I no longer have a source with access to Putin’s inner circle. I did not pretend to understand the astonishing episode of the Wagner march on Moscowat the time, and plainly it was impossible, if the Russian and Belarussian official narrative were remotely true, that Prigozhin could be allowed to carry on living.
Well, at least I got that right. But I still am no closer to understanding the entire dynamic. Unless Prigozhin has been effectively a prisoner these last few months, it seems incomprehensible that he did not flee.
To move from something I do not understand to something I do.
In comments below the line here, and even more so in replies to the post of this article on twitter, I am intensely irritated by the sheer stupidity of the lines trotted out by the Putin cult.
Ukraine has not lost 400,000 dead. That is half of British Empire casualties in World War 1 – in one year? It is 80% of the size of the Ukrainian armed forces in 2021. To try to give a meaningful comparison, those units of the Iraqi Republican Guard destroyed in the initial 2003 onslaught by vastly superior forces using massive firepower, lost about 20% dead in the most extreme cases. They had broken long before that many were killed in flight.
There would be evidence of fields piled up with thousands of bodies if 400,000 were dead. In all the drone and headcam footage we have seen, there is nothing remotely like that. It is simply a quite extraordinary example of the Big Lie technique. Ukrainian casualties have been serious, but nothing like on that scale.
I wrote below in the original article that ludicrous casualty figures have been claimed by both sides. I really do not need idiots doing so here.
The “Putin is perfect” narrative claims that Russia has failed to entirely subdue Ukraine because a) it never intended to b) Ukraine had an immensely powerful army at the start of the conflict.
Both claims are utter nonsense. Russia sent a column of its finest troops and armour to Kiev from the North at the start of this stage of invasion. It also sent special forces ahead into Kiev with the object of decapitating the Ukrainian command structure. The ground had been prepared by very large sums of money paid to key Ukrainian officials and generals.
The aim was regime change.
The whole was based on very faulty intelligence that there would be little resistance and the Ukrainian people would welcome regime change. Much of the money to have been laid out in bribes had in fact been stolen within the Russian FSB (something, I would add from personal experience, MI6 is not immune from either).
The initial Russian assault on Kiev was a costly failure, with many of Russia’s best forces very badly damaged. The attempt to deny this is pathetic. We all saw it.
Elsewhere the Russian advance meant much better. This is largely because:
It is nonsense to state that Ukraine had very powerful armed forces. In 2021 the Ukrainian army was equipped almost entirely with largely outdated ex-Soviet hardware. There were huge problems in supply chains caused by quite astonishing levels of Ukrainian corruption (though this was true of both sides). A Ukrainian command structure riddled by co-option of large, supply favoured, units of Nazis, which ran on bragadaccio, was hardly efficient either.
The Russian invasion of its far smaller, weaker and corruption-riddled neighbour has been a demonstration of Russian weakness.
Of course Russia will ultimately win – Russia is a lot bigger and it is taking on a smaller, underdeveloped and scarcely functional mafia state.
But that this is all an example of Putin’s genius, and casualty rates favour Russia by ten to one, are claims so divorced from reality they can only come from those who are utterly delusional – or paid to put them out.
END OF UPDATE
For well over a decade, we were used to nightly shots on our television news of British and US forces, in heavy combat gear, storming across desert landscapes in cloud of dust or firing heavy machine guns over the top of mud walls.
These shots were provided by “embedded journalists” with the UK and US forces, swaggering around in the same kind of body armour and helmets as the troops, often distinguishable only by a blue bib with “press” written on it.
Thankfully, we see almost no such screen footage of the proxy war NATO is fighting against Russia in Ukraine. War porn has almost disappeared from our screens. We saw a lot of it when the failed Russian column to Kiev was destroyed in the early part of the war, but since then, very little.
The answer is of course not hard to find. The ratio of Iraqi dead to American dead in the second Iraq war was about 200 to 1, and in the “triumphant” early advance was still higher than that. The embedded journalists travelling as part of US or UK armed forces in their armoured vehicles were posing as heroes, but in little real danger at that stage.
The US forces were a real danger to non-embedded journalists. 16 journalists and 6 other media workers were acknowledged as killed by US forces in Iraq, while scores of other Iraqi journalists disappeared with no certainty as to who killed them. By contrast 2 “embedded” journalists were killed.
The “embedded journalists” were of course not real journalists at all, they were simply functioning as actors, presenting images of the exhilarating triumph of colonial massacre of a technologically inferior people, to a home audience that lapped it up.
By contrast, being in the front line with Ukrainian troops now would be very dangerous indeed. The very tiny number of journalists who have done it are indeed worthy of the name. Streaming along as a passenger in a glamourised turkey shoot in Iraq is much more congenial than being embedded with troops in Ukraine who are fighting where the kill ratio is somewhere close to even.
(There are utterly ludicrous enemy casualty claims by both Ukraine and Russia, which should be treated with equal contempt).
The territorial gain in the vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive is of the same order as that in the notoriously futile Battle of the Somme. It doesn’t make for glorious television.
You may have noted a repeated Western propaganda meme, that very often when a Russian missile strikes hundreds of miles from the frontline, it is frequently said to have landed close to a hotel, bar or cafe used by western journalists.
I am not sure this is the propaganda win they think this is.
The Ukraine war is going extremely well for those who are making billions from the arms sales and increases to western defence budgets that have resulted. It is going extremely badly for ordinary people all over the world, who have suffered the inflationary and other consequences of the disruption of trade and production and the population flows.
Our rulers would love it to go on like this for years – in fact a quick Ukrainian victory would be a disaster for the profiteers.
This war is going nowhere on the ground. I do not expect a Russian winter offensive will be significantly more successful than the Ukrainian spring offensive. It would be impossible to display frontline coverage that did not demonstrate both abject horror and utter futility. Which is why there is almost none.
I am grateful we are seeing so little war porn on our screens. But I know why.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
This is one of those unusual occasions, where a little while ago I intended to write a post advocating the precise opposite, but events have changed my mind.
After long and hard thought, I had come to the conclusion that pride had to be swallowed and personal animosity set aside. For the sake of Scottish independence we all had to reunite the movement and that could only be behind the SNP. I had a few attempts at starting an article on this.
My mind was changed by Humza Yousaf stating that, unequivocally, Independence can only be achieved through a referendum sanctioned by Westminster, and that could only be obtained if polling showed the majority for Independence to be significantly over 53%.
That is an entirely fair précis of Humza’s interview found here.
As I have consistently explained, Westminster will never consent to lose Scotland’s resources. Independence will have to be taken.
Anybody who believes that we need permission from London for Independence, by definition does not believe in Scotland’s right of self-determination.
Humza Yousaf plainly has no intention whatsoever of progressing Independence.
I therefore cannot possibly suggest the Independence movement unite behind the SNP, because the SNP is de facto a unionist party, interested only in governing within the devolution arrangement of the UK.
The concomitant of that is that any real Independence party must seek not to cooperate with the SNP, but to replace it entirely.
That is a long hard slog, but there is no genuine alternative that is real about Independence. The other option is to seek an accommodation with the SNP, but that can only ultimately aim at sharing some of the fruits of office obtainable within UK institutions. That is all the SNP want.
The SNP and Independence are clean different things.
I therefore cannot any more support Alba’s campaign for a Scotland United ticket, because that would involve asking Independence supporters to vote for SNP MPs who are in it entirely for personal career and are a block on Independence, not movers towards it.
Besides, with the SNP rudely rebuffing Alba at every opportunity, there is now an extrordinary irony:
Alba repeatedly asking the SNP for a “Scotland United” joint ticket is becoming as pointless and humiliating as the SNP repeatedly asking Westminster for an S30 referendum.
Alba has already decided, at conference, that it is a political party not just a popular movement, and therefore is not confined to the Salvo/Liberation route.
Well, you are not a political party if you do not fight elections, and Rutherglen is here.
Now I am not a complete idiot (although I would be grateful if nobody polled my household on that). I realise that a great many genuine Independence supporters have not yet realised they are betrayed, indeed taken for fools, by the SNP.
I understand that the “Scotland United” proposal is designed to avoid Alba being blamed for loss of seats to unionists under the First Past the Post system when the Independence vote is split.
But we have passed that now. We have offered again and again, and the SNP has said no. Scotland United is a very dead parrot.
I also no longer care if the SNP does lose seats to Labour.
We have incontrovertible proof that if the SNP holds 95% of Westminster seats, it does nothing to move for Independence.
We have incontrovertible proof that if the SNP holds a majority in the Scottish Parliament, with or without the Scottish Greens, it does nothing to move for Independence.
There is simply no connection, since Alex Salmond left, between the SNP winning seats and “mandates”, and Scottish Independence.
That is an incontrovertible fact and we need to bite the bullet and start explaining it relentlessly to the electorate.
Starting in Rutherglen.
I realise this is a hard road. I realise we may convince only hundreds this time. But a long hard road starts with the first step.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Fernando Villavicencio, who with the Guardian’s Luke Harding and Dan Collyns fabricated the notorious Guardian front page lie that Paul Manafort and Julian Assange held pro-Trump meetings in the Ecuadorean Embassy, has been shot dead in Ecuador.
The appalling lie, which the Guardian’s $700,000 a year editor has refused to retract or remove, despite criticism even from the Washington Post which named Villavicencio as the fabricator, was aimed to give support to Clinton’s flagging “Russiagate” invention, which was crumbling fast.
Here is a photo of CIA assets Collyns, Harding and Villavicencio together in Quito.
Villavicencio’s claim to be an anti-corruption campaigner was highly selective and aimed only at making accusations against left wing figures, including a long history of fabricating documents.
Having been elected to the National Assembly in 2021, he devoted all his energy to obstructing the impeachment for corruption of Ecuador’s current President, fellow CIA asset and banker Guillermo Lasso. That seems rather strange for an anti-corruption campaigner.
Astonishingly, Villavicencio’s Wikipedia page presents him as an anti-corruption hero. It does not refer to the Manafort fabrication at all.
The Wikipedia page states that in 2015 Villavicencio informed Wikileaks of surveillance against Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy, as well as providing other documents to Wikileaks.
What it does not say is that Wikileaks did not publish Villavicencio’s material because their checks revealed at least some of it to be forged.
I must state here, for legal reasons, that the episode of surveillance on Assange in the Embassy mentioned in Villavicencio’s Wikipedia page, occurred before and was entirely unconnected to the UC Global affair, in which court case I am a witness and victim.
The result of Villavicencio’s information on surveillance of Assange in the Embassy led in fact directly to an attempt to blackmail over intimate moment images. Villavicencio’s role in that is, to say the least, murky. He was not present at the attempted shakedown.
None of which justifies Villavicencio’s awful death. But it does explain why you should not believe anything you are reading about it in the mainstream media.
CIA assets who forge documents, or distribute CIA forged documents, and spread corruption allegations against left wing figures, are most useful working in the shadows. If they become over-ambitious, draw attention to themselves, and run for President as Villavicencio did, when the CIA already has its approved puppet in the race, it is very easy to move from CIA asset to CIA liability.
Which is very bad for your health.
My sincere condolences to Mr Villavicencio’s family and those who loved him.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Given the large population in the UK of Pakistani origin, the lack of serious media coverage of the overthrow and incarceration of Imran Khan, and the mass imprisonment of his supporters, is truly extraordinary.
Imran Khan was last week sentenced to three years in prison – and a five year ban from politics – for alleged embezzlement of official gifts. This follows his removal as Prime Minister in a CIA engineered coup, and a vicious campaign of violence and imprisonment against Khan and his supporters.
It is currently illegal in Pakistan to publish or broadcast about Khan or the thousands of new political prisoners incarcerated in appalling conditions. There have been no protests from the UK or US governments.
Imran Khan is almost certainly the least corrupt senior politician in Pakistan’s history – I admit that is not a high bar. Pakistan’s politics are, to an extent not sufficiently understood in the west, literally feudal. Two dynasties, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos, have alternated in power, in a sometimes deadly rivalry, punctuated by periods of more open military rule.
There is no genuine ideological or policy gap between the Sharifs and Bhuttos, though the latter have more intellectual pretension. It is purely about control of state resource. The arbiter of power has in reality been the military, not the electorate. They have now put the Sharifs back in power.
Imran Khan’s incredible breakthrough in the 2018 National Assembly elections shattered normal political life in Pakistan. Winning a plurality of the popular vote and the most seats, Khan’s PTI party had risen from under 1% of the vote in 2002 to 32% in 2018.
The dates are important. It was not Khan’s cricketing heroics which made him politically popular. In 2002, when his cricket genius was much fresher in the mind than it is now, he was viewed as a joke candidate.
In fact it was Khan’s outspoken opposition to the United States using Pakistan as a base, and particularly his demand to stop the hundreds of dreadful US drone strikes within Pakistan, that caused the surge in his support.
The Pakistani military went along with him. The reason is not hard to find. Given the level of hatred the USA had engendered through its drone killings, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hideous torture excesses of the “War on terror”, it was temporarily not in the interests of the Pakistan military to foreground their deep relationship with the CIA and US military.
The Pakistan security service, ISI, had betrayed Osama Bin Laden to the USA, which hardly improved the popularity of the military and security services. Imran Khan was seen by them as a useful safety valve. It was believed he could channel the insurgent anti-Americanism and Islamic enthusiasm which was sweeping Pakistan, into a government acceptable to the West.
In power, Imran proved much more radical than the CIA, the British Tories and the Pakistani military had hoped. The belief that he was only a playboy dilettante at heart was soon shattered. A stream of Imran’s decisions upset the USA and threatened the income streams of the corrupt senior military.
Khan did not only talk about stopping the US drone programme, he actually stopped it.
Khan refused offers of large amounts of money, also linked in to US support for an IMF loan, for Pakistan to send ground forces to support the Saudi air campaign against Yemen. I was told this by one of Imran’s ministers when I visited in 2019, on condition of a confidentiality which need no longer apply.
Khan openly criticised military corruption and, in the action most guaranteed to precipitate a CIA coup, he supported the developing country movement to move trading away from the petrodollar. He accordingly sought to switch Pakistan’s oil suppliers from the Gulf states to Russia.
The Guardian, the chief neo-con mouthpiece in the UK, two days ago published an article about Khan so tendentious it took my breath away. How about this for a bit of dishonest reporting:
in November a gunman opened fire on his convoy at a rally, injuring his leg in what aides say was an assassination attempt.
“Aides say”: what is this implying?
Khan had himself shot in the legs as some kind of stunt? It was all a joke? He wasn’t actually shot but fell over and grazed a knee? It is truly disgraceful journalism.
It is hard to know whether the article’s astonishing assertion that Khan’s tenure as Prime Minister led to an increase in corruption in Pakistan, is a deliberate lie or extraordinary ignorance.
I am not sure whether Ms Graham-Harrison has ever been to Pakistan. I suspect the closest she has been to Pakistan is meeting Jemima Goldsmith at a party.
“Playboy”, “dilettante”, “misogynist”, the Guardian hit piece is relentless. It is an encapsulation of the “liberal” arguments for military intervention in Muslim states, for overthrowing Islamic governments and conquering Islamic countries, in order to install Western norms, in particular the tenets of Western feminism.
I think we have seen how that playbook has ended in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, amongst others. The use of the word “claim” to engender distrust of Khan in the Guardian article is studied. He “claimed” that his years living in the UK had inspired him to wish to create a welfare state in Pakistan.
