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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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.

————————————————

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

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Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

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 about Doune the Rabbit Hole frequently here. This is from a March 2020 article.

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.

The Case for Greater Funding Support of Scottish Independent Music Festivals

This is an extract from the letter:

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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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.

assangehighcourtappeal

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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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.

————————————————

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Paypal address for one-off donations: [email protected]

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
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BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

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Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

I had the chance to catch up over a few drinks with an old friend just retired from the diplomatic service. I guess I too would have been doing that around now, had I not stumbled upon extraordinary rendition and torture and quixotically attempted to stop it.

My friend wished to impress upon me how much less fun the job is now than when we were young. That is certainly true in many ways.

Even before I retired, the job had become much more about form-filling and accounting than it had about actually doing anything useful. Diplomats were becoming ever more confined to their circle of diplomatic premises and luxury hotels, and less and less connected to the country in which they were posted.

My friend’s complaint was somewhat different.

He said that there was now a real sense of diplomatic isolation. Being British Ambassador had always carried enormous prestige within the diplomatic corps. The weight of imperial history multiplied the effect of representing what is still one of the world’s largest economies, bolstered by the prestige of originating the language of international communication.

A few weeks before my friend’s retirement, the Italian Ambassador had hosted a soiree for a visiting minor opera star, who there trilled some Verdi. This is the trivia of diplomatic exchange, fostered by national cultural institutes.

My friend, as British Ambassador, had not been invited to the soprano soiree.

Now I know that sounds ridiculous to anybody outside the peculiar world of diplomacy. But to two former Ambassadors having a natter, the very notion conveyed a world of meaning. The UK is no longer one of the inner circle. Even the Italians snub us.

This is of course, in part, a product of Brexit. Indeed, had the UK still been in the EU, he would automatically have got an invite along with all the other EU Ambassadors.

But that is not the whole explanation, because the Italian invited several non-EU Ambassadors.

The UK’s fall from diplomatic grace matters, not least because Scottish Independence is going to have to be achieved in the teeth of Westminster opposition.

There is only one determinant of Independence and it has nothing to do with legality in domestic legislation of the state you are leaving.

The only thing that makes you an independent state, is recognition by other independent states.

There simply is no other criterion that makes the slightest difference.

And the UK is hated. Lots of countries would like to see it broken up.

The EU hate the UK because of Brexit. It sends an excellent message from their point of view, that the cost of leaving the EU is dissolution.

The developing world hate the UK because the Tories have absolutely slashed the development aid budget and perverted it to other uses. They hate the UK because of the history of colonial exploitation and slavery which is only now becoming fully acknowledged.

The international institutions hate the UK because of its rogue state decisions: the invasion of Iraq, and the refusal to obey the UN and the International Court of Justice by decolonising the Chagos Islands, being only two.

Even the United States is not the dependable supporter of the UK it once was, with Joe Biden’s political background in Irish American politics a key factor.

My friend despaired that the UK’s reaction to this isolation was a series of increasingly wild moves to try to gain relevance.

The UK was out in front in declaring China a threat and an enemy, which FCO professionals view as neither justified nor of obvious benefit. The UK is indulging in peculiar, and almost entirely unprovoked, military threat towards China with its declared US/UK/Australian alliance and extraordinary reorientation of UK defence strategy to the Pacific.

As if the UK has any ability whatsoever to constrain China’s growing world pre-eminence.

On Ukraine, too, the UK sought to be noticed, by trying to be the most “out there” country in promoting the war, wanting to be the always the first to push the next weapons escalation, with depleted uranium shells, with long range missiles, with battle tanks.

It all amounted to a policy of shouting “Me, me, me” loudest, with zero substance behind it.

My friend had another gin and tonic. He was glad he was retiring. He would have liked to see the soprano.

————————————————

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Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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Two months ago I wrote an article entitled “Fascist judges” about the concerted move by judges in England to outlaw jury nullification.

Despite the long and established history of juries refusing to convict for laws they view as an abuse of power by the state, climate protestors have been jailed for contempt simply for trying to tell juries why they acted.

Four out of five defendants have now been found guilty of intent to cause criminal damage in the “Shenstone 5” trial over the blockade of an Elbit factory.  Judge Chambers had ruled similarly that the defendants could not put the motive for their actions to the jury.

You may recall that when protesting outside another Elbit factory a few days ago, I had a policeman read out an order accusing me and the small group with me of “criminal intent”.

Chambers told the jury they were legally allowed only to decide the facts, not moral right.

The prosecution had argued, extraordinarily, that the defence of “necessity” could only be made if the defendants could identify the specific part number of a component, which specific weapon it had been put into, and prove which specific Palestinian had been killed by that weapon.

That the plant indubitably made components of weapons which killed Palestinian civilians was not enough.

We now know that Judge Chambers was in receipt of communication from Lawyers for Israel before sentencing, seeking to reinforce the new doctrine that jurors are not allowed to give a verdict according to conscience.

This really is a new doctrine. Every law school teaches the famous cases where juries refused to convict on principle and against the direction of the judge.

It is to me quite extraordinary that outside parties are permitted to contact a judge before sentencing in order to motivate him against a defendant.

I suspect anyone other than “Lawyers for Israel” who did this would be in trouble.

Just three days ago Mike Lynch-White was sentenced to a cruel 27 months for damaging property at a non-violent protest at yet another Israeli weapons factory in England.

There is plainly a state policy of vicious repression in play.

Fairly recent examples of “Jury nullification” or “perverse verdict” include the demolishers of the Colston statue, and the 2001 protestors against Trident who admitted they intended to cause damage. All were acquitted despite being plainly guilty on the facts.

In 2021 a judge directed the jury to convict Extinction Rebellion protestors who damaged Shell HQ, specifically stating they had “no defence in law.” Yet the jury refused to convict.

The most famous example in my lifetime was my friend, and member of this blog’s below the line community, Clive Ponting. The jury would not jail him for telling the truth, that Thatcher sank the old Argentine battleship General Belgrano as it headed away from the Falklands.

The current concerted judicial effort to outlaw jury nullification is of huge concern. It is of no surprise to see the hand of Israel attempting to guide the judiciary, in the interests of defending its weapons industry.

Of massive concern too is the growing number of political prisoners in the UK. Julian Assange is rightly the most famous. But how many prisoners are there currently in British prisons whose “crime” is political?

Adding together environmental activists, anti-lockdown activists, peace activists and others, the list of the UK’s political prisoners is alarmingly long. Is any NGO maintaining a constant count? Is there perhaps a need to found such an NGO?

I do not trust Amnesty when it comes to the UK as the leadership is too Starmer adjacent.

