Before Alex Salmond, Scottish Independence was an impossible dream, a romantic aspiration, outside the realm of practical politics. After Alex Salmond, it is the dominant question in Scottish politics and by far the biggest threat to the UK state.

I would argue that, with every poll for a decade showing overwhelming support for Independence among the under 30s and support for the UK only in a majority in the over 55s, Alex made Independence inevitable.

In Scotland’s national story, he deserves a place alongside William Wallace and Robert Bruce. (In my last conversation with Alex, about two weeks ago, he told me that new historical research made it pretty certain that Robert the Bruce was born in England. I told him that I knew that – in the family castle near Chelmsford, Essex, to be precise – and I had in fact published it about twenty years ago.)

I am really sad he has left us. It leaves a hero-sized hole in my consciousness. Very shortly after he retired as First Minister and Nicola Sturgeon replaced him, I said in reply to a comment on this blog that while I was not sure about Nicola, I would walk through fire for Alex.

In the end I did have to walk through fire, being imprisoned for publishing too much of the truth about the plot to destroy Alex and his reputation. Afterwards Alex very simply said “You had my back. I will always have yours.” We never mentioned it again; we both understood.

I am not going to give a history of Alex’s political career. There are plenty of others to do that. But I do want to recall that Alex was the only leading British politician to oppose the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 – on the day that Tony Blair called on NATO to intensify the bombing.

Alex vigorously opposed the invasion of Iraq and led campaigns to have Tony Blair impeached by parliament after being proven to have lied over Iraqi WMD, and also campaigned for charges against Bush and Blair at the International Criminal Court. He opposed the devastating bombing of Libya that plunged that country into a chaos from which it has never recovered.

His penultimate tweet referenced Starmer as following in Blair’s warmongering footsteps:

Starmer’s “we stand with Israel” declaration seems eerily reminiscent of a previous Labour Prime Minister’s open-ended commitment of some 20 years ago to stand with the USA on Iraq “come what may”. (1/3) https://t.co/s0oExsqwwc

— Alex Salmond (@AlexSalmond) October 2, 2024

Alex led an extremely tight and efficient SNP government of Scotland from 2007–2014 which had a long list of social accomplishments to be proud of and established Scotland as a more left-wing polity than England, with no tuition fees, free social care for the elderly, better childcare, free NHS prescriptions etc.

His weakness was that he was over-trustful and did not see the British security services coming. I know, because he told me, that Alex regretted allowing Angus Robertson to force through an amendment to SNP party policy in favour of Scotland remaining in NATO. Ironically, Alex did so because he thought it would pre-empt and buy off the US and UK security services, when of course they were actually behind it.

I do not pretend I had more than a nodding acquaintance with Alex before the plot to destroy him came to fruition. When he summoned me to meet him urgently on a cold, damp Edinburgh night I was delighted to go to see my hero. What he told me dropped my jaw.

But what stays with me most about that evening, in a bedroom of the George Hotel in Edinburgh, is that what he told me made it absolutely obvious that the plot against him was initiated in and directed from Nicola Sturgeon’s office. He was plainly in huge emotional pain over this.

He was also focused on Liz Lloyd, whom he believed to be an MI5 agent. He said that Lloyd had no connection to Scottish Independence and had initially been placed inside the SNP as an intern to an MP (or MSP, I forget) by a British Government graduate training scheme.

If you want to revisit today the conspiracy against Alex Salmond, I do recommend you read my affidavits in my own contempt of court hearing (as redacted for publication by the Crown Office).

The state deemed these affidavits so dangerous that Scotland’s corrupt judiciary quite literally ruled that they do not exist at all. They are “so evidently untrue as not to require cross-examination”. They were not accepted as evidence in my own case for which they were my evidence, which is truly remarkable. I was jailed with my evidence not even considered, or tested, as “self-evidently untrue”.

I swear to you and to the entire world, on my life and on every thing that I love or that is holy, that every single word is true. There has never been any evidence that anything in them is untrue. Everything we have learnt about the SNP in the last three years supports the truth of my story. Nothing has contradicted it.

In that last conversation with me, Alex was excited about recent council by-election results for his new party, Alba. It has been obtaining about six per cent, which would be enough to get representation in the Scottish parliament with its proportional system. More importantly, most SNP voters were now giving second preferences to Alba rather than the Greens, which he felt was an important shift.

Alex was very happy that Alba was more openly radical than the SNP. Anti-NATO and anti-monarchy, it represents a more radical route to Scottish Independence.

For a former First Minister to be building up a tiny party from scratch and getting 6% of the vote may be portrayed by some as humiliating. But Alex was really excited and upbeat about it; he relished the challenge and was thinking long term. There were days in his young life when 6% would have been a decent result for the SNP. He was simply bubbling with enthusiasm.

I should also recall the occasion when he hosted Peter Oborne, David Davis and me to dinner at a Mayfair restaurant and we got through three bottles of champagne before we even started to order. Alex was enormously good company and really enjoyed the finer things in life.

Heaven just got more fun. At least Alex will never have to worry about seeing his perjured accusers there.

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Western governments are deeply involved, strongly against the will of the majority of their population, in committing a colonial genocide of indigenous people. This happens because the political class have been bought by the Zionist lobby. The causes may run deeper, but that is the mechanism.

Democracy has therefore failed, having been fatally corrupted. In these circumstances, civil disobedience is not just ethically justified, it is the duty of the good citizen.

Palestine Action continue their highly effective actions to disrupt the chain of supply of the Israeli weapons industry.

On Friday morning I was at the Old Bailey with Palestine Action co-founder Richard Barnard (and afterwards in the pub, but let us draw a veil).

Richard was charged with support for terrorism under Section 12 (1) of the Terrorism Act in relation to a speech that he gave a year ago today. This carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years. He was also charged with incitement to criminal damage.

The trial has been set for Manchester on 14 April. I hope that we can see a very large show of support outside the court on that day. Because it is a jury trial, to discuss the facts of the case could be in contempt of court.

I think I may however note that ministers and officials had discussed the prosecution of Palestine Action activists with representatives of Israeli weapons companies and of the Israeli Embassy. It is entirely illegitimate for private companies and foreign states to influence prosecutions.

Barnard nevertheless had been told that the investigation was closed – until it was revived and charges brought by the new “Labour” government, with the specific involvement of the Attorney General.

I then headed to Blackburn in relation to some individual cases of injustice and imprisonment on which I was asked for help during my election campaign, and am working.

By sheer coincidence, while I was there two female supporters of Palestine Action were arrested just outside town, at the Palestine Action protest at the BAE factory at Samlesbury.

What is very plain is that the police used quite unnecessary levels of violence to arrest two young women, who were not engaged in violent behaviour. There was no need whatsoever for officers to press one woman down to the road with their knees in her back, and pinion her arms behind her back with handcuffs.

This routine use of state brutality to discourage dissent is so commonplace now it is accepted as normal. But we must never allow it to become normal.

The women were taken to Blackburn police station and I was able to get down and join the small vigil outside protesting at their being held.

Meanwhile Palestine Action have come up with another brilliant move this week, targeting the offices of Allianz Insurance, who both invest in and insure the activities of Elbit systems, the Israeli arms manufacturer with several UK factories.

Palestine Action has my wholehearted support because their activities are carefully targeted at the roots of the Israeli arms industry in the UK. This is the right kind of direct action.

I am less enamoured of the activities of climate change protestors Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. Either causing major disruption to the general public, or carrying out acts deliberately intended to cause shock and outrage, appear to me very strange activities which are counter-productive in gaining public support.

You can make intellectual arguments for closing roads or tube lines or pretend attacks on sanctified art works, but if the net result is to antagonise the general population to your cause, it is just an exercise in self-righteousness.

This does not mean in any way I support the excessive jail sentences that have been handed out to climate protestors. I certainly do not, and believe custodial sentences to be completely inappropriate for political protest.

But if they were to target for direct action the corporate HQs of Big Oil, or their major financiers and suppliers, they would be hugely more effective in getting their message across.

We know for certain that for decades the environmental movement has been heavily infiltrated by government agents. My suspicion is that some of the strange and unhelpful paths direct action protestors have gone down were initiated by agents provocateurs.

My admiration for those willing to act on their beliefs is not dimmed where they are slightly misguided in targeting.

In this increasingly authoritarian society, we shall continue to see growing numbers of political prisoners. The linked website is a good start but does not include the many cases of young Muslims jailed on extremely dubious terrorism-related convictions.

It is essential to the health of society that there is a vanguard of people willing to take direct action and ultimately to pay the price of imprisonment. Every great movement for social justice has needed such.

“What they hold over us is fear of getting arrested or going to prison. But if anything, this experience has taken away my fear. They’ve done the worst that they can do to me and I’m fine.”

— Francesca Nadin, a Palestine Action political prisoner https://t.co/OTAzhnUeHP

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) October 8, 2024

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At the end of Julian Assange’s testimony before the Judicial Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 95% of the entire room of 220 people rose in a standing ovation.

The audience consisted of members of the Parliamentary Assembly, who are delegated members of their national parliaments, from all over Europe. Furthermore they included members of the full European political spectrum, including the dominant national parties.

The audience also included Council of Europe staff and experts, and worldwide media. Note this well – and I have never witnessed anything remotely like this – the 100 or so media representatives all stood and joined in the applause. I need to stress this was largely not the alt media, but the legacy media in all its pomp.

Glancing up a level, they were even standing and applauding behind the glass of the interpreters’ booths.