Why is that a dubious comment from a man who spent the majority of his personal fortune on setting up and running a free cancer hospital in Pakistan?
Khan’s efforts to remove or sideline the most corrupt Generals, and those most openly in the pay of the CIA, are described by the Guardian as “he tried to take control of senior military appointments and began railing against the armed forces’ influence in politics.” How entirely unreasonable of him!
Literally thousands of members of Khan’s political party are currently in jail for the crime of having joined a new political party. The condemnation by the Western establishment has been non-existent.
It is difficult to think of a country, besides Pakistan, where thousands of largely middle class people could suddenly become political prisoners, while drawing almost no condemnation. It is of course because the UK supports the coup against Khan.
But I feel confident it also reflects in part the racism and contempt shown by the British political class towards the Pakistani immigrant community, which contrasts starkly with British ministerial enthusiasm for Modi’s India.
We should not forget New Labour have also never been a friend to democracy in Pakistan, and the Blair government was extremely comfortable with Pakistan’s last open military dictatorship under General Musharraf.
On my last visit to Pakistan I went to Karachi, Abbottabad and the Afghan border. I hope to return in the spring, should the new government let me in.
May I make the plea that all of this activity (and my coming Assange tour in the US next month) is funded entirely by your subscriptions and donations. Please do consider helping if you can, as the finances of the blog are very tight at the moment, as the cost of living crisis bites people. All the contributions, even the smallest, add up to a major cumulative difference to keep us going.
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This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Here is Friday’s New York WBAI broadcast hosted by Randy Credico with Roger Waters, John Shipton, Alicia Castro, Ray McGovern and myself.
I was slightly worried in retrospect we sounded like friends and campaigners having an internal conversation about strategy. But it appears people found that interesting to hear.
Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
In discussing government proposals to effectively enforce a mass public switch to heat pumps for home heating rather than gas boilers, I venture into an area where I have no expertise. I therefore intend to set out a series of numbered propositions which appear to me incontrovertible.
SONY DSC
I follow this by a series a) b) c) of policy propositions. (I have been trying to think of a word for enumerate when you are marking by alphabet, but can’t come up with one).
This is very much an invitation to debate, not an attempt to impose my view. I am reliant on common sense, which is really just an idiom meaning logic. Here are my propositions:
1) It is not unreasonable for people to wish homes to be heated to 20°C or slightly higher.
2) Heat pumps are much more energy efficient than gas boilers. They are therefore undoubtedly a good thing for reducing energy use. But in home size applications they cannot match a gas boiler’s ability to generate very hot water quickly.
3) Insulation should come before heat pumps. To concentrate on how heating is produced, ahead of reducing the need for heating, is illogical. This is particularly true as a great deal of the housing stock is so poorly insulated that standard domestic heat pumps are insufficiently powerful to maintain 20C in them in cold weather.
4) The efficiency of heat pumps reduces in cold weather. They use more electricity to produce the same amount of heat. This is a different point to the obvious fact that more heat is needed in cold weather.
5) Almost all heat pump systems therefore have an auxiliary method of simple resistance electric heating to boost output when needed, akin to an immersion heater. The “they work in Norway” argument therefore needs deeper consideration.
6) Ground source heat pumps do not suffer such efficiency losses but are much more expensive installations and of course you have to own enough ground.
6) In fact, particularly in colder areas, the fuel cost of running a heat pump is not significantly cheaper, and often not cheaper at all, than running a gas boiler with the same result in heat output. The notion that a heat pump will pay for itself in lower fuel bills is generally false.
7) The primary reason for this is that electricity is much more expensive than gas per thermal unit.
8) Electricity prices in the UK are double those in France from their state energy company, while the British privatised energy companies throughout the supply train make massive profits.
9) A full heat pump installation to an average home obviously varies but costs around £20,000. With upgraded radiators and insulation it not infrequently can be double that or more.
10) As a general rule, those least able to afford it live in the worst housing, particularly with regard to insulation.
11) It is simply impractical for the cost of transition to heat pumps to be met by the ordinary citizen.
12) The national grid already operates at 99% of capacity in coldest days of winter, even including the capacity to import. If all gas boilers were swapped for heat pumps, electricity demand on the coldest days of winter would approximately double.
So what is the solution? Well, I have long argued that the state needs to undertake a massive, fully state funded programme of insulation in every home. Here are my policy propositions:
a) The transition to a lower carbon economy is a massive undertaking that cannot be met by consumers “nudged” by government incentives or taxations
b) It requires emergency state intervention akin to the state takeover of virtually all industry during World War 2
c) All energy companies must be nationalised
d) The state must undertake a massive and urgent programme bringing every home up to high insulation standards, mobilising the needed resources and labour
e) Distributed electricity production must be prioritised. All buildings should be fitted with solar panels and battery storage, and marine type wind turbines
f) Heat pumps should be installed by the state in homes where practical. District heating systems should be constructed in all dense urban areas. A range of other technologies, eg biogas and geothermal, should be deployed for these where appropriate.
g) Use of fossil fuel should be minimised but abolition is impractical.
h) Land based wind power should be massively boosted and storage options, particularly pumped hydro-electric, selected and capacity built. Estuary barrages should be prioritised.
i) There must be an acceptance of undesirable localised environmental impact necessary to the big picture
I fear that ill thought out schemes that threaten to land households with massive and unrealistic transition costs are leading to an upsurge in climate change denial.
This claim from the Scottish Greens paints a far more optimistic picture:
?A new poll shows that a majority of people in Scotland back @patrickharvie's plans for a change in the way we heat our homes. ?
A majority of respondents said they would install a heat pump in their home. ♨️
Unfortunately it is not really true. If you look at the actual datasets for the survey, you find that 46.76% answered: “I would be willing to install a heat pump only with government finance”. Only 10.02% said they were prepared to install a heat pump without government finance.
Current proposals for subsidy would still leave the average consumer with a five figure bill. This is not the way forward.
Your views are most welcome. I realise this will attract some climate change denial in the comments, but hey-ho it’s a free blog.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
This is simply an anecdotal tale of my personal experience, but it seems to illustrate so much that is wrong with being an ordinary individual in modern late capitalist society, that I thought it was worth relating.
I sit writing in my study. Water is dripping through the ceiling across the other side of the room.
After a heavy storm about six weeks ago, there was a downpour from the ceiling. The water was very dark and smelly. I don’t think I have any outflow pipes it could possibly come from, or I would have thought it was sewage.
So I phoned the insurance company. I bought the household insurance through Comparethemarket.com. I accepted a quote from a company called CETA which was for approximately £450 per year.
So I called the Claims number provided and was rather surprised to find the phone answered by a totally different company, the Davies Group. I spoke to a very pleasant lady with a young voice who had great difficulty hearing me and apologised for her faulty headset. She promised to phone me back the next morning.
The next morning she did phone me back, took my policy details and the nature of my claim, and said they would be in touch.
Nothing happened for another week. Water continued to drip in occasionally, adding to the internal damage.
After about another ten days I received a phone call from a drone operator. They wanted permission to access my property to make a drone survey of the house for the insurer. I confess I was rather surprised by this, especially as you can walk on to the flat roof above the study via a door from the bedroom. But I agreed.
The water continued to drip in. The floor now needs replacement.
Eventually the drone came and went. More time passed. Then I received another email pointing out that it was a condition of the policy that any flat roof must have been inspected, and repaired if necessary, in the two years prior to the start of the policy.
By total chance, I had in fact had the flat roof relaid in the two years prior to the start of the policy. The Davies Group – who in this email described themselves as “loss adjusters”- had asked for evidence that the work had been carried out by a qualified roofer.
A general building company doing maintenance had sub-contracted the roofer, so more time went by – and more water came in – while I obtained documents from the actual roofing company. This eventually happened and I sent them to the Davies Group.
The Davies Group are also asking for “evidence” that no more than 50% of the roof of the property is flat roof. But it is obviously well less than 50% and they have themselves sent up a drone, so they have the evidence already.
It has been raining heavily and the water is coming in quite hard. What kind of insurance company immediately puts all claims – including quite small ones like this – out to a loss adjuster?
They seem to be spending more resources denying the claim than it would cost to fix the leak. What was the drone for?
I called the Davies Group this morning, and got another nice young lady who could not access my claim as their systems were down, and asked me to call back in a few hours.
I therefore decided to call the CETA Group who comparethemarket.com had listed as the insurer and who had sent me the policy documents. That did not get me very far. CETA are not an insurer, but a broker. Their website calls them “the broker for the broker”.
So comparethemarket.com – which is licensed as an “insurance intermediary”, had taken my money and sold me a policy provided by CETA, an insurance broker.
But what company was actually insuring me? It would be neither the intermediary nor the broker.
I phoned CETA and spoke to a very helpful lady in a call centre, apparently overseas. She read from her screen and kept trying to refer me to the Davies Group.
I explained that I did not want to speak to the loss adjusters, I wished to speak to my actual insurer.
After a long, long phone conversation she spoke to her supervisor and I was given an 0203 number for the insurer, where I was told I could register a complaint about claims handling.
I called this number which was for a company named Arkel. Now after research I found that Arkel are in fact also not the insurer. They are an underwriting agency, which is an agent that has been given the authority by the insurer to conclude contracts.
Arkel do not have a website but do have a Linkedin page. They are a little company with just seven employees.
When I phoned Arkel, I was answered by a young man who just gave his own name, not the company, and plainly was not expecting to receive calls from a member of the public. He really did sound exactly as though I had just woken him up.
However when I explained the situation he could not have been more friendly and helpful. He explained that Arkel do not handle claims, but he did offer to contact the Davies Group on my behalf and find out what was happening, and I believed he would do it.
By this time I had read very carefully through my policy document, and while it had a big Arkel letterhead at the top, in the detail it gave the name of the actual insurer as the Chaucer Insurance Company.
The Chaucer Insurance Company is in fact 100% owned by China Re. China Re is 100% owned by the Chinese state.
I was just trying to get my roof fixed and the ceiling repaired. I did not expect to have all this trouble, or to discover my home is actually insured by the Chinese state, to which, while it seems a strange thing for the Chinese state to spend its time doing, I have no objection.
But consider this. I bought my insurance from comparethe market.com, an “insurance intermediary”, who took a cut. They got it from CETA, an “insurance broker”, who took a cut. They got it from Arkel, an “underwriting agent”, who took a cut. They were acting on behalf of Chaucer Insurance, whose frontmen get a cut from China Re, who ultimately get the profit, which goes to the Chinese State.
It is amazing there is anything left from my £450 to be pooled for the payment of claims. Which is perhaps why any claims immediately go to a loss adjuster – who of course gets yet another cut – and we have weeks of messing around, including drone shots of a roof you can walk on.
For me the worst part of this has been that every individual I have spoken to, in all these companies, has seemed a really nice person, genuinely wanting to help, but stuck there wearing a headset, reading limited responses from a screen, operating within their tiny delimited space in this nightmarish corporate jungle.
So many people now have this kind of utterly demeaning employment it has a real effect on human welfare.
Since I started writing, another very nice gentleman from CETA has called me in response to a lousy review I published on Trustpilot. He too said he would contact the Davies Group.
It is impossible that in the real world this corporate spaghetti is more efficient than the old insurance company that used to collect premiums and handle its own claims.
Involving this vast plethora of intermediaries can only work by screwing more out of the consumer – by not paying their claims.
Automatically bringing in loss adjusters on a small household claim is vexatious.
This is just a small personal story, but it seems to illustrate how impossible it has become for ordinary people to interact effectively with the hypercapitalism that orders so much of our lives.
Finally one last irony.
I did not expect to find the Chinese State insuring my home. The claim is being “handled” by loss adjusters The Davies Group, a huge portmanteau services company.
The Davies Group is 100% owned by BC Partners.
BC Partners is 100% owned by the Guardian Media Group.
I didn’t expect that either. The Guardian. Loss adjusters to the Chinese state. Welcome to 2023.
UPDATE Incredibly the loss adjuster has come up with a new reason to try to deny the claim. They say that the weather in Swanston 18 to 19 June did not meet the definition of “storm.”
The word “storm” does not in fact appear in the policy document, so I don’t know where this comes from.
They have now accepted my evidence that the roof was relaid by a qualified roofer in 2020, and that less than 50% of the roof area is flat.
They have referred the question of “storm” to the insurer and promised me an answer in three to four days, “Possibly sooner”. The rain is still dripping in. END UPDATE
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
All of the worst atrocities in human history have been perpetrated by people convinced they were in the right. People act according to the mores of their era and group. There is nothing more dangerous that the inability to see that it is reasonable for others to have a different view or interest.
The Guardian has been publishing calls for NATO to declare war on Russia. Twitter is awash with fanatic “liberals” arguing there can be no negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine, and the war must only end with Ukraine recovering all territory including Crimea.
The most crazed sometimes go further and suggest the war may only end with regime change in Russia.
It does not require any special degree of intelligence to see the dangers of insisting on the unconditional surrender, and the personal incarceration or death, of those with their finger on the big red button, in a war against a nuclear power.
The 20th century saw two terrible “world wars”. The first was the result of Imperial rivalries and dynastic power, and it is difficult to discern any morality in it at all (though the propaganda fabrications about Germans bayonetting Belgian babies are a template that has been, with slight variations, repeated by western media in every war right up until today).
The Second World War, however, was as close to a justified war as can ever be found. Fascism and Nazism were truly evil doctrines, while the Western forces that opposed them were on the brink of a golden but short-lived era of social democracy and meaningful working class empowerment.
The problem is that this has become the template for thinking about war in the West – that we are always the “goodies” and the opponents are truly evil, and that total war must be fought leading to unconditional surrender, with even the most horrendous atrocities (Dresden, Hiroshima) justified within the overarching moral imperative.
We have seen straightforward imperial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, each of which the media has tried to manipulate to fit that thought pattern. It also drives the continual propaganda that the war in Ukraine comes from an invasion by an evil Russian regime and was “illegal and unprovoked”.
Now as you know, I hold that Russian incursion or invasion was illegal, both in 2014 and 2022. But unprovoked it most certainly was not.
It is interesting to return to the World War II precedent here, because it has never been understood to detract from acceptance of the evil of Nazism, to attempt to understand how it happened.
Every schoolchild of my age was taught the “Causes of World War II”, and the first cause was always the extremely punitive Treaty of Versailles.
The insistence on unconditional surrender in World War I, the entirely unfounded claim the whole conflict of World War I was Germany’s fault, the annexations, cruel financial reparations and blow to national pride of military suppression, were all universally acknowledged by historians as mistakes that were of great help to Hitler.
Interestingly, today’s history school curricula in the UK spend much more time on World War II than we used to, and are much less nuanced. The causes of the war feature much less if at all, and heroic Britnat tales of a brave struggling people (which are not of course untrue) feature much more.
With Ukraine, we are not allowed to acknowledge any of the factors that provoked Russia. Not NATO expansion and forward positioning of missiles, not glorification of Nazism, not suppression of Russian language and political parties, not shelling of Russian civilian areas.
In fact it is apparently traitorous to mention any of these things: a crime against the overarching goal of total victory.
This establishment and media narrative is countered on social media by others who take an opposite and equally uncompromising view. They believe Russia must fight to a total victory in Ukraine, depose Zelensky, and humiliate and weaken NATO, thus dealing a blow to US Imperialism.
While a much smaller group, the pro-Russian extremists can be every bit as bloodthirsty as the NATO hawks.