The moves in England to outlaw jury nullification and those in Scotland to abolish juries in sexual assault cases, are part of a major impulse to state authoritarianism shown also in the new UK Public Order Act, the Orwellian-named UK Online Safety Bill, and Scotland’s equally Orwellian-named Hate Crime Act.

This onslaught against civil liberties is caused by the nervousness of the entire political and oligarch classes, who are scared of their own citizens as the wealth gap ever increases.

That political class unanimity is proven by the undisguised support of Keir Starmer and the so-called “Labour Party” for all of these repressive developments.

Shamefully the SNP MPs have been sending out stock replies on Assange that fully support the UK government line.

Convictions based on “intent” to do something you have not actually done, are generally dubious. The Shenstone defendants have been told by Judge Chambers they will get prison sentences. Expect these to be vicious.

Doubtless there will be victory celebrations at Lawyers for Israel.

————————————————

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Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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When I started this blog I never envisaged I would be forced to write a defence of the use of juries in Scotland. We live in troubling times indeed.

A jury is an essential protection against the power of the state. It is a randomly selected group of citizens who decide on the facts of an accusation – crucially removing that power from officers of the state.

It is therefore a much needed safeguard against a state official just banging up people the state wishes to bang up, without just cause. It has been viewed that way for centuries.

The current proposition from the Scottish government is that, because conviction rates in rape trials in Scotland are lower than in England – approximately 52% to 75% – that juries should be abolished in rape and sexual assault cases and replaced by specially trained judges.

This proposition fails at the first hurdle of logic.

Juries decide rape trials in both England and in Scotland. So elementary logic tells you that the cause of difference is not juries (unless you believe there is a fundamental difference in attitudes to rape in English and Scottish society, which seems to me highly improbable).

I spoke with a Scottish KC who has been a prosecutor in sexual offence crimes. Their take was rather different. They think the reason for higher conviction rates in England was that Scottish prosecutors are more willing to run marginal cases.

In England the Crown Prosecution Service and its staff are measured against a set of achievement metrics on conviction rates, and as a result will not take a case forward unless it is close to a slam dunk.

In Scotland prosecutors are more willing to give accusers a chance to put their accusations before a jury.

You could achieve a higher conviction rate by the prosecutors bringing fewer cases, only those where the evidence is overwhelming. That is not an outcome anybody wants.

Look at this turned on its head. Is a 51% chance of convincing the jury not about the point at which a case ought to be allowed to proceed? Why is that wrong?

If an alleged victim has a 50% chance of being believed by the jury, they will get into court in Scotland. In England they need a 75% chance of being believed.

That is simply a different way of looking at the same statistic.

If the English prosecutors brought before a jury more of the very large majority of rape allegations which go unprosecuted, the conviction rate in England would fall, although there would be some of those extra prosecutions which were indeed successful.

If you bring 100 prosecutions at a 70% conviction rate you have convicted 70 rapists.

If you bring 200 prosecutions at a 50% conviction rate you have convicted 100 rapists, that is 30 more rapists in jail.

But on the conviction rate measure you are less successful, even though you jailed more rapists.

That paradox explains why conviction rates are a stupid measure to use in this conversation.

They are only of concern as a financial measurement. To convict 100 rapists at a 50% conviction rate costs twice as much as to convict just 70 rapists at a 70% conviction rate. Your cost per convicted rapist has increased by 45%.

That is why the CPS in England works to this metric. They put cost effectiveness above justice.

The notion that 52% conviction rates for rape are inadequate, needs to be challenged on another ground too. It is entirely in line with conviction rates for crimes of a similar severity.

Attempted murder 47%
Grievious Bodily Harm 48%
Manslaughter 48%

These are reasonable comparators to rape. Rape Crisis Scotland compare the 52% conviction rate for rape to an alleged overall 90% criminal conviction rate, but that includes the great bulk of summary cases for minor crimes, including not having a TV licence.

For comparable crimes, the conviction rate for rape is in fact not out of line at all.

(Incidentally the conviction rates for serious crimes above are from England. I can’t find any for Scotland. Conviction rates are not centrally collated by government and have to be compiled by academic researchers poring over thousands of cases).

The problem is not juries getting it wrong at trial. The difficulty is getting more cases to trial. Performance here is abysmal.

The urgent need is for much better resourcing in terms of equipment, dedicated personnel and training in Police Scotland, in the NHS, social services and in the Crown Office and in all other associated agencies dealing with those making allegations of rape or sexual assault.

That is expensive and requires thought and co-ordinated, serious action. It is much cheaper to pretend to be doing something, by simply getting rid of juries and instructing judges to increase convictions.

The Scottish Government has made no disguise at all of the fact that the purpose of abolishing juries is to increase the conviction rate. That means a defendant is going to be standing before a judge who has in effect been instructed to convict.

A plainer breach of human rights I find impossible to imagine.

It is also plain that the Scottish Government intends to make sure the judges obey the order to convict.

As Lord Uist has pointed out, for the first time in Scottish history the Criminal Justice Bill makes provision for judges, in the new “special courts”, to be removed from office without evidence of wrongdoing. Uist believes this to be contrary to the ECHR, an interference with judicial independence.

He also points out that the bill provides for the Scottish Government to monitor the performance of the “special courts” and to monitor “outcomes”.

Uist does not specifically add, but I will, that “outcomes” can only mean conviction rates. What other “outcomes” of a court might the Scottish Government be monitoring? It has been made clear higher conviction rates are the purpose, and the judges will be measured on them.

This explains the root and branch opposition of Scottish lawyers.

Anybody can surely see how deeply troubling these proposals are, how fundamentally opposed to any basic principle of justice.

The SNP has always had an authoritarian streak. Its leadership appears to have become utterly power-crazed in its self-righteous mission of social engineering.

————————————————

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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The torrential rain was shed from the policeman’s flat hat via its curved plastic peak, forming a curtain of water that flowed down in front of him, obscuring his face.

His name was Martin. A female colleague stood in solidarity beside him. Two other female policemen were filming with a large video camera from three metres away. Thirty yards down the road were large groups of burly policemen in fluorescent jackets, and beyond them the Tactical Support Group sat behind the dark windows of their mesh covered minibuses, fingering their shields and batons.

Facing Martin were the protestors. There were six of us, average age about 70. We were all absolutely sodden through, but still clutched umbrellas and tried to find angles from which to reduce the wind driven assault of cold water. As the rain was extremely noisy, and probably we don’t hear quite as well as we used to, we kept shuffling towards Martin and leaning forward to try to catch his words, before they were blown away or drowned.

Martin was reading the riot act. Or, to be precise, he was reading an order made under the Public Order Act 1986. With no sense that he understood the absurdity of his words, he intoned:

“I reasonably believe that this assembly has been organised with criminal intent. I reasonably believe that this assembly may result in violence to persons and to property. I reasonably believe that this assembly may cause disruption to the life of the community”.

