Nobody can accuse the authors of the Forde report of having a low opinion of themselves. Its lofty tone reflects profound disdain for the views and actions of mere mortals, and it utters judgments with an air of deep profundity. This is amusing as it is banal in the extreme.

The Forde Report is, peculiarly, a Report into a Report. The Forde panel’s terms of reference were simply to discover who commissioned the “Leaked Report”, and why, who leaked the “Leaked Report”, and whether the “allegations” in the “Leaked Report” were true.

It is often the case in official, or at least officious, documents that a simple bit of terminology betrays the entire mindset. The “Leaked Report” discovered a great many things, all of which the Forde Report finds to be essentially, and in detail, true. Yet the findings of the “Leaked Report” are described right from the terms of reference and throughout in the Forde exercise as “allegations”, while the findings of the Forde Report are, of course, “findings”.

This is a form of dishonest declension: I make findings, you make allegations.

Forde pulls well over a hundred pages of linguistic tricks to try to hide his basic “finding”, that the “allegations” of the “Leaked Report” are both accurate and fairly and honestly reached. Yet he can’t quite obscure it. He continually bangs on about the authors of the “Leaked Report” being “young and inexperienced”, as though that somehow detracts from the fact they wrote the truth. Forde is left to rest upon the very shaky ground that their truth was only a “factional” truth, so somehow doesn’t count.

There is an extended section where Forde traces the history of the party apparatus, how Labour HQ staff came to be dominated by a self-perpetuating clique of Blairites, and how this resulted in their seeking to subvert Jeremy Corbyn after the latter’s election by the new mass membership franchise. This is all good and accurate.

Forde then attempts to maintain “balance” and treat all “factions” as equally authoritative and morally valid. That is the great failing of his report, and can be described in one sentence: Forde denies democracy.

At no stage does the Forde report accept that Corbyn’s election by the mass membership gave him a democratic mandate that the paid HQ staff were obliged to follow. Rather Forde sees the HQ staff as guardians of a Blairite tradition that had an entirely equal right to determine events within the Labour Party, despite its leadership candidates being overwhelmingly rejected – several times – by the membership.

Forde’s entire report is undermined by this false equivalence – the notion that both “factions” were equally responsible for the problems, and deserved equal weight and consideration. This approach is well represented in this paragraph:

Forde throughout treats the Blairites’ attempts to cause Corbyn (LOTO = Leader of the Opposition) to fail as in some sense legitimate because they believed they were pursuing the Greater Good. Corbyn’s mandate from leadership elections is viewed by Forde only as one factor in a series of power balances; his view of the Labour Party is essentially anti-democratic.

It is worth noting that the Forde report found unequivocally that the appalling evidence of the “Leaked Report” was entirely genuine and not presented unfairly out of context (though the Forde panel says the authors of the published messages should have been given a right of reply).

It is worth reminding us – as Forde discreetly does not – what some of those messages actually said. Here are two senior members of Labour HQ staff hoping that Labour would lose Manchester Gorton to the Lib Dems

27/02/2017, 16:53 – Patrick Heneghan: Just had discussion at strategy meeting We will meet Steve and Andy next Monday – we are looking at all 3 in May but select in Gorton within 4 weeks Katy will speak to you/Iain
27/02/2017, 16:53 – Patrick Heneghan: From karie
27/02/2017, 16:54 – Patrick Heneghan: They didn’t include us in the discussion.
27/02/2017, 16:54 – Patrick Heneghan: Well let’s hope the lib dems can do it….113

Here are two senior members of Labour HQ staff hoping that Labour would decline in the opinion polls following a Corbyn speech pointing out that Western invasions in the Middle East cause terrorism at home:

Jo Greening 09:12: and I shall tell you why it is a peak and the polling was done after the Manchester attack so with a bit of luck this speech will show a clear polling decline and we shall all be able to point to how disgusting they truly are
(now obviously we know it was never real – but that isnt the point in politics!)
Francis Grove-White 09:13: Yeah I’m sure that’s right
Francis Grove-White 09:16: My fears are that: a) the speech won’t go down as badly as it deserves to thanks to the large groundswell of ill-informed opposition to all western interventions. And b) they will use that poll to claim they were on course to win and then Manchester happened. And whether or not JC goes, lots of the membership will buy that argument. Like after the referendum when they distorted the polling and claimed we had overtaken the Tories before the “coup” happpened
Jo Greening 09:17: if this speech gets cut through – as I think it may – it will harden normal people against us definitely in the face of a terror attack normal people do not blame foreign intervention they blame immigration whats more – all they will hear is we dont want to respond strongly we want peace with ISIS it all plays into a bigger picture of how they see corbyn so I have a feeling this will cut through you are right on the second point it has to be up to the MPs though to demonstrate how toxic he is on the doorstep throughout but that this speech particularly was toxic and Manchester had happened when that poll was in the field on the supporters I personally think we are going to do very badly in deed and I think it will shock a lot of them how badly we do including JC so everyone has to be ready when he is in shock it has to be clean and brutal and not involve the party at all in my opinion those crazy people who now make up our membership never want us to win in anycase they are communists and green supporters even if Manchester hadnt happened and we got smashed they would have never changed their minds
Francis Grove-White 09:23: Yeah that’s true

Senior Labour HQ staff member Jo Greening is here actually hoping that the general public blames immigrants, rather than Blair’s invasion of Iraq, for terrorist attacks. Let that sink in.

If you had not already done so, read my analysis of the “Leaked Report” here.

In the classical Establishment reaction to release of damning material, the Forde Panel are much more concerned about who leaked it than what it says (cf Assange). Forde sees this desire to damage Labour under Corbyn by its own senior staff as simply factionalism in which both sides are guilty.

However no evidence is produced anywhere of Corbyn supporters hoping that Labour will decline in the polls or will lose by-elections to the Lib Dems.

To be fair to the Forde panel, they did not pretend that utterly deplorable behaviour by the Blairite senior staff did not happen. Occasionally they are forthright:

The problem is that they did not allow the undeniable evidence, nor their accurate description of it, to affect their ultimate conclusion that it was all equally the fault of all sides; a conclusion which can only have been pre-determined.

It is also not the Forde Panel’s fault that the mainstream media completely failed to publish anything approaching a fair summation of the Forde Report, as described by the ever brilliant Peter Oborne.

One of the most stunning of the Forde Panel’s findings appears to have gone almost completely unreported – that Labour HQ staff conducted a systematic exercise to disenfranchise Corbyn supporters in the leadership elections. Here the Forde Report is unequivocal.

It is important to take fully on board what is being said here. It is not that in a ballot validation exercise, staff were biased in using it to remove Corbyn supporters. It is that the entire ballot validation exercise was initiated in the first place with the purpose of removing Corbyn supporters.

Again, let that sink in. Is that not a peculiar “finding” to go unhighlighted?

Forde found that the Blairites at HQ had indeed set up a separate operation at Ergon House in the 2017 general election to covertly channel funds and resources away from other seats to assist the defence of sitting, specifically selected Blairite MPs.

In an election in which Labour made gains, campaigns in Tory marginals were handicapped by lack of funds which had secretly been hived off to sitting Blairite MP’s. That is the long and short of it.

The Forde panel thinks it “unlikely” this significantly impacted the result of the election. They also claim to have seen no evidence the Blairite HQ staff were deliberately not winning the election (evidently in the space of twenty pages of report having forgotten the meaning of the Whatsapp messages above).

So that is apparently alright then. Just factionalism on both sides.

For me, the greatest hole in the report is its complete failure to tackle the actual issue of anti-semitism. The original report contained some appalling examples of real anti-semitism. There is no doubt it exists in society and must be actively challenged. But while noting the weaponisation of anti-semitism accusations for factional purposes, Forde has nothing to say on the fundamental issue.

Which is this. Does support for the rights of the Palestinians and criticism of the human rights record and settlement policies of the state of Israel amount to anti-semitism? With Starmer clearly set on an affirmative answer, perhaps Forde and his panel felt it unhelpful to address the question. But without at least noting it, there is a gaping hole in the report.

About a third of the mass membership that Corbyn brought into the Labour Party has now left. Starmer, having lied his way through his leadership election, has now positioned the party very squarely back as Blairite and Tory Lite. There is therefore a very real argument that the Forde Report simply does not matter.