The problem is that all these people on both sides, fuelled by the righteousness of their own belief, are blind to the immense human suffering of the war. They don’t seem to care that many times the amount of suffering so far would be required in order for either side to achieve total victory.
Whereas in the real world both sides are bogged down in a barely moving battle of attrition. The idea of “total victory” is impractical nonsense.
As for those actually making the decisions, for Western politicians a continuing war is a win-win. It drains Russia, their designated enemy. More importantly, it provides the massive opportunities for concentrated political power and super-profits from the public purse that only war can bring.
So far the UK has provided £4.1 billion of weaponry to Ukraine, without a mainstream political dissenting voice. If total victory is the aim, that is just an appetiser.
Yet we have the pretend opposition Labour Party stating that £1.2 billion a year cannot possibly be found to lift the two-child benefit cap and relieve child poverty.
That is one reason wars are so good for the wealthy who control us. Weapons expenditure is beyond control or criticism. To date £5 billion has been spent on the Ajax light armoured vehicle project without a single vehicle ready to enter service having been produced.
There is no telling how much Trident is eventually going to cost, though at least 125 billion. The war in Ukraine provides yet more evidence that our nuclear deterrent does not actually deter anything.
Though I suppose the Ukraine war does radically improve the chances that at least we might get our money’s worth from Trident by blowing the whole world to pieces.
I can see no logical refutation to my constantly repeated argument that the war in Ukraine has shown that Russia cannot speedily defeat a much smaller, weaker and extremely corrupt neighbouring state, so the incredibly high expenditure on “defence” by NATO is not really needed.
The idea that Russia, which is taking a long while to defeat Ukraine, could be a serious threat to the entire NATO alliance is plainly utter nonsense.
But Russia can of course eventually defeat its much weaker and smaller neighbour. Ultimately Ukraine cannot win this war, and somehow the West has to come to terms with that. Ukraine is quite simply going to run out of people able and willing to fight.
Ukraine’s use of US cluster weapons was perhaps the first major dent in the blue and yellow public opinion so carefully manufactured in the West. As the horrible war continues on with no real Ukrainian victories to cheer, the “who started it” question will fade in the public mind.
I still think it was unwise of Putin to start this war, as well as illegal. If his goals are limited, then this is a good time to move to cash in his gains.
You may be surprised to know that I have a certain degree of admiration for Bismarck. Apart from a genuine claim to have invented the foundations of a welfare state, Bismarck’s use of war was brilliant.
Bismarck stuck to defined and limited objectives, and did not allow spectacular military success to lead him to expand those objectives.
The purpose of his two wars against Austria and France was to unify Germany, and he succeeded in very quick wars, immediately ended. Humiliating or punishing France or Austria played no significant part in his thinking. Bismarck had limited goals, achieved them and stopped the fighting immediately.
This horrible war will end with Russia retaining Crimea. There is no point in arguing about it. Whether the Donbass remains theoretically part of Ukraine remains to be seen, but de facto Russian autonomy there will be established. I suspect that more important to Putin than the Donbass would be territory further south which secures the approaches to Crimea.
There has to be a territorial settlement. That is what diplomacy is for. The total war options are in themselves terrible and bring massive nuclear risk.
The idea of either side fighting through to total victory is, quite simply, madness. Sanity must be imposed on those who seek to profit from continuing war, or seek to engulf the world in the flames of ideology and righteousness.
Ask this one question of those who insist on total victory for one side or the other. “How many dead people is that worth?”. Insist on an actual number. For total victory either way, anything less than 1 million is utterly unrealistic. It could be much, much worse. Do you really want that?
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Keir Starmer’s determination to use his refusal to alleviate child poverty as the issue with which to demonstrate his macho Thatcherite credentials, has provided one of those moments when blurred perceptions crystallise.
A Labour government in the UK under Starmer will bring no significant changes in economic or foreign policy and will make no difference whatsoever to the lives of working class people.
If dividends were taxed at the same rate as wages, that alone would bring in very many times the cost of lifting the two-child benefit cap. But that would hurt the owners of capital and be redistributive, so it is firmly off Starmer’s agenda.
Starmer, Reeves and Streeting have no intention of attempting to bridge society’s stunning and ever-growing wealth gap.
Rather they seek to emphasise “wealth creation” and return to trickledown theory. Alongside “wealth creation” they talk of “reform”, by which they mean more deregulation and more private, for profit provision of public services.
The Labour Party has not only abandoned all thought of securing a capital interest for the worker in the enterprise where they work. The Labour Party has also abandoned the ideas both of state intervention in the unequal dynamic between worker and employer, and of facilitating and supporting self-organisation of Labour.
Tory anti-union legislation is to remain, and who can forget Starmer banning Labour MPs from official union picket lines?
The Labour Party in power is also not going to repeal the hostile environment for immigrants legislation, or the Tory attacks on civil liberties and the right to protest.
What precisely therefore is the purpose of the Labour Party? An extension to which question is, what then is the purpose of the next UK general election?
To register disgust at the rule of the Tories by voting in an alternative set of Tories?
There has been an undercurrent of concern about the sprint to the right under Starmer, but somehow the two-child benefit cap has crystallised it in the public mind. The fact that there is no real choice on offer to the electorate has even broken into the mainstream media narrative (the embedded video, not the tweet, though I agree with that too).
The Labour Right are the most disgusting, duplicitous cvnts in British politics pic.twitter.com/bfJSLTphgg
— ian westell ?️??️⚧️? (@ianwestell) July 17, 2023
It is not just a Westminster thing. Famously, the SNP have won eight successive electoral mandates on Scottish Independence while their elected representatives have done absolutely zero about it. They have not even really pretended they intend to do anything about it.
Western democracy appears to have failed in the sense that elections can achieve nothing that makes any difference to the lives of ordinary people. They only make a difference to lives of members of the political class, who jump on or off the gravy train according to the result.
This is not an accident. Those who have threatened the neoliberal order have been destroyed by lies like Corbyn – lies which the billionaire- and state-controlled media were delighted to amplify – or cheated out of election like Bernie Sanders.
In the United States, the current lawfare attempts to remove Donald Trump as a Presidential candidate are an extraordinary denial of democracy. Trump is accused of paying off sexual partners and of retaining classified documents.
Bill Clinton paid off sexual partners in a much more egregious fashion and Hillary’s data-handling arrangements were much worse, with zero legal consequences for either, but that does not seem in the least to concern the “liberal” Establishment.
The role of the US security services in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the last Presidential election should have been a giant wake-up call. But liberals were more interested in stopping Trump than in preventing the security state from manipulating the result of elections.
There is an “end justifies the means” approach by supposedly liberal thinkers that supports any action against Trump, as it supports the banking ostracism of Farage, because their views are not entirely those of the neoliberal Establishment.
Neither Trump nor Farage are close to my own views, though I differ from them in different ways from, but no more than I differ from, Starmer and Biden. But what is happening to both of them should be put together with what happened to Corbyn and with the gutting of Labour by Starmer, and even (God help us) with what happened to Truss, as part of the same process of ensuring the political agenda does not offer any real choice.
It has become banal to note that concentration of media ownership between state and billionaires, and social media gatekeeping by billionaires’ corporations in cahoots with state security services, has contributed to the limitation of accepted “respectable” viewpoints.
I am less and less confident I see any solution.
In looking to start this chain of thought, I was thinking of saying that I no longer believe in the Western model of democracy, but can find no acceptable alternative. On writing I find that I do in fact believe in the western model of democracy, but that model no longer exists.
What we had from roughly 1920 to 1990, when voting really could make a difference, is not what we have now.
Voting for Clement Attlee made a difference. The Establishment won’t make that mistake again.
The concentration of media ownership is only one facet of the concentration of wealth and political power which appears irreversible by democratic means, in that we will never be given the opportunity to vote for anyone in official politics who opposes it, or to hear the arguments against it on any media platform with an equal access to the market for ideas.
We live in a post-democratic society. That is difficult to accept, but it is true.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
This article will feature senior judges I have blogged about before, and explain how I expect the Assange case will be finally stitched up for extradition.
You may recall that my article analysing the dismissal of Assange’s High Court Appeal by Judge Lewis and Judge Swift – the former government lawyer who had said the intelligence services were his favourite clients – concentrated heavily on an analysis of the fact that Swift had also dismissed appeals against the government’s policy of deporting asylum claimants to Rwanda.
I am quite proud of that whole article, but the central point on Rwanda was this:
Swift and Lewis argue further, at paras 81 to 84, that in UK domestic law, the Home Secretary’s certification of Rwanda as a safe country is “irrebuttable” – ie there is no legal avenue to question its truth, and nor does it require parliamentary approval. The “safety” of Rwanda is a fact in law simply because Braverman certifies that it is.
Having stated that under Tory immigration legislation the Home Secretary can certify anywhere she feels like as safe, irrespective of objective truth (provide certain procedural steps are taken) Swift and Lewis then go on to the non-sequitur on which their judgment depends, that because a country has been certified “safe” for the purposes of UK domestic law, that makes it actually eligible for receipt of UK deportees in terms of the UN Refugee Convention.
Well, I am happy to say that the Swift/Lewis judgment on Rwanda has been overturned on appeal, precisely on the question of the need for the court to decide whether in the real world – as opposed to in an official document or in Suella Braverman’s head – Rwanda is actually a safe place for asylum seekers to be sent.
On the grounds that Rwanda is not safe, by a two to one decision Lord Underhill and Master of the Rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos ruled that the deportation policy is not lawful, against dissent from Lord Chief Justice Burnett.
Sir Geoffrez Vos, Master of the Rolls, said this:
90. The SSHD [Home Secretary] submitted to us, in effect, that, in the light
of the detailed guarantees and assurances in the MEDP and the longstanding relationship with Rwanda and its financial and other incentives to perform on its obligations, what happened in the past was of limited, if any, real significance. This was a key submission, because the
UNHCR’s evidence was all directed to what had happened in the past and what was
happening at the current time. The SSHD said that a predictive evaluation was needed,
and that in such an exercise, it was not significant that things had been less than ideal
in the past.
91. I do not accept that the past and the present can either be ignored or side-lined as the
SSHD suggests. Of course, a predictive evaluation is required, and of course great
weight will be given to the guarantees and assurances of the Rwandan Government.
But the likelihood of promises being performed must, anyway in part, be judged by
reference to what has happened in the past and the capacity and capability of the entity
making the promises to keep them. The SSHD acknowledges, in effect, that the
Rwandan asylum system has some way to go…
Vos also criticised Swift and Lewis’ failure to give sufficient weight to the views of the United Nation High Commission for Refugees, stating that their opinion was, while not determinative, “important” and not given sufficient weight.
199. It is not possible definitively to resolve the difference between the two tables, but I believe we should proceed on the basis of UNHCR’s figures, both because they are
carefully explained and defended in both LB 2 and LB 3 and because we should take a
“substantive grounds/real risk” approach. In my view the surprisingly high rejection
rate of claimants from known conflict zones, where UNHCR recommends against
returns, does indeed suggest a poor quality of decision-making.
Lord Underhill, like Vos, ruled that it was for the court to make a determination of the real world reality of the Tory claim that Rwanda is a safe country for asylum seekers. Underhill did not go so far as to state the truth, that everybody who is not a complete lunatic knows that Rwanda is a nsaty dictatorship and not a safe country, but did reach the same effective conclusion:
272. In short, the relocation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda under the MEDP would involve their claims being determined under a system which, on the evidence, has up to now
had serious deficiencies, and at the date of the hearing in the Divisional Court those
deficiencies had not been corrected and were not likely to be in the short term.
That left the Tory Lord Chief Justice Burnett. He agreed that it was for the court to determine whether in the real world Rwanda really was a safe country, and indeed argued that was what Swift and Lewis had said, when plainly it was not.
Burnett then went on to say that Rwanda was in fact a safe country because Mr Simon Mustard of the FCDO had said so – as if a foreign office official like Mustard (a particularly unimaginative ex Lothian and Borders police officer) were able to put forward an independent expert opinion that contradicted the wishes of ministers.
Burnett’s acceptance of Mustard’s view as authoritative is even more incongruous in that Burnett devoted several paragraphs to making out that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was not independent but parti pris.
Photo is Simon Mustard, the ex-cop FCO official whose views Burnett says are more reliable on Rwanda than those of the United Nations
Burnett sees no dangers in sending people to Rwanda, concluding:
525. The central question in these appeals is whether there are substantial grounds for believing that removal of these appellants and any individual to Rwanda pursuant to
the agreement with the Government of Rwanda will give rise to a real risk of treatment
contrary to article 3 ECHR either (a) as a result of deficiencies in the asylum system
with a consequent real risk of refoulement or (b) in Rwanda itself. My conclusion
accords with that of the Divisional Court. The evidence taken as a whole does not
support such a real risk in either case
Now the particularly well informed amongst you will have noticed that Burnett also ruled in favour of the United States’ earlier appeal in the Assange Case, on the same grounds, that US government assurances on treatmment were entirely to be trusted, irrespective of real world experience in other cases.
Burnett was best friends at Oxford University with Alan Duncan, the Tory Foreign Office minister who handled the arrest of Assange and coordination with the United States over the extradition request. Duncan called Assange a “horrible little worm” in parliament and Duncan’s best Tory friend Burnett quashed the initial ruling for him that had barred extradition on health and prison condition grounds. See my article on the subject.
You see the link? Burnett and Swift both ruled at different times in favour of Assange’s extradition and both similarly ruled that deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda was legal.
Assange’s final appeal against Swift and Lewis to the High Court – limited by Swift to 25 pages and a 30 minute hearing – will take place, probably soon.
I am willing to venture this prediction. Neither Vos nor Underhill, who rejected the legality of Rwanda deportations, will be on Assange’s new two judge panel. Burnett will be, probably alongside Lewis, Swift’s partner in crime on Rwanda, or Holroyde, Burnett’s earlier partner in crime on Assange.
Because that is how the Establishment quietly gets its dirty work done.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
I apologise for the break in articles. There is only one of me and I have been taking a little time to recharge my batteries and give my wonderful family some of the attention they deserve. I shall be back to the mill in another week.
I think it is very important that I provide irrefutable proof of the systematic lies behind the boycott campaign with which BECTU, supported by the MSM, destroyed Doune the Rabbit Hole.
The most devastating of these lies was the repeated, and entirely false, claim that the Festival was not just unable to meet its bills in 2022 due to carried debt from two late Covid cancellations in 2020 and 2021, but had not paid artists and suppliers over many festivals.
This is from BECTU’s statement of 23 May, which called for a customer, supplier and artist boycott:
When the organisers contacted our branch in December 2022 they claimed that no one was owed any money from any of the festivals previous to 2022. We already knew that this was not true. When it was pointed out to them that at least one company was owed thousands of pounds from Festival and Beverage (the company now back running this year’s festival) the response was “oh yes – except for them there is no-one else”…. We have also found other companies that are owed from multiple previous festivals.
The total costs of the 2019 festival were approximately £812,000. Of these £806,000 were paid. One single company was indeed owed £6,000 (the last instalment on a £21,000 bill) due to a simple error, compounded by subsequent covid dislocation.
2020 and 2021 were the covid cancellations. We have no idea who are the companies BECTU claim to have found who are owed money from 2019 or earlier. We have had nobody – no artist, no crew, no supplier – contact us with an outstanding invoice from 2019 or before.
Crucially, I have spoken to the liquidator of DTRH Ltd. In seven months of operation, not one person or company has come to the liquidator with any claim arising from the 2019 festival or before.