Some of my top teeth are no longer natural and I get dizzy after climbing a flight of stairs or getting out the bath. I was cold and wet and longing for a nice hot cup of tea. I felt perhaps proud, but rather puzzled, to be taken for a serious criminal danger to the city of Leicester.

Behind Martin stood the paramilitary security guards of the Israeli weapons factory. They did not look really nice. I wondered if Martin was facing in the right direction.

I sneaked this photo of one of them from the taxi as I was leaving. Not entirely what you expect to find down a wooded lane outside Leicester.

Overhead a red police drone buzzed. What it could see, that the scores of police eyes on us could not see, remains a mystery. It was possibly on the lookout for subversive messages on the top of umbrellas.

I found the police operator round the corner who, to be fair, was probably sheltering from the downpour under a tree rather than deliberately hiding behind the hedge.

The factory makes, among other things, components for the kind of drones that kill women and children in Gaza on a regular basis.

I would like you to meet Liane. One of the Palestinian children killed this week in Gaza by weaponry of the Elbit weapons company we were picketing. Whether her death involved any components made in this precise Leicester Elbit factory I do not know. It is probable.

Look into Liane’s eyes, then tell me you do not wish you had been with me, standing in the rain.

When Martin had finished speaking I replied, rather to his, and everybody else’s, surprise. He had started moving away but returned to listen.

I said that I was not an organiser of the protest, just a supporter. But the Order he had read out did not apply. We were just six people – that is not enough people to constitute an “assembly” under Part 2 of the 1986 Public Order Act.

I then went to the police camera team and said the same thing to them. As they were filming for evidence purposes to show the Order had been made, I asked them to maintain the tape for evidence that the police had been told we were not an assembly in terms of the act.

They were really not very happy about this. You could see the cogs whirring as they wondered whether they could arrest me. I presume all these police had arrived after an operational briefing that they were dealing with violent Middle Eastern terrorists, and they were having a brief bout of cognitive dissonance.

There are of course people who resolve cognitive dissonance by an immediate resort to violence, and rather a higher proportion of such people than you might expect, find their way into the police force, so I then wandered off with some friendly remarks about the weather.

I reported yesterday on the incredibly heavy handed policing of this protest. The Chief Constable of Leicestershire, Robert Nixon, has instructed the protest must be “stamped out”, according to one police officer I spoke with.

About sixty protestors have been arrested, and some 50 released on bail on condition they leave the county of Leicestershire completely.

Some have even been arrested hundreds of miles away, for the new crime of planning to attend a demonstration.

Palestine Action co-founders Huda and Richard were released last night, having being arrested Tuesday on the motorway following police surveillance #ShutElbitDown pic.twitter.com/9iClbSfSt6

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) May 4, 2023

Earlier that day I had witnessed the police harass a mother in hijab. Two male officers, not accompanied by a female officer, arriving to quiz her on why three children present at the protest were not at school.

Truancy is not in general a police matter, and if an intervention was deemed necessary it should have been carried out by a qualified local authority officer. The cultural insensitivity on display was remarkable, and it underlined the fact that every single police officer I saw over two days was white.

This picture, from a few days earlier at the same protest, illustrates it well. Leicester is a very multi-cultural city, but these are the county police.

Each time I arrived at the protest, I went walking around to count the number of police and see what they were doing. Generally I chatted with whoever was in charge, and made plain I thought they were far more heavy handed than was compatible with the right to protest.

I received a message from Palestine Action to the effect that friendly chats with the police are not really how they roll. I respect their position and its cause, but my own view is that if you treat the police officers personally as the enemy, it makes it hard to complain when they do the same to you.

On this final visit I noted, in addition to the ordinary and tactical support group minibuses; the drone squad, at least four marked police cars, the same number of unmarked cars with uniformed officers inside, and five cars parked up with occupants in civilian clothes sitting there for hours ostensibly doing nothing at all.

I called an Uber to leave. I then said my farewells, and my phone beeped saying the Uber had arrived, indicating the pick up point. I walked to the car and opened the back door – and there behind the dark windows were some burly policemen in plain clothes and a directional microphone.

The bearded driver was furious. He yelled at me “Why did you open that door?”

I replied “Well, if you will go around in disguise, people will mistake you for an Uber”.

The car doors were pulled shut again in anger and the car drove off. Three different groups of policemen approached, all yelling out “Why did you open that door?” “What were you doing with that car?”

Laughing, I replied “I am sorry, I thought it was my Uber”. Fortunately that very second my Uber pulled up next to me. I got in and left, giggling away.

The action at Elbit is continuous. I shall definitely be back at some stage. Please do get yourselves there. I regard it as a moral duty. We were just a few gentle souls in the rain, but I am proud to have been there.

————————————————

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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Update: Back protesting again today. I learn that 46 protestors who have been arrested have been released on the bail condition that they leave Leicestershire. Yes, the entire county.

People arrested for doing absolutely nothing but exercise the democratic right to protest, are thus prevented from exercising that right further, without a long period in jail on remand.

What is happening here is sickening.

Original post:

Monday was day eight of the protest at the Elbit Israeli weapons factory in Leicester. After seven days and over 60 arrests, fewer than 20 protestors remained.

The protestors are confined to a designated area by an order under the Public Order Act 1986. One demonstrator, who left the protest on Monday to go home, was detained by police for leaving the designated area.

Three protestors approached the police to inquire – politely – why their friend was being detained. They then returned to the cordon. 30 police then surrounded the cordon from the front and, through the woods, from the rear. They then entered and, with force, arrested the three for having left the cordon.

They also arrested two others who had never left the cordon at all, including one nervous young lady who had done absolutely nothing but stand quietly inside the designated area and had been telling fellow demonstrators how scared she was.

All the arrested people that day were BAME. White people were left alone.

As is common with demonstrations, numerous motorists had been honking their horn in support in passing. The police (and I have never heard of this before) were stopping the vehicles that sounded their horn, demanding to see driving licenses and vehicle insurance, taking down the drivers’ details and warning them they were liable to be charged with an offence.

I heard the details from eyewitnesses when I arrived on Tuesday evening to show support, and try to understand just what was happening. By Tuesday evening, the demonstration consisted of just nine people – three of whom were small children and three of whom were female.

Nevertheless there were three minibuses full of police watching them, and two burly private security guards facing them from behind the razor wire of the Elbit weapons factory, each with a large Alsatian dog on a leash. The police drone that had been overhead for a week had left shortly before we arrived.