The dignity and clarity of Julian’s prepared statement and the stark honesty of his delivery provoked this reaction, coupled with sympathy for a man who has unjustly suffered extreme hardship and deprivation for years. I hope it was a valuable and affirming moment for Julian, so richly deserved.

But I must confess I looked over at the applauding media, and thought how Julian had been slandered and traduced and his case entirely misrepresented for over a decade. I recalled how he had been wrongly represented for years as a sexual offender and as a lunatic who smeared excrement on walls.

Oh well … “there is more joy in heaven at one sinner that repenteth”.  If the mainstream media are now willing to give positive coverage to Julian’s thoughts, that will be a good thing, as indeed largely happened over this event. His words on the assassination of journalists in Gaza and on the programming of targets in Gaza using AI were an excellent pointer towards where his thoughts are trending.

I also was very worried about Julian’s health. I do not wish in any way to detract from his extremely good performance and the success he had and deserved. But to me, the signs that he has not fully recovered yet were very obvious. His physical recovery appears to be complete; he looked fit and had lost that prison puffiness. But after years of isolation the brain takes longer to re-adapt to stimuli.

The old sparkle and fire were not yet quite there. His voice had little variation in tone and pitch, and a slight hesitation in delivery. He answered questions adequately and thoughtfully but the quickfire command was lacking and sometimes he appeared not to have caught the thrust of the question.

When asked a question by German MP Sevim Dağdelen – a constant friend and doughty campaigner for him for many years – he plainly did not recognise her and at that point declared himself too tired to continue.

I am well acquainted with jet lag, and this was not just that.

I am also well acquainted with the effects of solitary confinement, having endured four months of it. Julian has endured 17 times more, preceded by eight years in the Embassy, with the added extreme pressure of not knowing when and even if it would ever end. Remember, as reported by Prof Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and now reaffirmed by the Council of Europe, Julian’s treatment amounted to years upon years of torture.

Julian himself stated at the start of his presentation that “the years of isolation have taken their toll”. In a press conference afterwards, Stella stated that, without violating Julian’s privacy, his recovery is far from complete.

I hope that the support of the Council of Europe has given a real boost to Julian’s morale, but I also hope that he will now return to concentrate on his recovery and not seek to dive back in to public affairs again too fast.

I see great pressures on Julian from those who wish, from the best of motives, to involve him in various causes in this crucial moment of crisis, of not just armed conflict, but a crisis of values and beliefs exacerbated by technology.

Julian indicated that his primary future interests may lie in AI, cryptology and neurotechnology and their uses and abuses. In the press conference without Julian, Kristinn Hrafnsson, Editor in Chief of Wikileaks, said that the future of Wikileaks and Julian’s role in it would be discussed, but Julian had only been free a few weeks and more time was needed before big decisions were taken.

I am sure this is right, and please take this article as a plea from me to everybody to leave Julian alone and give him more time – as much as he wants – fully to recover. He is a man, not a cause or a principle.

I might add here that obviously my own 14 years of work in campaigning to free Julian is done. This was a triumphant coda. Here I am looking very much younger making a speech outside the Ecuadorean Embassy on the day Julian entered it:

Here I am more than a decade later making a speech after his last High Court extradition appeal hearing:

It was a long, hard road in between, and one that took me across the world and caused me to meet so many wonderful campaigners and make so many wonderful friends, every one of whom contributed to the climate that eventually led to Julian’s release.

Enjoying champagne in Strassbourg with @Stella_Assange, @IFJGlobal president @DomPradalie, former British ambassador @CraigMurrayOrg and legal observer, @deepa_driver to celebrate @coe resolution on Julian #Assange based on @sunnago‘s report pic.twitter.com/1wT46p2KuR

— Stefania Maurizi (@SMaurizi) October 2, 2024

You can see Julian’s full speech and question and answer session here:

The Council of Europe is the grandfather of European institutions. It is not the European Union and is not the Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe. The Council of Europe’s mandate is to promote democracy and human rights, and it was a key instrument of detente, although Russia has recently left in protest at hypocrisy in the Council’s targeting.

Unlike the European Union, the Council of Europe has no economic role. Unlike the European Parliament of the EU, which makes law in conjunction with the Council and Commission, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is not a legislative body. Nor is it directly elected.

National parliaments of the member states of the Council of Europe send delegates from among their members to comprise PACE. So it consists of national domestic MPs.

In the case of the UK, several of these are members of the House of Lords. We therefore had the anomaly that the judicial committee before which Julian appeared, in a European body dedicated to promoting democracy, was chaired by a British politician for whom nobody had ever voted, Lord Richard Keen, a Scottish Tory.

The subsequent debate passed a resolution which specifically recognised that Julian Assange had been a political prisoner. This was the only aspect of the report and resolution on which the Atlanticists attempted to mount a rearguard action. They did not attempt to remove the elements on freedom of speech and information, on US war crimes and ending impunity, on protection for whistleblowers, on abuse of judicial process, or on the appalling conditions of Julian’s detention. But they did try to remove the phrase political prisoner.

They failed. Only the extreme Atlanticists voted for the amendments to that effect, primarily from the British Conservative Party and the Polish Law and Justice Party. At the final vote on the resolution they could muster only 13 votes against to 88 for.

The reason that delegates from ALDE and the EPP supported the resolution in PACE, when their colleagues in the European Parliament blocked such action, is that party leaderships take much less control in PACE. It was therefore able to set up a committee to investigate the case, with an excellent report produced by its Icelandic rapporteur.

I spoke with three members of the committee who all told me they had been shocked by how much the true facts of the case diverged from media accounts.

The European Parliament by contrast has refused to look at the Assange case at all and both the EPP and ALDE have point blank refused to discuss it even at internal group meetings.

This PACE report has no enforcement clout, but it can make a real difference to perception. The PACE report and resolution on torture and extraordinary rendition, for example, to which I myself gave witness evidence, had a major effect on public and political opinion and in getting the media to accept those events as fact.

The European Court of Human Rights is a Council of Europe body. Resolutions of PACE are of interest to the ECHR. One thing we learnt from Julian is that his plea bargain contains provisions against him going to the ECHR over his treatment, and against making Freedom of Information requests.

I assume that if he breaks these conditions, there is a mechanism within the USA by which his prosecution or at least sentencing can re-open. But I cannot see how it could be enforced against him in Europe. The ECHR is not going to accept that the right to appeal over fundamental rights can be signed away in a coerced agreement, and I cannot see even the UK seeking to extradite somebody to the US because they appealed to the ECHR.

It appears unthinkable.

It may be relevant that among Assange’s strangely large entourage were the Belgian and French lawyers who had been specifically tasked with preparing his appeal to the ECHR had the UK courts ordered his extradition. So watch this space…

It is also of note that PACE has selected Sweden for a Periodic Review of its human rights record beginning next year. Those behind the selection proposed it specifically so that a report can be produced that takes a deep dive into the extraordinary concoction of sexual assault allegations against Assange and their misuse by the authorities, as detailed in Nils Melzer’s remarkable book. So again, watch this space…

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Netanyahu is desperate to keep war simmering along and to draw the USA closer and closer to him. At the same time he cannot send ground forces into South Lebanon where they will take massive casualties.

Israel can assassinate, it can employ indiscriminate terrorism and it can bombard from the air, and it has done all these things against Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. But Israel cannot destroy Hamas nor Hezbollah, cannot get back its hostages from Gaza and cannot make Northern Israel safe for its colonialists.

Nothing Israel is doing in any way advances those declared objectives and in fact makes all of them increasingly unlikely ever to be attained.

But as Biden and Harris accept and reinforce every single escalation and every single illegality, Israel’s stranglehold on its western vassal politicians gets ever stronger. Those have now all (including both UK Labour and Conservative ministers) supported illegality well beyond the stage where there is any going back. They have now to hope that they will be “justified” by military victory.

The Iraq war shows that however illegal the war, if you win you get to write – or at least interpret – the rules of international law. I wish I could come up with good counter-examples. “Justice” is visited only upon losers.

But the problem for Netanyahu, Sunak, Starmer, von der Leyen et al. is that just what victory looks like, nobody seems in the least clear.

We appear to be locked into a hideous distortion of existentialism, where the killing of Arabs of any age and sex is in itself the path of virtue and a reason for living.

Israel’s TikTok army of child-killers, rapists and lingerie-flaunters will take heavy casualties if it advances into Lebanon. It is currently launching intense air attacks, but it cannot destroy Hezbollah that way, not even were it to triple the colossal amount of explosive it has dropped on Gaza.

Netanyahu’s strategy of assassinations and deadly stunts appears to be an attempt to goad Hezbollah out of their own territory into a suicidal advance into Israel. But Nasrullah is not falling for it.

It is worth stressing that, contrary to the propaganda, in the last year Israel has hit Lebanon with five missiles for every one sent by Hezbollah.

Meantime the United Kingdom’s claims to respect international law are exposed as an utter sham as it failed to vote for the UNGA Resolution giving effect to the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territory.

The ICJ’s ruling that the Occupation is itself an illegal act, and that states must do nothing which can assist Israel to maintain it, sets out a clear legal status quo which the UK is equally clearly breaking.

When the ICJ decision came out on 19 July, the FCDO statement was as follows:

We have received the Advisory Opinion issued by the International Court of Justice on Friday 19 July and are considering it carefully before responding. The UK respects the independence of the ICJ.

The promised response has never come; unless you take the failure to vote at the UN General Assembly for the implementation of the ICJ ruling as the response. The decision to suspend 8% of arms export licenses for Israel was framed not in terms of this ICJ ruling – which logically can only require the cessation of all arms sales to Israel – but more broadly in terms of unspecified possible breaches of international humanitarian law.