Yet BECTU say plainly: “We have also found other companies that are owed from multiple previous festivals”.
Who are they? So who are these companies? We don’t know.
We have repeatedly asked BECTU, from December 2022 onwards. I asked them in person at a face to face meeting at their Scottish branch office in March 2023.
BECTU have never given us the name of a single one of the companies they have repeatedly claimed we owe money from 2019 and earlier, even though we have repeatedly asked.
In June, when it became clear this claim was destroying ticket sales, we asked BECTU repeatedly in writing.
BECTU finally told us that they could not tell us who was owed money from before 2019, because that information is confidential. Yes, really, confidential from the people trying to make any payment due.
So to sum up. The Festival was crashed by BECTU chiefly on a claim that people were owed money from the 2019 festival and earlier, but none of the nameless companies they claim are owed that money has ever contacted us or contacted the liquidator.
Furthermore BECTU said they know who these companies are, but refuse to tell us – nor did they assist any such company to contact us.
Plainly BECTU had no interest whatsoever in securing payment for any such companies, but rather were using them as leverage to crash the festival – which means they would never be paid.
The only other explanation, which seems to be the most likely, is that these companies do not exist, that BECTU had no contact with any companies owed money from previous festivals as nobody is owed money.
The whole story is a malicious falsehood concocted to destroy the festival.
Can you make any other sense of why no requests for payment were ever made for this alleged pre 2022 debt?
Other BECTU falsehoods in their statement calling for the festival to be boycotted, concerned broadly health and safety issues.
This one was another major BECTU lie:
There was only one water outlet for much of the build due to the supply being tapped from a Scottish Water outlet without the company’s knowledge or permission.
This is completely, utterly untrue.
This is a picture of the water supply plant for the festival. It was bought by the Cardross Estate with the festival paying for installation and connection. It was installed on the advice of Scottish Water and it was tested and approved by Scottish Water.
Scottish Water tested the quality several times, with the last check just before the 2022 festival. In fact this caused a major problem, as owing to a delay in Scottish Water’s bio-culture laboratory, clearance did not come through as expected, and gate opening was held back by three hours.
There are no Scottish Water outlets on the estate: Scottish Water’s mains piping ends at the gate. We have never tapped in to any Scottish Water outlet.
BECTU at no stage ever asked us about the water supply. They published this utter nonsense without any attempt to discuss with us first. Again, that is absolute proof the intention was to destroy the festival, not to solve another non-existent problem.
Their entire statement is similarly inaccurate. It makes wild claims, including that food was “inedible”. I presume this refers to crew catering.
Catering was inedible and people refused to eat it.
Well, I was on site for four weeks and I ate exactly the same food as everybody else, and I am still here. Approximately 8,000 crew meals were produced from a field kitchen over this period.
Other claims include that somebody saw heavy plant being driven in a public area. But apparently said nothing at the time, and the complaint is first brought up 10 months later.
The festival happened in July 2022. BECTU first published this claim in May 2023, again without asking us first.
One of the SLEN committee was on site with a headline band (who have still not been paid) and saw a number of H&S concerns including heavy plant moving across public areas with no escort while the festival was open.
All heavy plant was driven by expert professionals who were paid £350 per day by the festival. None would have risked their career doing anything unsafe. Plant movements were accompanied by banksmen.
The only plant movement in public areas we are aware of during the festival was to set down stands of bottled water, which had been supplied free by Scottish Water due to the heatwave. This was done safely using banksmen and cordons established by volunteers.
Here is another wild claim from BECTU in their statement, this time on ticket sales by March:
We believe that those 2000 sales will have brought in at least £400,000.
The most expensive ticket sold had been £180 for an adult weekend ticket. A full third of sales were children’s weekend tickets at £10. There were also adult day tickets at £60 or £80. Do the sums yourself on 2,000 tickets.
The claim of £400,000 was not just a lie, it was a very malicious lie which two minutes’ due diligence would have negated.
BECTU’s claim of revenue was fantastically wrong. It was designed to play in to their constant sub-narrative that large sums of money were available but being misappropriated.
I could go on for some time. BECTU, on the basis of this onslaught of malicious fabrication, called for a total boycott of the festival and were enthusiastically echoed in both mainstream and social media, by the entire Establishment.
The festival in 2022 made a large loss because its attempt to make up massive covid cancellation debts from 2020 and 2021 failed. This meant some artists, crew and suppliers are owed money from 2022, even though approximately £1.3 million WAS paid out.
We are deeply sorry for the debt.
We were determined to pay off the debt. We wished to make the festival a success again and work like crazy over these next three years to get all those owed, paid up in full.
Payment had sometimes been late in the past, but before Covid everybody who ever worked at the festival had been paid, (bar a single mistake). If the festival had not been destroyed by the most cynical and vicious campaign of lies, I believe there was a real prospect everybody would get paid off over time.
Now nobody will be paid and this year’s ticket holders have lost out. Congratulations to BECTU on this achievement. When they called for a boycott by artists, suppliers and public, there is no doubt this was the intended consequence.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Well, 24 hours later I feel no closer to understanding what just happened.
I do not buy the idea it was all a clever charade designed by Putin. The damage it has caused to his image of great strength, and to the notion of the state monopoly of violence within Russia, is greater damage than can be counterbalanced by any alleged tactical change inside Ukraine.
I don’t see that change anyway, and frankly Russia did not need any such drama. Ukraine’s much trumpeted counter-offensive appears a damp squib.
If looking for something below the surface, the idea that Prigozhin had been turned by some kind of offer from the West seems more probable, but is hard to square with his sudden capitulation.
However the surface story of what just happened is equally implausible.
Wagner seem to have suffered no major reverse and encountered no serious military opposition before they turned round and gave back all they have taken. For which Prigozhin has on the face of it received nothing in turn but a rather fragile life as a guest of Lukashenko.
While Putin appears to have allowed an actual military revolt that killed at least a few Russian soldiers and airmen to take place, with no punishment. That seems to me very contrary to Putin’s nature.
These are my thoughts. But I am struggling enormously to understand this. As are the ordinary Russian public, for whom the whole incident has been surreal.
Who would have thought that creating a large well-armed mercenary army including a large proportion of convicts would turn out to be a bad idea?
I am not going to pretend to know what is going to happen – I did not predict Russia invading Ukraine. But here are a few thoughts:
It is very hard to see how Prigozhin and Putin both come out of this alive.
Prigozhin crossed a line yesterday when he started criticising not just the conduct of the Ukraine war, but its pretext.
Today, Putin’s speech made no overtures towards Prigozhin. He did not offer to dismiss the defence minister or bring Prigozhin on board. He characterised this as a rebellion – although holding out the prospect of an amnesty to the rank and file of Wagner if they desisted – and compared it to an eclectic mix of rebellions against central authority in Russian history.
This seems to be an attempted coup.
It does not have widespread popular support. Ordinary Russians are entirely surprised and bemused. Prigozhin had obtained a measure of popularity with the narrative that Wagner were the most effective of patriotic fighters, but that does not mean people want him to run Russia.
I do not see this developing into a sustained civil war. Civil wars in states are sustained by ethnic, ideological or religious division. None of that seems to apply in this case. It is hard to see what would motivate Russian troops to kill each other.
The caveat is of course that Wagner has its own morale and identity, forged in combat and sustained by a common mercenary motivation. There is a strong sociopathic element in any mercenary outfit, and one including many criminals still more so. It is therefore possible Wagner will be more ruthless and motivated than government troops opposing them.
A fast strike for Moscow is not a hopeless plan for Wagner.
Wagner does not have an air force. The Russian air force is an elite liable to remain largely loyal to Putin, which could be crucial.
I don’t see this turning into a widespread Russian civil war. I expect it will be over, one way or another, in a fortnight. One problem with mercenaries is that somebody else might pay them more, and I don’t rule out that Prigozhin has been turned.
But we should all hope that, rather than unleash more chaos across Eastern Europe, this development brings negotiations and an end to the conflict in Ukraine.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Please start by listening to this brief BBC interview.
I should state again upfront in text that not only have I never taken one single penny, directly or indirectly, from Doune the Rabbit Hole in salary, fee, dividend or expenses (nor from concessions etc), I have put in over 300,000 of personal money, all my retirement savings, to help pay debts.
I have also put in thousands of hours of unpaid work.
I will also state, I think the first time I have made this public, that some years ago (when I had money) I put 90,000 into the Eden Festival to save that festival also from bankruptcy.
I have always believed strongly that society needs more social interaction, and that the increasing isolation of people as consumers in their own living rooms causes a great deal of harm. Community, shared experience, family and plain having fun together are extremely important to me, and always have been. That is why I have been involved.
This is the most personal article I will ever have published or will publish. It is about a campaign of hatred and blatant lies that has caused a great loss to many other people and messed up the holiday hopes of hundreds of families and children, for which I simply cannot apologise enough. I am the target and so many others have been collateral damage.
But it is also a story with much wider resonances that I believe makes it worth your reading – about corporatism, political power, authority, the power of lies, and the desire to destroy something beautiful.
It has had a devastating effect on many people but including on me personally and on those close to me.
I therefore hope it is worth your reading.
Long term readers of the blog will know how important the Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival has been to me since it was started by my son Jamie in 2010. It has now been closed down by an orchestrated campaign of falsehoods which devastated ticket sales.
The Scottish media – including the Herald, Daily Record, Sun, Courier, BBC and STV, have each dedicated at least three times as much space to attacking the Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival as they have to Baroness Michelle Mone taking over 30 million of profit for dumping dodgy PPE on the NHS and disappearing out of the country on her private yacht.
An extraordinary alliance of “progressives”, including the union BECTU and social media such as the Bella Caledonia website and scores of SNP troll accounts, campaigned actively and successfully in combination with the MSM to close the festival down.
Doune the Rabbit Hole specifically aimed to revive the original spirit of festivals and avoid corporatism and rip-off. Just how horrible many so-called festivals have become, is extraordinary to me. Many “festivals” are commercial urban park concerts. Few people realise that Live Nation, which dominates the industry, is a Saudi music-washing effort. Several festivals that were independent, like Belladrum on which we used to model ourselves, have become corporate and changed atmosphere to hard, expensive sell inside.
I have written before about why we do the festival. It is about lifestyle and community, about creating a nicer, kinder world for a short time in the fields on the edge of the Highland Line. Doune the Rabbit Hole is a conscious attempt to maintain the communal values of the earliest music festivals, and the experience is very different from that of the large commercial ones. It is a family festival not just in the sense of being family owned and run. Under 12s come free and there is a huge amount of time and other resource devoted to providing facilities and entertainment for them. The very presence of so many children is important to the sense of being a community, not an audience, as is the extraordinary age range of those who come. There is no dominant age group. Pets are welcome and lots of people bring them.
The finances of the festival are a huge challenge. The fixed costs of the required infrastructure – fencing, temporary roads, water, stages, lighting, sound systems, toilets, tentage, signage, security, first aid and more – are colossal, amounting to over £400,000. This is why many of Scotland’s camping festivals, including Wicker Man and Electric Fields, have closed down in recent years. In the modern age, much of that is mandated by the authorities, for example we would be much happier without six miles of fencing. That is before you pay the musicians. Live performance rather than selling recorded music is nowadays a much higher percentage of a musicians’ income, and the cost of leading bands has increased exponentially in real terms over the last couple of decades. Plus, as a matter of principle, we pay all the musicians, including those looking to break through, of which we have masses.
Ten years of trying has proven to us that the only way a camping festival can survive financially is to reach a size of about 8,000 people, due to the fixed costs. You can imagine the challenges of attempting to grow the festival to the size needed, with all the infrastructure required to keep that many people entertained, safe, fed, watered and with clean toilets (and having the cleanest toilets of any festival is very high on our priorities), yet at the same time retain the community, family, non-commercial and above all friendly atmosphere. I hope that this link might take you to the public reviews on Google. My feeling was last year that we achieved this atmosphere for the visitors but not for the crew, who were over-stressed. I am spending a lot of time on how to make the community work for everybody and keep the finances together, while avoiding commercialisation. We are always very keen on keeping bar and food prices down to ordinary, non-festival levels and making sure that people never feel ripped off on site.
Artistically, I think we succeeded. Doune the Rabbit Hole was a beautiful experience. The Herald’s review of the 2022 Festival called it “the most relaxed of festivals” and concluded:
the self-proclaimed ‘Scotland’s biggest independent festival’ has proved it is a crucial part of the nation’s festival scene, after pandemic-related postponements in 2020 and 2021, with a tasty recipe of relaxed, family-friendly fun, cutting edge new music and established names.
I believe uniquely among music festivals of this size, Doune the Rabbit Hole had no permanent police presence, because the police deemed it unnecessary. Over 14 years, Doune the Rabbit Hole witnessed a total of eight arrests, six for drug dealing and two over matters unrelated to the festival. Most commercial festivals have at least that many arrests every single day. There was never a single fight in the bars, even though they opened until 3am.
I treasured this description of her first festival experience by Nicola Biggerstaff:
The thing that immediately struck me was the relaxed nature of our fellow festival-goers. Knowing only of the hundreds of thousands-strong Glastonbury crowds and the horror stories of the Astroworld crush and the lack of crowd control at Wireless, I was blown away by the chilled-out atmosphere hanging in the air, almost conflicting with the now soaring heat. With my history of anxiety, I was worried about being looked at, being judged, if I was wearing the right thing. I was immediately put right at ease by the array of characters who passed us by without a care in the world. Mad Hatter’s, inflatable T-Rexes, men in flowing skirts and women in suits, families in hiking gear and everything in between. Glitter, neon face paints, bandanas for miles. I had no reason to worry, I could breathe freely. By the first evening, we had given up on make-up and could not have cared less about it. All we needed on our faces was a smile, and a wide-eyed admiration of those who continued to adorn themselves in the forementioned for the duration of the weekend.
Robin McAlpine’s analysis of Doune the Rabbit Hole also summed up precisely what it meant to me.
Finally, what is it that makes people that go to this festival so often reach for ‘friendly’ as the first adjective to describe it? Why does that sense stick with us so much? The answer is because that’s the culture which is created. You smile at strangers when you pass because they smile at you. You help people or start conversations with them because someone else did it for you.
I’m pretty sure these aren’t ‘particularly nice and friendly people’ – it’s not a weekend based on genetic selection or anything. It’s the expectations we set ourselves when we arrive. We expect to not mind taking the ten seconds to stop and say hello, or to pick up something someone has dropped for them, or to tell someone that they look great. So we do.
Happy moments which are out of our normal reality are messages from ourselves to ourselves about why we should not accept our normality
Why are those expectations not ones we hold the rest of the time? What is it that gives us permission to be better people at this event than we might be day to day? I think the main answers are community and time. No-one is rushing, things will wait and if they don’t well that’s not a disaster. You don’t have ten things you have to do with time to do only six.
And you are instantly in a community, one that is going to share much of the same experiences over the weekend. You feel together because you are together.
The key points were that there was no corporate sponsorship or advertising, bars and catering were ordinary prices not “festival prices”, children’s tickets were always free or a token cost and until 2022 children’s drinks at the bar were free. Once inside the festival, all activities were free, there were no extra costs.
After years of financial struggle, in 2020 we finally seemed to have broken through to a size where the festival would stand on its own two feet. With a line up featuring Public Enemy, Belle and Sebastian, Bill Bailey, John Cale and Kate Tempest, we had sold two thirds of the tickets with three months to go, (having always sold over half the tickets in the last six weeks).