On the surface, it is all over for the prospect of any left wing challenge to rampant neo-liberalism, at least arising from the Labour Party. However the consequences of unchecked wealth inequality, destruction of worker and popular rights, environmental destruction and of violent neo-Imperialism abroad, are likely to strike the general population with ferocity this winter. I am not sure people are prepared for the level of calamity that is unfurling.

The lessons of what was done to Corbyn – and to Bernie Sanders – may yet need to be understood in the not too distant future. We have never stood more in need of radical change.

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Away from the Tory Babel over who will be the top “world-leading” sociopath, I spent the last two evenings in the company of decent people. John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian’s father and brother, were in Glasgow and Edinburgh for the screening of “Ithaka”, the documentary that follows the fight by Julian Assange’s family to have him freed. I was moderating the Q & A.

The odd pub may also have been visited.

Ithaka is heart-rending, and it has an important message in rehumanising Julian after over a decade of concerted (I use that word advisedly) propaganda aimed at dehumanising him. The sheer baseness of the extraordinary lies told by the mainstream media about his personal hygiene – leaving toilets unflushed and even smearing Embassy walls with excrement – is something straight out of Goebbels’ playbook.

The cold calculation behind Assange’s treatment in his last months in the Embassy, when he was denied access to wash and shave, in order to produce the apparent monster for the photos of his arrest, is a true example of evil unfolding.

Two days before his expulsion I telephoned the Embassy and spoke to the First Secretary (a call I recorded). I explained that if, as we understood, Julian were no longer welcome, they only had to say so and he would leave voluntarily to the police station. Instead we had that calculated piece of theatre.

Presentation aside, it also enabled them to retain all of Julian’s possessions, including all his legal papers covered by client-attorney privilege relating to his defence. As we heard in the extradition hearing, all of those papers were taken to Quito and then given to the CIA. This was admitted by counsel for the US government who claimed that “Chinese walls” – a direct quote – within the US government prevented the CIA from passing any of that information to the Justice Department, who are running the case.

If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. But the fact is that it is the US Government who is applying for extradition and the US Government has stolen the legal papers of the other party in the case. In any other case this would lead to the case being kicked out immediately.

If you add that together with the fact that the extradition treaty specifically bars political extradition, that the US government’s key witness is a convicted fraudster and paedophile who was paid for his evidence (which he has since denounced), and that no journalist in the US has ever been charged with Espionage before, you begin to start to understand the depth of state depravity that has kept Julian in the UK’s strongest security prison for four birthdays.

I found this curious. Mike Pompeo, former US Secretary of State, who oversaw the plot to kidnap or potentially assassinate Julian in the Ecuadorean Embassy, called on Priti Patel on 30 June, just after she signed Julian’s arrest warrant and also just after Pompeo had been summoned by a Spanish court to give evidence on the plot.

That photo is more unusual than might be immediately realised. With a Democrat in the White House, it is extremely rare for a senior British cabinet minister, acting in an official capacity, openly to flaunt friendship with senior Republicans from the defeated administration, and to hold official meetings with them.

Pompeo is now a private citizen. He could quite naturally be meeting Patel as a friend in her home – but officially, at the Home Office? This is really not done, or if exceptionally needed, it is done quietly.

What did they discuss in the Home Office?

Here is something else downright peculiar. According to the Wall Street Journal, Priti Patel asked the US government to give her public congratulations for agreeing the extradition of Julian Assange:

After Ms. Patel’s ruling on June 17, for example, a U.K. official asked the U.S. Embassy in London if officials there or at the Justice Department could release a statement welcoming Ms. Patel’s ruling, adding that she would appreciate such a show of support, according to people familiar with the request.
The Justice Department declined to issue such a statement,

There is a very strange smell surrounding this extradition.

The film Ithaka is not a dissection of the legal issues, nor an in-depth recounting of the Assange case. It rather focuses on the devastating effect of his cruel imprisonment on his family, both his wife and children, and on his father John Shipton.

John’s personal crusade to save his son is the main focus. The insight into the fundamentals of the case – that the man who did most to expose war crimes is the man locked up and tortured, not the people who committed the war crimes – mostly come from interviews with Professor Nils Melzer, then UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

Do go see the film – which has had excellent reviews from mainstream film critics. Chairing the Q&A sessions afterwards I have been struck by the number of tear-stained eyes when the lights go up, and the audience mood shifts from sorrow to anger fairly quickly. It is a remarkable film.

Let me give my own insights. As a technical bit of film-making, it is edited down from what must have been thousands of hours of footage. During the various stages of extradition hearings I was personally miked up every single day for the film for a total of over five weeks. Tens of hours of conversation between John and myself were recorded, not one second of which made it into the film.

That is absolutely not a complaint, you see more than enough of me. It is merely an illustration on the remarkable technique of editing down on this film. Over a thousand hours were left on the cutting room floor to get down to just two in the film.

That of course gives the director, Ben Lawrence, and his editor massive ability to shape the narrative by selection. Ben has chosen to illustrate the bleakness of Julian’s isolation by emphasising the loneliness of John and Stella’s quest. I am sure that is artistically valid and it presents a real truth – nobody can truly share the despair of the family, and in the long dark night of the soul they are alone.

But I do wish to assure you that the families are surrounded and supported by a group of really loving and caring people, very much more involved than I am. They are not foregrounded in the film for reasons of narrative selection, but they exist and they know they have the eternal gratitude of Julian and his whole family and many of the rest of us.

I would further add that John Shipton’s eclectic mind and deeply philosophical nature are brought out wonderfully, but his immense charm and also his great pleasure in social company perhaps do not come across on the screen. Ben has focused on the more angular bits of John’s nature.

None of that in any way detracts from the experience of a superb film by Ben Lawrence, produced by Julian’s quieter but very talented brother Gabriel. Undoubtedly the public perception has already been turning in Julian’s favour. Don’t just go see the film: take somebody who might have their eyes opened to the truth.

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All Empires end in ignominy. The United Kingdom is drawing to a close, not with a bang but with a fart.

A century from now, the dominant historical narrative will be Chinese, and Chinese historians will puzzle over how Boris Johnson fell over a lie about what he knew of sexual harassment by a very junior member of his government. Learned papers will be written over whether this was truly the cause, or whether the underlying socio-economic crisis caused by inflation and Brexit was the real determinant. Chinese books (or their technological equivalent) will be written on the crisis of neo-liberalism and how western society reached unsustainable levels of concentration of capital and wealth inequality.

Acres have been written in the mainstream media about Johnson’s lying and personal immorality, but there is very little serious effort to understand why so many in society have been prepared to tolerate this. The answer is that neo-liberalism has succeeded in destroying societal values, to the extent that anti-social and even sociopathic behaviour no longer appears peculiar.

In a society where authority condones, and constructs a system to enable, personal fortunes of US $200 billion or more while millions of children in the same country are genuinely hungry and poorly housed, what values is the socio-political structure telling people to hold? What value is placed on empathy? Ruthless ambition and resource grabbing is applauded, encouraged and held up as the model to be followed.

More and more, you are either part of the elite or you are struggling.

In the UK, the Thatcherite dream of mass property ownership is abruptly canceled. Social mobility and meritocracy are changed from an opportunity for large scale social advancement by multitudes, into Hunger Games. Where significant numbers of young people see their best shot at financial comfort as selection for Love Island, how do we expect them to be repulsed that Johnson was having multiple affairs while his then wife was struggling with cancer?

Johnson is explicitly a devotee of the great man theory of history. But in fact his startling political career is in itself merely a symptom of the decline of the United Kingdom, from great Imperial power to the breakup of the metropolitan state (the latter of course started to take formal effect in 1921).

Brexit was just a convulsion, as the United Kingdom went through the psychological trauma of accepting its change in status from great power to reasonably senior European state. There is a great treatise to be written on this and the consequent wave of populist English nationalism.

You may like to note the constant Tory use of the phrase “world-leading” in risible circumstances, the fact that even yesterday Starmer felt the need to comment on government collapse while planted between three Union Jacks, the constant militarism and fetishisation of the armed forces on TV, and the desire for reflected glory by fighting a great war to the blood of the very last Ukrainian.