In its “explanation of vote” at the UN General Assembly, the UK deliberately ignored a key tenet of the ICJ Opinion. The UK stated:

“our abstention reflects our unwavering determination to focus on efforts to bring about a peaceful and negotiated two-state solution,”

This ignores the ICJ ruling that Israel must leave the occupied territories before any negotiations. An occupied people cannot negotiate with, in effect, a gun held at their head. That is explicitly why the ICJ did not accept that the Oslo Accords alienated any Palestinian rights in international law.

The UK is still – directly contrary to the ICJ – attempting to maintain that Palestine’s right not to be occupied was signed away at Oslo.

British military flights, weapons supplies and intelligence cooperation with the Israel occupation continue unabated. Starmer’s total support for Israel is now a fixed part of the governing landscape, as the failure to condemn the terrorist device attacks on the Lebanon makes clear.

The US and UK are now hopelessly yoked to a Netanyahu nihilist strategy of which the primary aim is to retain his own power and immunity from prosecution by permanent conflict, of a kind which makes his allies ever more complicit and which will rope them in to active military support.

That requires constant Israeli aggression against an axis of resistance that has so far refused to be provoked into major conflict. Israel’s plan is to humiliate Iran and its allies to an extent that a full-on regional war becomes inevitable, in which the United States will fight alongside them – and very probably the Sunni Arab regimes too, I am extremely sorry to say.

This is plainly madness that is entirely against the interests of the Western powers themselves. But their politicians, including very directly Biden and Starmer, are so compromised by Zionist-lobby money that there appears to be no escape, short of popular revolt in the West.

The West is bound to Israel by the simple, unalloyed mechanism of cash paid to politicians. That is the truth.

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Keir Starmer has left about 70% of the landscape of historic western political and economic thought vacant to his left. It is unsurprising that a new party will arrive to claim the unoccupied ground.

A meeting at the weekend discussed a new party provisionally called The Collective, which may be led by Jeremy Corbyn, who addressed the meeting. That was strangely secretive but seems to have been an adjunct of Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Movement international conference, which occurred simultaneously and featured many of the same cast.

The Collective is not new. This name was used for a loose coalition of independent candidates in the last general election, although it did not register as a political party so the name was not on the ballot paper. I had expected it to join forces with the Workers Party for which I stood, which did not happen. I think a non-aggression pact was broadly observed, though I recall grumbles.

My general attitude is positive – I think a new left party is urgently needed as it sinks in to people just how right wing Starmer is. He is also becoming massively unpopular very quickly, while the Tories still are.

But I believe these practical points are important on the detail of what needs to be done on the left in the UK today.

1) Corbyn and Galloway must come together.

The Workers’ Party got 210,000 votes at the General Election, which is a good start that cannot be ignored, and is building a membership and organisational base.

I count both men as friends and I know they get on fine on a personal basis. Jeremy remains the leader who gained three million more general election votes in 2017 than Keir Starmer did in 2024. George Galloway has a large base of dedicated support.

The failure to come together as a united left in the 2024 general election was a historic opportunity lost. The blame for this did not lie with Galloway, who in January 2024 himself put a motion to the Workers Party conference enabling such merging. I did not discuss it direct with Jeremy, but I believe he thought his best chance of election was as an Independent.

My own belief is that a Corbyn-led party might have won several seats and this was a tactical mistake by Jeremy; whereas George needs to tone down his populist social conservatism, which alienated many around Jeremy, if the aim is for a united left.

The biggest mistake of all would be for the two parties to refuse to unite; which sadly is far from impossible. Initially any new party needs to be led by Jeremy to establish itself. George should be Deputy Leader. Neither man would wish to serve for an extended period.

I would like to see Andrew Feinstein eventually lead, not least because he most definitely would not want to do it.

2) The party must be anti-Zionist.

The destruction of Jeremy’s very real prospects of being Prime Minister by the utterly ludicrous, Establishment-organised slur of antisemitism cannot simply be ignored.

The truth is, I am very sorry to say, that as Labour leader Jeremy was far too willing to attempt to appease the Zionist lobby, by throwing people who would have walked through fire for him under the bus. Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson are among the scores of people who come to mind.

A great many of the expelled activists were Jewish.

A new party of the left should make plain that these anti-genocide activists are positively welcome, and celebrated.

3) The party must avoid cliquishness

If the new party is essentially Jeremy’s project, this is a problem. He does tend to surround himself with a very tight and unchanging group. If you will allow me a moment of delusion of grandeur, the fact that they held a conference on forming a new party of the left and did not bother to contact Craig Murray is an indicator they are not reaching out widely.

According to the report in the Canary, the Director of the new party will be Pamela Fitzpatrick, who is Director of Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project, unelected to either position.

I exclude Ms Fitzzpatrick from this next, because I simply do not know in her case. But one irony, and the reason so many decent activists were stabbed in the back when Corbyn was leader, is that many of the close Corbyn clique are in fact Zionists.

They are “soft” Zionists, you know, the ones who want to treat the natives kindly, pat Palestinians on the head and build them cultural centres in their reservations. But Zionists they are. They support the continued existence of the terrorist entity in the Middle East.

The Peace and Justice Project has laudable aims and does advocacy and campaigning work worldwide, with a focus inter alia on South America, influenced by Jeremy’s impressive and underrated wife Laura. But I am obliged to say it is not the most transparent of organisations.

The Peace and Justice Project Ltd is a private company. I believe it has a very serious membership income but I am not entirely sure what it is. The published accounts tell you next to nothing, certainly not its income or membership figures.

There are a number of linked organisations – Progressive International is another – which appear to primarily exist to pay their staff to do stuff that other activists do for nothing, only with added layers of self-importance and entitlement.

Perhaps the paying bit is a good thing, and doubtless the abuse is much worse in the world of right-wing think tanks. But there is just something about it all that does not quite sit right with me, and makes me think it is not a good basis for a mass political party.

So, in short, a genuine new party of the left cannot just automatically get run by the bunch around Jeremy Corbyn, as appears to be the presumption.

4) The party must avoid British Unionism

I have always found it very strange that there are those who support Irish unification but oppose Scottish Independence. The current support of the UK state for the genocide in Gaza is just one example of its malevolence, which is a feature and not a glitch.

In Scotland the large majority of the left wing are pro-Independence; while the right, including the Starmerite right, are overwhelmingly Unionist. The space for a radical left unionist party is very small indeed.

The desire to break up the imperialist UK – whose continuing Imperial instincts have helped devastate Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Palestine in recent times – is a perfectly decent left-wing impulse.

The Alba Party in Scotland is already anti-NATO and anti-monarchy, among other left-wing markers.

Ideally, a new left party should simply leave Scotland (and perhaps Wales) alone. If it does wish to campaign in Scotland, it should take the line that Independence is for the Scottish people alone to decide, and support the unfettered right of the Scottish people to choose, at a minimum.

But any genuine left-wing party should wish to break up the rogue UK state.

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Alongside Richard Medhurst I had the chance to state rather more truth than is generally heard inside the United Nations in Geneva:

“Not only is the West complicit in the Genocide in Palestine, the ruling class of the West is so scared of its own citizens that it is now prepared to persecute its own citizens in support of a genocide”.

Richard Medhurst followed up on the same theme:

Our appearance at the UN was organised by Justice for All International, an admirable Geneva based NGO with which I am proud to be associated. If you can donate to their continuing crowdfunder I should be grateful. Please note that neither Richard nor I stand to receive anything from this other than (hopefully) travel expenses. Their crowdfunder is here.

On an apparently unrelated note, the scandal of the day is Keir Starmer receiving money from wealthy donors for designer clothes and accessories for his wife and himself. In the video above I am wearing the second-hand suit I bought in the Hague when I pitched up for the ICJ South Africa/Israel Genocide case. It doesn’t appear to detract from my words at all.

In the video I state that the reason the western ruling class support Israel is that they are bought.

UK civil servants are not allowed to receive gifts above a very small monetary value, in case they are influenced. I cannot understand why elected politicians are not subject to the same rule. They are in receipt of perfectly adequate public salaries and administrative and policy support from the public purse.

Why are any donors allowed to pay to influence them?

I would say the same for political parties. Individual donations over £1,000 should be banned, from people or organisations. If that shrank party machines, that would be entirely a good thing.

If the West is ever to return to meaningful democracy, these are a small but essential proportion of the changes required in our corrupt systems.

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I just sat through a recording of the Trump/Harris debate. Ignoring the merits of their political stances, I agree with the general consensus that Kamala Harris “won” in performance terms, but only because Trump was awful.

Both were of course terrible on Palestine. While I appreciate that that is of most interest to perhaps a majority of my readers, and that it is a key issue for a significant slice of US voters, it is not what this post is about. I am considering more broadly the prospects for who becomes US President.

Trump’s ability to make a coherent argument appears to have deserted him and he was easily sidetracked by Harris into irrelevant quibbles, notably on rally attendances.

While Harris said nothing even vaguely impressive herself, and was wide open to attack on her own record, Trump did not seem sufficiently in command of the logic of debate effectively to counterpunch.

I suspect that the debate will have done very little to affect public support, because Trump’s attack messages on immigration will motivate his followers regardless, and he kept banging then out.