In 2020 we were projecting a £300,000 profit which would then set the company up with a reserve against future bad weather years.
Then Covid happened.
Lockdown regulations came in causing us to cancel, just three weeks before the festival, with almost all the infrastructure and artists booked and large deposits paid. The net loss from that Covid cancellation was about £350,000.
We offered to refund tickets and everybody who asked for a refund got it instantly. But such was the festival’s reputation that 96% of ticket holders rolled over their tickets to 2021.
The 2021 festival was planned for a few weeks after the announced date for lifting of covid restriction. Again, everything was fully booked and deposits paid. Then the extension of the restrictions was announced, even after restrictions were lifted in England, with no definite end date. Festivals in England were meantime allowed. So was the corporate Transmt festival in Scotland, allowed as an experiment. We on the other hand were obliged to cancel yet again, racking up a further loss of over £300,000.
We had now lost almost £700,000 to covid. Against that, we received a £50,000 bounceback loan and Scottish government covid support of just £90,000.
The Scottish government Covid support to festivals amounted to just one fifth per ticket sale of the amount given to festivals in England, as detailed in this letter from Scotland’s Independent Festivals.
In absolute terms, the average grant to independent Scottish music festivals, none of which were allowed to take place in 2021, was just £31,545. The average grant to independent English music festivals which had to cancel in 2021 was £432,380, twelve times the amount. In England even those independent festivals which were permitted to go ahead in 2021 received an average grant of £236,948.
The Scottish Government received equivalent Covid relief funding for the Arts from the Treasury. Simply Angus Robertson decided to heavily prioritise the big arts companies and permanent venues – ie buildings, plus a few specific touring artists.
The Stand Comedy Club received four times the funding of Knockengorroch, a vital node for Scotland’s traditional music, while one theatre in Aberdeen received more Covid funding than all Scotland’s independent music festivals put together.
So by Autumn 2021 we were £700,000 down from two Covid cancellations, continuing to have our staff and overheads costs and, after a second year of cancellation, understandably about 20% of ticket holders wanted their money back – and they all got it.
This left a terrible dilemma. If we simply gave up, there was no money to pay back the remaining ticket holders – it had all been spent on the two cancelled festivals and on refunds. If the event went ahead as in 2019, it could never cover the losses.
There was every reason to believe the festival was long term viable. It’s sales growth had been remarkable and consistent. The “go big” strategy in 2022 was nearly pulled off. Look at this graph and understand that, but for those huge Covid losses, the festival was well on the path to success.
(NB these include day tickets, so they are individuals over all three days, not the capacity of the event)
This graph is the answer to those who are arguing that Independent festivals ought not exist, that the sector should be left to the corporations with big pockets, that you ought not be allowed to run a festival unless you have all the cash upfront. That agenda is now being pursued actively and would knock out all the independents to the advantage of the corporates.
That may make you think about who was behind the massive media and social attack.
We decided to bank on further sales growth and make 2022 much more ambitious, spending over twice as much on artists and aiming to provide big name acts who would pack in the crowds. If we could sell out on a 12,000 capacity, we could cover the carried debt from Covid.
With a lineup including Patti Smith, Amy MacDonald, Belle and Sebastian, The Buzzcocks, 10cc, Sleaford Mods, Teenage Fanclub, Boney M and many more, we were advised by our booking agents and by industry professionals we could certainly sell out 12,000 tickets. So we went for it, putting in a £120,000 marketing budget.
It seemed to work. Early sales were extremely good. We had always sold over half our tickets in the last six weeks, and with six weeks to go we were well over half the needed sales.
Then the expected surge did not happen.
I still don’t fully understand why. In May 2022, the massive increase in people’s fuel bills and the onset of the cost of living crisis certainly had a major effect in dropping sales, but could not be the entire explanation. We also had some bad publicity with local councillors grandstanding over our license application (any music festival has the odd local opponent), but that does not explain it fully either.
We discussed with others in the industry. Everybody was experiencing lower ticket sales. Everybody was also experiencing higher costs post-Covid – fencing, stages, toilets, trackway etc had all bounced up by about 40% post pandemic.
But many in the industry reported a tendency for people to put off ticket sales right until the last week, after two years of cancellations. So we decided the late surge would just be later than usual.
With a week to go, having lived at site now already a couple of weeks during the build, sales were still not picking up, and it was now too late to cancel. Life became really unpleasant. Money was lacking to pay people for essential, safety critical equipment and operations, and I found myself cashing in all my pension savings and paying for these things direct.
Various organisational tasks were falling behind for lack of ability to pay people to do them. On top of which my son Jamie, the guiding hand behind the festival, was hospitalised with severe Covid and had been out of action for a month.
In previous years, in the last week we had been getting in £20,000 a day in ticket sales. In 2022 we had nothing near that, so the cash to pay for things was just not arriving.
Astonishingly, in 2022 we sold virtually zero tickets on the gate for the entire festival. This was unprecedented.
The Festival runs its own bars and these could be relied on for £250,000 (indeed!) profit once the gates opened, but getting to that stage was a nightmare.
I contacted everybody I know who might be able to chip in something, explaining that many families and children would lose their holiday if we cancelled. I think at this stage I can reveal that the one person who put his hand in his pocket and gave a four figure donation was Alex Salmond. There were also contributions from other family members.
We had frequent meetings with the management team about the dire situation. There was certainly nobody on the crew side of the fencing who did not know about it. It was incredibly stressful for me, dealing with companies demanding full payment immediately or threatening to not deliver or to withdraw services and equipment.
I also had to deal with numerous bands’ agents. In all of this I was just acting as a stand-in for Jamie, who remained very unwell although he dragged himself to site. I had scores of conversations with agents where I stated, openly and honestly, things like:
“Look, I am really sorry. We just have not sold enough tickets. I just cannot make you the final payment of £x before the artist goes on. No, I just don’t have the money. The Festival has made a loss. I am not going to bullshit you, I can’t promise we will ever be able to pay it”.
Frequently, these conversations concluded with the agent stating that the band/artist would therefore not perform.
Here is the heartwarming bit.
Every single artist did perform. Nobody refused to play. That goes for even the biggest of names. One artist actually said to me directly “These are my people, this is my community, they have come here to be entertained.”
I am very aware that not every artist, particularly those smaller ones without agents, may have gone out to perform in the knowledge that their fee was in danger. I am extremely sorry for this, and should have been more careful to make sure the situation was understood. It was not deliberate omission, everything was such a whirlwind.
Due to a simply incredible “the show must go on” attitude by artists and crew, we got through the weekend very successfully, and as the reviews show I think the festival goers had a wonderful time. The subsequent debt was appalling. When everything was added up, it seems the £600,000 debt we had gone in with had increased to over £800,000 as a result of our efforts to “go big” to get the debt cleared off.
I simply cannot get over to you the terrible feeling that this was. Some of those owed are small businesses and minor artists. Some are individuals. Having been running the festival for so many years, a significant number of those owed are personal friends of Jamie or myself.
I would also stress how astonishingly little rancour there was at first. A great many of those owed money were incredibly pleasant about it. There was much understanding that the basic problem was Covid, which had collapsed so many businesses. People could see for themselves that ticket sales were not what they needed to be. Nobody seemed to believe that anybody had run off with a huge pot of secret money.
There was now a huge decision to make. We could either close down the festival for good – which after this traumatic experience was extremely tempting – or we could go on with it. We were still on a trend of long terms sales growth. There was immediate, high demand for 2023 ticket sales.
The deciding factor was that, if we simply closed down the festival, not one of those people and businesses owed money would ever get paid.
We decided to go ahead with the Festival again in 2023, using the parent company. Doune the Rabbit Hole Ltd was put into liquidation to seal off the debt, but with an agreement with the liquidator that any profits from 2023 and future festivals would go to the liquidator, until all creditors had been paid off in full.
We believed we could pay off all the debt in three years, and starting with a financial clean slate for the 2023 festival we were confident all would be OK. Early ticket sales were very strong.
We were also promised a donation from a “White Knight”, a major corporation, of at least £600,000. Various practical arrangements were required to put this in place, including receiving approval from the charities regulator of a plan to funnel the money via a grant giving charity.
Everything was set up, including with the charities regulator, and the money was supposed to arrive in the bank account by end October 2022. But it never did arrive, in quite extraordinary and still inexplicable circumstances that would be an article in themselves.
This was yet another emotional rollercoaster, but just put us back to the idea of a three year plan to pay off the creditors.
All seemed to go very well, and a much less expensive but nonetheless highly enjoyable lineup was put together for Doune the Rabbit Hole 2023. Ticket sales were good. Then from about November 2022 began an astonishing series of media and social media attacks on us, ever mounting in vitriol, and very often aimed at me personally.
Very few of these appeared to be initiated by anybody we owed money, though one or two people we owed money were occasionally co-opted by the media. The attacks originated in what I might characterise as Scotland’s public funded arts sector.
They frequently repeated a series of lies that became unquenchable social media myth. Of these the most pervasive were these two. There are others –
1) That Doune the Rabbit Hole had paid nothing to artists and crew in the 2022 Festival
Whereas in fact we had paid over £380,000 to artists and over £180,000 to crew. That is in addition to over £750,000 to suppliers.
2) That Doune the Rabbit Hole had large debts from festivals prior to 2022
We believe this to be simply untrue. We only know of one company owed a debt from before 2022, and that is a final instalment on a lighting company bill that slipped through the cracks during Covid.
The technicians’ union BECTU has appeared frequently all over the media claiming that Doune the Rabbit Hole has debt from multiple years. We have told them repeatedly that we do not believe it is true. We have asked them, face to face and repeatedly in writing, who we owe money to from before 2022.
Eventually BECTU replied to us stating they could not say who we owed money from before 2022, as it was commercially confidential information. Nobody (bar the single company mentioned) has been in contact with us or with the liquidator to claim to be owed from before 2022. BECTU have just been using it as a tool to argue for the closure of the festival; they have done literally nothing aimed at getting any such company paid.
There has been a constant bombardment of negative stories, often fuelled by BECTU. They have campaigned openly to destroy the festival, calling for a boycott, for artists not to perform, and for suppliers to break their contracts.
One major artist has told us that their coach company had cancelled their tour bus on the grounds that Doune the Rabbit Hole is blacklisted. Two of our key staff resigned because they had been told they would not be allowed on other jobs if they continue to work for us.
Music festivals bankrupt in Scotland with unfortunate regularity. Playground, Electric Fields and Wickerman are all major independent festivals that went bust. None has ever been subjected to this sustained campaign of hatred.
Three independent music festivals in Scotland have announced cancellation in the last two weeks, Otherlands, Midnight Sun and EH32. The post-Covid carnage in the sector, of which we warned the Scottish Government, is unfolding.
In December, January and May, coordinated attacks on Doune the Rabbit Hole were launched across all Scottish newspapers and the BBC and STV. Two of these “coincided” with the very day of 2023 first lineup launch – traditionally our largest sales day – and of our final lineup announcement.
Most of our advertising is online and most of our ticket sales are online, and there have been literally thousands of posts calling on people to boycott the event. These have been positively organised by BECTU, who asked their staff to do it, and by the Scottish government linked troll farms.
It is not just our own posts which have been trolled. Individuals notifying others on Facebook or Twitter and saying that they are going, have attracted numerous trolls telling them to cancel.
The underlying and quite deliberate insinuation had been, throughout, that this is some sort of rip-off and that money had gone missing. This is absolutely untrue.
Well, the campaign has worked. Ticket sales are now so poor we simply cannot afford the infrastructure needed to put the event on safely and in accordance with Council standards.
Over 30 bands have received 100% payment for this year’s performance and many more have received part payment. Many suppliers have already been paid. But we just can’t get it home, and it is not fair to try to sell more tickets when the event may not happen.
So now we have the irony that many artists have been paid to play but will not perform this year, while many performed and were not paid last year.
Because of this campaign to close the festival, those owed from 2022 will now never be paid.
But there is no money left for ticket refunds; people will have to apply to their card issuer. That should work – the card processor holds back 20% of revenue from us, and other independent festivals, as a bond against this happening. But I am extremely conscious that this is not an instant process and many families’ holiday plans will be messed up.
I am sorry there is no happy ending to this story. But that is the unvarnished truth. You will hear much unpleasantness about me this next few days which is not true. I realise some of my decisions did not work out so some criticism is fair, and I accept that. I will try to answer any genuine questions in comments below.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
The massive obituaries to Daniel Ellsberg at the weekend in both New York Times and Washington Post were proof of the status he held in the United States.
Only Presidents get that size of obituary.
His name was not nearly so widely known in the UK. I first met Dan on 3 May 2006 when we were giving a joint presentation at Berkeley. The large hall was full to overflowing, and to my surprise there were young students queuing outside and striving to listen on stairways through open doors.
The large majority of the audience were not born when Dan leaked the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971. But his star status endured.
I know the date because we went afterwards for a marvellous dinner at his Californian home, replete with excellent wine. We talked long into the night, and he signed – and dated – me a copy of his book Secrets, which tells the story of his path to whistleblowing on the lies that kept the Vietnam war going.
I am looking at his message now. It reads “To Craig Murray – with greatest admiration for your conscientious truth-telling! and looking forward to a friendship”.
In 2010 we were again on stage together in London, at a massively attended Wikileaks press conference on the release of the Iraq war logs. We jointly presented Julian Assange with his Sam Adams Award.
It was at this event that I first realised that something had gone disastrously wrong in the relationship between Wikileaks and the Guardian.
They had been cooperating closely, and I myself had published frequent articles in the Guardian over the past four years. Arriving at the press conference, I ran into David Leigh, Deputy Editor of the Guardian, whom I viewed as a friend. We had lunch together a couple of times in the previous few months.
I said “Hello, David” and he simply stared at me. I thought he was lost in thought or somehow had not recognised me. I waved my hands in front of his eyes to get his attention. He stared at me, turned on his heel and walked away.
It was from that day that the Guardian’s coverage of Assange entirely changed and he was treated as a bitter enemy – and that the Guardian became a servile channel for security service propaganda.
For me the Guardian smashing of the Snowden hard drives therefore came as no surprise. I had already witnessed them turn. David Leigh, incidentally, never spoke to me again and the Guardian stopped accepting my articles.
At the time of that press conference, the publication of Leigh and Harding’s book on Assange – which gave away the location and password of the Chelsea Manning cache – was two months away, so it must already have been written.
There had been a massive row between them all over Assange’s biography, which at that height of his fame was worth millions. Julian had decided he did not want the Guardian journalists involved after all, and I think a large part of the bitterness of the break was largely the sordid matter of money.
Which brings me at last to the thought behind this article.
Dan Ellsberg maintained until the last his “respectability” in society as the “good whistleblower”.
Yet the publication of papers from Chelsea Manning and others, similar in so many ways to Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, became demonised, then criminalised, and Julian became the “bad whistleblower”, or more accurately publisher of whistleblowers.
Now Dan Ellsberg totally rejected this characterisation. It infuriated him and he actively fought against it, including at Julian’s extradition hearing, on which see below.
But how did this process of characterisation happen?
To me, the fundamental point is that the United States achieved consensus that the Vietnam War had been a terrible mistake. It was fought in the interests of colonialism, for the suppression of a nation, and was ultimately unwinnable.
The USA went through a cathartic rejection of the Vietnam War, which included recognition of the atrocities perpetrated by their armed forces on civilian populations. Portrayal of the Vietnam War, in Hollywood, in popular fiction, or in the “serious” media, portrayed it unflinchingly as a bungle and a disgrace; notably often relieved by comic treatment.