Peter Oborne’s meticulous compilation of Johnson lies shows how peculiar it is that the crisis should come over a comparatively minor lie about knowledge of bad sexual behaviour, in which Johnson for once was not personally involved. But it is quite wrong to think of Johnson as unique. Oborne’s wonderful book The Rise of Political Lying chronicles the massive attack on governmental standards perpetrated by the charlatan Tony Blair.

Johnson is just a part of a process. As the power of an Empire disintegrates, so do its mores. Since the second world war, over sixty states have become independent of British rule. The pink bits on the map (“this colony is where your tapioca comes from”) they showed me so proudly at primary school have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. Thank God children are no longer taught to sing “Over the seas there are little brown children” in need of conversion (I really was taught that, I am not making stuff up).

As the UK’s military, economic and political power have collapsed, so have its political mores – both for good and for bad. Johnson is but a turd spewed to the top of the gushing sewer of British decline.

Every one of those sixty states that have left British rule, was warned that it would struggle without the UK. No state has ever wanted to return to British rule. Fellow Scots, take note.

I also want to make plain to my English readers – and remember I am half English myself – that I genuinely believe the breakup of the highly artificial British union will be very beneficial to England. Scottish Independence and Irish reunification are coming soon. Welsh Independence is fast gathering support.

It will take the break-up of the UK to jolt the great power nostalgia and silly patriotism that underlies so much of Tory support – and that of other right wing union jack fetishists like Starmer. Only the shock of the formal closure of the British state will precipitate the psychological change needed for England to become a modern, forward looking, middle ranking European state with concern for domestic and international fairness.

The UK has been in socio-political turmoil since 2016 and is now entering profound economic crisis. These very days are the end-time of the United Kingdom. Rejoice!

I shall leave the last word to that great radical Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Footage has emerged of the Uzbek authorities cleaning up a huge amount of blood after suppression of protests in Nukus, Uzbekistan.

The Karakalpaks are a separate ethnic and linguistic group. Karakalpakstan covers a huge area, but almost all of it is uninhabitable desert. A small majority of the population of the autonomous region of Karakalpakstan are not Karakalpak ethnically or linguistically – they are Kazakhs, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Koreans, Tatars and others – but the regional, arguably national, identity is also strong among these groups settled in Karakalpakstan.

Among the historical events that gave the Karakalpak such a diverse population, were mass deportations by Stalin of Krim Tartar from Crimea and Koreans from the Russia/Korea border. The latter group in particular were simply dumped from trains into the desert. Many perished, while others were saved by the kindness of locals. Official provision for their sustenance was deliberately scanty. When I was there in 2001 there were still many eye witness and direct victims of these events fifty years earlier.

Although protest was sparked by constitutional changes aiming to eliminate Karakalpakstan’s regional autonomy, the discontent runs much deeper than that. Karakalpakstan has suffered most from the enormous, almost unthinkable, environmental degradation arising from the destruction of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers and consequent disappearance of the Aral Sea.

Being right at the end of the line for agricultural water from river systems which are massively over-extracted for irrigation of the cotton crop, Karakalpakstan is permanently drought struck and agriculturally impoverished. The massive over-use of fertiliser to maintain the upstream cotton monoculture has left the dried up river beds and Aral seabed as a source of friable poisons swept over towns by wind. That is even without considering the legacy of Soviet biological and chemical weapon research programmes centred on Nukus.

Karakalpaks have had no clout in independent Uzbekistan’s oligarch driven system of government, and benefited hardly at all from having most of Uzbekistan’s oil and gas, the money staying in Tashkent (or rather London and Geneva). To add to this, there is substantial popular racial prejudice against Karakalpaks in the capital. Linguistic suppression both in education and in publications is a further long term factor of discontent.

I don’t currently have good contacts with Karakalpak dissidents, so I cannot give much detail of immediate events. The Uzbek government seems to have combined its usual vicious suppression of dissent with an abandonment of the constitutional proposals which were the immediate spark.

We will see the usual attempts to portray events through a prism understood by people in the West. But this is not anything to do with Islamic terrorism, nor is it a CIA provoked colour revolution. Beware comments from “journalists” who have just found it on the map. It is an attempt, I fear doomed for now, of a suppressed population to assert themselves.

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I was walking down that improbably long central corridor in a group of about eight mainstream prisoners heading for legal visits, when panic broke out among the escorting guards. About a hundred yards further down, and coming towards us, was an overweight and bearded old man walking with a zimmer frame and wearing the maroon shirt of a protected prisoner.

Pandemonium broke out as the prisoners I was with saw him; they yelled, screamed and made barking noises. A couple made as though to break from the guards and run down the corridor to attack him, but they stopped after only a few yards and hurled abuse. One of them shouted “you bloody foster carer!”. It seemed a strange term of abuse, but it was for me a moment of epiphany.

Putting that together with a couple of conversations I had heard in the dinner queue and exercise yard, I suddenly realised that the reason sexual offenders are so hated in jail is that a high proportion of the prisoners, coming from whole lives of various forms of state institutionalisation, had been victims of child sexual abuse themselves. As I realised it, so much that I had witnessed became less confusing, and I understood the community I found myself in with a new clarity.

A couple of months later I had the opportunity to discuss this revelation with the prison psychiatrist and he confirmed to me that a high proportion of prisoners were indeed childhood sexual abuse victims.

I also took the opportunity of testing this insight on a couple of prisoners with whom I had become friendly and who I judged would not react badly to the subject. Both confirmed the truth of it, and one welled with tears. It is, he said, one of those things everyone in jail knows but nobody says and I would be well advised to follow that while in Saughton, and not raise it with anybody else.

The truth is that most of the prisoners have been in the crosshairs of the state for their entire lives. Almost all were born into poverty, frequently born into addiction, had been the subject of care worker supervision since infancy, had troubled and sometimes infrequent schooling, and very often had transitioned from care worker to foster or care home, to young offenders’ institution, to jail. Almost all had acquired substance addictions from childhood.

Institutionalisation was their life, with brief respites back in close knit urban communities, where the state is seen as a threat as much as a helper.

Once you have been jailed once or twice, judges impose jail sentences for the most trivial of offences. About a quarter of the people I met in Saughton were there for breach of bail conditions. Many others were there for shoplifting, petty burglary or lowest level drug dealing, largely to feed their own addiction.

Think of every sensible thing you think you know about prison. Think of education, training, rehabilitation. It is all completely ignored by the Scottish Prison Service. I am telling you I saw none of it at all in Saughton jail. Nothing, zilch.

What I saw was levels of security and cruel and harsh conditions that differ little from Victorian times, apart from the plumbing. All prisoners are subjected to utterly unneccessary levels of security and physical discomfort.

In the cell block next to mine was kept Peter Tobin, Scotland’s most notorious serial killer, repeat sexual abuser and murderer of little girls. He was kept in precisely the same conditions and security levels as the shoplifter and the seller of little packets of cannabis. Peter Tobin was held in exactly the same conditions as me, a journalist in jail as a civil prisoner.

The conditions of Peter Tobin may be appropriate to a mass murderer – locked in a tiny barred cell for 23 hours a day, never allowed anywhere unescorted, held behind multiple walls and razor wired fences, with eight locked and guarded gates and metal doors between him and freedom. That is very harsh, but not unreasonable for a dangerous mass murderer.

But why is a shoplifter locked in a tiny barred cell for 23 hours a day, never allowed anywhere unescorted, held behind multiple walls and razor wired fences, with eight locked and guarded gates and metal doors between him and freedom?

That is barbaric, an utterly, ludicrously harsh level of punishment. It is perpetrated upon “criminals” who are in reality often amongst the most vulnerable people in society, who come from extreme poverty and deprivation, who the police and justice system treat with scarce respect for their rights or their dignity.

The large majority of prisoners I met were people needing treatment for addiction and mental health conditions, and needing an alleviation of extreme poverty and lack of education. Instead, society finds it easier to lock people up and forget about them. In prison they are subject to constant humiliation and denigration; they are infantilised and deprived of self-worth. How this is supposed to improve society I could not in any way tell. There was not one single person in jail that I met who I felt needed or deserved the level of brutal security provided.

