession.
The chilling effect that the fear of such sanctions has on the exercise of journalistic freedom of expression is evident…”
51. Had the Appeal Court considered the functional test in relation to the applicant’s status as a journalist, it ought to have concluded that the applicant had carefully and in good faith obtained and presented information from a number of sources with regards to a matter of significant public interest. The applicant was, in other words, carrying out responsible journalism. Whether the court considered his conclusions to be true or not, such expression is worthy of protection. The applicant was denied that protection, in violation of Article 10.
v. The sentence of imprisonment was excessive
52. The protection that should have been accorded to the applicant includes the Court’s consistent protection against the imprisonment of journalists for press offences. The sentence imposed by the High Court of Justiciary – believed to be the first imprisonment of a British journalist for a press offence in modern history- is plainly wrong, as it appears to have been based on a distinction which finds no support in this Court’s case-law and is in fact contrary to it, as set out above.
53. There are additional reasons why the sentence is disproportionate. Where freedom of the press is at stake, the national authorities have only a limited margin of appreciation to decide whether there is a pressing social need to take measures against the media: Stoll v. Switzerland [GC], no. 69698/01, § 105, 10 December 2007. For that reason, such measures against the media call for particularly close scrutiny, and a measure imposed by the national courts will not be proportionate if there are other means of achieving the same end that would interfere less seriously with Article 10. That principle applies where the press or others publish confidential information in the course of reporting on criminal proceedings or other matters of public interest. In such cases, any decision to impose a fine instead of custodial sentence (and particularly a fine at a relatively modest level) is always a weighty factor in this Court’s finding that the sanction is proportionate: Bédat v. Switzerland [GC], no. 56925/08, 29 March 2016 at § 81; and Stoll, cited above, §§ 153-161. The Court’s case-law in fact goes further. It is now clear in that case-law that the imposition of a prison sentence for a press offence will be compatible with journalists’ freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 10 of the Convention only in exceptional circumstances, notably where other fundamental rights have been seriously impaired, as, for example, in the cases of hate speech or incitement to violence: Cumpana and Mazare v. Romania [GC], no. 33348/95, § 115, ECHR 2004-XI.
54. A finding of contempt of court against a journalist – including a journalist working in the new media – is clearly a “press offence”, as the Court has used that term in Cumpana and Mazare et al. The High Court of Justiciary should therefore have only imposed a custodial sentence on the applicant in exceptional circumstances, notably if other fundamental rights had been seriously impaired. “Seriously impaired” is a high standard and the examples given in Cumpana and Mazare, of hate speech and incitement to violence, reinforce that. That high standard was not met in this case, notwithstanding the comments at §79 of the Appeal Court Opinion. Whatever its effect on the fundamental rights of the complainers in the Salmond trial, the applicant’s conduct does not reach the exceptionally high level contemplated by this Court before a sentence of imprisonment will be justified, still less the 8 months’ sentence imposed in his case. Responsible journalism, such as that carried out by the applicant (in which there was an avowed intention not to identify the complainers), cannot amount to conduct comparable to hate speech or incitement to violence. To the extent that the Appeal Court implies that it does, it has fallen into error.
55. There are 2 further markers of the disproportionality of the applicant’s sentence: (i) The first is that, as a consequence of the Scottish legislation on release of prisoners, the applicant had to serve more of his sentence than if he were an ordinary prisoner. Reference is made to the application of the Prisoners and Criminal Proceedings (Scotland) Act 1993 at §6 of this Supplementary Statement. In effect, he served a longer sentence as a journalist than a prisoner given the same sentence for an ordinary criminal offence. (ii) The second additional marker of the disproportionality of the sentence is that the applicant is in poor physical health. The medical report obtained in the course of the domestic proceedings from Professor Kopelman is included with this application. It sets out the applicant’s various medical conditions and that the applicant suffers from recurrent pulmonary hypertension, an ultimately fatal condition which gives rise to sudden losses of consciousness. He also suffers from bipolar disorder and depression. The effect of imprisonment on this particular applicant was thus greater than it would have been for another journalist in sound physical health.
CONCLUSIONS
56. For these reasons the applicant respectfully invites the Court: (i) To declare the application admissible; (ii) To find that there has been a violation of Article 6 § 1 read in conjunction with Article 6 § 3 (a) and (b) of the Convention; and (iii) To find that there has been a violation of Article 10 of the Convention.