We have never really been through that process with the Iraq War. Although it is now generally accepted that the war was started on lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, a very significant number of the political class – and quite possibly a majority of MPs, for example – do not accept that the Iraq War was a mistake.
There has been a serious failure to accept and process the fact of the numerous atrocities committed by British troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Oslo last week, Jeremy Corbyn told me that, when he stood up as Labour leader to apologise for the Iraq War, he was very conscious that he did not have the support of the vast majority of his own MPs.
It is extraordinary how many politicians, and how many high profile “journalists”, cleave to the view that the Iraq war was justified because it saved the Iraqi people from a dreadful dictator. It killed or maimed millions, displaced millions more, blasted the entire infrastructure back forty years, destroyed the economy, and set off unending civil war, but somehow the devotees of “liberal intervention” see all this as “better”.
Precisely the same, of course, can be said of Libya or Afghanistan or of Western backed Saudi organised wars in Syria or Yemen. Not only have those countries been completely devastated, the resultant mass refugee crisis has politically destabilised Europe.
Sirte, Libya, after NATO bombing
Yet, astonishingly, there is no Establishment consensus that the attacks on the Middle East and Central Asia were a terrible mistake, in the same way that Vietnam is acknowledged as a terrible mistake. The doctrine of “liberal intervention” retains a deep hold on the political and media classes.
“Liberal intervention”, of course, is simply “imperialism”. The notion that non-European people would be better off if their rulers were deposed and replaced by western mandated puppets is precisely how the British Empire worked. The justification was always the same – it was always for the good of the conquered people themselves.
The reason Dan Ellsberg attained a folk hero status denied to Assange, Snowden or Manning is that Vietnam has full Establishment acceptance as an error, but the 21st century invasions, interventions and the population mass surveillance are viewed as “justified”.
In the Assange hearing, counsel on behalf of the United States government openly stated that the New York Times – could have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for the publication of the Pentagon Papers, but that US Executive had chosen not to do so.
Let me tell you this of Daniel Ellsberg.
At the age of 89, Dan gave evidence in the Assange extradition hearing, by videolink. The court had scheduled his evidence at 2.30pm, which was 6.30am for Dan in California.
The defence applied for this to start later in the afternoon, given Dan’s age and the time. The court refused.
Then consider this also. The court had only sent Ellsberg the “bundle” the previous day, giving him less than 24 hours to master 600 pages of documentation, before rising at 5.30am and getting ready to give evidence and be cross-examined.
This to an 89 year old man.
Here is my eye witness account of Ellsberg’s subsequent testimony. I cannot do better to give you an idea of the man.
Re-reading it, I am still lost in admiration:
In the afternoon, the witness was Dan Ellsberg, doyen of whistleblowers. Born in Chicago in 1931, he was educated at Harvard and Cambridge. He served in the Marines from 1954–7, and from 1964–5 was Special Assistant to the US Secretary of Defence. He was then involved in the making of an official classified 47-volume report entitled History of Decision Making in Vietnam.
Ellsberg briefly explained that the report showed that the war in Vietnam had been continued in the knowledge that it could not be won. It showed that both the public and Congress had repeatedly been lied to. He had leaked the report to lawmakers and then the public as “The Pentagon Papers”. This had resulted in the famous case on prior restraint on publication. There had also been a less well-known criminal case against him personally under the Espionage Act. This had been dismissed with prejudice by the court.
Asked by Edward Fitzgerald QC (counsel for Assange) to comment on the Wikileaks/Manning publication on Afghanistan, Ellsberg replied that he saw extremely strong parallels with his own case. These papers had the capability of informing the public of the progress of the war and the limited possibility that it could be brought to a successful conclusion at all. The Afghan War Logs showed operational-level information not a wider view, but the effect was similar. He strongly identified with both the source (Manning) and the process of publication.
Fitzgerald then asked Ellsberg whether Assange held political opinions relevant to this publication. Ellsberg said it was absurd for the prosecution to argue otherwise. He had himself been motivated by his political views in his publication and Assange’s views were very similar. He had held very interesting discussions with Assange and felt a great affinity with him. They both believed that there was a great lack of transparency to the public over government decisions. The public were fed much information that was false.
When the public had so little genuine information and were fed so much false information, real democracy was not possible. An example was the Iraq War, clearly an illegal war of aggression in breach of the UN charter, sold on lies to the public.
The Afghan War Logs were similar to low-level reports Ellsberg had himself written in Vietnam. It was the same thing; the invasion and occupation of a foreign country against the wishes of the majority of its population. That could only bring defeat or endless conflict: 19 years so far. The war logs had exposed a pattern of war crimes: torture, assassination and death squads. The one thing that had changed since Vietnam was that these things were now so normalised they were classified below Top Secret.
All the Pentagon Papers were Top Secret. None of the Wikileaks documents were. They were not just below Top Secret, they had no restricted distribution classifications. This meant that, by definition, there should be nothing genuinely sensitive, and certainly not life-endangering, in papers of this classification.
Fitzgerald asked him about the Collateral Murder video. Ellsberg stated that it definitely showed murder, including the deliberate machine gunning of a wounded and unarmed civilian. That it was murder was undoubted. The dubious word was “collateral”, which implies accidental. What was truly shocking about it was the Pentagon reaction that these war crimes were within the Rules of Engagement. Which therefore permitted murder.
Edward Fitzgerald asked whether Ellsberg was allowed to put forward the question of intention at his trial. He replied no, the distribution of classified material outside those designated to receive it was an offence of strict liability under the 1917 Espionage Act. This was absolutely inappropriate to trials of whistleblowers. “I did not get a fair trial and nor have recent whistleblowers in the USA. Julian Assange could not get a fair trial.”
Cross-examining for the US Government, James Lewis QC asked Ellsberg to confirm that at the time he copied the Pentagon Papers he was working for the Rand Corporation. He said yes. Lewis said that Assange was not being prosecuted for publication of the Collateral Murder video. Ellsberg said that the Collateral Murder video was essential to an understanding of the Rules of Engagement. Lewis countered that Assange was not being charged for publication of the Rules of Engagement. He was only being charged for publication of unredacted names of those who might come to harm.
Ellsberg replied that he had read the superseding indictment and that Assange was being charged with obtaining, receiving and possession of material including the Rules of Engagement and the Collateral Murder video, and all the documents. On publishing, he was only charged with the names. Lewis said the other charges related to conspiracy with Chelsea Manning. Ellsberg replied “Yes. They are still charges.”
Lewis quoted US Assistant Attorney Gordon Kromberg stating that prosecution was for documents up to Secret level containing the names of those “who risked their lives and freedom while helping the USA”. Lewis contrasted this with Ellsberg “when you published the Pentagon Papers you were very careful what you gave to the media”. Ellsberg replied that he withheld three or four volumes not to cause difficulties to diplomatic efforts to end the war.
Lewis suggested he was protecting individuals. Ellsberg said no; if he released those documents, the US government might have used it as an excuse to exit diplomacy and continue the war. Lewis asked if there were names in the Pentagon Papers that would risk harm to them. Ellsberg replied yes. In one case, a clandestine CIA agent was named, involved in the CIA assassination of a major Vietnamese politician. He was a personal friend of Ellsberg and Ellsberg had thought hard about it, but had left him in.
Lewis Asked Ellsberg whether he had read the article “Why Wikileaks is Not the Pentagon Papers” by Floyd Abrams, who had represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case. Ellsberg replied he had read several articles like this by Abrams. He did not know Abrams. He had only been involved in the civil case, not the criminal one. He had seen him once, at an awards ceremony long after.
Lewis said that Abrams had written that Ellsberg had withheld four volumes, whereas “can anyone doubt” that Assange would have published all of them? Ellsberg replied he disagreed, Abrams had never had one minute of discussion with him or Assange. “He does not understand my motives at all in his article”. The position he outlines is widely held by those who want to criticise Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden while pretending to be liberal.
What he writes is simply untrue. Julian Assange withheld 15,000 files. He went through a long, hard process of redaction. He requested help from both the State Department and Department of Defence on redaction. I have no doubt Julian would have removed the volumes as I did, in my place. He had no intention to name names.
Ellsberg continued that ten years later, the US Government has still not been able to name one single individual who was actually harmed by the Wikileaks releases. “I was shocked that Kromberg should make that allegation while offering no evidence. As nobody was hurt, clearly the risk was never as high as they claimed – as indeed the document classification would tell you.”
“They said exactly the same of me. They said CIA agents and those helping the USA would be hurt. They said I would have blood on my hands.”
There now followed an extraordinary “question” from James Lewis QC who was permitted to read out about 11 paragraphs from various locations in one of Kromberg’s rambling affidavits, in which Kromberg said that as a result of Wikileaks publication, some US sources had had to leave their homeland, go into hiding, or change their names, in a number of countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, China and Ethiopia.
Some individuals in Afghanistan and Iraq had subsequently disappeared. The Taliban were on record as saying that those who cooperated with US forces would be killed. One Ethiopian journalist was forced to flee Ethiopia after being named as a US source. The US Embassy in China reported threats had been made against some of their named Chinese sources. Wikileaks material was found in the possessions of Osama Bin Laden after he was shot.
Lewis asked in a furious voice “How can you possibly, honestly say that nobody was harmed?”
Ellsberg: With all these people who felt they were in danger, of course I am sorry it was inconvenient for them, and that is regrettable. But was any one of them actually physically harmed? Did one of them actually suffer the claimed physical consequences? Lewis: You call it regrettable that people were put at risk. Is it your position that there was absolutely no harm caused by the publication of the names of these individuals? Ellsberg: Assange’s actions are absolutely antithetical to the notion that he deliberately published these names. Had hundreds been harmed, that would count against the great good done by publication of the information. No evidence is produced that any actual harm came to them.
But this has to be put in the context of the policies which Assange was trying to change, invasions that led to 37 million refugees and 1 million deaths.
Of course some people could not be located again in a war that killed a million people and displaced 37 million. The government is extremely hypocritical to pretend a concern for them against their general contempt for Middle Eastern lives. They had even refused to help redact the names. This is a pretence at concern. Lewis: What about the disappeared? Is it not common sense that some had been forced to disappear or flee under another name? Ellsberg: It does not seem to me that that small percentage of those named who may have been murdered or fled, can necessarily be attributed as a result of Wikileaks, when they are in among more than 1 million who have been murdered and 37 million who have fled.
Lewis then asked Ellsberg if it was true he had held an encrypted back up copy of the Manning material for Assange. Ellsberg replied it was; it had subsequently been physically destroyed.
In re-examination, Fitzgerald took Ellsberg to a passage in the Kromberg affidavit which stated that the US Government could not positively attribute any death to the Wikileaks material. Ellsberg said that was his understanding, and had been said at the Manning trial.
He was shocked. It was just like Iraqi WMD. He had at first been inclined to believe the government on Iraqi WMD, just as he had first been inclined to believe the government on deaths caused by Wikileaks releases. In both cases it had proved they were making it up.
I hope that gives you an idea of the intellectual and moral stature and the incredible resilience of my friend Daniel Ellsberg. I will never forget that sparkling moment when, having been given almost no chance to prepare and so early in the morning, he corrected in detail the counsel for the US government on the contents of the second superseding indictment!
It was an incredible honour just to have known him.
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There has never existed any government so evil and repugnant that it has been unable to find lawyers, and particularly judges, to do its bidding.
Hitler did not need to manufacture lawyers and judges. A very significant number, indeed the majority, of established and reputable German lawyers were prepared to participate actively in Nazi law, both its development and implementation.
That of course includes Roland Freisler, a Doctor of Law from the University of Jena, who was a practising solicitor before his elevation.
This was prosecutor Telford Taylor, opening the trial of Nazi lawyers at Nuremberg:
This case is unusual, in that the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the name of the law. These men, together with their deceased or fugitive colleagues, were the embodiment of what passed for justice in the Third Reich.
Most of the defendants have served, at various times, as judges, as state prosecutors, and as officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice. ALL BUT ONE ARE PROFESSIONAL JURISTS. They are well accustomed to courts, and courtrooms, though their present role may be new to them.
But a court is far more than a courtroom; it is a process and a spirit. It is the house of law. This the defendants know, or must have known in times past. I doubt that they ever forgot.
Indeed, the root of the accusation in this case is that these men, leaders of the German judicial system, consciously and deliberately suppressed the law, engaged in an unholy masquerade of tyranny disguised as justice, and converted the German judicial systems to an engine of despotism, conquest, pillage and slaughter.
Taylor’s quote “an unholy masquerade of tyranny disguised as justice” is a phrase that has been rattling around my head as a perfect encapsulation of the state “legal” process against Julian Assange, which I have been detailing this last several years.
Together, of course, with the fact that the NATO states hate Assange – and seek his judicial murder – precisely for revealing truths that embarrassed their system of “conquest, pillage and slaughter” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere.
It is worth noting Hitler was by no means alone in being able to call on the respected lawyers to do his bidding.
The prosecutor of Stalin’s show trials, Andrei Vishinski, whom Freisler traveled to Moscow to see in action and whose screaming and taunting Freisler consciously copied, was also a “proper” lawyer, a graduate of the University of Kiev with a background of practice in Moscow.
(I should note in passing the counter case that Stalin’s favourite judge, Ulrich, was an auto-didact out of military tribunals).
We are brought up with an innate respect for the rule of law and belief that, though it makes mistakes, it is impartial and honest. Unfortunately, that is merely one of the myths by which our society functions. That is something I have reluctantly come to understand.
I was, nonetheless, so taken aback by Justice Jonathan Swift’s current and curt ruling, dismissing Assange’s High Court appeal in the extradition saga, that I thought I would dig a little deeper.
I therefore started with Swift’s surprising December ruling, in cahoots with Judge Lewis, that the Tory government’s scheme to deport refugees to Rwanda is lawful.
His judgment depends above all on the notion that any fiction concocted by the UK government has more legal force than actual fact. There is no real world doubt that Rwanda is a ghastly dictatorship and kills opponents. Nor that it has killed the inhabitants of refugee camps on its soil.
But that is OK, say Swift and Lewis, because the government of Rwanda has said in an MOU that it won’t do that to our refugees, who are different to those other refugees:
73. The Claimants rely on what happened in 2018 when
refugees from neighbouring countries at Kiziba refugee camp protested at the
conditions in the camp. It has been reported (for example, by Human Rights Watch)
that the police who entered the camp in response to the protests used excessive force.
They fired on the refugees and some were killed. The Claimants also point more
generally to limits in Rwanda on the freedom to express political opinion if that opinion is critical of the Rwandan authorities.
74. We do not consider that any direct inference can be drawn from the events at Kiziba refugee camp in 2018. The circumstances that led to those protests are unlikely to be repeated for any person transferred to Rwanda under the MEDP. The treatment of transferred persons, both prior to and after determination of their asylum claims is
provided for in the MOU (at paragraphs 8 and 10) and in the Support NV. For the
reasons already given, we consider the Rwandan authorities will abide by the terms set out in those documents.
…
On top of which, the Refugee Convention, according to Swift and Lewis, says that refugees must be treated no worse than a state’s own citizens. So if Rwanda persecutes its own people, then there is no breach in persecuting the refugees we send too.
…the Claimants’ case comes to the proposition that, following removal to Rwanda, it is possible that one or more of those transferred might come to hold opinions critical of the Rwandan authorities, and that possibility means that now, the Soering threshold is passed.