The Elbit weapons factory is a large, non-descript modern grey building in a sprawling industrial estate outside Leicester. It has high fences and razor wire, but no identification. There is no sign with a company name. It is just labelled “Unit 13”.

In a reminder that suppression of protest was not invented in 2022, the police are operating largely through a draconian order made under the Tory “Public Order Act 1986”.

This legislation was Thatcher’s reaction to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, to trades union picketing and to travellers.

The order – drawn up under the act by the police without any judicial authority – limits the assembly to a small “designated area” on the footpath opposite the Elbit factory, and specifically excludes the woodland beyond the footpath. It further prohibits the erection of structures for accommodation on the footpath, highway or any public path.

So protestors are not permitted to be anywhere but on the footpath, and on the footpath they are not permitted to erect tents.

The police have used this provision quite deliberately to thwart the protestors from setting up any kind of camp. The police have systematically confiscated, smashed and torn any tents, camping equipment and sleeping bags. They have even stopped protestors sheltering under a tarpaulin during Tuesday’s heavy thunderstorms.

But the right of protestors to camp out has been a traditional and regularly observed feature of western democracy, and UK democracy in particular, for centuries. Brian Haw was even permitted by the courts to stay encamped in Parliament Square for years.

I myself took part in the protest camp on the Torness nuclear power site in 1978. I addressed the Occupy! camp in front of St Paul’s Cathedral in 2011. The Faslane Peace Camp is ongoing.

The level of suppression of protest here in Leicester is not consistent with British traditions of democracy. It is policing which is aggressive and hostile in a way I am simply not used to – I have had numerous friendly conversations with policemen on demonstrations in the past.

In short, this is overtly political policing which sees peaceful protestors as “the enemy”.

It happens that early on Tuesday morning, before I travelled down to Leicester, the Israeli military killed five children and three women in bombing attacks on the helpless people of Gaza. The odds are, of course, that on any given day I came, they would have killed innocents.

Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.

The nine surviving protestors were friendly and cheerful. I was accompanied by my friend Haward Soper, who took these photographs. Haward and I left the designated area and wandered all over the place, but the police did not bother us, we being old, white and middle class.

I asked whether the protest would still be going on come Wednesday morning. I was told yes, but there are less people in the mornings.

That is less than nine. They were, however, hoping for a big turnout this weekend.

When I was young, Palestine and apartheid South Africa were the two international injustices we most campaigned over. South African apartheid ended, but Israeli apartheid has worsened. I am still campaigning for Palestinians after 50 years.

I am most concerned that our radical energies have been successfully diverted into the sterile ground of the identity politics of the Western middle classes.

Palestinian is one of the most abused identities in the world. Focus on that.

Most of those arrested have been charged with public order offences. The Leicester Mercury is reporting about half are charged under the 2022 Public Order Act. They are going to need support through the court system.

I do urge you to make time to get here to Leicester. See the Palestine Action website for details.

Not only will you be standing against apartheid, against the slow genocide of the Palestinian people, you will be affirming your own right to stand up for what you believe.

A right the police are making very plain they intend to negate.

————————————————

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Paypal address for one-off donations: [email protected]

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
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Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

Though convicted of nothing, and merely in “administrative detention” entitled to the presumption of innocence, for five years Julian Assange’s voice has been effectively silenced.

The dreadful place of harsh incarceration that is Belmarsh prison, where terrorists are kept, has not allowed his voice to be heard by the world. Journalists are not permitted to visit him – even NGOs have been prevented from visiting on the false basis they are journalists, and may communicate his thoughts to the outside world.

I don’t know how, but somehow Julian has managed to send out some thoughts in the pretext of an appeal to King Charles over prison conditions. The text is clearly heavily sarcastic, and the subject limited. But at least it serves to remind the world of Julian’s terrible fate.

I know the dreadful, pointless inhumanity of which he speaks, the stupid rules, the isolation, the utter waste of money and human potential with no useful outcome. Two people died in Saughton jail the very week I left. Close your eyes and you can perhaps hear the beautiful tenor voice of Julian’s friend who committed suicide.

To His Majesty King Charles III,

On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.

You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”

Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.

Your Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is located at the prestigious address of One Western Way, London, just a short foxhunt from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. How delightful it must be to have such an esteemed establishment bear your name.

It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe. As your noble government has recently declared, your kingdom is currently undergoing “the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century”, with its ambitious projections showing an increase of the prison population from 82,000 to 106,000 within the next four years. Quite the legacy, indeed.

As a political prisoner, held at Your Majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world-class institution. Truly, your kingdom knows no bounds.

During your visit, you will have the opportunity to feast upon the culinary delights prepared for your loyal subjects on a generous budget of two pounds per day. Savour the blended tuna heads and the ubiquitous reconstituted forms that are purportedly made from chicken. And worry not, for unlike lesser institutions such as Alcatraz or San Quentin, there is no communal dining in a mess hall. At Belmarsh, prisoners dine alone in their cells, ensuring the utmost intimacy with their meal.

Beyond the gustatory pleasures, I can assure you that Belmarsh provides ample educational opportunities for your subjects. As Proverbs 22:6 has it: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Observe the shuffling queues at the medicine hatch, where inmates gather their prescriptions, not for daily use, but for the horizon-expanding experience of a “big day out”—all at once.

You will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets. His exquisite tenor voice now silenced forever.

Venture further into the depths of Belmarsh and you will find the most isolated place within its walls: Healthcare, or “Hellcare” as its inhabitants lovingly call it. Here, you will marvel at sensible rules designed for everyone’s safety, such as the prohibition of chess, whilst permitting the far less dangerous game of checkers.

Deep within Hellcare lies the most gloriously uplifting place in all of Belmarsh, nay, the whole of the United Kingdom: the sublimely named Belmarsh End of Life Suite. Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of “Brother, I’m going to die in here”, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison.

But fear not, for there is beauty to be found within these walls. Feast your eyes upon the picturesque crows nesting in the razor wire and the hundreds of hungry rats that call Belmarsh home. And if you come in the spring, you may even catch a glimpse of the ducklings laid by wayward mallards within the prison grounds. But don’t delay, for the ravenous rats ensure their lives are fleeting.

I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king. As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.

Your most devoted subject,

Julian Assange
A9379AY

I think my own statement when I was released from jail is worth another look here in the similar things I said about prison conditions. I also stated:
“I shall never really feel free until my friend and colleague Julian Assange is also free”.
That remains absolutely the case.

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Joe Biden will very probably be re-elected. No incumbent President has ever lost a primary (though it should be remembered the current primary system is younger than me). Only one sitting President has ever not been selected by their party to stand again, and that was knocking on two hundred years ago.