People who have never been a physical threat of assault to anybody, are held in conditions that would be viewed as barbaric and unenlightened for that class of prisoner by almost any other European state. I, a journalist and civil prisoner, was locked in a tiny barred cell for 23 hours a day, never allowed anywhere unescorted, held behind multiple walls and razor wired fences, with eight locked and guarded gates and metal doors between me and the outside world.

This is Barlinnie rather than Saughton, but it gives a fair idea of the kind of space in which I was held 23 hours a day

What was the point of that level of security? I remember on day one, as I plodded around the exercise yard, ankle deep in sloppy rubbish, with four guards supervising just me, I was thinking that in time, once they have done their threat assessments, this will alleviate. It did, in that later I only had two guards supervising me plodding around the yard.

The truth of the matter is that Scotland, with a single small exception, has no other kind of prison than what are, in truth, maximum security prisons in all but name. A number of smaller and less harsh institutions have been deliberately closed down over the past eight years as Scotland concentrates on large, vastly overcrowded, megaprisons.

The only vaguely amusing thing about this is that the Scottish Prison Service makes it a boast that now “all prisoners are treated equally”. As though treating poor shoplifters as though they are Peter Tobin is a proud, democratic thing rather than a prime example of callous, unimaginative, bureaucratic stupidity, combined with cruelty.

The eight foot by twelve cells in Saughton are all designed as single cells. Over 90% have two people crammed into them. That is the extent of overcrowding. This is a product, not of high crime rates, but of a completely unimaginative and brutal justice system that resorts to imprisonment far too readily.

It is also, of course, a result of the failed policy of the “War on drugs” and the attempt to fight addiction through criminalisation. You see the results of that failed policy in Scotland’s high drug deaths and in the misery on the streets of our cities. You also see it in the overcrowded jails.

One third of the people suffering from this extreme regime in Saughton have not been convicted of anything. They are remand prisoners awaiting trial. The average remand prisoner currently spends 11 months in jail before being tried – against a maximum “target” of eight months. Some spend much longer. One prisoner in Saughton had been on remand for over three years.

If you have previous convictions, you will almost certainly be held on remand, no matter how trivial your current alleged offence.

One prisoner I got to know, had committed the following offence. He had been extremely drunk with his friends in a pub one afternoon, a regular situation for them. He had brought a £25 round using his friend’s contactless card. He believed his friend had asked him to as it was his round. The friend disagreed. There followed an argument, and a bit of a scuffle. Nobody was hurt.

The police were called, he was arrested, and charged with several counts of violent disorder. He was in Saughton for 11 months on remand. At the end of 11 months, at trial, he was found guilty of some kind of minor affray and fined £75. After 11 months in prison. Think of that.

You see, nobody does think of that. He was one of Edinburgh’s underclass, and nobody cares.

The prisoner with whom I became most friendly was charged with kidnapping and assorted other offences. He was one of the few non-addicts in the jail, but his girlfriend was an addict. There had been a row where he bundled her into his car to drive her away from her drug dealer. A friend of hers, also addicted, had reported this to police and he found himself charged with kidnapping.

He was in jail for over a year on remand before being found not guilty by the jury at trial. He is an entirely respectable member of society. He too had been held in the same security conditions as a mass murderer.

Another prisoner I got to know, only by conversations through his cell window, had been on remand for over fifteen months and still had no trial date. He was in jail for breaching an order against seeing his children. He claimed – and I believe him – that he simply met them by accident when taking his everyday route home from work. There is no accusation he did anything wrong when he saw them, other than pick up his infant daughter for a brief hug.

The problem with jailing people for domestic abuse is that they are simply locked away; nothing is done to alter their behaviour. In fact, the opposite is true. They are put into an environment where their behaviour is reinforced, even approved. While perpetrators of sexual violence are universally loathed, perpetrators of non-sexual domestic violence are much sympathised with by fellow prisoners, and viewed as victims of undue police interference.

One direct quote I can give you, overheard in the exercise yard from a prisoner explaining his case to a small knot of others, was “I gave her a slap, as anybody would”. This brought grunts and nods of agreement.

Why society thinks it is helpful to put domestic abusers into this prison community I fail to understand. There was no concerted effort that I could perceive to tackle these attitudes. There were no classes, no meetings with victims of domestic abuse, no attempts to explain why it is wrong or to make the prisoner think differently about the role of women in society and in his own life.

Eventually the prisoner is released back into society, with his views reinforced plus an added, much stronger, layer of resentment against women for having put him inside.

Simple imprisonment is completely counter-productive as a means of tackling violence against women. There is no education on equal rights; there is no meeting with victims to understand the impact on them; there are no seminars teaching the effect of domestic abuse on the children. There is simply nothing to correct the behaviour. After the embittering experience of harsh prison, they are simply let out. Then the justice system feigns alarm that they do it again.

The Scottish Parliament has not intended that prison conditions in Scotland should be as hard as they are. The Prison Rules approved by parliament contain much that is good provision for prisoners’ rights. Yet almost every single provision in the rules that assists prisoners has been systematically and deliberately negated by the Scottish Prison Service, drawing on the sweeping powers given to Governors to ignore the rules on security grounds.

The comprehensive extent of this denial of rights is truly astonishing. I shall elaborate on that in my next episode.

I am aware it has taken six months to produce this instalment. The truth is that I find the subject very emotionally disturbing, not because of what happened to me, but because of those I left as all those gates and metal doors slammed shut again behind me. I was finally shamed into producing this by an ex-prisoner I met at the Eden Festival.

He told me that there are many people inside jail who had been waiting for me to expose these abuses, and that I had a moral duty to speak on behalf of those who had no ability to express these things themselves, or occupied a place in society where nobody listened. I am grateful to him for the reminder.

If you have not read it, you can find the first part of my prison experience written up here.

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There is no Establishment pathway to the final destruction of the Imperial British state. It will be momentous; the daft pomposity of the Jubilee celebrations reminds us of how powerful the United Kingdom once was. Only real power can prevent such forms from looking ludicrous. The show continues with the power behind it gone.

The British decline from being the greatest world power to the collapse of the metropolitan state has taken only a century. It held world pre-eminence for less than two centuries, approximately Plassey to Hiroshima. This ephemeral parade of military conquest, rape, looting and systematic economic exploitation is drawing to the most inglorious of closes. Empires do that.

Who remembers the details of the final Roman Emperors, the sackings of Rome, the alliances, the purple seized by outsiders? Very few. We recall Rome’s heyday; Pompey, Caesar, Antony, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Claudius. Of later Emperors, Constantine and Hadrian have name recognition. But the last three Emperors in Rome were Glycerius, Julius Nepos and Romulus Augustus. Even I had to look them up (and that isn’t the Romulus nor the Augustus that you have heard of – he appropriated the names).

Similarly I expect that a millennium hence not much will be heard of Boris Johnson; Walpole, Pitt, Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George and Churchill will be names known to history students. Johnson will be just an opportunity for historians to pen amusing footnotes.

Historians will write sagely, scathingly or amusingly of the unbelievable mess at the very end of the UK. The extraordinary paralysis of government caused by Brexit, the brazen corruption on an enormous scale in PPE contracts, these will be briefly referenced. Johnson will get fleeting mentions as the epitome of the collapse of standards in public life at the UK’s decline; an inveterate liar. There will be scoffing at Partygate and the uncertain number of his children.

But one thing will puzzle historians. Why did the UK have enough strength to hold together for some time once the fissiparous forces had become overwhelming?

Given a Brexit which Scotland strongly opposed, a whole succession of very right wing Tory governments which Scotland also strongly opposed, and the utter mess of the May and Johnson governments which were hated in Scotland, how did a wasted decade (at least) pass after 2014 without Scotland moving to Independence. What held the union together?

The answer, of course, will be that Nicola Sturgeon held the union together. In the year 3000, first year history students at Dundee University will be sitting down to an essay question that reads “Nicola Sturgeon – Coward or Traitor? Discuss”.

The argument I have frequently seen used by those nowadays in the SNP for not moving towards Independence is that public opinion is not yet strongly enough in favour. What I do not understand is how they think public opinion will shift in favour without a campaign, when corporate and state media are so overwhelmingly biased against Independence.

The SNP justifies its period of taking huge personal emoluments from the British state with the argument that by demonstrating a capacity for good government they will encourage people towards Independence. Well, after eight years of power Nicola Sturgeon has moved Independence support from 45% to … 45%.