But I wanted to focus in on the shameless bias of the moderators in favour of Harris. The framing of questions to each candidate was far more hostile towards Trump. Let me take the first four questions asked, two to each candidate:

David Muir to Trump:

“Mr President, I do want to drill down on something you both brought up. The Vice President brought up your tariffs, you responded, and let’s drill down on this. Because your plan, it is what she calls, it is essentially, a national sales tax. Your proposal calls for tariffs, as you pointed out here, on foreign imports across the board. You recently said that you might double your plan imposing tariffs of 20% on goods coming into this country. As you know many economists say that with tariffs at that level, costs are then passed on to the consumer. Vice President Harris has said it will mean higher prices on gas, food, clothing, medication, arguing it will cost the typical family nearly 4,000 dollars a year. Do you believe Americans can afford higher prices because of tariffs.”

Note what is happening here. Muir twice quotes Harris and validates her assertion that a tariff is a sales tax: “it is what she calls, it is essentially, a national sales tax”. He then quotes Harris again on it costing American families $4,000 a year. His question then to Trump is not framed as whether he agrees with Harris’s assertion, but the much more loaded question of “Do you believe Americans can afford higher prices?”

I am in general inclined towards free trade myself, but a tariff is not simply a sales tax, and the $4,000 a year claim is utter nonsense.

The average US household spends only about 11% of its consumption on imported goods. That equates to about $8,000 worth of imported goods per household per year.

Even if Trump were to slap a 20% tariff on all imported goods – which is not his plan – and even if all those goods currently enjoyed zero tariff – which is certainly not the case – and even if there were no import substitution and the entire cost was passed on to the consumer – neither of which would be the case, it plainly is not remotely possible that a 20% tariff on part of $8,000 of spending could cost $4,000.

But whereas various nonsenses spouted by Trump were “fact-checked” by the moderators, Harris’s completely clueless propaganda was endorsed and reinforced.

Trump however ought to have been able to counter by talking of the purpose of promoting domestic production and encouraging domestic industry and agriculture. His inability to do so – and indeed to counterpunch with logical refutation on anything – made this deeply unsatisfying watching.

Lindsey David to Trump

“I want to turn to the issue of abortion. President Trump you have often touted that you were able to kill Roe v Wade last year. You said that you were proud to be the most pro-life President in American history. Then last month you said that your administration would be great for women and their reproductive rights. In your home state of Florida you surprised many with regard to your six-week abortion ban because you initially said that it was too short and said (quote) “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks”. But then the very next day you reversed course and said that you would vote to support the six-week ban. Vice President Harris says that women should not trust you on the issue of abortion because you have changed your position so many times. Therefore why should they trust you?”

Note the aggression in the phrasing of this question, and the use of the negative connotation verb “touting” in the setup. Also throwing in of amplifier phrases… “the very next day”.

Now contrast the tone with the superficially “combative” questions to challenge Harris

David Muir to Harris:

“We are going to turn now to immigration and border security. We know it’s an issue to Republicans, Democrats, voters across the board in this country. Vice President Harris, you were tasked by President Biden with getting to the root causes of migration from Central America. We know that illegal border crossings reached a high in the Biden administration. This past June President Biden passed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act, and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?”

This is fascinating because plainly the intention is to appear to be tackling Harris, while the entire framing of the question is slanted to favour her. The characterisation of Harris’s role is precisely the framing of her campaign team: she was not in charge of border control or immigrant policy, but rather of tackling “the root causes” of immigration. This is exactly how Harris wants it put, but not really true.

Furthermore the problem is presented as essentially solved, again an extremely dubious proposition, and the question is basically – why did it take you so long?

After a couple of exchanges between the candidates Muir leapt in to interject and reinforce a point already made by Kamala Harris:

David Muir:
“President Trump on that point I am going to invite your response”
Trump:
“Well I would like to respond”
David Muir:
“Let me just ask though, why did you try to kill that bill, and successfully do so, that would have put thousands of extra agents on the border?

Let us then look at the framing of another “challenging” question to Harris:

Lindsey David to Harris:

Vice President Harris, in your last run for President you said you wanted to ban fracking, now you don’t. You wanted mandatory buyback programmes for assault weapons, now your campaign says you don’t. You supported decriminalising border crossings, now you are taking a harder line. I know you say that your values have not changed, so then why have so many of your policy positions changed?

Note how, with both questions to Harris, the answer is provided within the question. The immigration question was presented as solved and the flip flop question as reflecting consistent values. Harris did grab on to the proffered lifeline and banged on about her values as a “middle class kid”, and all the hard luck cases she claimed to have been inspired to help.

On Palestine, naturally both vied to present themselves as the staunchest supporters of Israel. Kamala Harris did genuflect towards protection of Palestinian civilians and the Palestinian right of self-determination, but this was so obviously a token gesture from Israel’s chief armers and funders as to not need further comment.

All in all, extremely dispiriting. Harris came over as an entirely unprincipled political operator who will adopt whatever positions serve her career, but is rather more intellectually competent than previously expected. Trump came over as a loose cannon which nobody has loaded.

As with Starmer, there is no doubt that Harris is the Deep State shoo-in candidate, and the priming of the debate in her favour is hardly unexpected. It does require an effort of textual analysis to pin it down, and I hope I have given you a start on that.

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As Starmer and Reeves subject the UK economy to yet more austerity and deregulation, the Scottish Government takes the blame for cutbacks caused by an economic policy in which they have zero say.

That has always been the problem with devolution: it is responsibility without power – an invidious position to be in.

That is not to say the Scottish government does not make plenty of mistakes of its own – the absurdly large sums of money thrown at the “third sector”, often to further pet causes, is one example.

Angus Robertson has just imposed cuts on Creative Scotland programmes, when the arts are a powerful economic driver for Scotland. What he has not done is cut the bloated Creative Scotland itself. Scotland spends considerably more on the administration of the arts than the creation of art.

The SNP has embraced the entire Freeport scam, which is deregulation gone wild and a recipe for human and environmental exploitation.

All this is a reminder that in an Independent Scotland, life will not be perfect and we will still have some appalling politicians. But it also shows that devolution is an effective weapon against Independence because the Scottish Government faces almost inevitable unpopularity from implementing Westminster-enforced policy.

The pretendy “parliament” at Holyrood is a jumped up regional council, no more than that. As we look back on ten years since the Independence referendum, we can mourn the gradual decline in governmental competence at Holyrood.

Still more can we mourn the undeniable fact that for the SNP leadership devolution was enough. They like pretending to be a government and in the last decade have done nothing to advance Independence (other than a Supreme Court hearing for the power to hold a referendum, which they were always going to lose but still deliberately threw, to make sure).

The truth of the conspiracy by Sturgeon to jail Alex Salmond continues to leak out bit by bit. I would add this thought:

When I first (before the Salmond trial) saw the WhatsApp messages between the conspirators plotting the allegations, I could not understand at all why the police were not investigating conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

I realised that in fact the conspiracy stretched beyond Sturgeon’s office and SNP HQ, and the police and the Crown Office had to be corruptly involved too. I remain absolutely convinced of that.

I have written recently of the revolutionary atmosphere that pervaded the Independence campaign ten years ago – the feeling that a new nation could be built that was radically fairer and more equal.

For me, the most significant date in Scottish history in my lifetime was 31 January 2020. On that night the UK left the EU, and Sturgeon assembled the SNP MPs and MSPs for an announcement. There was widespread anticipation she would announce a referendum, given massive public opinion on Scotland against leaving the EU. Independence had established a sustained polling lead.

Instead Sturgeon climbed down completely and said that there were “no tricks or clever wheezes” that could bring Independence. That was the Rubicon moment for the SNP, the day that they became a unionist party and not an Independence party.

I also want to make an observation about the 2014 Referendum. While I was making myself ill, dashing all over Scotland giving numerous speeches, I noticed the almost total absence of both Sturgeon and Robertson from the street campaign. Neither was frequently in broadcasting studios either, especially in the crucial last week. I have been told Sturgeon experienced a medical event, but that does not fully explain it.

This Labour government is going to become very unpopular, very quickly. Starmer achieved the second lowest ever percentage of votes cast for his party of any Prime Minister in British history.

Only Ramsay MacDonald’s 1923 minority government had a narrower base of support:

1923 MacDonald 30.7%
2024 Starmer 33.7%
2005 Blair 35.2%
2010 Cameron 36.1%

If you look not at percentage of voters but percentage of the total electorate, the result is even more stark:

2024 Starmer 20.2%
2005 Blair 21.8%
1923 MacDonald 21.8%
2010 Cameron 26.7%

One in five eligible voters cast their votes for Starmer. If you look at the other lowest examples, MacDonald led a minority government, Cameron a coalition, and Blair had to resign after two years.

Do not allow the fluke first past the post result to fool you. A Labour victory in the next Holyrood election is not inevitable. And yes, I do intend to stand for Alba.

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No major western leader is ever again going to be able to speak about human rights or ethical values, without attracting howls of derision. They are turning on their own people in order to prevent protest at a genocide they actively support.

Keir Starmer stepped up the pressure on opponents of Zionist genocide on Thursday with the arrest of journalist Sarah Wilkinson and the charging of activist Richard Barnard, both under the draconian Section 12 of the Terrorism Act which carries a sentence of up to 14 years in prison.

The UK MSM has of course ignored these, but is universally carrying outrage at the conviction of two Hong Kong activists for sedition, which carries a maximum sentence of … 2 years.

But they tell us it is China and not the UK which is the authoritarian dictatorship.

(To be plain, I do view the Hong Kong convictions as also an unwarranted interference with free speech. I merely point out the incredible hypocrisy of the British Establishment and far worse laws here).

Richard Barnard has been charged and will face trial, apparently related to public speeches supporting the Palestinian right to armed resistance.

Sarah Wilkinson was released on bail after about 14 hours. Like the recent arrest and bailing of Richard Medhurst, the arrest and bailing is a device to chill her reporting and activism.