Both Biden’s main primary challenger, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and his likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump, are less than enthusiastic about promoting massive war in Europe and risking nuclear obliteration. (I hope everyone in the UK enjoyed the nationwide new alert test the other day and spent a few moments contemplating whether they would die instantly or slowly in agony).

The military industrial complex simply cannot permit a non-hawkish President. The sums of money at stake are enormous.

Trump, for all his many faults, was the only President in recent memory not to have started any wars. I know he continued some, but his entire Presidency needs to be seen as a dialectic between Trump and the intelligence service/military power base, in which to his credit Trump was never captured as completely as Obama. (Clinton and the Bush family did not need to be captured, they were always true believers).

Thirteen months ago, I wrote this:

The Biden laptop was leaked on 14 October 2020, three weeks before voting day in the Presidential election. Its suppression by the mainstream media, Twitter and Facebook, at the behest of the security services, is the biggest illegitimate interference in an election in modern western history.

The evidence has piled up since. It is truly astounding that incalculable volumes of media coverage have been given to largely groundless accusations of Russian interference in US Presidential elections, when this actual, entirely proven interference in a US Presidential Election, which arguably was key to Biden’s election, has in itself been largely suppressed.

The letter released by 51 former US intelligence officials, telling what we now know to be the outright lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation”, was initiated by the Biden campaign, according to sworn testimony from former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell – who was willingly a part of it with the declared aim of wanting Biden to win.

If you are not fully up to speed with this, this Wall Street Journal podcast is excellent.

It should be recalled that, apart from all the sex and drugs, the laptop contained emails showing plainly Hunter Biden leveraging his father’s influence to obtain lucrative business deals with, inter alia, Ukraine and China.

Three weeks before a close election, the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could undoubtedly have swayed it, if it had not been massively and falsely derided as a Russian hoax by almost the entire mainstream media, and censored to death by Twitter and Facebook.

Since Elon Musk released Twitter files, we have known for certain that the FBI orchestrated the suppression of the story on social media. This Twitter thread is five months old but remains a must read.

It is, I think, the epitome of the corruption of modern mainstream media that, if you go to the CNN website you can still find a “fact check” item from CNN which states that Donald Trump was promoting Russian disinformation by referring to the Hunter Biden laptop.

Google searches differ depending on the person making them. But try this. Google for the exposure of the Hunter Biden laptop “Russian hoax” as itself misinformation. How many stories come up for you from the “liberal” media, from the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC, Guaridan etc?

I get nothing on from them on the front page of my google search except the old CNN misinformation. That says a great deal both about the legacy media – and about Google.

So we have conclusive evidence from the Hunter Biden laptop story that the security services, corporate media and corporate internet gatekeepers were in cahoots to ensure the election of Joe Biden. What we see now is the same forces working to ensure that he is re-elected.

Now read this from Robert F Kennedy’s campaign website:

In the long term, a nation’s strength does not come from its armies. America spends as much on weaponry as the next nine nations combined, yet the country has grown weaker, not stronger, over the last 30 years. Even as its military technology has reigned supreme, America has been hollowing out from the inside. We cannot be a strong or secure nation when our infrastructure, industry, society, and economy are infirm.

A high priority of a Kennedy administration will be to make America strong again. When a body is sick, it withdraws its energy from the extremities in order to nourish the vital organs. It is time to end the imperial project and attend to all that has been neglected: the crumbling cities, the antiquated railways, the failing water systems, the decaying infrastructure, the ailing economy. Annual defense-related spending is close to one trillion dollars. We maintain 800 military bases around the world. The peace dividend that was supposed to come after the Berlin Wall fell was never redeemed. Now we have another chance.

As President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will start the process of unwinding empire. We will bring the troops home. We will stop racking up unpayable debt to fight one war after another. The military will return to its proper role of defending our country. We will end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know it’s happening. But it is happening, a constant drain on our strength. It’s time to come home and restore this country.

In Ukraine, the most important priority is to end the suffering of the Ukrainian people, victims of a brutal Russian invasion, and also victims of American geopolitical machinations going back at least to 2014. We must first get clear: Is our mission to help the brave Ukrainians defend their sovereignty? Or is it to use Ukraine as a pawn to weaken Russia? Robert F. Kennedy will choose the first. He will find a diplomatic solution that brings peace to Ukraine and brings our resources back where they belong. We will offer to withdraw our troops and nuclear-capable missiles from Russia’s borders. Russia will withdraw its troops from Ukraine and guarantee its freedom and independence. UN peacekeepers will guarantee peace to the Russian-speaking eastern regions. We will put an end to this war. We will put an end to the suffering of the Ukranian people. That will be the start of a broader program of demilitarization of all countries.

This is astonishing stuff to be put before the American people from the scion of one of the great American political dynasties.

(I am aware of his chequered past, his support for Hillary over Bernie, and his Covid vaccine scepticism, though the latter appears to be more based on his long term commitment to tackling the profiteering and corrupt influence of big Pharma than an actual anti-vaccine stance).

I did not predict that the USA would become a gerontocracy. Biden shows signs of the mental decay that is a natural part of the human condition. He will not have to face Kennedy in any Primary debates – the NDC could be relied on to stitch up that potentially huge hurdle for him – but the risk of Biden detariorating further mentally in a way that is impossible to hide must exist for anyone of his age. So the Kennedy challenge is not without a slim hope.

A slim hope for a declared opponent of the military industrial complex is one hope too many, therefore the twin agencies of social media suppression and corporate media ridicule have already swung in to action against Kennedy.

The challenge must be choked at birth. The range of acceptable opinion to the US Establishment is now extremely narrow.

Trump remains an enigma. He is a mixture of far right prejudice and serious outbursts of commonsense. I do not doubt that he does have interests beyond the personal advancement of Donald J Trump, but only in an incidental way.

In Ukraine we are either going to see death and destruction on a scale well beyond the terrible horrors already inflicted, or there is ultimately going to be a deal involving the ceding of some territory to Russia (Crimea+, as my FCO sources tell me it is currently called in Beijing based diplomacy).

Trump says this. It is the kind of thing that makes the US military-industrial-security service complex hate him, as they are seeing super profits, massive resources and political influence stretching ahead for at least another five years. They don’t care at all how many Eastern Europeans die.

Trump is a much greater threat to Biden, and the full weight of the state is therefore being thrown into stopping him through lawfare. Some of this is very dubious, and subject to the perfectly true response that Bill Clinton was never prosecuted for remarkably identical behaviours.

Watching the agencies of the state find a way to stop Trump is going to be fascinating.

Russiagate was a hoax. There is however a real interference with what the public are allowed to know which makes the notion of “democracy” in the USA meaningless, and that is the interference of the security state of the USA itself.

Those interests got Biden into power, and will do everything and literally anything to help him stay there.