77. There is evidence that opportunities for political opposition in Rwanda are very limited and closely regulated. The position is set out in the “General Human Rights in Rwanda” assessment document, one of the documents published by the Home Secretary on 9 May 2022. There are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The Claimants submitted that this state of affairs might mean that any transfer to Rwanda would entail a breach of article 15 of the Refugee Convention (which provides that refugees must be accorded the most favourable treatment accorded to nationals in respect of non-political and non-profit-making associations and trade unions). However, we do not consider there is any force in this submission at all. Putting to one side the fact that article 15 does not extend to all rights of association, it is, in any event, a non-discrimination provision – i.e., persons protected under the Refugee Convention must not be less favourably treated than the receiving country’s own citizens. There is no evidence to that effect in this case.
Indeed, Swift and Lewis tell us, the defendant’s case is “speculative”. There is no evidence that the government of Rwanda will wish to torture them, simply because the government of Rwanda hasn’t even met them yet. Besides, the government of Rwanda has promised not to mistreat people under an agreement with the UK, “the MEDP”, which gives the Rwandan government 120 million of cash to steal, or spend on Rwanda’s economic development.
Returning to the material covered in the Home Secretary’s assessment document, there is also evidence (from a US State Department report of 2020) that political opponents have been detained in “unofficial” detention centres and that persons so detained have been subjected to torture and article 3 ill-treatment short of torture. Further, there is evidence that prisons in Rwanda are over-crowded and the conditions are very poor. Nevertheless, the Claimants’ submission is speculative. It does not rest on any evidence of any presently-held opinion. There is no suggestion that any of the individual Claimants would be required to conceal presently-held political or other views. The Claimants’ submission also assumes that the response of the Rwandan authorities to any opinion that may in future be held by any transferred person would (or might) involve article 3 ill-treatment. Given that the person concerned would have been transferred under the terms of the MEDP that possibility is not a real risk.
Swift and Lewis argue further, at paras 81 to 84, that in UK domestic law, the Home Secretary’s certification of Rwanda as a safe country is “irrebuttable” – ie there is no legal avenue to question its truth, and nor does it require parliamentary approval. The “safety” of Rwanda is a fact in law simply because Braverman certifies that it is.
Having stated that under Tory immigration legislation the Home Secretary can certify anywhere she feels like as safe, irrespective of objective truth (provide certain procedural steps are taken) Swift and Lewis then go on to the non-sequitur on which their judgment depends, that because a country has been certified “safe” for the purposes of UK domestic law, that makes it actually eligible for receipt of UK deportees in terms of the UN Refugee Convention.
The UN Refugee Convention says this:
No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a
refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories
where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his
race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social
group or political opinion.
That is the obligation under international law, incorporated into British law. It does not disappear with a signature from the Home Secretary, but depends on the actual, real state of affairs.
It would not, in real life or in the Refugee Convention, be safe to deport people to Yemen, Eastern Ukraine nor the Sudan just because Braverman signed something. The Refugee Convention is not subject to the fantasy propositions of “irrebuttable” Whitehall certificates.
As devoted servants of the Executive, Lewis and Swift undeniably have one thing in common with Freisler, Ullrich and Vishinski, which is an impatience with pesky defendants bothering them with evidence, troublesome arguments and annoying amounts of paper, and trying to save their own lives.
Lewis and Swift begin their judgment on Rwanda with a full throttled rant at the annoyance of having to wade through the paperwork that the deportees had the downright cheek to produce in defence:
36. The pleadings in these proceedings are not models of good practice. Practice Direction 54A requires Statements of Facts and Grounds to be clear and concise. None of the pleadings meets this requirement, even though many if not all have been revised one or more times since the proceedings were issued. On the Claimants’ side the pleading in claim CO/2032/2022 (AAA and others) has taken pole position, setting out various generic grounds of challenge as well as grounds specific to the facts of the cases of the individual claimants in that case. Seven generic grounds of challenge are pleaded (Grounds 1, 1A – 1C, 2A and 3-6). However, these grounds tend to overlap or circle back on one another. Other claims brought by other Claimants have adopted these generic grounds of challenge or formulated variations on them, as well as pleading complaints based on their own circumstances. The pleading in CO/2056/2022 (the Asylum Aid case) raises complaints about the Home Secretary’s decision-making procedure. What is said about procedural fairness in this case largely overlap with the complaints on procedural fairness raised in CO/2023/2022 and other claims. Asylum Aid contends that these matters demonstrate there is systemic unfairness in the procedure adopted to deal with the inadmissibility and removal decisions. The Home Secretary pleading is a response in kind. The Amended Detailed Grounds of Defence (to all claims) runs to some 215 pages.
37. At the court’s request the parties prepared an agreed list of issues. However, that
exercise failed to simplify the position: the list identifies 29 generic issues, many of
which are repetitive or overlapping; and many more issues specific to each claim.
38. The same approach has been repeated in the Skeleton Arguments. Mention should be made of the Skeleton Argument in CO/2032/2022 and CO/2104/2022 (262 pages), and the Skeleton Argument in CO/2094/2022 (63 pages). Each comfortably exceeds the maximum length permitted by Practice Direction 54A (25 pages). Permission to file skeleton arguments longer than the maximum permitted was not requested in advance; each document was presented to the court as a fait accompli. The length of these documents has not served to clarify the way in which the various complaints are put. The documents meander and repeat themselves. .
This is plainly a particular bugbear of Swift. My examination of his ruling on Rwanda deportations is only a prelude, to put into context this ruling on the Assange appeal. What I have found common to both decisions is an insistence that narrative put forward by the executive is not to be questioned, and an extreme distaste for having to entertain lengthy arguments on behalf of those individuals whose lives hang in the balance.
The Assange Appeal
I consider the High Court appeal of Julian Assange to be, in itself a document of historic importance. I have therefore decided to publish it in full, and I recommend you at the very least to dip in to it.
The very first sentence of Assange’s Appeal rings out loud, and explains why his extradition proceedings were held effectively in closed court and why the High Court are determined to avoid any substantive public hearing:
Julian Assange and Wikileaks were responsible for the exposure of criminality on the part of
the US Government on a massive and unprecedented scale.
In the first 3 pages (of 150), it outlines the argument and the ground it covers:
IN THE MATTER OF AN APPEAL UNDER S.103 OF THE EXTRADITION ACT 2003
B E T W E E N:
JULIAN ASSANGE
Appellant
v
GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Respondent
__________________________________________________________
PERFECTED GROUNDS OF APPEAL
____________________________________________________________
References to CB/X are references to the core permission bundle.
EB/X are references to the section 103 evidence bundle.
1. Introduction
1.1. Julian Assange and Wikileaks were responsible for the exposure of criminality on the part of the US Government on a massive and unprecedented scale. The publication in 2010 and 2011
of materials sent by a serving military officer, Private Manning, sit at the very apex of publicinterest disclosures. By publishing this material ‘WikiLeaks…exposed outrageous, even
murderous wrongdoing [including] war crimes, torture and atrocities on civilians’
(Feldstein, EB/10, §4).
1.2. Julian Assange’s work, dedicated to ensuring public accountability by exposing global human
rights abuses, and facilitating the investigation of and prosecution for state criminality, has
contributed to the saving of countless lives, stopped human rights abuses in their tracks, and
brought down despotic and autocratic regimes.
1.3. Those who expose grave state criminality, defenders of fundamental human rights, are, and
always have been, vulnerable to acts of political retaliation and persecution from the regimes
whose criminality they expose. Julian Assange is no exception.
1.4. The law is fiercely protective of human rights defenders. Exposure of state criminality is, in law, a protected political act, the product of a political opinion. Prosecutions ‘on account of’ such acts are straightforwardly prohibited by s.81 of the 2003 Act.
1.5. The history of this prosecution, between Mr Assange’s exposures in 2010 and 2011 and the
indictment in 2018, is a textbook example of political persecution. The course of this case
since 2011 is simply extraordinary. It involves, inter alia, US Governmental plots to interfere
with judges who investigate the matters Mr Assange exposed; to silence the International
Criminal Court (ICC) who have taken up Mr Assange’s disclosures; and to kidnap and
rendition Mr Assange himself, or else murder him. What follows below is conduct of the type
one would normally expect from a military dictatorship. The DJ failed to act upon (or even
address) these issues from the perspective of s.81 because (despite having the law drawn
squarely and repeatedly to her attention) she failed to recognise or acknowledge that exposure
of state criminality is, in law, a protected ‘political’ act, engaging s.81.
1.6. The evidence in this case has, moreover, developed since the DJ’s decision in January 2021.
Investigations in America now provide a fuller picture of the US state-level plans to kidnap,
rendition and murder Mr Assange. They also reveal that the initiation of criminal proceedings
in this case – by a criminal complaint in December 2017 resulted after obstacles (some
reported as having been erected by the UK) to those criminal plans.
1.7. The prosecution that the US were forced to resort to instead, commenced in 2018, is no less
extraordinary. (a) It is unprecedented in law. (b) It cuts clean across established principles of free speech. (c) To deal with that, it anticipates a trial at which Mr Assange, as a foreigner, can be denied reliance on the First Amendment (d) indeed, a trial outwith protections of the US Constitution altogether, and (e) is accompanied by exposure to a grossly disproportionate sentence. In short, the circumstances of the prosecution are so stark and unusual that they engage bars to extradition in their own right.
1.8. As to the circumstances of the ensuing extradition request. (f) It violates the prohibition on extradition for political offences expressly provided for in the relevant treaty and under
international law. (g) It deliberately misstates the core facts. The DJ took these issues one by
one and reasoned that none offended the 2003 Act. For reasons which follow, she was plainly
wrong in multiple respects.
1.9. But even if she were right on each of these issues when viewed separately, the DJ then
needed, but failed entirely, to stand back and examine what they cumulatively told her about
the political origins of this case. They were all, in short, individually and cumulatively, the
clearest evidence of a prosecution mounted ‘on account of’ Mr Assange’s political opinions –
namely his stated and proven commitment to the exposure of US-state-level criminality.
1.10. These Perfected Grounds of Appeal, served in accordance with Crim PR r.50.20(5), are
structured as follows:
1.11. Part A: addresses Ground of Appeal 1, namely that the judge wrongly rejected the
argument that the request was being made for the purposes of prosecuting or punishing Julian
Assange for his political opinions, and therefore barred by s.81(a).1 Accordingly Part A
provides an overview of the history of this matter, and explains the over-arching s.81 case the
DJ failed to engage with. This includes:
(i) Section 2: the evidence before the DJ concerning Mr Assange’s political opinions;
(ii) Section 3: the evidence before the DJ about the criminality Mr Assange exposed.
1 Ground 1 also encompasses the allegation of abuse of process, by reason of ulterior motivation of the request and
the underlying prosecution, which is dealt with in Part D.
(iii) Section 4: The law the DJ ignored;
(iv) Section 5 and 6: the other evidence before the DJ concerning the origins of the 2018
prosecution.
(v) Section 7: The DJ’s decision
1.12. Part B: addresses Grounds of Appeal 2 to 6. That is the various egregious aspects of the
prosecution, eventually commenced in 2018, which individually bar extradition, regardless of
s.81; including:
(i) Section 9: An unprecedented prosecution (Ground of Appeal 2: Article 7 ECHR);
(ii) Section 10: A prosecution for protected speech (Ground of Appeal 3: Article 10
ECHR);
(iii) Section 11: A prosecution designed to secure a guilty verdict (Ground of Appeal 4:
Article 6 ECHR);
(iv) Section 12: A prosecution with no Convention Rights protections at all (Ground of
Appeal 5);
(v) Section 13: Followed by a grossly disproportionate sentence (Ground of Appeal 6).
1.13. Part C: addresses Grounds of Appeal 7 to 8. That is the aspects of the ensuing extradition
request which individually bar extradition, regardless of s.81; including:
(i) Section 14: An extradition request for political offences, in violation of the treaty and
international law (Ground of Appeal 7);
(ii) Section 15: An extradition request which deliberately misstates the core facts,
unfairly improperly and inaccurately (Ground of Appeal 8).
1.14. Part D: returns to s.81 and abuse of process (Ground of Appeal 1), as the DJ ought to have
done, in Section 16. Finally, Sections 17 and 18 address the new evidence in this case.
There follows a further 147 pages of outstanding legal argument, including compelling evidence.
The summary of the crimes of the US Government exposed by Julian Assange at pages 9 to 18 is simply mind-blowing. That section starts thus:
Every single one of the five ‘national security’ publications that are the subject of this extradition request exposed US Governmental involvement in crimes of the first order of magnitude. These disclosures exposed irrefutable evidence of, inter alia, illegal rendition, torture, and black site CIA prisons across Europe, as well as aggressive steps taken to maintain impunity and prevent the prosecution of any American operatives involved in these crimes. The following represents the unchallenged evidence before the DJ of the atrocities Mr Assange exposed.
Here is just one example of the ensuing evidence:
3.3. Mr Stafford-Smith’s unchallenged evidence was that cables, for example, revealed by WikiLeaks regarding US government drone killings in Pakistan ‘contributed to [subsequent] court findings that US drone strikes are criminal offences and that criminal proceedings should be initiated against senior US officials involved in such strikes’ (Stafford-Smith, EB/22, §84, 91). ‘Those were very important in litigation in Pakistan’ (EB/40 Tr 8.9.20, xic, p4). The Peshawar High Court ruled, inter alia, that the drone strikes carried out by the CIA and US authorities were a ‘blatant violation of basic human rights’ including ‘a blatant
breach of the absolute right to life’ and ‘a war crime’ (Stafford-Smith, EB/22, §91). What
‘we have to term criminal offences were taking place’ (EB/40 Tr 8.9.230, xic. p4). Moreover,
and as a result, ‘the drone strikes, which were in their hundreds and causing many…innocent
deaths, stopped very rapidly’ such that ‘there were none reported…in 2019’ (Stafford-Smith,
EB/22, §93). WikiLeaks had ‘put a stop to a massive human rights abuse’ (Stafford-Smith,
EB/22, §92-93). ‘Pakistan was an American ally. It was not like we were doing that to an
enemy, and that again is just extraordinary to me’ (Stafford-Smith, EB/40 Tr 8.9.20, re-x, 26-
27). Without the WikiLeaks disclosures, it ‘would have been very, very different and very
difficult’ to prevent this crime (Stafford-Smith, EB/40 Tr 8.9.20, xic, p5).
There is much other material in the appeal which the US and UK governments would not wish to be rehearsed in public:
Secondly, the report provides further, corroborative, evidence (not
available to the DJ) of the fruit of the resulting ‘no limits’ discussions.
Namely, the emergence of US Governmental plans about which Witness 2 (EB/2)
gave evidence to the DJ to:
(i) Kidnap Mr Assange:
‘This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former
U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct
Assange’ (p2)
‘Pompeo and [Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange. At
meetings between senior Trump administration officials after WikiLeaks started
publishing the Vault 7 materials, Pompeo began discussing kidnapping Assange’
(p18)
(ii) In order to rendition Mr Assange to the US:
‘Pompeo and others at the agency proposed abducting Assange from the embassy and
surreptitiously bringing him back to the United States via a third country — a process
known as rendition. The idea was to ‘break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and
bring him to where we want,’ said a former intelligence official’ (p18)
(iii) Or else murder Mr Assange:
‘Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed
killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to
assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the
highest levels’ of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence
official. ‘There seemed to be no boundaries’’ (p1)
‘Some discussions even went beyond kidnapping. U.S. officials had also considered
killing Assange, according to three former officials. One of those officials said he
was briefed on a spring 2017 meeting in which the president asked whether the CIA could
assassinate Assange and provide him ‘options’ for how to do so’ (p20)
‘agency executives requested and received ‘sketches’ of plans for killing Assange …
said a former intelligence official. There were discussions ‘on whether killing
Assange was possible and whether it was legal,’ the former official said’ (p20).