We are shocked that the case has suddenly been dismissed by the Armenian judge at the European Court of Human Rights, sitting alone, essentially in a single sentence.2211101700 JUDGMENT from ECHR Registry (2) (1)
And that is the end of that. To say my legal team were stunned would be to put it mildly. Having perhaps seen more of the workings of international institutions from the inside, I was possibly a little less surprised. We had not been expecting anything to happen for probably a year, and had understood the Court had accepted the eligibility of the application. Those on the legal team with expertise in the ECHR wonder how this case came to be given to the Armenian judge – the court’s general practice is to hand cases to judges from a broadly similar legal milieu.
It appears the case never reached the stage of the Scottish authorities being required to respond. What is particularly worrying is the dismissal of the arguments at para 44 to 54 of our argument. It is now set in law that “journalists” are only those who work for the state and corporate media (there are resonances to the Assange case here), and that those in new media cannot expect the protection from long jail sentences.
The extremely wide definition of jigsaw identification as addressed in our argument at paras 38 to 43 is also now set in law.
While this road is now closed, the ramifications are so important that others are now taking up these issues, independently of me, and it is not the end of the affair. I shall let you know more when I can.
In the meantime, the unexpectedly sudden closure of the case has left me holding unexpectedly sudden legal bills. The difference between what we raised from the defence fund and the final total is about £47,000 (which may vary slightly as the last bill to come in is an estimate at present).
I shall forever be grateful to all those who contributed to the fight, and now that the fight is lost I realise it is much harder to expect people to help meet the costs of a failed cause. I also realise these are difficult times. But if anyone does feel able to help meet the final bills that would be hugely appreciated.
My work continues. I shall be heading down to London to cover the Supreme Court ruling on Scotland’s right to hold an Independence referendum, and then be off on a three week speaking tour of Germany, Austria and Slovenia, talking on the Assange case. If you subscribe to the blog you support both the articles and my activism.
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The Scottish Parliament is under the untrue impression that Scottish prisons run under the fairly liberal Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions (Scotland) Rules 2011 laid before parliament by Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill MP on 14 September 2011. In fact the Scottish Prisons Service totally ignores them and is absolutely a law unto itself.
I intend to prove this to you. Let me start with a very basic rule: the availability of the rules to prisoners. This is plainly set out in the rules themselves.
This was specifically continued in the covid update:
This law – and it is a law – is deliberately ignored by the prison authorities. On entering the prison, I was asked to wear prison uniform. I had been told by my lawyers that civil and remand prisoners have the right to wear their own clothing. I therefore asked to see the prison rules.
I was not shown the prison rules. First I was told they were held on a different level and arrangements would have to be made. Then several days later I was told they were in the prison library but the library was closed because of covid. Then some weeks later I was told they were unavailable to prisoners.
Prisoners have no internet access, but I had asked my lawyers to send me a copy of the Rules and they eventually arrived, including many documents of amendments. I then took up the matter of wearing my own clothing. This is very important because it affected a third of the prisoners in Saughton, who were on remand – “untried” in official parlance.
It also mattered to me because it was upsetting for my family when visiting to see me in prison clothing. Avoiding This indignity is precisely why civil and untried prisoners – who are entitled to the presumption of innocence – have for centuries been entitled to their own clothing.
Continuation of that centuries old tradition, except in unusual circumstances, is undoubtedly what the Scottish Parliament believed was being laid before them here:
But the Scottish Prisons Service completely ignores the right, established here in law, for civil and untried prisoners to wear their own clothing, claiming that it only applies inside the prison cell (which appears nowhere in the legislation).
I actually took this issue through the complaints process in the prison, to a prison tribunal of three prison officers held on 30 August 2021, the result of which was the tribunal claimed that under para 32 (4) the Governor had the right to instruct civil and remand prisoners to wear prison clothing for the security and management of the prison.
I pointed out that those provisions are clearly meant to apply to any problematic qualities of the particular clothing of an individual prisoner. 32 (4) could not be intended to abolish the entire right that it qualified. 32 (5) plainly reserved to Scottish ministers the power to make any more general cancellation of the right for whole classes of the prison population.
No Scottish minister has ever canceled the right of civil and remand prisoners to wear their own clothes. The Scottish Prisons Service has simply done it contrary to the law laid before Parliament.
This meant nothing to the prison staff forming the tribunal. They did not, at the tribunal, have a copy of the The Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions (Scotland) Rules 2011 available to them either. What they were going by was Scottish Prison Service memos which totally ignore the Rules – which is to say, totally ignore the law.
Rights which parliament believes to have been granted to prisoners are again and again severely circumscribed by the Scottish Prison Service.
The right to have books is circumscribed in Saughton jail by a rule that prisoners may only have books purchased and sent direct from Blackwell’s in Oxford. “Other means of amusement” is circumscribed to a very small list of articles but only if they are purchased through the prison, at a much higher price than commercially.