So if the argument is true that good SNP government will gain support for Independence, it follows that as support has not increased, the SNP is not providing good government. I think that is basically the case.

The problem is that, from an Independence movement bubbling with enormous talent, the paranoid Sturgeon picks people solely based on two criteria. The first is absolute subservience to her. The second is that they are entirely mediocre and could never be a threat. Those genuinely talented are ruthlessly disposed of – Michelle Thomson, Joanna Cherry and of course Alex Salmond come to mind immediately, there are others.

That John Swinney, Keith Brown, Shirley-Anne Somerville and Humza Yousaf hold national office in a country as full of talent as Scotland, is something I struggle to believe. Not one of those could ever aspire to attain mediocrity. They are dunces.

The penny first dropped with me that SNP internal elections are fixed when it was announced that Keith Brown had beaten Tommy Sheppard to be Deputy Leader. The worst example was the alleged victory of Angus Robertson over Marco Biaggi to be MSP candidate for Edinburgh Central. I was a member of the constituency association and literally knew not one single person who was voting for Robertson. Opinion in the SNP club on a Friday night was equally unanimous.

As I discovered when I came second in the SNP Presidency election, there is zero transparency to candidates in the SNP voting process. You are told the result, and that is it (I should make plain I am not suspicious about the victor in my own case).

It is a remarkable fact that the addition of some very weak Green ministers has nevertheless raised the level of the Scottish government. I was noticing that we see them on television much more than we see SNP ministers. Then the penny dropped that the Green ministers can make media appearances without Nicola’s permission, whereas SNP ministers cannot.

Once you realise that, you quickly see just how much Sturgeon monopolises the media and how very little publicity she allows to her ministers. She truly is the most astonishing narcissist. She is never off the media while the minsters, bar the Greens, are virtually invisible.

It cannot be denied that Sturgeon is very good at winning elections. If the goal is sustaining the SNP in power as colonial governors, she most definitely achieves it. If the goal is Independence, she has achieved nothing. In his identical period in office, Alex Salmond moved support for Independence from 28% to 45%. On that measure, Sturgeon has achieved absolutely nothing.

I have enormous respect for Alex Salmond. I did not follow the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial at all – they both seem weird and unpleasant. But what it is impossible to miss is the massive gulf between what ordinary people say on social media they believe, having watched the actual broadcast of the trial, and what the “liberal” media is loudly telling them that they ought to believe.

The difference could not be more stark and it amounts to this. The overwhelming majority of ordinary people reject the notion that you should decide the truth of events based on the gender of those involved. The jury rejected that too. The media persist in telling them they must base who to believe on gender.

How I wish the trial of Alex Salmond had also been televised. People would have seen, as the Salmond jury saw, that accusers were blatantly lying and conspiring. But the mass of people did not see that, and exactly as in the Heard/Depp trial, the media overwhelmingly portrayed the jury as wrong and the verdict as perverse and unethical.

Imagine if all you know of the Heard/Depp trial had been what it said in the Guardian and on the BBC? Public opinion would be overwhelmingly different from what it is. But the public are not fools, and when a trial is truly public and they can see it, they understand.

The Salmond trial was not truly public. What you were permitted to know was strictly controlled. It has only reached people through an entirely and deliberately warped media filter. If you had seen and heard it, your knowledge of the truth would be entirely different. The jury saw and heard it. They gave a true and honest verdict. How I wish the Salmond trial had been televised – that is worth saying again.

The same is of course true of the Assange trials.

As things stand, despite the jury and entirely unfairly, it is the reputation of Alex Salmond which is destroyed and not those of his lying accusers. His Alba Party, of which I am a member, barely registers at the polls. Yet Alex Salmond is, despite his age, starting again from scratch, speaking to audiences of 100 in draughty local halls around Scotland, plugging the case for Independence, as he was doing 50 years ago.

The man has the heart of a lion. The words of Kipling (a much maligned and misrepresented poet) come to mind:

“If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss”

Salmond is a hero, pure and simple. The sheer evil of what Sturgeon tried to do to him – and in many ways succeeded – is far beyond my comprehension.

I do not believe Sturgeon will hold an Independence referendum in 2023 as promised. I think she will ask Boris Johnson for a Section 30 agreement to hold one, knowing he will refuse. She will then declare herself again against “illegal” and “wildcat” referenda and will urge everybody to vote SNP in the 2024 Westminster elections, to give her yet another “mandate” she will not use and her mates another long ride on the gravy train.

You may be surprised to hear that in one sense I am quite relaxed about this. I am not a believer in referenda, or other forms of direct democracy.

About a month ago I was listening to an interview on Radio 4 with a Brexit voter who was being expelled from Spain. He had lived there for some years, and owned his home there, but he had failed whatever test it was for residency the Spanish government had implemented post Brexit.

The kicker of course was that the man and his wife (who was audibly sobbing) had voted for Brexit. He had no idea, he told the BBC, that it might lead to his expulsion from Spain. The first instinct was to laugh at him, and that was rather the tone of the piece.

But that is, of course, the problem with referenda. They ask simplified questions of people many of whom are incapable of understanding, or not bothered to understand, the ramifications. They also provide a great amplifier for popular prejudice, as witness a series of anti-Muslim decisions in Switzerland.

Indeed (and it always annoys people when I say this), while there is a left wing case for Brexit, many Brexit voters were motivated by simple anti-immigrant feeling. Indeed, a period living in Ramsgate destroyed in me any illusions about the nobility of “the people”.

Even more than I dislike referenda do I dislike Citizens Assemblies, where ordinary people are led by the nose by a battery of “experts” and carefully selected reading material, towards the Establishment’s predetermined objective.

In any event, the conditions for a fair referendum simply do not exist in Scotland – as they did not exist in 2014. The public have been subjected to a lifetime of unionist education and media propaganda, and that would persist throughout the election campaign. In 2014 the BBC achieved the not inconsiderable feat of being even more biased than the corporate media.

Alan Knight’s wonderful documentary on BBC bias in the 2014 campaign, London Calling, was one of the most enjoyable things I have worked on.

Unlike the joyful outburst of popular enthusiasm that characterised the 2014 campaign, Sturgeon is determined to control the Yes movement in the event her party forces her to hold the referendum. To that end she has introduced a committee of compliant Sturgeonistas – people almost entirely invisible in the 2014 campaign – who apparently are now officially the Yes Movement, and have unveiled a pledge of political correctness we all have to sign to take part, all about things entirely unrelated to Independence.

The problem is that Sturgeon’s vision of an Independent Scotland looks an awful lot like the UK. First and foremost it is to be entirely neoliberal and centre right in politics, as witness the reaffirmation of the SNP Growth Commission as the blueprint. That document could have been produced by Fred Goodwin’s Royal Bank of Scotland in 2006. Furthermore Scotland is to be entirely Atlanticist, enthusiastically into NATO and arms sales, and joined at the hip with Westminster in defence policy, while still subservient to a London based monarch and using London currency.

I am not at all sure I see the point of Independence in Nicola’s vision. Nor do I know any Scot genuinely enthusiastic about Independence who sees the future of Scotland in that way. It is a vision of Independence for people who do not actually believe in Independence. It is not a vision that will ever win a referendum campaign.

Let us forget referenda. In constitutional affairs I am in some respects an adherent of the Irish conservative philosopher Edmund Burke. I believe that the best democracy consists of the people voting to choose wise and responsible people to make law, and not in the people trying to make law direct themselves.

Now I admit that Burke’s theory has taken a huge hammering in recent years, as western democracy has declined into sophisticated kleptocracy and elected representatives have become deeply unimpressive charlatans and puppets of the super rich. But I still think leaders should lead.

The conundrum was perhaps solved for me last year by my friend Joseph who remarked “you may think you are a Burkean conservative, Craig, but actually you are a revolutionary vanguardist”. Which I discover is, in important respects, surprisingly much the same thing.

Either way, it boils down to this. Leaders lead. Scotland needs to forget about referenda. It has elected a majority of pro-Independence representatives. They should declare Independence. This could be done by the Scottish Parliament, but I would much prefer a National Assembly to be called combining both MPs and MSPs. The National Assembly should declare Independence and apply to the United Nations for recognition.