The harassment of dissident journalists at ports, using the extensive powers of the Terrorism Act for questioning and confiscation of communications equipment, has become routine. I myself suffered detention, interrogation and confiscation of equipment for “terrorism” last October.

But the Sarah Wilkinson case is an escalation, in that this is a raid on a journalist whose home was invaded by 16 policemen at 7.30am, while she was arrested and taken to the police station as her home was comprehensively turned over, presumably looking for gunmen under the bed.

More details of the raid have come out which are scarcely believable. Armed counter-terrorism police wearing balaclavas were used against a peaceful, female journalist. She was manhandled and physically hurt. The ashes in her mother’s funerary urn were desecrated in a “search”. And Sarah’s bail conditions include that she may not use a computer or mobile telephone.

It is a fascist government that sends 16 police to bust a peaceful journalist at home at 7.30am.

Like the stopping of Richard Medhurst’s plane on the tarmac by police vehicles and his being dragged from the plane (which had just landed and was en route to the gate anyway) this is an authoritarian theatre of intimidation, a Nazi stamping of the violence of the state.

Richard Barnard is a co-founder of the brilliant Palestine Action, which has done so much to disrupt the Israeli arms industry in the UK as it continues to send vital equipment to carry out the mass destruction of civilians in Gaza.

BREAKING: After a targeted campaign by the zionist lobby, Palestine Action's co-founder Richard Barnard is facing three charges for two speeches.

He is accused of supporting a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act and encouraging 'criminal activity'. pic.twitter.com/cWq0qwk15v

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) August 29, 2024

Richard has been charged under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act over two speeches he made supporting the Palestinian resistance.

I have of course said this before, but it bears repeating:

Palestine has the legitimate right of self-defence against the illegal occupation.
The occupying power Israel has no right of self-defence. That is the plain position in international law.

Yet in the UK, it is legal to offer full-throated support to Israel’s genocide and to wish that all Palestinians are exterminated.

IDF participants in genocide happily move between Israel and the UK with no legal consequences.

Yet it is illegal to support certain Palestinian organisations when engaged in legal acts of armed resistance.

The state’s actions against activists have been ramped up – as I predicted – since Starmer came to power.

Five young activists in Glasgow were ten days ago given sentences ranging from 12 months to 24 months in prison for direct action against Thales weapons plant in Govan, which makes parts for Israel’s Watchkeeper drones, widely used against civilians in Gaza.

The sentences from Sheriff Judge McCormick were savage – far higher than would normally be given on the specified charges, which were of breach of the peace, vandalism, disorderly conduct and acting in an abusive manner.

These normally would attract at most a suspended sentence on a first offence. McCormick also ignored the Scottish government guidelines not to give custodial sentences of 24 months or less but to seek alternatives.

More tellingly, McCormick completely ignored the elephant in the room: the genocide in Gaza, which Thales are supplying.

(The fact the action occurred before the genocide should be properly viewed as a commendable act of prescience.)

The Zionist Starmerite Establishment were quick to crow over the jailing – notably Luke Akehurst and John Woodcock (who is laughably called Lord Walney nowadays and is the Government Adviser on political violence) who said “Activists considering breaking the law to get their way need to see there will be consequences”.

This follows similarly harsh sentencing of climate change activists, including those who merely took part in Zoom calls discussing direct action.

The authoritarian reaction of the threatened Zionist ruling class is a worldwide phenomenon. Redoubtable Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis has been ludicrously charged under hate speech laws for retweeting mainstream pro-Palestinian tweets.

American activist Professor Danny Shaw was turned over by the FBI on return to the USA following a trip which included speaking on a panel alongside me at the Palestine International Film Festival.

Also in the United States my friend Scott Ritter has been raided by the FBI and all his electronics and other materials confiscated.

I have spoken to Danny Shaw and to Richard Medhurst. In all of these arrests and detentions, including my own, the emphasis has been on confiscating electronics and on questioning focusing very strongly on contacts, meetings and sources of finance.

The Five Eyes intelligence services are plainly building up Venn diagrams of the democratic opposition to Zionism and the neoliberal project. It is notable that many of those recently arrested over Palestine – including Mary Kostakidis, Richard Medhurst, Scott Ritter and myself – were active in the campaign to free Julian Assange.

I have always maintained that Keir Starmer’s record shows that he will be an even bigger danger to civil liberties than the Tories. It is worth noting that all of the Tory recent draconian legislation – The Public Order Act, The National Security Act and even the Rwanda Act – was not opposed or was supported by Starmer as the pretend “Leader of the Opposition”.

Starmer and Cooper are continuing the Tory policy of challenging a High Court ruling won by Liberty, that Suella Braverman acted illegally in tabling secondary legislation lowering the threshold to ban a demonstration on grounds of inconvenience to the public.

The forthcoming Online Safety Act will be truly chilling, including making it illegal to publish what the government deems misinformation.

Starmer has always been MI5-controlled. The fact that, while a Tory government was in power, the Crown Prosecution Service destroyed all the key documentation revealing Starmer’s involvement in the Assange, Savile and Janner cases (the last being far more important than generally appreciated), shows the extent to which Starmer is a protected Deep State asset.

If we are to survive this descent onto fascism as a society, we need to be prepared to dissent now, and each of us needs to be prepared to go to jail if necessary.

A last word to Craig Mokhiber, the senior UN international lawyer who resigned in protest at UN pusillanimity in face of genocide:

A dark evil has descended over the West. As the genocide in Palestine continues, the US, UK, Germany & other Western governments, instead of cracking down on those committing, aiding and inciting the genocide, are cracking down on those opposing the genocide. Human rights…

— Craig Mokhiber (@CraigMokhiber) August 31, 2024

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We were waiting for Richard Medhurst to arrive and join our panel at the Beautiful Days festival, when he was arrested and imprisoned for 23.5 hours. Obviously we were all worried sick about him.

I was arrested at Heathrow Airport under the Terrorism Act, Sec 12 because of my reporting.

6 police officers were waiting for me at the entrance of the aircraft.

I was held for almost 24 hours and questioned.

I believe I'm the first journalist to be arrested under this… pic.twitter.com/pbf6q5dXIf

— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) August 19, 2024

It is now becoming easier to list the truly dissident UK journalists who have not been arrested for terrorism than those who have! This fascist ploy of labelling journalists as terrorists is incredible.

Richard’s case is slightly different to that of other journalists including myself, John Laughland, Vanessa Beeley, Johanna Ross, Kit Klarenberg and many more to suffer the same treatment, in that Richard was specifically held under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act – which outlaws support for a proscribed organisation.

Yes, you are reading that right. You can go to jail for 14 years for expressing an opinion in support of a proscribed organisation.

We now have an extraordinary conflict between UK domestic law and international law.

The International Court of Justice has just last month stated definitively to the UN General Assembly that the Israeli occupation is illegal and it is the duty of states not to support it.

279. Moreover, the Court considers that, in view of the character and importance of the rights and obligations involved, all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It is for all States, while respecting the Charter of the United Nations and international law, to ensure that any impediment resulting from the illegal presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the exercise of the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end. In addition, all the States parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention have the obligation, while respecting the Charter of the United Nations and international law, to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law as embodied in that Convention.

Yet it is perfectly legal in UK domestic law for zionists to state that they support the Israeli Defence Force and they hope that the IDF kill every Palestinian in Gaza.

Indeed zionists state this all the time, supporting an action that is entirely illegal in international law, and no action is ever taken against these zionists by the UK state.

Members of the IDF who have actually participated in the genocide are able to come and live in the UK unmolested.

In stark contrast to the illegal acts of the occupying power, the Palestinian people do have the right of armed resistance in international law.

This right is founded on the right of self-determination in the UN Charter and is encapsulated in the First Protocol of the Geneva Convention (1977) Article 1 Para 4:

The situations referred to in the preceding paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

Yet under UK law it is legal to express support for the completely illegal operations of the IDF (illegal even without considering the question of Genocide!) while it is illegal to express support for completely legal acts of resistance by certain Palestinian groups.

Let me spell this out again.

It is legal in UK law to support Israel’s genocidal and illegal acts of colonial occupation, but illegal in UK law to support Palestine’s legal acts of armed resistance to colonial and racist occupation.

The Protocol to the Geneva Convention makes clear that those engaged in armed resistance against occupation are both entitled to the same humanitarian protections, and obliged to respect the same humanitarian law, as other combatants.

There is a fascinating twist here from the days when Robin Cook was Foreign Secretary and I was Deputy Head of the FCO Africa Department. In 1998 the First Protocol of the Geneva Convention was incorporated into UK law, and the United Kingdom made a very telling reservation.

British law stipulates that the First Protocol’s recognition that a person not wearing uniform may still be a lawful combatant, and entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Convention provided he carries his arms openly, applies only in occupied territory or when engaged in fighting colonial or racist occupation.

Let us look at that more closely.

Schedule H of the UK Geneva Conventions Act (First Protocol) Order 1998 states that

ARTICLE 44, paragraph 3

It is the understanding of the United Kingdom that:

the situation in the second sentence of paragraph 3 can only exist in occupied territory or in armed conflicts covered by paragraph 4 of Article 1;

… which means that this provision of the First Protocol:

Recognizing, however, that there are situations in armed conflicts where, owing to the nature of the hostilities an armed combatant cannot so distinguish himself, he shall retain his status as a combatant, provided that, in such situations, he carries his arms openly:

(a) During each military engagement, and

(b) During such time as he is visible to the adversary while he is engaged in a military deployment preceding the launching of an attack in which he is to participate.