I bought from the jail an Akai radio for the eye-watering price of £34.95. It took seven weeks to arrive. You can buy a Playstation from the jail, or a choice of just three jigsaws, but you cannot buy a chess set. When you are locked in your cell for 23 hours a day, these things are very important.
The right to correspondence in para 54 of the the prison rules is circumscribed by strict arbitary limitations set by the prison governor on the number of stamps you may purchase. The right to use the telephone at para 62 is circumscribed by the stipulation that you may only call a list of phone numbers you must register in advance. So if you need unexpectedly to talk to your children’s school or to the taxman, for example, you cannot do it.
In short, the prisoners’ rights contained in the law are systematically reduced, again and again and again, by the Scottish Prison Service. Some times this is probably legal, using provisions related to security in the prison rules, at other times it appears simply illegal, as in denying the right for civil and remand prisoners to wear their own clothing.
What is plain is that the Scottish Prison Service cares not one jot for the legal framework under which it is supposed to operate, either in letter or in spirit.
How has this situation arisen? Well, the most important factor is complete neglect by ministers and a lack of any political control over the Scottish Prisons Service.
Following the excellent MacAskill, who established the legislation, Scotland has had two total duds as Justice Minister – firstly Humza Yusuf, who is lazy and feckless, and then Keith Brown, who is lazy and stupid. The SPS has therefore been able to do what it likes.
The second problem is that there is nobody to stand up for the rights of prisoners. As I explain in the first two parts of my prison memoir, the large majority of the prison population have come from lives of deprivation, institutionalisation and addiction. They are not conscious of their rights.
Most prisoners are dependent on legal aid for their legal representation – which is often peremptory at best as the entire system is straining to breaking point. There is no legal aid available for bringing cases on prison conditions. All the actors – prisoners, their lawyers and prison staff – are imbued by the same sense of hopelessness and absolute cynicism.
Those managing the prison have, on a day to day basis, two overriding priorities to which everything else is subordinated. The first is reducing the flow of drugs into the jail. The second is keeping different classes of prisoners separate.
Therefore prisoners’ access to stamps – and thus their ability to communicate with their friends and family – is limited because allegedly stamps are used as currency inside prison to buy drugs. Access to books is limited because the pages of books can be impregnated with drugs. For the same reason prisoners are not permitted photographs of their families, which is particularly cruel.
The extraordinary thing is that the banning of anything and everything in the aim of stopping the flow of drugs has no effect whatsoever. Drugs in prison are available with a freedom you cannot believe. Not one day passed of my time in prison when I did not witness druges passing between prisoners.
Trying to stop the stuff getting in is plainly hopeless. A much more sensible approach would be to look at why people whose basic problem is addiction form the majority of prisoners, when prison does absolutely nothing to cure addiction.
Remand prisoners are not allowed to wear their own clothing because the prison’s priority is the distinction of different classes of prisoners. Personally I have my doubts about a system of which the practical effect is to put sexual offenders in maroon so other prisoners know who to kill, but there you are.
The Scottish Prisons Service is not driving a coach and horses through the Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions (Scotland) Rules 2011 legislation out of gratuitous cruelty. It is doing so as it views that as the best way to fulfil its operational plan, and because nobody seems to care enough about prisoners to note that it is illegal.
So we have a massive dichotomy between what the law says about the governance of Scotland’s prisons, and what actually happens.
I should make plain that I did not suffer, at any stage, from any cruelty or unpleasantness from prison officers (bar one brief and minor incident). I was personally treated with kindness and courtesy, and in view of my status as a civil prisoner a number of Saughton’s practices, for example on books, were altered for me to be more in line with the actual law.
I am writing from concern for those now in jail, and for the highly unsatisfactory situation where the administration of the punitive force of the state is itself carried out illegally.
This is what I think of as a signpost article – it points you to something the mainstream media is deliberately not giving the prominence it needs, but I have no personal expertise or inside knowledge to give you. I am just giving you a start to get going. Several readers will have a much better understanding than I, and I encourage you to give your thoughts in comments below.
It is also worth noting that only the immediate improvement to freedom of speech on Twitter by Elon Musk has brought this to my attention. Several sources – particularly Citizens for Legitimate Government – have suddenly appeared in my feed again after being entirely suppressed.
My own tweets are, for now, less suppressed – my own family have been receiving notifications from me after they were stopped for over a year. I am not in general a fan of billionaires like Musk, and I do not know where Twitter will settle, but there is undoubted initial improvement.
The FTX story seems truly remarkable. From being founded only in 2017 it rose to be a “partner organisation” of the World Economic Forum and the second largest donor to Biden and the Democrat’s mid-term election campaign. It has now gone completely bust, taking every penny of its depositors money with it.
That is some trajectory.