While that is pending, and at least six months after the declaration, a confirmatory plebiscite can be held under conditions which Scotland controls.

The SNP can do this, or it can continue to be a super gravy train for otherwise entirely unemployable politicians.

The moment is now. Boris Johnson is uniquely bereft of moral authority. The UK will never be weaker. Never will the UK have a leader who will command so little international and domestic respect and support, should he seek to reassert London control by violence. However should he succeed by violence, nothing could better expedite our eventual success.

It really is time for SNP politicians to stand up. Do you actually want Independence, or are you just stuffing your pockets on the backs of those who do?

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I am today in Izmir. The last time I was here, eleven years ago, I called on the bereaved family of an aid worker murdered by Israel on the Mavi Mamara. A decade later, as witness the case of Shireen Abu Aqlah, Israel is still carrying out blatant public murder of good people; there has been no progress at all. The only thing that has changed is that the suppression of critics of Israel has become much more intense across social media, mainstream media and political debate.

I have in the last 18 years shared a platform with almost every prominent left wing figure in the UK I can think of. Out of all of them, the one I enjoyed listening to the most was Mhairi Black. I was therefore not in the least surprised by the warm social media reception of her speech in the House of Commons on the slide to fascism.

I endorse what she says, and I think that the strongest evidence is the extraordinary collaboration of billionaire and state owned media in forwarding the neo-liberal political agenda. In a situation as complex as the Ukraine, the absence of any nuance whatsoever across the entire mainstream media is simply staggering.

My own position, for example, is that the invasion is indeed illegal and a war crime – but that does not make Ukraine faultless. The tolerance of Nazism, the anti-Russian language and other policies and failure to implement the Minsk agreements were very real problems. The war on Iraq, as just one example, was equally criminal and NATO expansion is foolish. A negotiated settlement is needed.

These cannot remotely be characterised as crazed or outrageous opinions, whether you agree or not. But you will not find anywhere, in any mainstream media newsroom, any of those views beyond “the invasion is indeed illegal and a war crime”. It is not just that the editorial line is precisely the same in every single mainstream media outlet. It is that dissent from the editorial line is not published. This total harmony of state and corporate media in favour of a rigorous pro-war propaganda is precisely of the essence of fascism.

As recently as the Iraq War, opponents of the war were occasionally allowed on to give another perspective. A few years later I was invited on to all new channels to explain why the UK was wrong in claiming British sailors temporarily arrested by Iran had been in Iraqi waters. The Daily Mail a decade ago published a centre page article on why the war in Afghanistan was about hydrocarbons and about the massive increase of heroin production in NATO controlled areas.

Such pathways for dissent have over the last few years become completely unavailable.

To return to Mhairi, the difficulty is that she belongs to a party which is itself highly intolerant of dissent and has no feel at all for individual liberty. I might instance the banning of protest outside the Scottish parliament, the hate speech act, the SNP initiated jailing of Manni Singh for starting an approved demonstration two hours late, the appalling leadership approved pile-on on Joanna Cherry, the creation of a single centrally controlled police force, the incredibly sinister “named person” plan thankfully struck down by the courts, and the political use of the Crown Office for prosecutions.

I have never heard Mhairi dissent from any of this, and I do not know where she stands. The last time I set eyes on her was at the 2019 SNP conference, where I was a delegate. I went over to say hi, and was headed off by a horde of besuited minders. She appeared to me quite literally captured by the system.

A final thought on fascism. Boris Johnson reminds me not so much of Mussolini as Berlusconi. The latter appeared a ludicrous figure to us, with his outrageous financial self-interest, sexual antics and dishonesty. Yet Berlusconi kept winning elections because he appealed to something deep in the Italian psyche which did not care about all those other things. That seems a real parallel with Johnson, who appeals to enough English – and I mean English – people who feel he reflects their worldview. The rest of the world is mystified, and that includes Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where even the unionists can’t stand him.

It is to me a cause of deep sadness that having ignored the opportunity for Scottish Independence opened by Brexit, Sturgeon is now ignoring the opportunity provided by antipathy to Johnson. In a fascist state the functions of central political control extend through both public and private sectors and all permitted political institutions, including permitted parties. That is a thought worth considering.

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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.

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Texaco operations in Ecuador from 1962 to 1994 dumped 70 billion litres of “wastewater”, heavily contaminated with oil and other chemicals, into the Amazon rainforest, plus over 650,000 barrels of crude oil. They polluted over 800,000 hectares.

It is one of the worst ecological disasters in history — 30 times greater than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and 85 times greater than the Gulf of Mexico spill by British Petroleum (BP) in 2010. During the supposed clean up in the provinces of Sucumbios and Orellana, before it left Ecuador, Texaco hid over a thousand different swamps of toxic waste throughout the rainforests, dumping a layer of topsoil over them.

Crude contaminates the Aguarico 4 oil pit, an open pool abandoned by Texaco after 6 years of production and never remediated.

Texaco was taken over by Chevron in 2000. Chevron claims that Texaco only ever extracted $490 million in profit from Ecuador over 30 years. The accounting of that is hotly contested by the Amazon Defense Coalition which claims Texaco made $30 billion profit. One thing for sure is that even the Chevron figure is at historic values, not real terms, and would be worth vastly more today.

The cost of the pollution to the inhabitants of the Amazon is incalculable in simple monetary terms, as is the cost of the environmental catastrophe to the entire world. However in the mid 1990’s Ecuador was firmly under the United States heel and – as Chevron’s legal team assert – in 1995 the Government of Ecuador was persuaded to sign a ludicrous clean-up agreement with Texaco as it left the country, releasing it from all legal obligations at a cost of just US $40 million.

Yes, that really is just $40 million. Compare that to the $61.6 billion that BP paid out for the almost 100 times smaller Deepwater Horizon environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1998 the corrupt, US controlled, government of Ecuadorean President Jamil Mahuad signed a final release relieving Texaco for all liability from economic pollution. That release has now been upheld by the Court of International Arbitration in the Hague.

How this was achieved by Chevron/Texaco is well explained in a book I highly recommend, a copy of which was sent to me in prison by a supporter:
The Misery of International Law by Linarelli, Salomon and Sornarajah (Oxford University Press 2018).

A Chevron lobbyist in 2008 said that “we can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this”. At the time of this writing, Chevron is the fourth largest company headquartered in the United States, operating in over one hundred countries, with gross revenues twice that of Ecuador’s GDP. When Texaco began operations in Ecuador in 1964, the country was unstable and extremely poor, with bananas as its main export. One lawyer who works for Oxfam had argued that “Texaco ran the country for twenty years. They had the US Embassy in their pocket. They had the military. Politically, there was no way that Texaco was going to be held accountable in Ecuador.” At the time Ecuador needed Texaco’s expertise and technology if it was to extract the oil. The lawsuit alleged that Texaco dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the water system in the region, along with 17 billion gallons of crude oil, and left 916 clearly visible unlined toxic waste pits full of black sludge throughout the region. At the time, Texaco’s operations did not violate Ecuadorean law. Ecuador had no real environmental law at the time. While Chevron vigorously contests the facts, the evidence shows that Texaco failed to use environmentally sustainable technologies in its operations in Ecuador. As the former Ecuador Ambassador to the United States Nathalie Cely has put it: “When Texaco left Ecuador, significant profits in hand, it left unprecedented damage to the environment in its wake and no compensation to those affected.”

In my writing I always try to add value when I can by giving my own experience where relevant, and the situation described here reminds me precisely of the impunity with which Shell acted in Nigeria in their similarly massive pollution of the Niger Delta. I witnessed this close up when I was Second Secretary at the British High Commission in Lagos from 1986 to 1990. My brief was “Agriculture and Water Resources” and I therefore encountered the environmental devastation at first hand.

From my privileged diplomatic position I also saw the political power wielded by Shell in Nigeria through corruption and bribery, and I absolutely recognise the description given above of Texaco in Ecuador: “They had the US Embassy in their pocket”. In Nigeria, Shell had the British High Commission in their pocket, throughout decades in which all bar one of Nigeria’s military dictators was trained at Sandhurst, and the exception went to another British military college.