Acts which comply with the requirements of this paragraph shall not be considered as perfidious within the meaning of Article 37, paragraph 1 (c).

… only applies in UK law where:

The situations referred to in the preceding paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

So, and it is absolutely important this is understood, the right to fight against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes is not only an absolute right in international law, it is also a specific right in UK law.

And UK law further specifically recognises that when fighting colonial domination, alien occupation and a racist regime you do not have to wear uniform.

Applying this to 7 October, it means that those armed Palestinian combatants who were not members of a proscribed organisation (see below) were engaged in legal armed struggle in terms of UK law, provided they respected international humanitarian law in so doing.

Which makes the recent clarifications that the majority of civilian casualties were killed by the IDF and that the mass rapes and beheaded babies stories were a total fabrication, still more important.

Every colonial or racist power that has ever faced armed resistance has always characterised the native peoples resisting as “terrorists”, “savages” or similar. Asymmetric warfare is by nature unconventional. The systematic and often legalised atrocities of the coloniser will indeed often spark uncontrolled acts of rage that rightly fall outside what international humanitarian law will condone.

So we now have the situation that Richard Medhurst is arrested for allegedly supporting armed resistance that is not only undeniably legal in international law but is also specifically legal in British law.

The source of this conundrum is the extraordinarily arbitrary power of proscribing an organisation.

Now to proscribe an organisation the government does not have to prove its actions were illegal, either under international law or UK law. An organisation is proscribed simply on the basis that the government says so.

If the government proscribed the Girl Guides, you could get up to 14 years in jail for expressing support for the Girl Guides, and no amount of argument in court that the Girl Guides is not in fact a terrorist organisation would help you.

Hamas and Hezbollah are acting legally in UK law in terms of the Geneva Convention First Protocol Order of 1998, but expressing support for them is nevertheless illegal because the proscription of an organisation is an entirely arbitrary power of the executive.

When I ran the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s South Africa (Political) Desk in 1985, it was the firm position of the Thatcher Government that the ANC was a terrorist organisation and that Nelson Mandela was rightly and correctly imprisoned as a terrorist.

The notion that governments can fairly and impartially designate “terrorists” is very obviously nuts.

It is important to add that this analysis of the legal position in no way implies that I do, or do not, approve of Hamas or Hezbollah. In general I am not in favour of mixing the state and religion, so I come from a very different place and have my criticisms.

But it is also important not to be scared to state that the proscription of Hamas as a terrorist organisation does not align with the UK legal position in the First Protocol Order that specifically recognises the right of an occupied people to armed resistance.

It also causes great confusion. It is, for example, only the military wing of Hamas that is a proscribed organisation. So far as I can tell, it would not be illegal to state that Hamas did a very good job of running Gaza’s schools and hospitals.

But it is very difficult to be sure – the law and its application are arbitrary and not foreseeable.

When I stood for election in Blackburn, I had the specific endorsement of the Palestinian Foreign Ministry which had been engaged with the South African delegation in the ICJ Genocide case against Israel at the Hague.

I was then also (unsolicited) offered the endorsement of Hamas. This caused some head-scratching and I consulted an eminent lawyer. He advised that while it would be illegal for me to endorse Hamas, it would not be illegal for Hamas to endorse me.

Particularly so if it came from the political and not the military wing.

I thought this sounded great fun, but perhaps not great enough fun for me to spend several years of my life fighting the case from inside a prison cell. So I did not take up the offer.

Any law which states you can be jailed for fourteen years simply for expressing an opinion is a very bad law, no matter what that opinion may be.

To use such arbitrary power to seek to silence those who are opposing a most dreadful genocide, is the action of an over-mighty state led by evil people.

I think it is most important that we are not silenced. Hence this article. Most of my friends are advising me I should travel abroad for a while once again, and I am trying to make up my mind about this. I should be grateful for your views.

The UK is plainly not a safe place for political dissidents.

The reason for this galloping authoritarianism is of course panic by the political class that they have lost popular consent, particularly for zionism in view of the appalling genocide in plain view by the terrorist settler state.

To conclude on an optimistic note, here is a photo of the gathering that Richard was prevented from joining. It brought together at Beautiful Days a few of the wonderful people who will not be silenced, and who will be remembered as being on the right side of history.

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The purpose of Scottish Independence is not to replicate the UK state on a smaller scale with a prettier flag. The purpose is to eschew the imperialist past, stop invading other countries, and build a fairer and more equal society both domestically and internationally.

I thank God I was alive and campaigning in 2014 when for a joyous few months a better world seemed within our grasp; genuine transformational change to a better society was almost tangible, we only had to reach for it.

In all the speeches I gave in that campaign, I concentrated on international relations, because others were covering domestic policy comprehensively and brilliantly, and because Independence at essence is a factor of international relations: it is the standing of a state in relation to other states.

The more radical vision I proposed was well received everywhere. I spoke of a Scotland without enemies, without nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers, with genuinely defensive defence forces, not part of the organised aggression that is NATO.

I remember Glasgow Green erupting in cheers when I quoted James Connolly to a huge crowd:

When it is said that we ought to unite to protect our shores against the ‘foreign enemy’, I confess to be unable to follow that line of reasoning, as I know of no foreign enemy of this country except the British Government

I should add that having then addressed grassroots meetings of every conceivable size over months, on pavements, in meeting rooms and church halls or on stages in parks, not a single person ever turned round and said to me “Oh no, I think we should stay in NATO” or “I think Trident is essential”.

Well, we lost the Independence referendum, though it was far closer than anybody had imagined a year previously. The energies of the Independence movement were all diverted into the institutional structure of the SNP, which became temporarily dominant in Scotland.

But there all the energy and enthusiasm, all of that idealism, was dissipated by the leadership of a political class who turned out to be just the same as the political class at Westminster. Corrupt, greedy, self-serving and desperate for “respectability” and their role within the UK Establishment.

This has been brutally hammered home this week by Angus Robertson, the Scottish Government’s external affairs and culture minister, meeting the Israeli Deputy Ambassador to the UK in the midst of the current accelerated phase of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

Thank you @AngusRobertson for welcoming us to wonderful Scotland.

Discussed the unique commonalities between 🇮🇱-🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and also emphasized the urgent need to bring back our 115 hostages.

Looking forward to cooperating in the fields of technology, culture and renewable energy. pic.twitter.com/sh2KeqRa9j

— Daniela Grudsky (@DanielaGrudsky) August 12, 2024

A Scottish Government spokesman confirmed that areas of mutual cooperation had been discussed before John Swinney, alarmed at the criticism from the membership, dribbled out a statement to say it was “essential” to meet the Israeli diplomat to “call for a ceasefire”.

The Scottish government spokesperson’s account aligned with Israel’s account:

The spokesperson said: “They discussed areas of mutual interest, including culture, renewable energy and engaging the country’s respective diasporas.

In 1985 my first big job in the FCO was running the South Africa (political) desk during apartheid there and while Thatcher was Prime Minister. As the US and UK stood alone against international calls to sanction and boycott South Africa, the Thatcher line was that contact was essential to promote reform.

The contact was of course in fact pretty well devoid of any advocacy of reform, other than a hurried mention so civil servants could say it had been raised. Instead, it was all about making money from apartheid.

Forty years on the SNP is pulling the same stunt as the Tories did over apartheid South Africa . As the ever brilliant Robin McAlpine put it:

Let me be really, really blunt; if calling for an end to genocide is only one item on your agenda for a meeting, you’re an appalling human. ‘Please stop killing Palestinian babies, oh, and would you like a Scotwind contract and an invitation to the Edinburgh Festival’? Fuck right off.

Swinney and Robertson are of course long term Zionists, as is almost the entire UK political class (and mark my words, there are few members of the British political class with their feet more firmly under the UK political structures table than Swinney and Robertson). Indeed, as I have previously explained, Zionism is a necessary badge of entry to the UK political class.

Here is Robertson with former Israeli government spokesman and Israeli Ambassador to the UK Mark Regev:

And here with Zionism's Lord Haw Haw, Mark Regev. pic.twitter.com/uqGm0eia9k

— Mark Hirst (@Documark) August 15, 2024

And here Robertson is with Israeli President Herzog, who was quoted directly by the International Court of Justice as giving an example of genocidal speech which was among the markers that justified their finding of a case to answer on genocide. Herzog also has signed bombs ready to drop on Gaza.

All of this begs the question, what other undisclosed meetings and contacts have @theSNP @scotgov been having with Israeli officials that weren't inadvertently revealed by Zionist representatives?

Scottish Government is not usually so coy!

Full disclosure needed. https://t.co/saruo7LMwg

— Mark Hirst (@Documark) August 15, 2024

Note Kirsten Oswald front left, Nicola Sturgeon’s close political ally. These last photos were taken before last year, but Israel’s illegal and genocidal actions have been in train for 76 years, not just 10 months.

First Minister John Swinney has a terrible record of collaboration with Israel.

Eden Springs was an Israeli settler owned water company, bottling water from the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights. They opened a subsidiary company in Scotland which was the subject of much controversy a decade ago, with a huge and successful boycott movement, especially among students.

As Scottish Minister for Trade and Industry, Swinney actually gave Eden Springs £200,000 of Scottish government money to help them overcome the effects of the boycott.

Before that, as SPSC reported in 2012, John Swinney made a rare foray into the BDS arena: A subsidiary of Eden Springs, an Israeli water bottling company operating in Britain “turned successfully for help from the Scottish Government to deal with what the Israeli company called ‘a wave of protests…that is threatening the future of Eden Springs UK’”.