Swift dismisses the 150 page appeal in just three pages, with a curt and sneering rejection.
There are 8 proposed grounds of appeal. They are set out at great length (some 100pp), but the extraordinary length of the pleading serves only to make clear that the proposed appeal comes to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the District Judge.
Swift then stipulates that if Assange’s lawyers apply for a hearing for their request for an appeal to be heard, then that hearing will be limited to 30 minutes.
Furthermore, he limits Assange’s defence to just 20 pages. 20 pages and 30 minutes (the latter being the time for the entire hearing, including the response by the US government). That is the value Swift places on pleadings for a man’s life. Swift even aims a prim taunt at the defence: “The present grounds of appeal are unwieldy and do not comply with any known rules of pleading”.
Swift states that “the issue is the one posed by section 103 of the 2003 (Extradition Act); ought the judge to have decided a question at the extradition heariing differently”. Swift then subjects this “issue” to impossible constraints. Neither the judge’s evaluation of fact nor their assessment of argument can be revisited. He also objects to new evidence, even though new evidence at appeal is specifically allowed by the Extradition Act.
Swift’s background is as a government lawyer. He revealed something of himself in this interview with a legal magazine, where he stated that:
Favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies. ‘They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.’
and
What really matters is that the bond of confidence between Executive and Judiciary is maintained
But perhaps even more revealing is that in this brief interview about his career, he chooses to throw in an entirely gratuitous and pointed anecdote about how unpleasant left wing people are, which perforce implies he was coming from an opposite position:
The first member of his family to go to university and the first to be a lawyer, he remembers his welcome at New College. ‘I unpacked and knocked on the door opposite to introduce myself. ‘Hello, I’m Jonathan,’ only to get the response ‘I’m Dave. I’m a Militant. F*** off!’’ After all, it was the mid-1980s.
It is perfectly plain what Swift is, and that he could be entirely relied on to dismiss Assange’s appeal with no discussion of any difficult subject matter on state crimes.
UPDATE
It turns out that Swift’s reputation is well established. I was sent a copy of this revealing tweet.
END OF UPDATE
In the District Court, Judge Baraitser ruled against Assange on the eight grounds, but had ruled for him on the grounds of mental health and US prison conditions. This resulted in the complicated process of successive High Court Appeals.
First the United States was permitted to appeal on health and US prison conditions. After they won, it was Assange’s turn to appeal on those other eight grounds, on which he had lost at the District Court.
The difference between the High Court treatment of the US appeal, which was accepted and eventually won, and Assange’s appeal, which is dismissed out of hand, is highly instructive.
The US appeal turned very largely on new evidence. That consisted of new diplomatic assurances from the USA in which they stated that Assange would not be placed in a super-max prison pre-trial and would not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures – unless it became necessary to do so.
These “assurances” could have been given during the original hearing but were not, because of course the US has every intention of placing Julian in super-max prison. Judges Burnett and Holroyde, ruling in favour of the USA, airily stated that the new assurances were admissible because assurances were not “evidence”:
A diplomatic note or assurance letter is not “evidence” in the sense contemplated
by section 106(5)(a) of the 2003 Act: it is neither a statement going to prove the
existence of a past fact, nor a statement of expert opinion on a relevant matter.
Rather, it is a statement about the intentions of the requesting state as to its future
conduct
So they ruled that, while new evidence is excluded, new “assurances” are not, a bit of special pleading they simply picked out of their capacious arses.
Compare this to the evidence submitted by Assange that the USA spied on his legal defence team and plotted to kidnap him, while actively discussing his assassination. That is excluded on the basis that it is “new evidence”, and on the fact that it is in part based on journalistic reports. The fact that the US government’s star witness has admitted he lied and gave his evidence for money, has also been dismissed on the grounds that information is available from journalistic reports.
Yet a media interview with one of the psychiatrist witnesses for Julian Assange, introduced by the US as part of their High Court appeal, was accepted, and not excluded as either “new evidence” or a “press report”.
You can read the entire the Burnett and Holroyde judgment, discussing the District Judge’s assessment of the evidence of Julian Assange’s mental health and US prison conditions, and it is impossible not to conclude that they are absolutely “second guessing the original judge’s evaluation of the facts and assessment of the arguments”.
There is literally nothing else they are doing.
Therefore, in finding for the USA appeal, the High Court conducted precisely the exercise which Swift rules is out of order when argued for the other side of the case, for the Assange appeal.
My favourite bit of stinking hypocrisy from Holroyde and Burnett comes at para 45:
Extradition proceedings are not private law proceedings but a process through
which solemn treaty obligations are satisfied in the context of a framework which
ensures that a requested person is provided with proper safeguards.
The phrase “solemn treaty obligations are satisfied” should cause an immediate revulsion. The Treaty in question is the US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2003, and it states at Article 4 that there can be no political extradition.
The District Court ruling, specifically upheld by Swift now, is that the UK/US Extradition Treaty has no legal standing and therefore the bar on political extradition it contains does not apply. Swift accepts the argument, that as the 2003 Extradition Act does not include a bar on political extradition, that provision of the Treaty does not apply.
The Extradition Treaty, Swift baldly states, is “not justiciable”, ie cannot be taken into legal account.
How it can both be that, and be a “solemn obligation” at the base of these entire proceedings, is an extraordinary contradiction which worries none of these judges in their concern to quickly and efficiently impose the brute force of the state. The entire process is designed as punishment for Assange’s unauthorised revelation of truth.
How an extradition can take place specifically under a Treaty whose provisions cannot be applied to that extradition, is a logical conundrum to which only the sophisticates of the UK judiciary could adapt their flexible intellects and – more to the point – consciences.
The executive will always find the judiciary needed to do its dirty work. Any executive. There may be occasional blips in periods of political convulsion. There was a temporary standoff with the Supreme Court over facets of Brexit, for example. But the judiciary will realign themselves with the executive in quick time. The power of the State is the constant.
Julian’s persecution has nothing to do with the law. It is a simple demonstration of the crushing power of the state.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
The Guardian has revealed some of the extraordinary danger of artificial intelligence in a headline that reveals an Israeli bullet decided all by itself to kill somebody.
Despite having no electronic components, the heavy baton round managed to slam itself straight into the face of a 22 year old Palestinian news photographer.
This use of the passive in describing Israeli crimes is absolutely typical of the Guardian, and of the entire mainstream media.
A more naturally expressed and honest headline would have been “Israeli soldiers shoot Palestinian journalist in the head for filming demolition of Ramallah homes”.
Note that the word “suspect” also carries a huge amount of weight in the headline.
“Terrorist suspect” is the standard media term to describe any Palestinian civilian who has not been convicted of anything.
Note the failure to acknowledge the destruction also rendered homeless many other families in the block.
Ramallah, of course, is not in the territory which Israel officially claims as part of its state or even under its control.
This reporting style is no accident. Things always just happen to Palestinians. A sentence which starts “Israeli forces shoot” or “Israeli forces bomb” is as rare as hens’ teeth. Gaza however “is shelled” or “is bombed” with remarkable regularity. But it is always “Hamas fire rockets”.
Palestinians being less sophisticated, presumably, their weapons don’t just fire themselves, whereas Israeli weapons apparently do.
The 30 to 1 casualty rate in Israeli/Palestinian conflict doesn’t prevent Israeli attacks always being presented as “clashes” between the two sides, and Israeli action is always a response to “terrorism”.
Israeli violence is 30 times more deadly than Palestinian, against a people almost unarmed.
Yet all Palestinian violence is terrorism. All Israeli violence is heroic self defence.
Remember that, and you might get a job at the Guardian or even working for Keir Starmer.
Deny that, and you are an evil Nazi and need to be cancelled like Roger Waters.
That is how we live today.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
On Sunday I spoke alongside Jeremy Corbyn and others at a packed meeting in Oslo to discuss freedom in the modern world, with particular reference to Julian Assange and to Guantanamo. It was a truly inspirational event.
It finished at 6.30 pm local time. The speakers were then mobbed by well-wishers and those wanting to give contact details or request campaigning help. Books were given and signed, and a great many selfies were taken. I saw Jeremy pose literally for dozens of selfies with beaming supporters.
Finally making it out of the hall and into the street, Jeremy was approached by a couple, man and wife, requesting a selfie. We then continued down the street to the hotel, for a quick wash and brush up, before leaving again for an 8pm dinner reservation.
The man who had approached Jeremy in the street with his wife turns out to have been Hans Jorgen Johansen, an obscure far right activist. He almost immediately posted his selfie with Jeremy to Facebook. As we were ordering dinner in the restaurant, arch neo-con journalist Oz Katerji was tweeting out the photo of Corbyn and the “Neo-Nazi” to the world. (No link because I have been blocked by Katerji for years).
Johansen was not a speaker at the meeting, not an organiser, and not on the platform. It is not plain if he was in the 200 strong audience at all – it was a public meeting. He approached on the street outside.
I could only find one of the Norwegians with us who had ever even heard of Johansen, who has just 6,000 followers. Yet in less than an hour of this obscure figure putting up a photo with Corbyn, it was being tweeted out by Katerji.
Now how did Katerji come so very quickly to see the Facebook page of this obscure Norwegian? I can find no evidence of Katerji ever having written anything on Norway, and none of him monitoring the far right.
Katerji’s interests very much lie elsewhere.
A former Murdoch hack, Katerji is the archetypal neo-con journalist whose every production aggressively promotes the position and interests of the security services and NATO.
Katerji first came to my attention as the most vehement of propagandists for the extreme jihadists in Syria, funded and armed of course by the US and Saudi Arabia.
There was no false flag chemical weapons attack staged by the jihadists so obvious that Katerji would not promote it, and as his beloved head choppers were beaten back by Russian forces, Katerji completely became immersed in hatred. He called me an “Islamophobe” and Edward Snowden a “full time Putin propagandist”.
Katerji’s support for Israel also became increasingly fierce and uncompromising, with anybody expressing concern for the Palestinians denounced by him as anti-semitic. He produced an entire podcast series giving the views of extreme zionist right wingers on Jeremy Corbyn.
It was therefore no surprise when, at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it turned out Katerji was safely ensconced in a pleasant Kiev flat, with some very enviable company. He has been churning out the most ludicrously biased of NATO propaganda narratives on Ukraine ever since, presumably to his personal profit.
So a highly obscure right wing extremist takes a selfie with Jeremy on an Oslo street and under an hour later it is in the possession of Oz Katerji, of all people, who tweets it out.
Not a set-up at all…
Katerji’s role in this stinks. Whether Johansen is exactly what he seems is also an open question.
The gaps in Johansen’s public cv may simply be because he is such a minor figure, but from Norwegian wikipedia it seems he took 6 years over an undergraduate economics degree from 1990 to 1996, and then in 1997 Johansen was working briefly in mining in the Philippines.
That is not an obvious move for a new Norwegian economics graduate, and the only source is his own word for it. There is then a complete gap in his cv from 1997 to 2000 before he reappears in Norway and gets into far right politics.
The key point on what happened in Oslo is of course is that this man was not a part of the event and that Corbyn had not the slightest idea who he was. That did not, however, stop the BBC, the Mail and other outlets running this ludicrous non-story to bring up more “Corbyn antisemitic” slurs.
The next morning, afer a meeting with young activists, we went for a guided tour of the Munch Museum. Despite the completely bad faith media storm created against him, as we went round the museum Jeremy, as usual, happily posed with the many ordinary people who approached him. He will always remain a good man.
Postscript
In the interests of complete transparency, I should own up to a personal message exchange with John Sweeney, including a reference to Oz Katerji, at the very start of the Russian invasion, when Russian forces attempted quickly to take Kiev.
I reveal this in order to avoid the charge of hypocrisy. I was offering to help Sweeney and also Oz Katerji escape if necessary. I may disagree with or dislike somebody, that does not mean I wish them harm.
Given that John Sweeney’s part of the conversation is merely a six word rejection, I do not think I am betraying his confidence.
To extend the transparency further, the money referred to was all given two months later to help cover the financial losses of the Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival in 2022.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Three British journalists I know personally – Johanna Ross, Vanessa Beeley and Kit Klarenberg – have each in the last two years been detained at immigration for hours on re-entering their own country, and questioned by police under anti-terrorist legislation.
This is plainly an abuse of the power to detain at port of entry, because in each case they could have been questioned at any time in the UK were there legitimate cause, and the questioning was not focused on their travels.
They were in fact detained and interrogated simply for holding and publishing dissident opinion on foreign policy, and in particular for supporting a more collaborative approach to Russia – with which, lest we forget, the UK is not at war.
These detentions have taken place over the period of a couple of years. All were targeted for journalism and this is plainly a continuing policy of harassment of dissident British journalists.
I have three times in that same period been questioned by police in my own home in Edinburgh for journalism, over three separate matters. I spent four months in jail for publicising essential information to show that a high level conspiracy was behind the false accusations against Scottish Independence leader Alex Salmond.
Julian Assange remains in maximum security jail for publicising the truth about war crimes. Meanwhile a new National Security Bill goes through the Westminster parliament, which will make it illegal for a journalist possess or publish classified information.
This has never been illegal. The responsibility has always lain with the whistleblower or leaker, not the journalist or publisher. It seeks to enshrine in UK law precisely what the US Government is seeking to achieve against Assange using the US 1917 Espionage Act. This is a huge threat to journalism.
It is also worth pointing out that, if Evan Gershkovich was indeed doing nothing more than he has claimed to have been doing in Russia, that action would land him a long jail sentence in either the USA or the UK under the provisions which both governments are attempting to enforce.
On top of that, you have the Online Safety Bill, which under the excuse of protecting against paedophilia, will require social media gatekeepers to remove any kind of content the government deems as illegal.
When you put all this together with the new Public Order Act, which effectively gives the police authority to ban any protest they wish to ban, there is a fundamental change happening.
This is not just a theoretical restriction on liberty. Active enforcement against non-approved speech is already underway, as shown by those detentions and, most strongly of all, by Julian’s continued and appalling incarceration.
To complete the horror, there is no longer a genuine opposition within the political class. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party opposes none of this wave of attacks on civil liberties. The SNP has been sending out identical stock replies from its MPs on Julian Assange, 100% backing the UK government line on his extradition and imprisonment.
I feel this very personally. I know all of these people affected – Julian, Alex, Kit, Vanessa, Johanna, and view them as colleagues whose rights I defend, even though I do not always agree with all of their disparate views.
Two other people I know personally and admire are under attack. The campaign of lies and innuendo against Roger Waters this last few weeks has been astonishing in both its viciousness and its mendacity, recalling the dreadful attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.
More mundane but also part of the same phenomenon, my friend Randy Credico has had his Twitter account cancelled.
To be a dissident in the UK, or indeed the “West”, today is to see, every single day, your friends persecuted and to see the walls close in upon yourself.
A unified political class, controlled by billionaires, is hurtling us towards fascism. That now seems to me undeniable.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