The Chairman and MD of Shell Nigeria, Brian Lavers, was treated as a deity and lived a life of extraordinary power and luxury. The British High Commissioner, Sir Martin Ewans, himself a very haughty man, deferred routinely to Lavers. I recall one occasion when the diplomatic staff were all instructed to attend a private briefing by Lavers in the High Commission. He made some dismissive and complacent comments about the “fuss” over pollution. I, a rather diffident and nervous young man on my first diplomatic assignment, very respectfully queried him on something I knew from direct observation to be untrue. I got a public ticking off from the High Commissioner followed by a massive private bollocking from my boss, and was later told that Shell made a complaint against me to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

So, in brief, I know of what they speak. I should add that I am still extremely upset by all of this because of the subsequent execution of Ken Saro Wiwa, whom I knew, and other indigenous environmental activists, for which I hold Shell in part culpable. 35 years since I got carpeted for raising the shocking effects, and 25 years since the executions shocked the world, Shell’s devastation of the Niger Delta continues. (see Footnote).

29 years ago, in 1993, Steven Donziger, a New York lawyer, visited Ecuador and saw communities who lived their lives with their bare feet and hands permanently covered in oil sludge and other pollutants, whose agriculture was ruined and who suffered high levels of mortality and birth defects. He started a class action against Texaco in the United States, representing over 30,000 local people. Texaco, confident that they had control of Ecuador, requested the US court to rule that jurisdiction lay in Ecuador. It also set about obtaining the agreement from the Government of Ecuador to cancel any liability. In 2002 the New York court finally agreed with Texaco (now Chevron) that is had no jurisdiction and the case moved to Ecuador, much to Chevron’s delight.

What Chevron had not bargained for was that corrupt US control of Ecuador might loosen. In 2007 left wing Rafael Correa became President and Chevron’s previously total impunity in the country dissolved. In 2011 Donziger and his team won an award of $18 billion in compensation for the local population from a provincial Ecuadorean court, later reduced to $9.5 billion by the Supreme Court of Ecuador.

Chevron now did two things. Firstly, it invoked the bribery obtained agreements of 1995 and 1998 limiting its liability to the paltry $40 million clean-up operation, and appealed to the international tribunals specified in those agreements. Chevron succeeded, as was fairly certain to happen. The agreements had indeed been signed and did relieve Texaco/Chevron of any liability.

This brings us into precisely the same area as Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements and the ability of huge multinationals to bully or bribe poorer states into signing away their sovereign authority in favour of judgement, not by a multilateral state institution like the International Court of Justice, but of a commercial tribunal formed of western corporate lawyers of strong neo-conservative ideology.

Western governments put enormous pressure on developing countries to succumb to such jurisdiction, including making it a condition of aid flows. The system is so unfair on developing countries that even Hillary Clinton inveighed against it, before she started fund-raising for her Presidential bid.

Big oil apologists are cock-a-hoop that the disgraceful, well-feathered right wing jurists of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague gave Chevron a judgement that their bribed 1998 “Get out of jail free” card did indeed say “Get out of jail free”. This case in itself damns the arbitration system. The truth is, of course, that no developing country has ever initiated surrendering its sovereignty to such a tribunal, and it is strongly in the institutional and financial interest of the tribunal and its members to find in favour of the big western corporations on which their very existence thus depends.

The second thing that Chevron did was to attempt to destroy Steven Donziger personally. In 2011 they filed a suit in New York under the anti-mob Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act, arguing that in Ecuador Donziger had bribed a judge, bribed witnesses and plaintiffs, ghost-written the original judgement and subverted expert witnesses.

The case against Donziger now becomes an incredible tale of corrupt judges in both Ecuador and the United States, of whom the most corrupt of all is US District Judge Lewis A Kaplan. It is important to note that the case against Donziger came before Kaplan as a civil case, not a criminal case. Chevron were seeking an injunction to stop Donziger acting further against them. Originally they were suing Donziger for $60 billion in damages, but that was dropped because it would have meant Donziger had a jury. By merely seeking an injunction, Chevron could ensure that Kaplan was unconstrained.

What happened next beggars belief. Kaplan made a ruling setting aside the judgement of the Ecuadorean court on the grounds it was based on racketeering, coercion and bribery. It should be recalled that, at Chevron’s insistence, the New York District Court had nine years earlier ruled it had no jurisdiction over the case, and that jurisdiction lay in Ecuador. Kaplan now ruled the opposite; both times Chevron got what they wanted.

So who is Kaplan? From 1970 to 1994 he was in private practice, representing in particular the interests of tobacco companies including Philip Morris – itself, I would argue, sufficient sign of moral bankruptcy. He was also the “trusty” judge the federal government used to rule that years of detention and torture in Guantanamo Bay did not affect prosecutions of detainees there. On the plus side, Kaplan did allow Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew to go ahead; but then Andrew is not a US state or commercial interest.

The only testimony of bribery and corruption which Kaplan heard came from a single source, Ecuadorean judge Alberto Guerra. He claimed he was bribed to support the local plaintiff’s case against Chevron and to ghost write the judgement with Donziger for the trial judge. No other evidence of racketeering or bribery was given before Kaplan.

Guerra was extremely unconvincing in court. In his judgement for Chevron Kaplan stated that:

“Guerra on many occasions has acted deceitfully and broken the law […] but that does not necessarily mean that it should be disregarded wholesale…evidence leads to one conclusion: Guerra told the truth regarding the bribe and the essential fact as to who wrote the Judgment.”

Guerra produced no corroboration of his story. He could not, for example, show any draft of, or work on, the judgement he had allegedly ghostwritten with Donziger. A forensic search of Donziger’s laptop found nothing either. The reason for this was to become clear when Guerra admitted, before the International Court of Arbitration, that he had invented the whole story.

Not only had Guerra invented the whole story, but he had in fact been bribed by Chevron with a large sum for his testimony. Guerra admitted that he had invented the story to Chevron of Donziger offering to buy him for $300,000, simply to raise the price which Chevron would pay him. Before giving evidence in the USA, Guerra spent 51 days being coached on his evidence by Chevron’s lawyers – which Kaplan permitted as it was a civil not a criminal case.

In 2016 the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Kaplan’s verdict for Chevron, on the grounds that Guerra’s evidence had been properly given in a US court, and it had not been recanted in any formal evidence to a US court; while Donziger could not prove, without Guerra’s testimony in court, that Guerra had been paid by Chevron.

Followers of the Assange case will of course note the parallels with Siggi Thordarson, the convicted fraudster who was paid by the CIA to give evidence against Assange that is central to the “hacking” charges under the Espionage Act, but whose open admission that he lied in his testimony the English High Court refused to hear as he has not formally withdrawn his evidence in court.

In the interests of scrupulous honesty, I should note that Chevron seem to me to have one good legal point. There was unlawful coordination between one technical expert in the case in Ecuador and Donziger’s legal team. This was motivated by genuine environmental concern and goodwill, and not by bribery, but was nevertheless unwise. I do not however believe that any reasonable judge would find this in itself sufficient to dismiss the case, given the great weight of other evidence on the pollution and its effects.

Kaplan now set out, at Chevron’s behest, to destroy Donziger as an individual. Extraordinarily in a civil case, Kaplan ruled that Donziger must turn over all of his phones, laptops and communications devices to Chevron, so they could investigate his dealings with others over the Ecuadorean case.

Donziger of course refused on the grounds that he was an attorney representing the local plaintiffs in the case, and the devices held numerous communications covered by attorney-client privilege. Kaplan ruled that the clients were not in US jurisdiction so attorney-client privilege did not apply. He then sought to institute a criminal prosecution of Donziger for contempt of court for refusing to obey his order to hand them over to Chevron.

It should be noted that by this stage Rafael Correa had retired as President of Ecuador as decreed by the constitution, and the CIA was again firmly in control through the traitorous President Lenin Moreno. Not only was Donziger entitled on absolute grounds to refuse to hand over attorney-client communication, there was now a real danger the indigenous people and other locals involved in the case might be targeted for reprisals in Ecuador by Moreno and the CIA.

There is again a startling resonance with the Assange case. When Moreno removed Assange’s diplomatic immunity, and Assange was grabbed from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and imprisoned, all of Assange’s papers were seized by the Ecuadorean government and shipped back to Quito, where they all were handed over to the CIA. These specifically included thousands of documents relating to Assange’s defence against extradition, documents which were covered by attorney-client privilege. Again, when dealing with an “enemy of the state” like Assange or Donziger, the judges decided that this did not matter.