On January 5th 2010, a meeting took place between Eden Springs’ UK Managing Director Jean-Marc Bolinger and Scottish Minister John Swinney. The Scottish Government the following year gave £200,000 of Scottish taxpayers’ money to Eden Springs, some of which will end up as profits in Israel, taxed there and freeing up state funds for military aggression and further dispossession of the Palestinian people.

So, to use the modern phrase, Swinney and Robertson’s Zionism is a feature not a glitch. The SNP is just like the other parties in being led by career politicians for whom Zionism is an essential belief for admission to the UK Establishment.

This episode has served to highlight the difference between the continued aspiration of the Scottish people for a better state, in which foreign relations are conducted on ethical grounds, and the actual SNP political class who have precisely the same cynical and transactional approach to politics as their UK peers – they see it essentially as a tool to make a fat living.

The key point is of course that everybody cares about Gaza because of the immediacy with which we can see the devastating genocide on our mobile devices. The political and media classes cannot gaslight us that it is not happening.

Ordinary people look at creatures like Robertson with horror. Swinney is counting on the summer holidays and the traditional extreme deference of the SNP membership to enable him to ride out this storm.

Despite the best effort of the traitors to Independence who run the SNP, the extraordinary thing is that the dream has not died. Support for Independence has not fallen even as the SNP itself has dwindled to a despised rump of its former representation.

A huge well of support remains for anyone who can invoke again the spirit of 2014.

We are not far off that day. As come it will for a’ that.

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In Murder in Samarkand I describe how as a British Ambassador, when I discovered the full extent of our complicity in torture in the War on Terror, I thought it must be a rogue operation and all I had to do was make ministers and senior officials aware and they would stop it.

When I was reprimanded and officially told that receipt of intelligence from torture in the “War on Terror” was approved from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary down, and it became clear to me that there was a deliberate promoting of false intelligence narratives through torture which exaggerated the Al Qaida threat to justify military policy in Afghanistan and Central Asia, my worldview was severely shaken.

Somehow I mentally compartmentalised this as an aberration, due to overreaction to 9/11 and the unique narcissism and viciousness of Tony Blair. I did not lose faith in western democracy or the notion that the western powers, on the whole, were a positive force when contrasted with other powers.

It is a hard thing to lose the entire belief system in which you were brought up – probably particularly hard if like me, you had a very happy life right from childhood and were highly successful within the terms of the governmental system.

I have however now finally shed the last of my illusions and I am obliged to acknowledge that the system of which I am a part – call it “the West”, “liberal democracy”, “capitalism”, “neo-liberalism”, “neo-conservatism”, “Imperialism”, “the New World Order” – call it what you will in fact, it is a force for evil.

Gaza has been an important catalyst. I am not lacking in empathy, but my knowledge of the horrid butchery by the Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya was an intellectual knowledge, not a lived experience.

Sirte, Libya, after Nato “liberation”.

Technology has brought us the Gaza genocide – which has so far killed fewer people than any of those earlier NATO member perpetrated massacres – in gut wrenching detail. I have just been looking at 75kg bags of mixed human meat handed over to relatives in lieu of an identifiable corpse, and am in shock.

That is not the worst we have seen in Gaza.

If only the people of Mosul and Fallujah had had modern mobile phone technology, what horrors we would know.

Incidentally, I tried to find you some images of the massive US destruction of Mosul and Fallujah in 2002‒4 and Google won’t give me any. It will, however, offer thousands of images from fighting there with ISIL in 2017. Which rather underlines my point about the extraordinary lack of imagery of the Second Iraq War.

Of the current genocide in Gaza, again I found myself naively thinking at some point this will stop. That Western politicians would not in fact countenance the total destruction of Gaza. That there would be a limit to the number of Palestinian civilian deaths they could accept, the number of UN facilities, schools and hospitals destroyed, the number of little children torn into shreds.

I thought that at some stage human decency must outweigh Zionist lobby cash.

But I was wrong.

The Ukrainian attack into Kursk also has a profound emotional resonance. The Battle of Kursk was arguably the most important blow struck against Nazi Germany, the largest tank battle in the history of the world by a wide margin.

The Ukrainian government has destroyed all the monuments to the Red Army which achieved this, and denigrates the Ukrainians who fought against fascism. By contrast, it honours the very substantial Ukrainian components of the Nazi forces, including but not limited to, the Galician Division and their leaders.

Kursk is therefore a place of great symbolism for Ukraine to attack now into Russia, including with German artillery and armour.

German politicians seem to have an atavistic urge to attack Russia, and support the genocide of Palestinians to an astonishing degree.

Germany has effectively ended all freedom of speech on Palestine, banning conferences of distinguished speakers and making pro-Palestinian speech illegal. Germany has intervened on Israel’s side in the genocide case before the ICJ, and intervened at the ICC to object to an arrest warrant against Netanyahu.

I do not know how many civilian dead would assuage German lust for the expiatory blood of Palestinians. 500,000? 1 Million? 2 Million?

Or perhaps 6 Million?

The West are not the good guys. Our so-called “democratic systems” give us no ability to vote for anybody who may get into power who does not support the genocide and imperialist foreign policy.

It is not an accident and it is not genius that makes a man-child like Elon Musk worth 100 billion dollars. The power structures of society are deliberately designed by those with wealth to promote massive concentration of wealth in favour of those who already have it, exploiting and disempowering the rest of society.

The rise of the multi-billionaires is not a fluke. It is a plan, and the misallocation of more than adequate resources is the cause of poverty. The attempt to shift blame onto the desperate constituents of waves of immigration forced into life by Western destruction of foreign countries, is also systematic.

There is no longer any free space for dissent in the media to oppose any of this.

We are the Bad Guys. We resist our own governing systems, or we are complicit.

In the United Kingdom it falls to the Celtic nations to try to break up the state which is a subordinate but important imperialist engine. The paths of resistance are various, depending where you are.

But find one and take one.

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I cannot think of a period in my lifetime when so much was happening in the world so quickly with which it feels that, as a reluctant UK citizen, I have a direct connection and indeed responsibility.

Race riots in the UK, the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on civil liberty and decline in effective democracy across the western world, the ever darkening reach of mass surveillance, including of the individual’s use of currency; those are just a few of the issues in play and the links between all of them are intimate and inextricable.

I do not believe that the race riots have been fomented in order to provide an excuse to crack down further on civil liberties. But that Starmer – whom I suspect will prove to be the most authoritarian Prime Minister in British history – is seizing on them for that prupose is undeniable.

In particular the announcement that the already deeply worrying Online Safety Act will be amended, to give the state still greater power over information sources like the one which you are currently reading, could signal a massive blow to internet freedom.

Publication of “misinformation” is to be criminalised – which means the official narrative will be enforced on social media.

Given that, for example, the government has relentlessly promoted the demonstrably false stories of mass rape by Palestinians on October 7, while studiously failing to notice the vast amount of unquestionable evidence in the last fortnight of systematic rape of Palestinian prisoners on a vast scale by the Israeli Defence Force, no reasonable person can fail to understand the danger of the enforcement of state-approved “truth”.

Articles like my dissection of the state narrative on the Skripals look set to be deemed a threat to the “online safety” of the nation. Alternative narratives over Covid, over 9/11, over the death of David Kelly – any deviation from the official line is liable to be deemed criminal.

Meanwhile, with “two-tier justice” being the latest right wing mantra, we find that race rioters who set fires in inhabited buildings and threw rocks at policemen, in fact get lighter sentences than environmentalists involved in planning non-violent actions.

Predictably, we are already seeing the unrest used as a justification for increased usage of facial recognition technology. 24/7 state surveillance of the individual is no longer a wild dystopian fear.

Looking further afield, the narrative is moved on by the claims that an ISIS-linked terrorist in Austria planned to attack a Taylor Swift concert. This plays nicely into the Taylor Swift theme of the dance class where the girls were horribly murdered in Southport, and reinvigorates the flagging wave of Islamophobia.

Given that ISIS cooperates closely with both Israel and the CIA and has avoided attacking Israel or western targets, while I still can without being locked up may I express my scepticism at this item of news management.

Islamophobia is of course an important link between events here and in the Middle East. While there is of course a small Palestinian Christian minority, there is no doubt that hatred of Muslims is a large driver in the Israeli dehumanisation of Palestinians that paves the psychological grounds for genocide, mass rape and torture.

Here Israel is just acting as the Western colonial enterprise that it is. As the West has sought to seize the physical resources of the Middle East – the hydrocarbons of Iraq, Syria and Libya and the lands of the Palestinians – the deliberate promulgation of Islamophobia at home has driven public support for these ventures, though that public support is thankfully a dwindling commodity.

After decades of being fed nonsense about a war of civilisations and the dangers of Islamic terrorism, whipping up anti-immigrant mobs has not been difficult. It does not require too deep an analysis of the nexus of Islamophobia and wider racism to understand that.

But it is also true that Zionist interests have been extremely keen to stoke this unrest, as a counter-narrative to the mass popular support for Palestine which the genocide has engendered among western populations.

What’s causing the Islamophobic riots across the UK, and why now?

1. The riots have been instigated by the Zionist asset Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), who has been working for the State of Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called ‘counterjihad’ Islamophobia…

— David Miller (@Tracking_Power) August 3, 2024

It is also well worth reading this thread from Lowkey

Tommy Robinson has previously stated he would “fight for Israel in a war.”

This thread examines Robinson and EDL’s very clear material relationship with the Zionist Movement and considers the possibility that the racist attacks and pogroms in Britain are part of that fight.