The World Economic Forum has deleted its FTX page, but the Wayback machine has it:
I suppose it is inevitable that dodgy chancers would create derivatives markets for gambling on crypto, but I confess I had not given the matter much thought. It goes without saying that in those five years the founder of FTX had managed to take a huge personal fortune out of the company before it went bust.
FTX was a one man company belonging to Sam Bankman-Fried. The board consisted of him, an employee and the company lawyer. Over US$20 billion of investors’ funds from FTX were funneled to a fund management company, Alameda Research, also owned by Sam Bankman-Fried.
$37 million was donated by Bankman-Fried to the Democrats for the 2022 elections. Every penny of that originated with duped FTX investors. That is in addition to the $5 million given to the Biden 2020 campaign. FTX, of course, crashed instantly after those mid-term elections, which is interesting timing.
The BBC and the Guardian were constantly bombarding us with the term “democracy denier” in their coverage of the US elections, strangely not in reference to Hillary’s ludicrous claims that Russian interference was the cause of her loss in 2016.
I view as a joke any notion that the USA is a democracy. Democracy is about giving citizens a choice of political direction. The 2022 elections saw a simply incredible campaign spend of US$ 9.7 billion. Yes, nearly ten billion dollars. This is not democracy, it is a huge exercise in corporate control from which the ordinary citizen is frozen out.
Despite an aggressive tribalism which has stalemated the political system for decades, the difference in policy platform between Democrats and Republicans is highly marginal, with no alternative on offer to rampant and uninhibited commercial exploitation of the population by the super-wealthy.
The Democrats are marginally more keen on attacking other countries; the Republicans are marginally more against measures to curb carbon emissions. Vaunted differences on immigration and welfare turn out to be very small indeed, with very little changing when the White House does.
American elections are simply about the super rich funneling in vast donations, expecting to benefit when their team gets its nose in the trough, or often donating to both sides to benefit either way.
I am not sure what the connection to democracy is supposed to be.
One simple fact illustrates the true nature of the bribery fest. By far the majority of the funds channeled through Political Action Committees (PACs) are given to incumbents who face no serious threat to re-election anyway. The PAC’s are interested in bribing those in power, not changing those in power. They are simply lobby groups with an opportunity for legal bribery. To illustrate that, the largest donating PACs are:
National Assn of Realtors
National Beer Wholesalers Assn
American Israel Public Affairs Cmte
Credit Union National Assn
Blue Cross/Blue Shield
American Crystal Sugar
It is worth noting that Bankman-Fried donated ten times as much as the largest PAC donation. This brought access – he and his brother had meetings inside the White House on 7 March, 22 April and 12 May.
It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that FTX was involved in Ukraine, offering to exchange cryptocurrency for fiat and send it to Ukraine in an official partnership with the Ukrainian government. This from their press release
Aid For Ukraine is cooperating with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX which converts crypto funds received into fiat and sends the donations to the National Bank of Ukraine. This marks the first-ever instance of a cryptocurrency exchange directly cooperating with a public financial entity to provide a conduit for crypto donations. Earlier this month, FTX already converted $1 million worth of SOL and transferred it to the National Bank of Ukraine.
The collapse of the Bankman Fried scam was allegedly caused by hackers stealing what should have been a comparatively small portion of the assets of FTX, had they not been hived off elsewhere. Doubtless we will shortly hear from state salaried conspiracy theorists that this was Russia/Guccifer/an ISP address traced by Bellingcat to inside the Kremlin.
What we really have here is an Allen Stanford for 2022, with added political connections.
We would do well to heed the advice of crypto developer Nikolai Mushegian, who had as his Twitter profile: “Larpers who self-style as CEOs or CTOs or VCs are a bigger problem than the establishment. They can’t build anything and will sell you out in 2 seconds.”
His final tweet was posted on 28 October:
The next day he drowned in the sea off a beach in Puerto Rico, where he lived. He was fully clothed including a jacket. The police are not treating it as homicide so presumably their theory is suicide by wading out to sea.
States of course have a massive incentive to destroy non fiat currencies, or convert them into a new category of regulation. I am interested in the current discussion on smart state digital currencies where the state can track, control and block any transaction and know in real time exactly where each citizen or entity is spending or keeping every penny.
It occurs to me this is the wrong way round. The state belongs to its citizens, not the citizens to the state. We should be able to track online every single penny of public money in real time and see how it is spent. Imagine being able to follow every penny of the billions the Tories spent on fraudulent PPE contracts, for example.
The only people whose personal currency should be able to be tracked are those who hold, or have held, positions of power in the state. Their wealth and dealings should be available in great detail to public view. As for the rest of us, our money is ours and we are entitled to privacy.
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