Let me again interpolate some personal experience. Judge Kaplan now decided to transform Chevron’s civil case against Donziger into an explicitly criminal case of contempt of court. In Scotland and throughout the UK, Kaplan could simply have declared Donziger guilty of violating his own Order and sent him to jail, precisely as judge Lady Dorrian did to me. But in the United States – as in every other democracy outside the UK – a judge cannot arbitrarily decide on a violation of their own order.

Kaplan therefore referred Donziger’s “contempt” to the federal prosecutors of the Southern District of New York. But they declined to prosecute. Here we had a civil case brought by Chevron over a decision by an Ecuadorean court which the US courts had insisted had jurisdiction, but which Kaplan had repatriated, found for Chevron on the basis of extremely dodgy evidence, and now turned into the criminal trial of an environmental activist lawyer based on a complete repudiation of attorney-client privilege. Federal prosecutors viewed none of this as valid.

So Kaplan now did something for which nobody can provide a convincing precedent. In 2020 he appointed private legal prosecutors, paid for by his court, to bring the criminal case against Donziger which the state prosecutors had declined to bring. Kaplan had personal links to the firm involved, Seward and Kissel, who had been acting for Chevron in various matters less than two years previously. During the prosecution process, Seward and Kissel as prosecutors were in constant contact with Chevron’s avowed lead lawyers, Gibson Dunn and Crutcher, over the case.

For all these reasons the Donziger case has been described as the first private criminal prosecution by a corporation in US history. Chevron’s ability to control the entire judicial and legal process has been terrifying. Every public affairs NGO you can think of, not in the pockets of big oil and climate change denial, has raised serious concerns about the case.

Contrary to convention, though not contrary to law, Kaplan also personally appointed the judge to hear the case for criminal breach of his order, rather than leaving it to the court system. His nominee, Judge Loretta Preska, committed Donziger to house arrest pending trial. On October 21 2021 she sentenced Donziger to six months in prison; the maximum for contempt of court in the USA (I was sentenced to 8 months in Scotland). After 45 days Donziger was released from prison due to Covid, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. In total, before and after trial, Donziger spent 993 days in detention. He was released two days ago.

Donziger has been disbarred as a lawyer. Chevron have a lien on his home and all his assets for compensation. They have paid nothing to the victims of their pollution of the Amazon.

I really cannot think of any individual story that better incorporates so many aspects of the dreadful corruption of modern western society. We are all, in a sense, the prisoners of corporations which dictate the terms on which we live, work and share knowledge. Justice against the powerful appears impossible. It is profoundly disturbing, and I recommend everyone to take a few minutes to reflect about the full meaning of the Donziger story in all its many tangents.

There is a good interview with Steve Donziger, which understandably concentrates on the personal effect upon him, here.
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Footnote: It would be churlish of me not to mention that when Sir Brian Barder became High Commissioner in Lagos he took a different line on Shell and pollution, much to the annoyance of Tory minister Norman Tebbit. 20 years later I was eventually sacked by the FCO for an excess of dissent, and Brian and Jane immediately invited me to dinner. Brian is no longer with us but his son @owenbarder is well worth following on development issues.

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There is a completely crazed article by Simon Tisdall in the Guardian – worryingly its “most shared” – calling for “direct, in-country military support” by western powers in Ukraine against Russia.

While Tisdall outlines well the many catastrophic and wide-reaching effects of the Ukraine war, including tangents such as its effect on climate change, he fails completely to acknowledge the rather more obviously catastrophic possibility that direct western military intervention in Ukraine will lead to full scale nuclear war.

But strangely that is not what I find most wrong-headed in Tisdall’s article. What I find culpably unbalanced is this paragraph:

The broader, negative political impact of the war, should it rage on indefinitely, is almost incalculable. The UN’s future as an authoritative global forum, lawmaker and peacekeeper is in jeopardy, as more than 200 former officials warned Guterres last week. At risk, too, is the credibility of the international court of justice, whose injunction to withdraw was scorned by Putin, and the entire system of war crimes prosecutions.

It is as though the illegal invasion of Iraq had never happened, and had not already dealt the severe blow to the moral authority of the United Nations that helps enable Putin’s actions now. And Why is defiance by Putin of the International Court of Justice a severe blow to its credibility, but British refusal to obey its instruction to return the Chagos islands to the survivors of the British genocide there apparently was not a severe blow?

Putin is merely following British and American example. The failure of liberals like Tisdall (whom I generally respect) to acknowledge this I find infuriating. I condemn the invasion of Ukraine and I have no hesitation in calling Putin a war criminal. However for precisely the same reasons so are Bush and Blair. It astonishes me how very few people in the media are prepared, in the current emergency, to acknowledge this. That is perhaps understandable if not readily excusable. But to claim like Tisdall that Putin’s actions are somehow unique and precedent-setting goes beyond omission to active propaganda and lying.

I am returned from holiday with the family, much refreshed, and have decided to revert to the idea that not every article on this website needs to be long form or profound. Shorter, snappier pieces like this to fill the gaps between highly worked articles are also useful to keep brain cells sparking and conversation flowing.

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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.

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UPDATED: The BBC now reports UK to give asylum seekers one-way ticket to Rwanda

Some asylum seekers who arrive in the UK on small boats across the Channel will be given a one-way ticket to Rwanda, under new government plans.

Home Secretary Priti Patel is in the African nation to agree a £120m trial involving mostly single men arriving in Britain on boats or lorries.

BBC home editor Mark Easton, reporting from Rwanda, said ministers face legal hurdles and substantial costs.

Refugee organisations have criticised the plans as cruel and urged a rethink.

When the Tory government announced it was in talks with the government of Ghana over opening internment camps for asylum seekers in that country, I was quickly able to confirm with Ghanaian ministers that this was simply a lie; the subject had never been discussed and would not be discussed.

I am hoping that the same may be true of Rwanda, and the Tories may simply again be making up stories to placate their racist base. Certainly the Times reported that Johnson was this week forced to delay an announcement as arrangements were not yet in place. But unlike Ghana, I do not have contacts with the government of Rwanda so I cannot be certain.

What I am sure of is that it would be a massive disgrace to any African country to host prisons for locking up those fleeing persecution – including fellow Africans. I do not wish to believe that any African state would cooperate with the continent’s largest former colonial power, which still retains colonial possessions, in the systematic imposition of racist detention. It would be a terrible blot on the good name of Rwanda, and a terrible blot on the good name of Africa.

We must call on all Rwandans, wherever they may be, to express through your contacts and institutions your unhappiness at any Rwandan involvement in such a scheme. It is only racism that determines that refugees from wars and disaster from Eritrea, Syria or Libya should be treated differently (by the UK) from Ukrainians or political dissidents from Russia (though God knows the UK has failed to offer the real help to Ukrainians it promised).

A policy which is going to include using naval boats to push struggling Africans and others in small craft back in the cruel sea, which will include shackling Africans, who have done nothing except flee war and starvation, to fly them to Rwanda, should not for a moment be entertained by any African country. No amount of money promised by Johnson and his crew is worth selling the souls of the Rwandan nation for this scheme.

We must also call on the African Union to adopt a policy that no African country will host immigration detention camps for former colonial powers. We must call on His Excellency President Macky Sall of Senegal, Chairperson of the African Union, to bring the matter forward. I call on Presidents Cyril Ramaphosa, Nana Akuffo Addo and Muhammadu Buhari to make sure there is a firm African Union policy against this evil. We must especially call on President Paul Kagame of Rwanda to follow the Ghanaian example and immediately deny Johnson’s claims.

This really is an issue where Africans, both in Africa and in the diaspora, particularly in the UK, I believe could get a reaction from their governments if everybody feeds in their concern by whatever means is available to them.

Africa has been for many years the victim of white racism. Africans should never act as the facilitator of white racism.

I am contacting a number of people to see if I can organise a delegation to Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa and OAU Headquarters in Addis Ababa to lobby against Johnson’s prison camps.

I am very happy to hear from anybody who can contribute in any way to efforts to unite Africa against this shameful proposal.

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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 to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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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.