The British security state is of course complicit. A final thought.

It is fast approaching a year since Julian Assange submitted his High Court appeal against extradition, and still the High Court has not even decided if it will hear the appeal or not. We had initially hoped the actual hearing might be before last Christmas.

The Assange prosecution is not popular in the USA, where even the mainstream media have come out against charging a journalist with espionage.  In addition everybody can now see the parallel with Evan Gershkovich and potential impact of Assange’s treatment on Gershkovich.

Assange’s arrival in Washington would be a free speech cause celebre with the potential to alienate some liberal support from Biden in a close election. The US security services therefore still very much want Julian imprisoned for life – but they do not want him extradited until after Biden is safely re-elected.

The British government therefore need to keep Julian in maximum security in Belmarsh for another two years, to keep the Biden campaign and its security service backers happy.

This can only be done by introducing lengthy and unnecessary delays into the judicial process. We see that happening, or rather we see it “inexplicably” not happening, before our very eyes.

The senior British judiciary do what the security services tell them to do. Discreetly suggested, in the club.

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Now that precisely the same individuals who organised the conspiracy to frame Alex Salmond are under heavy police investigation for financial fraud, many people are now prepared to listen who refused to do so before.

I am going forward with a case to the UN Human Rights Committee over my substantial imprisonment for journalism. This will set out what really happened in Scotland – to Alex Salmond, to me, to Clive Thomson, to Mark Hirst and others – on the international stage.

It will highlight that it remains illegal to publish almost any of the truth about the conspiracy led by Sturgeon, Murrell, Lloyd and Ruddick.

Going to the UN has several advantages.

I am no longer constrained as I was in appeals, to stick to matters presented at the original hearing, which you might recall was over in half an hour and at which my lawyers appeared to believe the case would be simply dismissed if not much fuss was made.

I am also no longer constrained to use Scottish lawyers. The extraordinary deference in the Scottish legal system, and the refusal of a series of Scots lawyers to say anything remotely critical of Lady Dorrian, or anything that might challenge the extreme restrictions on evidence she had placed in both my trial and the Salmond trial, has been crippling.

I am going to the United Nations with non-Scots international lawyers. You can judge the difference in their approach from the fact-finding report below.

Among the evidence barred by Lady Dorrian from the Salmond trial, and on which she refused a formal application for disclosure in my own hearing, were the WhatsApp messages between Murrell, Ruddick and others in which they were plainly trying to generate and influence complaints against Salmond.

I cannot put this better than David Davis did in the House of Commons using parliamentary privilege.

For example, these texts show that there is a concerted effort by senior members of the SNP to encourage complaints. The messages suggest that SNP chief executive Peter Murrell co-ordinated Ruddick and Ian McCann, the SNP’s compliance officer, in the handling of specific complainants. On 28 September, a month after the police had started their investigation of the criminal case, McCann expressed great disappointment to Ruddick that someone who had promised to deliver five complainants to him by the end of that week had come up empty, or “overreached”, as he put it. One of the complainants said to Ruddick that she was

“feeling pressurised by the whole thing rather than supported”.

The day following the Scottish Government’s collapse in a judicial review in January 2019, Ruddick expressed to McCann the hope that one of the complainants would be

“sickened enough to get back in the game.”

Later that month, she confirmed to Murrell that the complainant was now “up for the fight” and

“keen to see him go to jail”.

Ruddick herself, in one of her texts, expressed nervousness about

“what happens when my name comes out as [redacted] fishing for others to come forward”.

Note, again, that this was after the criminal investigation into Salmond had commenced. This is improper, to say the least. Contact with, and influence of, potential witnesses is totally inappropriate once a criminal investigation is under way. That was known inside the SNP itself.

Text messages reveal that at an SNP national executive committee meeting early in January 2019, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) raised concerns among staff at Westminster that SNP headquarters were engaged in “suborning” of witnesses, while on 28 August 2018, a senior member of SNP staff in this building described in an email the SNP headquarters move against Salmond as a “witch-hunt”.

Shortly after charges were brought against Salmond, Peter Murrell sent messages saying that it was a

“good time to be pressurising”

detectives working on the case, and that the more fronts Salmond was having to “firefight” on,

“the better for all complainers.”

When the inquiry put those messages to Mr Murrell, he said that they were “quite out of character”. That is no defence even were it true, but, having seen the evidence of other messages, it seems to me that they were all too much in character for Mr Murrell. In a Committee evidence session on 8 December last year, Mr Murrell replied under questioning that there were no more messages of the type already in the public domain from January 2019.

That statement, delivered under oath, is hard to reconcile with the dozens of messages stretching over a period of months from September 2018 that I have now seen. There is more, but it would take the whole debate to read them out.

You will recall that, after release from prison, I was interviewed by police at my home about who was responsible for leaks to MPs of Murrell’s and Ruddick’s self-incriminating messages.

It does seem that the lesson of these revealing messages was learnt by the Sturgeon clique:

In a properly run country, Sue Ruddick would have been correct to worry what would happen if it came out that she was “fishing for complainers to come forward”. It has always been my contention, and it remains so, that in the attempted fit-up of Alex Salmond the Crown Office were in cahoots.

Sue Ruddick has been promoted now to Chief Executive Officer of the SNP.

I am afraid it will take funds to get my case before the UN. £30,000 will get us over the line, and more than that will enable us to do a more thorough job (there are over 1,000 pages of supporting documentation) and to pay the costs for further organisations and experts to become involved.

I will remind you that among the urgent issues on which we seek comment from the UN, is the ruling that bloggers and citizen journalists do not benefit from the protections for free speech enjoyed by mainstream media.

This is the initial draft report (small redactions purely for publication on this blog) prepared by the team that will be taking the case forward:

Depending on your device, this might be easier to read in the original pdf here:

KORFF-AZIZOV – Factfinding report on Craig Murray – EDITED 230423finalfinal2

I keep going with this because it is important to lift this cloud that looms over Scotland’s political life, that leaves journalists in fear of persecution, that threatens bloggers, unfairly stigmatises me, and is frankly a disgrace.

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The collapse of the governing party of the Scottish colonial administration is a direct consequence of the Union. It shows the need for Independence.

Devolution infantilises Scottish politics. The Scottish Government budget is a massive £60 billion. But that all comes through London. The Scottish Government has no effective control on the productivity of its economy.

It has extremely limited, essentially cosmetic, powers to vary fiscal policy, excluding indirect and corporate taxation. It has no power whatsoever over monetary policy. The “Scottish government” is in essence very little more than a distribution mechanism for government revenue channelled through London.

The Scottish government is not a government in any real sense of the term when it comes to the ability to run the Scottish economy. It does however have tremendous powers to manage huge sums in spending. It has a great deal of power, and extremely limited responsibility.

Of course, much spending is not really discretionary. The NHS and Education will always need vast sums. But even little droppings off the margins of £60 billion remain huge sums of money in personal terms, and the Scottish government finds itself able to deploy life changing patronage on an astonishing human scale.

The result of all this is that devolution has created a Scottish political class at Holyrood fattened on this dripping roast, and swept into heights of vainglory by the pretence that their tightly constrained body is a national parliament, when on any rational analysis it is a slightly tarted-up regional council.

It does not control the Scottish economy, it does not control Scottish foreign policy, it does not control Scottish defence policy, it is not permitted to enable democratic decisions on the future Scottish constitution.

It is not a parliament.

So here we have this “parliament”, stuffed with MSPs who are not particularly bright, and have an irresponsible role but control immense amounts of dosh to spread around. The first thing they do, of course, is feather their own nests and build little empires.

You will recall that the first crack in the SNP wall came with the resignation of their chief spin doctor, Murray Foote, for being caught in repeated lying to the media about SNP membership numbers.

I was astonished then to discover that Murray Foote was not an employee of the SNP,  but of the Scottish Parliament. Apparently the Corporate Body of the Scottish Parliament (a committee of MSPs) provides money to each political party to fund the central staff “supporting” the party’s MSPs, including spin doctors.

Parties have every right to campaign at their own expense and try to persuade us to vote for them, but I object fundamentally to party spin doctors being paid by the taxpayer to spread their lies and propaganda.

Welcome to the cosy world of the Scottish political class, where everything is cushy on the gravy train of flowing money, and the public are mugs.

As the SNP leadership election campaign proceeded, I realised that there are hundreds more paid SNP staff than I realised, 95% of them toiling away night and day to bundle continuity candidate Humza over the finishing line.

As the daily flood of twitter endorsements for Humza started to reach the bottom of the barrel, endorsements were tweeted out from people billed as “activists”.

I googled one of the “activists”, Doug Daniel, and found he is in fact full-time staff – again paid for by the Scottish Parliament. He is “communications and campaigns manager” to an MSP.

Now I don’t mind the public purse paying for MSPs to have secretaries and constituency caseworkers, but why on earth should the public pay for MSPs’ campaigners?

It is not just the SNP, of course. All political parties welcome the ever burgeoning gravy train, and seize the opportunity to employ each other’s families, their friends, thrusting young careerists and, to an astonishing degree, young people they fancy.

(The confidential report  Nicola Sturgeon and Leslie Evans received on sexual harassment inside the Scottish Parliament contained over 200 allegations. They buried everything except one against Alex Salmond. There have since been numerous high profile cases of harassment by MSPs).

The SNP command the lion’s share of the money as the ruling party, and the direct political class expands and expands. Why Humza needs almost twice as many ministers as Alex Salmond did, and more than twice as many SPADs, is not immediately obvious other than to provide jobs for the faithful.

But the “direct” political class pales into insignificance compared to the massive cloud of government-funded positions in Scotland’s disproportionately large “third sector”. Pop into any bistro on Byres Road in Glasgow, and you will find it replete with people from NGOs or the “creative industries”, keeping their bills to submit to some Scottish Government branch or agency or funded organisation.

Sometimes one of these figures emerges into the daylight. HIV Scotland, the “national HIV policy organisation”, were in receipt of a grant of £270,000 per year. Its chief executive was Nathan Sparling.

Sparling is a good example of the career path available to the Scottish political class. He started off his taxpayer-funded campaign as a parliamentary assistant to Angus Robertson.

Robertson and Sparling

He then became Chief Executive of HIV Scotland – from which position he was forced to resign, and has just been charged with fraud. He is of course entitled to the presumption of innocence.

HIV Scotland has stopped operating and been closed down.

The interesting thing about this is that I cannot find any reaction from anyone – not the Scottish government who were funding them, not the HIV sufferer community, not the Terence Higgins Trust – bemoaning the closure of HIV Scotland. It is as though the “national HIV policy organisation” is not missed and was not actually doing anything useful at all.

A remarkable number of those organisations being funded by the Scottish government in this way are “policy organisations”, rather than actually delivering a service. The salaries in this part of the troughocracy are better than in the direct public service, with several effectively taxpayer-funded NGO chief executives earning substantially more than MSPs.

One remarkable effect of this system is that the Scottish government is constantly holding stakeholder consultations on policy with policy NGOs funded entirely by the Scottish government to promote the policies of the Scottish government. (You probably need to read that sentence twice. I needed to write it twice.)

One reason the Gender Recognition Reform measure has caused such political damage to the SNP is that the excessive ideological purity of the approach was continually reinforced at closed meetings between Scottish government officials and trans rights campaigning organisations funded by the Scottish government.

This kind of paid echo chamber explains how the mad, and since apparently abandoned by Humza, position of insisting that convicted rapists could self-identify and simply change sex, came to be adopted.

But my main point here is that the taxpayer is paying for swathes of trans rights campaigners. As it happens I am sympathetic in general to self-ID (though not for rapists). But I do not believe the public should be paying for this stuff.

This political-class gravy train in Scotland is massively disproportionate to the size of the country.

Gender reform is just one area where the Scottish government has wasted large amounts of money paying young activists substantial salaries to agree with them. You will find Scottish government-funded environmental groups advocating for Highly Protected Marine Areas. You will find swarms of the public funded self-righteous advocating to ban alcohol advertising.

The Scottish government estimates its grant support to the third sector at half a billion pounds.

Yes £500,000,000.

That is a stunning amount of patronage. Most of it is to excellent organisations doing very good work. But that still leaves huge scope for political patronage to policy and campaigning organisations.

Often of course third sector organisations are involved in both service delivery and policy work, including not just policy development but lobbying and campaigning. One such organisation is Rape Crisis Scotland.

Now as it happens I would support a very substantial increase indeed in government support for rape victims, though I would prefer it to be delivered via the NHS and local authorities rather than a highly politicised NGO.

I should also like to see a very large increase in resources, in personnel, training, finance and equipment, and above all priority, devoted by Police Scotland to rape cases.

Rape Crisis Scotland is almost entirely Scottish Government funded. In that circular policy making, its chief executive Sandy Brindley has played a key role in formulating and promoting Lady Dorrian’s proposals to abolish juries in sexual assault trials.

In an example of exactly the kind of highly paid circle jerk I am explaining, the official Jury Trials Working Group contains three third sector organisations funded by the Scottish government which accordingly support the abolition of juries – Rape Crisis Scotland, Women’s Aid Scotland and Victim Support Scotland.

The Scottish government do not fund any organisation that works for fair trials, so there is no NGO represented in favour of juries.

You would imagine that the highly remunerated CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland, Ms Brindley, is a lovely person motivated by humanitarian concern, given that she devotes her life to campaigning for rape victims.

And yet an Employment Tribunal recently found that the Establishment hero Ms Brindley deliberately and persistently hounded a disabled woman out of her job at Rape Crisis. This is from the Scottish Legal News on the tribunal judgment:

In its decision, the Tribunal expressed concerns at the extensive role played by Ms Brindley throughout proceedings, commenting: “While the Tribunal was mindful that the respondent was a small mainly voluntary organisation, it seemed extraordinary that the chief executive of the organisation would make a recommendation that an employee be suspended, take part in a grievance hearing concerning that employee and then be present at the disciplinary and appeal hearings concerning that same employee where the employee was suggesting that the grievance and disciplinary proceedings ought to have been combined.”

It continued: “Ms Brindley appeared unable or unwilling to understand that her presence throughout both the grievance and disciplinary processes could have a bearing on the extent to which these were conducted in an impartial manner. It was clear to the Tribunal that Ms Brindley operated an invisible hand throughout both processes and her presence was not neutral.”

Assessing the respondent’s awareness of the claimant’s disability, the Tribunal said: “The respondent appeared to be of the view that in the absence of a formal diagnosis, then they were not obliged to consider whether there were any steps they ought to take in terms of the claimant’s condition. While such a position is of course wrong in law, the Tribunal was extremely surprised that an organisation such as the respondent, whose services were focussed on supporting women who had experienced trauma would adopt such a position.”

…The Tribunal concluded: “The disciplinary hearing was not fair. Further, the presence of Ms Brindley at every stage of the proceedings reinforced the Tribunal’s view that the dismissal of the claimant was predetermined. Ms Brindley was aware of the grievance raised by the claimant and the outcome and recommendations which had been made. However, she did not raise this with the disciplinary hearing as an alternative potential outcome, which the Tribunal found very surprising.”

The Tribunal was “extremely surprised” and Ms Brindley’s behaviour was “Surprising”. That is about as tough as language ever gets from an employment tribunal, but their opinion of Ms Brindley is extremely clear. She withheld information from a disciplinary hearing, and her “invisible hand” hounded a disabled woman out of a job.

I would, incidentally, be prepared to wager a sum that the £50,000 in compensation and costs that Brindley’s appalling behaviour cost Rape Crisis Scotland, will ultimately be met by public funds. Certainly not by Brindley.

Yet Sandy Brindley remains a Duchess in the enormous realm of Scottish government-favoured, public funded NGO’s, a star in the firmament of policy lobbyists with big taxpayer-funded salaries.

With hysterical levels of hypocrisy, Brindley, who broke all procedure against her employee, is still the Scottish government’s star authority on the requirements of justice in sexual assault cases.

Their jobs may not be in Politics with a capital P, but I would argue that Ms Brindley and Mr Sparling are prime examples of Scotland’s sprawling, public funded political class, excrescences of the vast patronage wielded by Holyrood.

Of course it extends beyond the third sector. Failed Scottish politicians easily find eye-watering highly paid positions in Scottish universities, for which they are in no sense qualified. Wendy Alexander, Kezia Dugdale and Stephen Gethins are all clear examples.

Arts funding in Scotland and the capricious patronage behind it requires not just a separate article, but a separate book. One theatre in Aberdeen not entirely unconnected to the Aberdeen Independence Movement received more government Covid relief funding than the entire independent music festival sector.

So whatever happened in SNP finances must be seen in this much wider context of the morally shrivelled political culture of Scotland, of the limited power but excessive patronage enjoyed by Scottish governments and of the widespread use of public money for personal advantage of the political class.

The devolution system is a moral sink. Scottish Labour was massively corrupt in its years in power, with good old fashioned brown-envelope corruption all over Scottish central and local government in the Labour years. It was worse than the SNP.

But what really killed off Scottish Labour’s years of power was the recognition by the public that the Scottish Labour political class were interested in their own careers entirely, and had zero real concern for the people of Scotland.

The problem is that all those careerists nowadays flock in to the SNP rather than Labour. The interests of the Scottish political class once again take priority over the interests of the Scottish people.

It is a direct consequence of the fundamentally flawed devolution system, which confers power of patronage with no real responsibility for the economy.

The underlying fact is that Scotland produces vastly more wealth for government in London than the amount which is returned to Holyrood. But the producers are diverse, whereas the portion returned is concentrated into a single channel of distribution, creating that power of patronage and corruption.

Thus we have this strange combination of a poor and exploited nation but a sated and self-satisfied political class. This kind of devolution is precisely how to buy off any Scottish leadership and draw the sting of popular demand for Independence.

That was of course Blair’s open and admitted goal in initiating the devolution project. And it works.

Humza Yousaf has exacerbated all this by specifically excluding from his government those who have some understanding of the supply side of the economy, particularly Kate Forbes and Ivan McKee, and filling his cabinet precisely with those who are interested in nothing but how to control funding to client groups.

Devolution is a trap. Working within the financial ruination that is Westminster economic policy, with no monetary and little fiscal control, suffering from hard Brexit and Tory austerity, it is impossible properly to run proper public services.

Of course Scottish education and the Scottish NHS are in a bloody terrible state. Because of the grossly mismanaged UK economy and Tory austerity, they are bound to be in a terrible state. But devolution makes the SNP take responsibility for the disaster made elsewhere, and it ends up defending the indefensible and arguing that it is not quite as terrible as London.

Under devolution the Scottish government will always get it in the neck for problems made in London. Devolution is a trap. The Scottish political class accept it, and furiously defend it, because it feathers their nest.

The only escape for Scotland is Independence. The Scottish political class are bought off by the corruption of devolution.

This scenario is familiar to every student of imperialism and post-colonial studies. There is always a nominally nationalist governing caste of collaborators sucking at the Imperial teat. Those collaborators always claim to represent and act in the interests of their nation.

The balance of resource flows always benefits the Imperial capital and disbenefits the colony, but enough is “graciously” dispensed to the local ruling caste to keep them sweet.

Scotland is not in any way unique. It is a sad old story. The good news is that the people always triumph in the end and throw off both the local collaborating political caste and the yoke of foreign rule.

That London yoke is onerous. It has impoverished Scotland for centuries, and of course current Tory Westminster corruption is several orders of magnitude worse than anything seen in Scotland. I have every sympathy for those wondering why the houses of Michelle Mone and dozens of other senior Tories who profiteered from Covid have not been turned over by police.

Scotland’s people need to move forward quickly to Independence. That will probably entail writing off the SNP.

Realising that devolution and its advocates are not friends to Independence is a key step to progress.

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