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) August 4, 2024

It is also of course impossible to ignore the role of born-again Zionist Elon Musk and his cohort in whipping up the Islamophobic and racist narrative.

These people, of course, always support free movement for themselves. Elon Musk is in fact an immigrant from Africa, whereas “Tommy Robinson” is an immigrant in Spain.

Predictably the state has countered with the anti-semitism narrative, and rather hilariously they have yet again brought out the utterly ludicrous claims of the “Community Security Trust” of an increase in “anti-semitic incidents”.

This time the Trust are claiming a 210% increase in anti-semitic incidents, which is quite modest by their standards. I have pointed out again and again that any journalist with a Maths O-level would have been able to work out that their claims of increases in attacks between 45% and 300% every year for twenty years simply cannot be true or there would now be many hundreds of thousands of attacks on Jewish people per year and thankfully that is plainly untrue.

Every single year since 2005 the Community Security Trust has claimed an increase in anti-semitic incidents of between 42% and 300%. “Journalists” like Peston always retail this.
If true there would now be at least 36,000 violent anti-semitic attacks a year.
Average number of… https://t.co/Tf3Mx7mBj0 pic.twitter.com/bQbjITXgOg

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) October 10, 2023

I suppose if the lie works as propaganda, they simply stick with it. But there could hardly be a starker illustration of the pathetic enslavement of mainstream media journalists that nobody ever queries these plainly impossible claims.

It is also worth noting that as the CST – which gets £12 million a year from the Home Office – construes references to “apartheid Israel” as anti-semitic incidents, then the ICJ Opinion on the Occupied Territories would count as an anti-semitic incident by these Home Office sponsored standards!

Finally, while the racist tide appears to be receding, I commend everybody who got out there to counter-protest. It is extremely dangerous to allow fascists the run of the streets and we must remain both nimble and active.

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UPDATE

The people of Blackburn scored a vital victory today against the forces of fascism as “Tommy Robinson”‘s overweight racist disciples were met with an overwhelming show of solidarity in the street, of which I was proud with my friends to be a part.

The fascists like to attack defenceless targets. Faced with the prospect of real resistance, they ran away.

Poor little Tommy is not happy in his Spanish hideaway, where he lives his life as an immigrant.

Blackburn should be a model of how to face down the fascists.

Yesterday I received a phone call from a police Inspector asking me to delete my tweet calling for people to assemble to prevent the far-right demonstration called for Blackburn today and tweeted out by “Tommy Robinson”, the well-known immigrant to Spain with the false name.

She also asked me not to come to Blackburn myself, and said that members of the community had contacted her and said I was an outsider coming to Blackburn to make trouble.

I am therefore on a train to Blackburn, a place where a number of people have been telling me to leave for weeks, but I genuinely can’t walk down the street without being warmly greeted by name by random locals.

Although our conversation was perfectly friendly and I have no complaints about the police Inspector, who seemed to accept that her telling me not to come was unlikely to work, I do rather object to the police telling me what to do.

There are a number of interesting questions raised by this. There is a wave of anti-immigrant far-right violence spreading across the North of England – Sunderland, Southport, Hartlepool and elsewhere – and recently London saw the largest fascist demonstration for many years.

The horrific murders of the poor little girls in Southport at a dance class have been seized on by the far right to foment anti-immigrant violence. This is such a well-established pattern now across the country that it is impossible to deny.

And yet the police inspector who phoned me did deny it. She told me to be aware that three little girls had died and this was about commemorating them. I replied it was not about that at all; it was about stirring up racial hatred against a community who had no connection at all to the murder.

Blackburn’s newly elected independent MP, Adnan Hussain, has also issued a call to people not to gather to oppose any far-right demonstration today. I believe this is mistaken. The wave of fascist violence across the country has gathered momentum precisely because it breeds copycat activity. Fascism has to be confronted and stopped.

That is not just a matter of explaining that poverty and deprivation is not caused by immigration but by an economic system designed to produce massive inequality of wealth. Fascism has also to be nipped in the bud by denying them control of the street. That is what we achieved with the Anti-Nazi League 40-odd years ago.

If you do not confront fascism and defeat it, it will grow.

How does this stand with my strong commitment to free speech?

In On Liberty, the great John Stuart Mill argued that to state that corn merchants are thieves and profiteers who starve the poor was perfectly valid. But to shout the same thing to a howling mob outside a corn merchant’s house was not valid freedom of speech.

It is not just the words, it is their context. This is a crucial insight (and it also carries a pro-freedom of speech weight against the sledgehammer of hate speech legislation which denies the importance of context and seeks to condemn simple forms of speech).

And I have no doubt at all that as for the likes of “Tommy Robinson” to be encouraging anti-immigrant speech in the highly ethnically diverse town of Blackburn, in the context of widespread anti-immigrant violence, this fits perfectly with Mill’s exception to free speech in the case of the mob and the corn merchant.

I hope all goes quietly and my journey is quite unnecessary. There are multiple far-right demonstrations today and perhaps this will not be one of those that gets nasty. But I shall be there ready to profess my truth and my opposition to fascism if called for.

Allowing fascists to speak and sitting mute ourselves – or being prevented from speaking by the police – is completely the wrong prescription.

I very much hope I don’t get arrested because I have to dash back to speak at the Free Palestine Film Festival this evening, Genesis Cinema, Mile End Road, London. Yesterday’s opening night was great and I will blog about it when life is less fraught. There may still be tickets for tonight – phone the cinema to check.

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The cause of the tragic Druze deaths in Majdal Shams was the illegal Israeli occupation in Syria, a fact which the residents of the town are clear about. The large majority of the Druze community in the Golan Heights has always refused to accept Israeli citizenship.

That picture is from a demonstration four years ago, but it shows that the Golan Druze know where their allegiance lies, and it is not with their Israeli occupiers.

The deaths are a tragedy, and they would be a tragedy if they were Druze, Palestinian or Jewish kids. The right of occupied peoples to armed resistance against Israel is absolute, but that does not remove the personal tragedy of anybody who loses their children.

But last night the disproportion of the BBC coverage of these deaths, which the BBC blamed on Hezbollah, compared to the coverage of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, was so outrageous as to be beyond parody and almost beyond belief.

It was the lead item on the main news. It was the full treatment. Intrepid British BBC journalist visits the scene, shows the blast area and damaged football pitch, interviews eye witnesses, interviews parents, scenes of funerals. Grief piled upon grief. Bellicose self-righteous statements from Israeli ministers.

It was not just hugely more coverage than given to any of the ten times the number of kids in Gaza who have been killed on average every single day for nearly ten months; we have a direct comparator where Israel recently attacked a Palestinian children’s football game killing scores more people.

The Palestinians did not get a British BBC journalist, coverage of the funerals, interviews with relatives. That incident got about 3% of the BBC airtime.

Furthermore, while reporting the Hezbollah denial, the BBC then said that the United States regime had confirmed it was a Hezbollah missile, as though that settled it.

The notion that the United States is either a neutral or an honest arbiter is utterly ludicrous. But it passes muster in BBC la-la land.

Israel has been bombarding Syria relentlessly from long before October 2023 and has continued unabated – and unreported by western media. Israel’s attacks on civilian areas of Damascus this last few weeks have been devastating.

It is pretty obvious that any loose missile that dropped on Majdal Shams is likely to have come from Israel, which is slinging huge quantities of munitions into Syria and Lebanon with wild abandon.

Alternatively if Netanyahu wished to pull a false flag to justify escalation, it is also pretty obvious he would choose a minority community within Israel as the victims.

Of course, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, anybody in the BBC capable of such thoughts would no longer be in the BBC.

Finally, many congratulations to Nicolas Maduro on his re-election in Venezuela.

I have to confess I got this wrong. I thought the huge amount of effort and money poured in by the CIA would be effective, particularly in undermining key officials through bribery. The collaboration of Twitter and Meta with the CIA programme also looked more effective than it evidently was.

A great day for democracy. In a few hours’ time I shall raise a glass of Lagavulin to Nicolas Maduro and the revolution in Venezuela.

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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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I have frequently explained that when I sat in the International Court of Justice and heard Israel’s lawyers tell lie after lie to justify or excuse the Gaza genocide, I could feel I was palpably in the presence of evil.

At least in the Hague you could also feel and indeed observe that most people in the courtroom – including the majority of the judges – were repulsed by the evil.

Yesterday that same evil, and the same lies, was manifested in the US Congress by Netanyahu, to an audience which glorified, reflected and amplified that evil.

Let us not forget that the large majority of citizens of the world, including majorities in many Western countries with pro-genocide leadership classes, are indeed repulsed by and reject the genocide.

The United States has now, openly and before the entire world, endorsed its genocidal imperialist project and rejected both the very notion of international law and the institutions which a more idealistic American generation worked so hard to create – the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.

Netanyahu’s slanderous attacks on the institutions of international law were applauded to the rafters by America’s political leaders. The whole world was watching, and took note.

The Zionist project per se is evil. To steal another people’s land and subject them to long and progressive genocide is about as evil a deed as can be imagined.

There is no such thing as a moderate or progressive Zionist. Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide are fundamental to the entire Zionist project.

I am hopeful that for an entire younger generation around the world, any notion that the United States are the “good guys” has now been destroyed. The reduction of international relations to USA = good guys vs Russia and China = bad guys was never true.

In Europe I am also hopeful that this will lead to a more widespread realisation that NATO is anything but a force for peace and stability, that the destruction of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan was a series of terrible crimes, and that Ukraine/Russia is massively more complicated than the media would have you believe.

We always have hope, we always have courage, and we always have determination. The fight for truth and freedom never ends.

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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box: