Speaking to the No2Nato meeting on Saturday, I had the challenge of telling a packed and highly motivated audience some things that they very much instinctively disagreed with, from a very different viewpoint to much of what they had heard from some excellent speakers all day.
I had to follow a really effective rabble rousing performance from Chris Williamson which had raised the rafters.
On top of which, I was outlining facts and arguments which have had no discernible place in the public discourse on Ukraine on any “side” and were new to most people there.
I appealed at the start for the audience to listen with an open mind, and I think largely they did.
So here is me, with no notes and no visuals, just talking, giving people my own perspective.
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I give this detail because I am often asked where the subscriptions go! Lawyers, mostly.
This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
It is over ten years since I allowed a guest post on this blog. This is because I never listen to anybody except myself. That way I avoid hearing anything disagreeable.
(Those last two sentences are a joke, deliberately in the style of Jane Austen. Of course it ruins the joke to explain it, but if I don’t, then twitter will be full of trials writing jibes about narcissism).
I have turned down hundreds of requests, but today I have decided to publish Stephen Norris, the Convener of his SNP branch, who has just had enough.
The SNP Inner Circle’s desire to fix the election for Humza could hardly be more obvious. Murrell and Sturgeon remain in place to oversee the process – and are carefully diverting attention to the counting process rather than the issuing and verification of login IDs.
Almost half of the campaigning days available are to be taken up by a series of 8 regional hustings meetings. The SNP machine (ie the Murrells) have decreed – against the will of two of the three candidates – that these will be closed meetings and neither reported nor streamed.
All are fully booked with no tickets available, and the party machine that booked them tipped off their own people to grab the seats. The candidates will only be able to speak to 3,500 members in total through these hustings, out of a membership claimed to be over 100,000.
It is deliberately designed to tie the candidates up and minimise their exposure. Of course, as a new mother, it is particularly constraining for Kate Forbes.
Now Stephen Norris has captured regional list MSP Emma Harper breaking party rules by emailing the South of Scotland membership on the SNP email system, urging them to vote for Humza Yousaf.
This plainly contravenes the election rules, but is on a par with Humza appearing everywhere with placards etc using fonts, styles and materials exactly as used by party HQ, and almost certainly produced by them.
Before I finally hand you over to Stephen Norris, I might further explain that ultra-Sturgeon loyalist Emma Harper MSP was jemmied into her seat by a fake process designed to exclude the Independence stalwart Joan McAlpine MSP – a talented and independent figure detested by Sturgeon.
McAlpine was removed by a rule change adopted by the Sturgeon controlled SNP national executive, which rules that regional lists must be topped by disabled candidates. Members voted for candidates in the normal way and the boosting was done AFTER the vote, with the disabled promoted to the top.
The extremely talented McAlpine was therefore forced out of parliament by the ultra loyalist nonentity Emma Harper, on the sole grounds that Harper has diabetes. It is worth noting that in other regions, candidates with less than 5% of the members’ vote were promoted to the top of the list, above individual candidates with ten times as many votes, and are now MSPs.
So now you know how Harper got to her position, I give you Stephen Norris:
“Election Cheating
I write this with a heavy heart and after much soul searching.
But events over the last few days have left me with no other choice.
I trust that those who read this understand I do so out of loyalty to my party, to Scotland, and the wider independence movement.
THE SCOTTISH National Party will stage the first of eight hustings on Wednesday, March 1, 2023. Arguably, with Alex Salmond gone and Nicola Sturgeon going, it will be the most important leadership election in its history.
Sadly, and to the shame of those involved, the process of choosing our new leader and Scotland’s First Minister has been compromised before it starts. The act has been perpetrated in the most sleekit, arrogant and undemocratic manner imaginable. And I use that word “undemocratic” deliberately.
Once upon a time, the party to which I have devoted 41 years of my life, campaigned for, argued for, stood for and believed in, prided itself on a democratic power derived from its diverse and multi-talented membership. A power feared and respected by our unionist opponents and one which led our movement to the brink of victory.
Be in no doubt, that victory – the vital independence of our country and the restoration of its social and economic fortunes – remains within our grasp. The grassroots Yes movement still survives and thrives and – despite a succession of surrenders and false promises – a platform of around 50 per cent support for independence remains as our start point.
But the independence our country so desperately needs will not be achieved with Humza Yousaf and his backers at the helm of the SNP.
On Friday, February 24, 2023, two hours and 26 minutes before nominations for the leadership contest closed at noon, I received an email. It was from Emma Harper, the sole list MSP for the region, and time-stamped 9.34am. On investigation I discovered the same email had been sent to SNP members across the South of Scotland, whose numbers run into thousands, at exactly the same time.
Members in the three southernmost constituencies, Galloway and West Dumfries, Dumfriesshire and Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire, received this email. Ms Harper holds the SNP brief for these seats because these are the only ones where there is no constituency SNP MSP.
I have learned that she spoke to Mr Yousaf about his campaign and strategy for the south the day before she sent the blanket email – a fact of which I have written proof. It transpires that Ms Harper, with the consent of party HQ, has been granted access to the South Scotland membership database, ostensibly to broadcast her work as an MSP. The email was not issued via Ms Harper’s personal account but from “Scottish National Party” with the delivery email of [email protected].
It states:
___________________________________________________________________________
Dear Members,
As we draw closer to the end of the nomination process in the contest for leadership of our party and for Scotland’s next First Minister, I wanted to take the opportunity to write to you all with my decision to back Humza Yousaf for these top jobs.
As I am sure we all agree, Nicola Sturgeon has served Scotland and the SNP with absolute distinction. As the first female First Minister, she has also been the longest serving incumbent in the role. Both of these are stunning achievements in themselves. Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy in Government is one which has improved the lives of tens of thousands of families the length and breadth of Scotland and is one which has brought us ever closer to our nations independence.
Being First Minister is the top job in our country. It requires experience and dedication – a First Minister is never off duty. In my opinion, and after consideration, I believe Humza Yousaf to be the best person for this role. Humza has had many of the toughest jobs in government over the last 10 years – Transport Minister, Justice Secretary and Health Secretary in the midst of a global pandemic. He has also openly reaffirmed his commitment to our nations independence, to progressive politics and to equality for all, all of which I view to be crucial in Scotland’s journey to become a fairer, progressive and more equal country.
One of Humza’s many strengths is reaching out to bring people together and that is exactly what we need right now. However, as you will be well aware, my priority – as it always has been and as it will continue to be — is on representing the views of people in Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders. To this end, I will be making the case to Humza to prioritise the needs of our region if he is successful in becoming the leader of our party and First Minister. Issues like addressing derelict buildings, improving our transport infrastructure, addressing rural healthcare needs and unlocking the potential of the region – to name just some.
I will, of course, keep members updated on the actions I take to ensure our area is represented and listened to. As always, members can contact me at any time, should you be looking for any advice or support.
And a wee final reminder – please ensure you log onto MYSNP to nominate your candidate and to vote for who you think is the best option for party leader and First Minister.
The last paragraph, by any interpretation, attempts to add a veneer of impartiality to everything above – which is nothing more than blatant electioneering on behalf of Humza.
No other candidate or campaign team leader was offered a similar facility to make their pitch to the South Scotland membership, in the same way Emma Harper did for Humza Yousaf. I do not – and for many reasons could not – support Humza, so I phoned round my Kirkcudbright and District Branch executive to see if they had received a similar email. They all had – at 9.34am.
I then contacted members in the two seats east of Galloway and West Dumfries – Dumfriesshire, and Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire, with the same question. They too had been issued the same email by Ms Harper, via Scottish National Party and [email protected], with precisely the same time stamp – 9.34am. I have these emails in my possession – written proof that they were sent on behalf of Humza Yousaf across all three constituencies. Suffice it to say my friends in Dumfriesshire and the Borders are equally incensed at this sleekit attempt to manipulate the vote and sidestep our party’s strict electoral rules.
The Kirkcudbright branch secretary then told me something else. A second email had gone out later that day, February 24, this time to “All Conveners, Secretaries, Organisers, Membership Secretaries, Women’s Officers, Political Education Officers Councillors, MPs and MSPs.”
I am convener of Kirkcudbright and District Branch SNP. It is dated February 24 with a time stamp of 19.10, headed Scottish National Party and sent via [email protected]. It was sent out after nominations had closed at noon that day, and nine hours after Ms Harper’s first email.
It states:
Dear colleague,
With the candidates now confirmed for the Leadership Contest, I wanted to remind all members who have emailing rights on my.snp.org about their responsibilities during the period of the contest.
We encourage branches and elected members to make sure that members are aware of the contest, and engage with it, either through attendance at in-person or online hustings. It’s an important period, and it’s important that members have buy-in to the process, since for many it will be the first time that they’ve voted for a party leader.
The dedicated page for the contest on the member portal will stay up to date with information throughout the period of the contest.
I would like to draw your attention to the section on organisational neutrality. It’s important that, in sending emails to members, that personal thoughts on who to back are not conveyed to others. Who an individual member chooses to vote for will be up to them. This also applies to branch/organisational social media accounts. The views of the individual(s) with login details for a social media account do not determine views of the branch/organisation. So no mention of support for a particular candidate should be shared on those accounts. And under no circumstances should any membership data be given to a candidate or candidates.
Please also note that under Rule 4.2 any party organisation organising an event with any candidate during the election period must issue an invitation to all candidates.
The relevant part of the rules (which can be found here) are:
9. Organisational Neutrality
9.1 All hustings must be conducted in a manner which gives no advantage to any of the candidates seeking selection.
9.2 No resources of the Party, including membership data, may be used by, or made available to, any candidate seeking election.
9.3 No Party meeting may take a vote preferring any candidate in the election.
9.4 No member may use a Party email facility to seek to influence the votes of members in the election.
9.5 Headquarters staff must not act, or be asked to act, in a way which would call into question their impartiality.
9.6 Parliamentarians and councillors must ensure that neither they nor their staff use parliamentary or council resources for campaigning.
If you have any questions, please email me at [email protected]
Lorna Finn
National Secretary
_________________________________________________________________________
Of particular relevance are points 9.2, 9.4 and 9.5.
Point 9.2 clearly states that “No resources of the Party, including membership data, may be used by, or made available to, any candidate seeking election”. Ms Harper is Humza’s lead campaign organiser in the south. She deliberately, on his behalf, lobbied thousands of members across the south seeking their support for him, to the total exclusion of the other candidates.
Similarly, point 9.4 states that “no member may use a party email facility to seek to influence the votes of members in the election”. Ms Harper, acting on Mr Yousaf’s behalf, did precisely that in direct contravention of the party’s constitution and rules regarding ‘Organisational Neutrality’.
Point 9.5 also has relevance: “Headquarters staff must not act, or be asked to act, in a way which would call into question their impartiality.” Plainly, headquarters staff granted Ms Harper access to the entire South of Scotland membership database. It is inconceivable that Ms Harper’s actions were unknown to HQ – and, suffice it to say, key personnel therein. In short, they too stand accused of acting outwith the party’s constitution and rules.
There is much more I could say but at this moment in time I will refrain from doing so.
But I want to place on record one thing. This is my party, the party I love. Unlike many, I have never left, and I will not do so.
I leave it up to others to decide who is bringing our great party into disrepute – I, or all those at whose door I lay the blame for this shameful cheating and trashing of Scottish National Party internal democracy.
In conclusion, Scotland’s cause means more to me than words can express. I have six grandchildren all of whom, for the present at least, thankfully remain within Caledonia’s shores. I want only that they should have the best possible future as citizens of an independent Scotland, of Europe and the world.
And it is for them that I fight for independence – more, much more, than for myself.
Such a happy and necessary event can only happen if the SNP returns to form at the head of the entire YES movement. Our party will never be able to win independence without that great civic force for good, of creativity, hope and imagination.
The onus is on us to lead by example, whereby our internal party democracy acts as a template for our country’s future democracy and constitution, one founded on the pillars of justice, truth, openness and equality of opportunity for all.
In conjunction with that it goes without saying that corruption, nepotism and gerrymandering of opinion have no place in our party, and never should have.
We cannot, must not, emulate the unionist parties in going down the anti-democratic path. We are better than that.
As an ordinary SNP member and branch convenor, I therefore call on Humza Yousaf, as a matter of honour and integrity, to immediately resile himself from the leadership contest and withdraw his candidature, for the reasons I have outlined above.
Caledonianly yours,
Steve Norris
Convener
Kirkcudbright and District SNP ”
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Unexpectedly, the election for leader of the SNP has become a true hinge moment in the entire history of the Scottish nation.
Sure of their control of the party, the devolutionists in the SNP have openly come out with the proposal that Independence is merely an “aspiration” – Humza Yousaf’s exact word.
Stewart McDonald and Alyn Smith have set 2050 as a possible Independence date. Humza has poured scorn on the idea that 50% + 1 of votes would be sufficient for Independence, thus conceding the Tory proposals for a qualified majority and abandoning the principle of the 2014 referendum.
This puzzles me entirely. If 50% + 1 for the Union is enough to decide for the Union, why is 50% + 1 against the Union not enough to decide against the Union?
Why can I have my will thwarted by losing by one vote, but Gordon Brown not have his will thwarted by losing by one vote?
Above all, Yousaf, Smith, McDonald and a large number of SNP elected parliamentarians have stated explicitly that Independence can only come with Westminster’s agreement.
They have conceded that London has a permanent veto over Scottish Independence.
Even Nicola Sturgeon never explicitly came out and said that, though her insistence that Independence must be legal in terms of UK domestic law had the same effect.
The problem is that, if you believe that London has a right of veto over Scottish Independence, you cannot actually believe that Scotland is a nation with the right of self-determination.
A vote for Humza Yousaf is a vote for decades more of devolution. Which is why a majority of the SNP MPs and MSPs, collecting huge salaries from the UK devolution settlement, have come out in support of him.
Humza is the trougher’s trougher.
Not only is the “official” Sturgeon continuity SNP solely devolutionist, its primary interest in devolution is to pursue identity politics, rather than general wealth equality.
Hence we have had radical reform on Gender Recognition, but timid and tiny efforts at Land Reform, which have paid tens of millions of public money to the Duke of Buccleuch and others for small parcels of marginal land they did not want to keep.
Hence the attempt to move the conversation on to whether candidates will, within the devolution settlement, carry on a hopeless legal battle with London over gender reform, whereas the solution which the SNP is supposed by its constitution to advocate is the opposite: obtaining Independence for Scotland so Scotland can settle these matters for itself.
Ash Regan offers the opposite view. She espouses precisely what I have advocated on this website for a decade – that Scotland’s elected representatives should declare Independence, as has been the normal and accepted route to Independence, in a world where over half the states have become Independent during my lifetime.
So SNP members have the clearest choice. If they vote for Humza they are voting for devolution and no action on Independence apart from “aspiration” and “conversation”.
If they vote for Ash they are voting for confrontation with London and eventual UDI. As the SNP continues its electoral dominance, this is a major turning point.
It is not entirely plain which side of this divide stands Kate Forbes, but I believe she is closer to Ash’s position than to Humza’s.
The key point is that nobody knows what the SNP members actually think about all this. The choice will get clearer to them as hustings go on these next few weeks.
The SNP leadership have spent eight years dismantling the democratic mechanisms of the party. Conferences have been cancelled or reduced. The last one was about a fifth the size they were from 2014 to 18, and heavily influenced by the payroll vote.
The National Executive is dominated by representatives of affiliated groups, who are massively over-represented compared to those elected by the party conference.
There has been no election by the entire party membership for twenty years, nor I believe any other kind of whole membership vote.
The SNP staff and SNP elected representatives are very heavily behind the Sturgeon agenda. Because of Sturgeon’s personal crusades they are far more interested in identity politics than in Independence.
The presumption has been that this is representative of the SNP’s current membership.
Certainly it is true that over 10,000 members left the party, dissatisfied with Sturgeon’s commitment to Independence. 6,000 of them formed the Alba party.
It is also true that many young members have joined who are much more interested (as is their right) in gay and trans issues than in Independence.
But I suspect that the SNP elected members and staff, and those wannabe careerists dominating their youth groups, are less representative than people realise. On Twitter, the SNP appears almost exclusively a matter of pronouns and rainbow flags, cf. the much lauded Mhairi Black intervention to attack Kate Forbes.
Yet I believe there are tens of thousands of ordinary members whose primary interest is still Independence – and Independence quickly, not in 2050.
I meet these people at Yes group, AUOB and similar events. They have remained loyal to the SNP in the patient belief that things will come right and action on Independence is pending.
It seems to me that the SNP leadership have miscalculated their membership – because the leadership has been in a small cocoon of staff and troughing MPs and MSPs not too bothered about Independence.
I think the members are about to let the leadership know what they really think, in the first opportunity for decades.
While I would love to see Ash in charge, I suspect the ultimate beneficiary may be Kate Forbes.
It is an STV election. I suspect that followers of Ash and Kate will largely transfer between each other. To be plain, to win Humza needs to be far ahead on first preferences.
That is looking highly improbable. The devolutionists have badly miscalculated.
A final thought. I do not trust Peter Murrell at all to run the election. Voting is electronic.
Candidates have no method to tally those issued with voting logins against the party membership, and to do sampling to check that all those electronic votes are from real, existing members. Or indeed from real people at all rather than just batches of fake names to support batches of logins.
That is just one weak point in the system. There are many others. It would be much better if a respected organisation were brought in that oversees the whole process including verification sampling of voters.
The SNP uses MiVoice, which does not do this. The Electoral Reform Society would do it.
Do not hold your breath for a fair voting process. At the very least, the person in charge should not be under police investigation for fraud.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
In their urgency to foist Sturgeon’s nominated devolutionist successor on Scotland, the media are going all out against Kate Forbes for saying she could never vote for gay marriage. But they have not noted that Humza Yousaf also did not vote for gay marriage, he absented himself.
It is absolutely plain that he did this on a totally false pretext. He claims he had an urgent meeting with the Pakistani Consul General to discuss the case of a man on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy.
How can anybody argue with such a crucial mercy dash?
Except that the appointment was arranged, deliberately to coincide with the gay marriage vote, almost three weeks in advance. The chap could have been executed in the intervening period, if that was genuinely the concern.
The evidence that it was a deliberate ruse is cast iron solid.
The Equal Marriage vote took place on 4 February 2014. On 14 January 2014, three weeks in advance, the Minister for Parliamentary Business had entered it into Humza Yousaf’s ministerial diary (as all other ministers).
Just two days later, on 16 January 2014, Humza arranged his “urgent” meeting with the Pakistani Consul General for 19 days later, to miss the gay marriage vote.
This could not be an accident. The conflict would instantly have been highlighted in the ministerial diary – that is what they are for.
At 19 days’ notice it plainly was not an urgent dash to save somebody’s life. The awful cynicism of using such an excuse and sheltering behind the suffering is breathtaking.
Everybody at the time knew that Humza had deliberately dodged the vote, after criticism from the Muslim community in Glasgow (on which he depended electorally) for supporting the earlier stage of the Bill.
All the Scottish media at the time knew that Humza had dodged the vote. Now he is the anointed one, they have conveniently forgotten it.
I might add something from my perspective as a former senior diplomat. The Pakistani Consulate in Glasgow deals with assisting the interests of Pakistani nationals in Scotland, and with visas. You might as well discuss a death row case with a Pakistani train driver as the Pakistani consul.
Consuls are low status diplomats. The Pakistani Consul General’s diary would not need 19 days’ notice to see the Scottish Justice Minister: he would be delighted to get the meeting.
Here is a photo from the Facebook page of the mighty Pakistani Consul General in Glasgow this month, showcasing his important meeting with… a Scot who shoots goats.
The notion that a meeting with the Pakistani Consul General needed 19 days’ notice and could only be scheduled to coincide with the gay marriage vote – is such obvious nonsense it insults our intelligence and damages the moral stature of all those who parrot the lie.
Humza bottled the gay marriage vote and came up with a really unpleasant ruse to justify it, profiting from the suffering of someone on death row.
For him then to attack Kate Forbes for her views on gay marriage – which are at least honest – is sickening.
I fully support equal marriage and I was very saddened at the time to have a slightly bitter disagreement with my old friend and mentor, Gordon Wilson, over it. Scotland has a legacy of social conservatism. Moving on from that is painful for some people.
I support Ash Regan. A breath of fresh air. Left wing economics and urgent on Independence.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Donald John Morrison was the last man to speak to Willie McRae, unless his murderer talked. He invited me warmly into his neat Benbecula home, where I was visiting with my friend, his cousin Donnie.
Donald took my coat from me and hung it neatly in a cupboard. He then sat us in the front room, while he went to make us tea. On the wood and glass coffee table was a copy of Gareth Wardell’s Essays, thumbed and marked.
Donald John returned with the tea and two slices of pizza, warm and crisp, with sweet fresh cherry tomatoes on top, their skins split from the oven.
Donald John’s movements were fluid. He is remarkably spritely for a man in his late seventies, his back only slightly bowed, his eyes clear behind his spectacles, his hands deft and assured.
There is a calm island lisp to his voice, but he speaks compellingly, assuredly, with the policeman’s eye for relevance and detail. He was a central Glasgow beat policeman for decades, in times when Glasgow was a tough and dangerous city – and when there were beat policemen.
He comes across as more than friendly, positively kindly. But then at key points in his narrative, his eyes suddenly flash and you see the inner steel that he needed in the Glasgow polis.
It happens when he is angry, and there are parts of this story that make him angry indeed.
He knew Willie McRae professionally quite well, in the way that a policeman knows a lawyer. They would meet in court, and sometimes he would need to serve papers on McRae’s office on Bath Street.
Everybody knew the office, it was on the first floor, the biggest law practice in the city, its door protected by a steel shutter on a roller.
In early 1985 he saw Willie McRae more often than usual, because he had to attend on four separate occasions to burglaries of the law office. On every occasion cabinets had been forced and papers had been taken, but no money.
On the same floor of the Bath Street building was an office belonging to a Director of Celtic. That too was burgled, and when he attended that one, the Director told him he believed the break-in was looking for papers belonging to Willie McRae.
Then one day in March 1985, his sergeant came out to the beat and told Donald John and his partner that, whatever occurred, they were to stay away from the McRae offices that evening because a Special Branch and MI5 operation was in process.
That night Donald John was pulling a “doubler” – a twelve hour shift. He found that McRae had been taken into custody and a police cell, for Driving Under the Influence (which to be fair could have been done to Willie McRae almost any day of the week).
Donald John had seen this before. In those days, the personal effects of a prisoner in the police cells were put into a large brown envelope and sealed. Special Branch would take away the envelope from the custody sergeant, open it, remove the prisoner’s house keys, and before the custody court the next morning at 9.30am they would return them and reseal.
It appears that evening the plan did not work, as Willie McRae did not have the roller shutter keys on him – they were in fact kept by the cleaner who came in and opened up at 7.30am every morning.
Donald John grinned that he could have told Special Branch that, if they had asked him.
Then on 7 April Donald John was walking his beat, when he spotted two men keeping surveillance on Agnews store. He immediately tagged them as policemen.
One, a tall thin man of around forty years with prematurely white hair, was pacing up and down outside the barbershop, as though waiting for someone. The second, a shorter and stouter man with curly black hair, was pretending to look into a plate glass shop window. Occasionally they would glance to check on each other.
Donald John was walking towards Agnews store, somewhat on guard, when Willie McRae emerged from the store and walked towards him. In each hand McRae held a bottle of Islay Mist whisky.
Donald joked that he would have to breathylise him. Willie replied that in a few hours he would be enjoying the whisky by a warm fire in Kintail.
They walked together to McRae’s car. Willie put one bottle on the roof while he opened the door, and Donald John caught it for him as it started to roll from the roof.
Willie placed both bottles on the front seat next to a bulging briefcase. Donald moved them onto the floor of the car, suggesting they would be safer as they could fall off the seat.
Willie looked at Donald John and patted the bulging briefcase, which had papers sticking out.
“I have got them this time, Donald”, he said. Then he repeated: “I have got them this time”.
They were probably the last words Willie McRae spoke.
As McRae closed the car door, Donald John Morrison looked up and saw one of the police surveillance team signal to the other with outturned hands, as though to indicate he had no idea what was happening, why a uniformed policeman was speaking to McRae.
I interrupted Donald John (the only time I needed to in the whole discourse) to ask him how McRae had seemed. He said he was neatly dressed and shaven, in a check shirt with a tie and a tweed jacket. He seemed on good form, “in fine fettle”. He had a sparkle in his eye and seemed to be relishing the idea of that drink by the fire in Kintail.
Donald John said apparently there had been a blaze at McRae’s home earlier that day but he gave no indication of it. There was absolutely nothing in his demeanour to indicate he was troubled: quite the opposite.
When he heard of the alleged suicide, Donald John was astonished and did not believe it. He had spoken to Roddy Mackay of Agnew’s Store, who had sold Willie the whisky, and he had also found McRae just as cheerful.
Morrison gave a full statement to the investigation, including everything detailed here. He recommended they also take a statement from Roddy Mackay.
A former beat collague of Donald John Morrison had joined Special Branch. He subsequently told Donald John that the whole investigation into McRae’s death was a cover-up and a tissue of lies by the police.
Donald John also found that Roddy Mackay had never been interviewed.
Over a decade later, once the Freedom of Information Act had passed, Donald John FOIA requested a copy of the report into the death of Willie McRae.
Donald John Morrison was astonished to find that his entire statement had been falsified and replaced with a fake statement onto which his signature had been photocpied.
In his “official” statement in the report there was nothing about surveillance, nothing about MI5 or Special Branch, and nothing about the whisky or the briefcase.
The official version of the death of Willie McRae is that there was no whisky or briefcase in the car, and that he shot himself in the back of the head whilst driving along, the gun flying out of the car window.
That remains the official story to this day.
Donald John was absolutely furious about the forgery of his statement. As this was obviously a serious crime in itself, he went to the procurator fiscal in Elgin to try to get a prosecution commenced against the Special Branch officers involved.
Eventually he was told that the Crown Office had ruled a prosecution would not be “procedurally correct”.
Donald John Morrison believes that, from the death of Willie McRae on, he was a marked man in the police because of what he knew.
Despite an exemplary record he was never offered promotion, though he says he did not want it. He was involved on three occasions in tackling and physically subduing armed robbers, but got not so much as a commendation. Frequently arrests he made were attributed to others.
Morrison says that it was made absolutely plain to officers, by the senior command, that they were expected to join the Orange Lodge, which he did. There were only five Catholic officers – who he named – in his division. The McRae affair also caused him problems in the Orange Lodge, but that is a story, he suggested, for another day.
Morrison is a compelling witness. His testimony is detailed and precise. He ventures nothing beyond what he himself saw and did. He had not a word to say on why McRae was killed, because he does not know.
But he does know there was a bulging briefcase that McRae patted when he said “I have got them this time”. He knows that there were two bottles of Islay Mist. He knows that these things officially “disappeared”. He knows his statement was forged, and that it was done by Special Branch. He knows McRae was under British state surveillance.
I know that I met an honest and brave man. As we left, he stood there, eyes twinkling, and insisted that next time we came to the island we were staying with him, “with your wife and bairns too”.
It was a pleasure to be hosted by the remarkable Donald John Morrison. Just an honest beat cop, standing up against the murderers of the British state.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Nicola Sturgeon is discarded, having served her purpose for the British Establishment once she obtained the UK Supreme Court judgment that Scotland could not hold a referendum on Independence.
That fight was deliberately thrown by Sturgeon’s unionist Lord Advocate. After almost nine years of leading Independence supporters into a whole series of blind alleys, with promise after promise broken to deliver a referendum, and mandate after mandate squandered, she appears to have shattered the Independence movement.
Throughout this nine years, Sturgeon was sustained and promoted by the unionist media.
She pretended she wanted Independence, and they pretended to attack her for it.
Meanwhile Sturgeon was given an extraordinarily easy ride over the real failings of her government. The achievements of Alex Salmond in building an extremely efficient reputation for the SNP’s ability to manage the business of government, were all knocked back.
The collusion of the unionist media in hiding Sturgeon’s role in the attempt to frame Alex Salmond on false charges – a conspiracy orchestrated from her office and her husband’s office – showed the Sturgeon/Unionist axis in operation.
Salmond of course was rightly perceived by the unionists as a much more genuine threat to the union. They had a joint interest with Sturgeon in putting him away.
The main cause of bad government performance was Sturgeon’s compulsion to sideline all people of real talent in the SNP, and surround herself only with the extremely mediocre, who would never challenge her.
No leader genuinely concerned with the good of the country would ever appoint Shirley-Anne Somerville to be a minister.
Scotland has slid down the international tables, in healthcare, in education, in substance abuse, in almost every important area. The ferries debacle has been a disaster for the island communities.
Much of this has been a result of the SNP gradualists walking into the devolution trap. Devolution forces the government in Holyrood to try to mitigate the effects of Tory policies, with resources constrained by Tory austerity and hands tied by neo-con fiscal policy.
Devolution is a dead end filled with poison gas. Sturgeon’s lack of urgency to escape from it was inexplicable.
Sturgeon’s place in history will be as the woman who saved the Union in its hour of maximum danger – the moment the UK left the European Union, against the will of the large majority of Scottish people expressed in a referendum.
Having saved the Union then, Sturgeon went on to obtain the Supreme Court ruling against a referendum and subsequently shattered the Independence movement over identity politics.
She succeeded, by refusal to listen sympathetically to concerns of others, to unleash a wave of hatred towards trans people from those who had previously given the question not a moment of thought.
The contrast is astonishing between her softly softly attitude to Scotland’s Independence, where doubters were to be gently persuaded over decades, and her drastic attitude to gender reform, where doubters were to be condemned as misogynists and racists.
Sturgeon was a great boon to the unionists. Whether as useful idiot or as traitor is something history will decide. My money is on the latter.
But after the Supreme Court judgement, the UK Establishment did not need her any more. All that soft soap treatment disappeared. They started to seriously question her, on all points.
There has been a huge change in press tone towards Sturgeon since the Supreme Court judgment. The UK establishment believe they no longer need her to hold back the Independence movement.
I suspect much more tellingly, the Establishment has also finally taken off the gloves over the missing £600,000, that was donated to to a “ring-fenced” fund to campaign in the Indyref2 that Sturgeon did not deliver.
The money disappeared into the SNP’s accounts and where it went is not clear.
I could not understand why Sturgeon blatantly lied at the press conference last week, when asked by Tom Gordon of the Herald when she first knew that her husband had lent £107,000 to the SNP.
She replied she could not recall, and sought to distance herself from the loan, saying he used “his resources”.
Now it is a strange marriage where the husband lends £107,000 without telling the wife. But it is not impossible.
However it is impossible that the leader of the SNP was not told that the party was lent £107,000. Whoever it was from, let alone her own husband.
But I could see no reason that Peter Murrell should not lend the party the money. It was not illegal to do so and arguably a good thing to do. Why on earth would Nicola pretend she didn’t know?
This only started to make sense to me yesterday, when I learnt that Murrell made the loan the day after he was interviewed by the police about the missing £600,000.
No wonder she wanted to distance herself from it, and the timing.
Numerous sources have reported in the last few days that Police Scotland have now been given the go ahead by the Crown Office to pursue a criminal case over the missing money.
That seems the most likely explanation for the timing of her resignation today.
The good news is that, if my sources are correct, the £600,000 question is going to make the coronation of the Angus Robertson family collective as devolutionist party leaders somewhat difficult.
So farewell Nicola Sturgeon. You served the Union well. Now they don’t need you any more and you have been tossed away.
They won’t get you that UN job either (all UN posts need to be agreed with the candidate’s member state). The Establishment is both ruthless and ungrateful. I suspect the protection over the Salmond affair will disappear too.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
This morning, lawyers are acting on my request to prepare a counsel’s opinion on the legality of publishing those of Stewart McDonald’s emails which are in the public interest to be revealed.
This may take a day or two.
Emails of dubious provenance are published all the time. Emails about Partygate brought down Boris Johnson. Nobody got imprisoned for the Paul Mason, Richard Dearlove or Integrity Initiative troves. Nobody argued the Guardian could not publish their (tendentious) selection from the Panama Papers. The law did not stop publication of the stolen UEA emails on climate change.
But this is Scotland, where a politician can phone the chief constable at 6pm and by 9pm they are in the home of a journalist on an intimidation mission.
(NB I have no complaint at all about the behaviour of the individual officers last Saturday, they were very friendly).
If you get burgled Police Scotland will be with you within 48 hours, if at all. But threaten exposure of the political establishment and senior plain clothes officers can be mobilised straight away.
Sturgeon’s repeated use of both police and prosecutors to pursue private vendettas cannot be safely ignored, so forgive me if I proceed soberly. Kindly be patient.
I was not involved in obtaining the emails and of course it follows I am not the only one with access to them. Others are safely outside the UK. So they may get published elsewhere.
I have set out the very restrained way I intended to judge which are in the public interest. If the Sturgeon goon squad succeeds in removing me from the process, that may well not be the win they think it is.
Finally, legality and morality are not the same. There is a great deal of outrage toward me from the do nothing wing of the SNP about “publishing private emails”.
Well, post Snowden nobody has an excuse for not understanding that the British security services look continually at the private emails of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, myself included.
Stewart McDonald is not only an MP, he is one of the biggest fanboys and cheerleaders for the British security services. I have never seen anything from him remotely critical on the security services’ mass surveillance.
Amazing how these establishment figures squeal when the boot is on the other foot and citizens push back a little.
Secondly, to anybody who has paid attention, it is simply extraordinary that an ardent British nationalist like Stewart McDonald is in the SNP at all, let alone in a senior position.
McDonald is an enthusiastic proponent of British neo-imperialist foreign policy and also of the Israeli Defence Force and the Zionist state.
McDonald, even after Independence, wants Scotland to keep hosting British nuclear weapons at Faslane and allow Scottish regiments in the British Armed Forces.
McDonald has always supported every blockage to Independence. He is currently proposing there should be no plebiscite election at all, and the Scottish Government should do nothing except continue to ask Westminster for permission to hold a referendum. That is the amendment McDonald is proposing to the SNP “special conference” on the way forward.
I am not sure that those who obtained the emails specifically targeted McDonald. I think it more probable McDonald self-selected as the only MP stupid enough to enter his email login details and password in reply to a phishing email.
But I am delighted it is him.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
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 have obtained access to all of Stewart McDonald’s emails, after approaching a number of people to find out who might have them. This is something the entire Scottish mainstream media have failed to do.
I had no hand in obtaining the emails nor prior knowledge. I am grateful they have been so generously shared.
I want to reassure Mr McDonald that his hysterical ranting about being hacked by a state intelligence service, when he appears by his own account to have fallen for a phishing scam the average 12 year old would see through, is hilariously wide of the mark.
Who in 2023 enters their login details into a third party website because they receive an email asking them to?
I think Mr McDonald’s credentials as a defence expert and NATO warrior have perhaps taken a hit.
I also want to reassure Mr McDonald that a highly responsible journalistic process will now be undertaken. Nothing will be altered or falsified. Nothing purely personal or about his love life will appear.
In particular, anything related to his constituents will remain absolutely and properly confidential.
If Mr McDonald or the SNP wish to get in touch about other material in the emails which is particularly sensitive for reasons of which we may not be aware, that will be given every consideration.
What will be published is material in which there is a legitimate public interest, relating to interactions with NATO, the British military and MOD, the Integrity Initiative and journalists in that crooked network, parliamentary committees, intelligence agencies, foreign powers, UK government defence institutes and conservative think tanks.
There has been little online support for Mr McDonald – and what there has been is telling
There is much of interest in the cache, including emails direct to and from Nicola Sturgeon, showing the toxic relationships within the SNP group at Westminster, where McDonald regards himself as in a very small minority of Sturgeon loyalists.
It is my hope that all those emails which are in the public interest for the public to know, with redactions if responsibly required, will eventually be published as a cache, so you can make up your own mind about the material.
This is also going to be a very interesting test on journalistic freedom in Scotland and Sturgeon’s iron control over the police and prosecutorial services.
In this context, the fact that I had no connection to, nor prior knowledge of, the materials being obtained is the essential point. My own involvement is purely to have tracked down who had them and then been given access to them, as journalist and publisher.
Doubtless after the usual pressure from Murrell and Robertson, the Lord Advocate will have the Crown Office looking feverishly to find a crime in that before the end of the afternoon.
It is a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called western democracies, that Sy Hersh, arguably the greatest living journalist, cannot get this monumental revelation on the front of the Washington Post or New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net.
Hersh tells the story of the US destruction of the Nordstream pipelines in forensic detail, giving dates, times, method and military units involved. He also outlines the importance of the Norwegian armed forces working alongside the US Navy in the operation.
One point Sy does not much stress, but it is worth saying more about, is that Norway and the USA are of course the two countries who have benefitted financially, to an enormous degree, from blowing up the pipeline.
Both not only have gained huge export surpluses from the jump in gas prices, but Norway has directly replaced Russian gas to the tune of some $40 billion per year. From 2023 the United States will appear in that list in second place behind Norway, following the opening in the last two months of two new Liquefied Natural Gas terminals in Germany, built to replace Russian gas with US and Qatari supplies.
So Russia lost out massively financially from the destruction of Nordstream and who benefited? The USA and Norway, the two countries who blew up the pipeline.
But of course, this war is nothing to do with money or hydrocarbons and is all about freedom and democracy…
To return to Hersh’s account, particularly interesting are the series of decisions taken to avoid classification of the operation in various ways which would require it to be reported to Congress. In terms of United States history, this ought to be a big deal.
For the Executive to commit what is an act of war without the approval of the Legislature is fundamentally unconstitutional. But that is one of those quaint remnants of democracy that the neo-liberal elite consensus can quietly sidestep nowadays.
Hersh sets out the well known background in compelling detail, including the fact that, from Biden down, the Americans effectively announced what they were going to do, openly.
But what most worries me about the entire story is the unanimous complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring the completely obvious.
The media line, parroted here relentlessly by the BBC and corporate media, was that the Russians had probably themselves blown up the pipeline on which they had expended such great resources and three decades of intense diplomatic activity, and which was to be the key to Russia’s single most valuable source of income for the next 40 years.
This was always quite literally incredible. You would have to be deranged to believe it.
It actually taught me not just that we truly are in the realm of totalitarianism and the Big Lie, but I learnt something very important about how the Big Lie works.
The secret is not that people genuinely believe an outrageous claim. The secret is that people do genuinely believe that they are in a battle of good against evil, and it is necessary to accept the narrative being promoted, in the interests of fighting evil.
Don’t question, just follow. If you do question, you are promoting evil.
I am sure that is how it works.
State and corporate stenographer journalists are actually intelligent individuals. If they thought about it, they would realise that the narrative that Russia blew up its own pipeline is obvious nonsense.
But they are convinced it is morally wrong to think about it.
Which is why none of them challenged the equally mad claims that Russia was repeatedly shelling its own forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, and indeed is why none of them challenged the utterly risible official version of the Skripal story.
I previously told the anecdote from when I worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and asked a good friend if he really believed the misinformatioin on Iraqi WMD with which he was involved.
He replied by referring to the video game Championship Manager (now renamed Football Manager), which we used to play together. He said when he was in the game, it was immersive, he was manager of Liverpool, and it fully absorbed him.
Similarly, when he walked through the FCO gates, the world of the intelligence reports was immersive and Iraq did have these WMDs inside that world. He worked in the “reality” of the FCO. Once he left in the evening, he lived in a different reality, the world of us in the pub.
I do know of one or two journalists bright enough to detach their professional output from what they really think, in a similar way. (I once had a conversation along these lines with Jeremy Bowen in Tashkent.)
Most however don’t think like this. They simply think that all right thinking people support the historic struggle against the evil Russians, so it must be right to read out the propaganda without thinking too much about it.
Those of us critical of the aggressive promotion of war in Europe, are not only barred from all mainstream media and confined to corners of the internet, and even then heavily suppressed on social media (which is why Sy Hersh’s article does not have the scores of millions of readers it merits).
We can’t even obtain freedom of assembly.
Two established left wing venues have cancelled the No 2 Nato meeting I am addressing in London on 25 February. Conway Hall’s reasons for cancellation included threats to funding and fears for the safety of staff.
We are now reduced to a guerrilla meeting, the Central London venue for which will not be announced until the evening before.
Is this really a democracy, where it is not possible for dissidents to hold a public meeting without secrecy, subterfuge and hiding from supporters of the state?
I do urge you to come along on the day, whatever your views on the subject, to support the right to freedom of speech.
I have a different view from perhaps all of the other speakers, on the legitimacy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which I oppose.
But I also oppose NATO expansion which is an underlying cause of the war, and indeed oppose the existence of NATO itself.
NATO is a war machine which sucks resources from working people to benefit the military industrial complex, and unleashes devastating destruction on developing states which do not make their natural resources available to western billionaire elites.
It is also a fundamental node of the propaganda apparatus which manipulates and controls our society, particularly as counter narrative and dissident thought is now rigorously and systematically excluded.
There is no longer an Overton window of permitted debate. It has narrowed and should be renamed the Overton letterbox.
One of those small difficult ones right down at the bottom of the door. With a very fierce spring, and snarling dogs guarding it.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
How much of Shell’s record US $40 billion profit was due to the Ukraine war and freezing Russia out of the market?
If you apply the “excess deaths” methodology we became familiar with during covid, comparing profit against a running average of the previous five years, we get a figure of about $25 billion “excess profit”.
This is of course a rough technique, both with deaths as with profits, as neither covid nor the Ukraine war were the sole factor affecting the outcome, and “all other things” are not equal but in some degree variable.
But it is a good indication when a major new factor comes in to play.
If we simply remove Shell’s 2020 accounts, with their US$20 billion covid loss, from the equation as exceptional, we still have a figure of US$15 billion excess profit, arising largely from the war in Ukraine.
Isn’t it good to know that all those people have not died or been maimed in vain? At least Shell are raking it in.
Shell of course are not alone. We will see something similar from all the energy companies, including those that are billing you massive amounts to heat your home. It isn’t costing any more to produce the energy, it is simply vulture predation on market disruption.
Capitalism in theory works in free markets of trade flows. But in practice financial flows are manipulated by states to the benefit of the rich in numerous ways, of which war and sanctions are just the bluntest examples.
The United States blowing up the Nordstream 2 pipeline was a pretty significant state market intervention. Yet when the result of that kind of action is to cause super profits to western energy companies at consumer expense, market intervention to remove that super profit becomes “unhelpful”.
Arms manufacturers are also coining it. To December, investors in merchants of death BAE had seen an increase in value of their investment by 63% in twelve months. Now everybody with a finger in the pie is clamouring to send more tanks and planes to the Ukraine. Money, money, money.
The story is no different at Lockheed Martin etc.
We should also not forget that the military and security services are themselves a vested financial interest. Vastly rising budgets, more career opportunities, more second career jobs in the arms industries and the think tanks that pump out the propaganda for more war, war without end.
I have said this before, but J A Hobson’s short book, Imperialism: A Study contains analysis of how all this works that stands true over a hundred years on, is expressed with clarity, and fundamentally changed how I view the world, when I read it forty years ago.
There is yet more acceleration in the massive transfer of resources to the wealthy. Every world event – Covid, the war in Ukraine – is manipulated by states to increase inequality. Oxfam, who seem the most genuine of the large relief charities (admittedly not a high bar), recently published this:
Billionaires have seen extraordinary increases in their wealth. During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent, while $16 trillion (37 percent) went to the rest of the world put together. A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 percent. Billionaire fortunes have increased by $2.7 billion a day. This comes on top of a decade of historic gains —the number and wealth of billionaires having doubled over the last ten years.
In this western world, I am not sure what percentage of ordinary people have to reach what stage of desperation before we see the start of genuine revolt. Should things continue on this trend, we are going to find out eventually.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
It is nearly 20 years since I blew the whistle on British Government complicity in torture and the extraordinary rendition programme, under which thousands of people were deliberately tortured as a systematic act of government policy.
Many of them were killed.
I had, and I leaked, substantial documentary evidence to back my claims, of which this is but one example.
Yet the BBC never gave a spectacular, combat shot illustrated four and a half minute lead television news item to my revelations of official UK government involvement in mass torture, as they gave to junior Russian officer Konstantin Yefremov’s far less spectacular allegations.
My revelations were actually about the UK, not a foreign country. They came from a much more senior source than Lt Yefremov. They had undeniable supporting evidence. They revealed ministerially approved policy, not the possibly rogue behaviour detailed by Yefremov.
Yet to the BBC it was a much less important story.
Now I don’t actually doubt Yefremov’s modest testimony: he witnessed a single incident of torture and some looting. I am sorry to say I have no doubt, from close study, that torture and other crimes have always been committed by all armies in war.
Those who deny that Russian soldiers do it are as purblind and bigoted as those who deny that British or United States – or Ukrainian – soldiers do it.
But the massive propaganda punch given to Lt Yefremov’s testimony is in stark contrast to the treatment of domestic UK whistleblowers, or to the equally harrowing stories of the torture of Russian prisoners.
When have you ever seen Australian Major David McBride given four and a half minutes of BBC main news headline story to outline his allegations of widespread war crimes by allied forces in Afghanistan?
Of course you haven’t seen that. Such coverage would never happen.
On the other hand, when Public Interest Lawyers were closed down over irregularities in soliciting and pursuing the cases of victims of British atrocities in Iraq, the BBC gave that enormous coverage including on prime time news broadcasts, as though it proved no such atrocities ever occurred.
The BBC gives blanket coverage to a junior Russian officer, but gave almost none to New Zealand’s Operation Burnham, in which the Special Air Service killed a child, tortured an opponent and handed him over to further torture, and then systematically lied and covered up – all of which an official inquiry confirmed happened but declared “legal”.
Of course we know we live in an age of wall to wall propaganda. Of course we know that the BBC is an integral part of it. The really shocking thing about propaganda – as true of today’s BBC as it was of Goebbels – is that being massively unsubtle and obvious appears to magnify rather than diminish its power to sway public opinion.
The lesson of this current article is that it is not necessary to invent facts for propaganda. A completely false narrative can be built by extreme selectivity of what facts you amplify, and what facts you bury.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
I spoke at this meeting on Saturday and gave a broader overview than usual of the Assange case and its importance. I think it comes over fairly cogently, even though I was actually feeling pretty dizzy and faint.
Jonathan Cook is, as ever, particularly worth listening to closely, and it was great to catch up with Jeremy Corbyn again.
At the end of the event I was particularly honoured to receive from Jeremy the Gavin Macfadyen Prize for supporting whistleblowers, not for myself but on behalf of Julian Assange, and I say a few more words on that subject.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
A No to Nato rally at Conway Hall on 25 February, at which I was due to speak, has been cancelled after the venue received threats and abuse online that made them concerned both for staff safety and for funding.
This is just another symptom of the serious threat to free speech in modern society. In fact we are now at the stage where we might say free speech has already been lost.
Neither state nor corporate media would give any space to the views likely to have been expressed at Conway Hall. The war raging in Europe is not allowed to be discussed in any terms, other than as a straightforward conflict between good and evil, with the West as the good guy and Russia as the evil.
Social media posts saying anything else are rigorously suppressed. Because of the successful creation of corporate gatekeeper sites like Facebook and Twitter, the readership of this article will be at a quarter the level of a year ago, due to rigorous suppression of my posts linking here.
Now my position on the Ukraine war is a great deal more nuanced than most of the speakers at the No to NATO debate. I oppose NATO because it is an agent of neo-imperialism and a mechanism for the diversion of huge amounts of resources to the super rich, via the arms and military industries.
But I am plain that while provoked, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was nonetheless illegal in international law. I view those who regard Putin as a defender of democracy or of workers’ rights as seriously deluded.
Putin is a very bad man, and the West is only just achieving the levels of wealth inequality that Russia has experienced (with a push from the West) these last three decades. The oligarchs and military industrial complex rip off the ordinary man in Russia, just as in the West.
This is a disaster for the people of Ukraine, for the people of Russia and for the people of the World. It is going to end with Crimea absorbed into Russia and some kind of autonomous status inside Ukraine for the Donbass regions.
That outcome could have been agreed without war, before thousands had to die and millions be impoverished. It could be agreed today. All the death and destruction and weapons systems will achieve nothing – except massive profits for the wealthy.
Responsible politicians would stop the fighting now. But no politician sees a personal interest in doing anything other than escalating and pouring in more and more weapons systems to mince human flesh.
I worry hugely about the abysmal quality of public debate. I am not sure whether bad education, social media or a race to the bottom in broadcast and print media – which are mostly about commentators not about news – are most to blame.
But quality of thought and depth of understanding are abandoned almost entirely in what passes for public debate in favour of risible extremist positions.
Ukraine is one example, where we have an establishment view that NATO and Ukraine are perfect, that there was no constant pre-invasion shelling of Russian speaking civilians or banning of Russian oriented political parties or the Russian language and publications, and definitely no Nazi influence in the Ukrainian armed forces.
Then you have those brave enough to suggest a counter view, but who claim that Putin is perfect and Russia a workers’ paradise, that all Ukrainians are Nazis, that there are no Ukrainians in the Donbass, and that Russia is only prevented by self-restraint from total military victory.
These are both ideological positions which are self-evidently ludicrous, but the first is in fact adopted by Western governments and the entire mainstream media.
I find I receive continual abuse from both sides for not adopting one crazed narrative or the other.
The market for reason has become very small.
On three current major controversies – Ukraine, covid and trans rights, debate is extraordinarily polarised, and the slightest deviation from the official narrative is heresy. Those who see themselves as heretics despise all but their own, equally extreme, interpretation.
On Covid, the official narrative is that it was a uniquely devastating virus and that humankind was only saved from a serious disaster by a combination of ruthless lockdown and revolutionary vaccines.
On the other side we have those who believe Covid was an engineered virus designed to make a fortune for big pharma and to justify government measures to reduce civil liberties, and that the vaccines are themselves deadly.
Personally, I believe neither of these opposing narratives.
My own view is that covid-19 is a respiratory disease which, in its initial outbreak, was similarly lethal, or possibly a little worse, than one of the major flu pandemics. The “Hong Kong flu” of 1968/9 I vividly remember. I knew a healthy child who died of Hong Kong flu, and my whole family caught it.
The Hong Kong flu killed an estimated 1 to 4 million people worldwide. The famous Spanish flu pandemic from 1919 killed an estimated 25 million.
To say covid-19 was similar to a flu pandemic is not to downplay it: they are terrible things.
The Covid-19 pandemic killed, according to Wikipedia which is curated very close to the official line on these matters, about 6.7 million people – about a quarter of the number killed by the Spanish flu. According to the same source, without vaccines it would have killed about 17 million more, which would be about the same as the Spanish flu.
Although of course the Spanish flu still killed a much larger proportion than Covid-19 of the world’s then much smaller population. Indeed as a percentage of population killed, covid-19 is not out of the same league as the Hong Kong flu of 1968/9.
So Covid-19 is a very nasty virus, which also may have more debilitating long term effects than generally associated with a flu pandemic, but not dissimilar in its mortality rate.
There are difficulties in collating the statistics. The figures for historic flus are not very reliable. The practice of treating as covid-19 deaths anybody who died with the disease, when they actually died of something else, is also perplexing.
If you look at excess deaths (above the 5 year rolling average), it is undoubtedly true that at the minute excess deaths are as high in the UK as at the height of the covid-19 outbreak before the vaccine programme, even though only 5% of current deaths involve covid.
It is also true that they were this high in January 2015 and, in both cases, a severe winter flu paid a role. The official narrative to explain the current death toll features heavily health problems caused by lack of access to medical treatment during lockdown.
Some of my own views on covid-19 are these. The pandemic was comparable to a nasty flu pandemic. The panic caused went beyond the rational, and governments were involved in pumping that up. There was little danger to the young and to healthy mature adults, but real danger to the elderly and unwell.
Accordingly I believe lockdown was too severe and should better have focused on shielding the easily identified vulnerable, rather than placing harsh and unnecessary restrictions on the large majority in society.
There could have been massive infrastructure, physical, moral and psychological support offered by the state to those who needed to shield. Rather than lock down everybody else. Closing universities for example was completely unnecessary.
Just like all pandemics before it, the covid-19 virus is busily following its own self-interest by mutating into a less vicious form that can co-exist more comfortably with its host.
I welcome vaccines as long as they are voluntary. Medical science of course makes mistakes but in general has been a massive force for good. The argument that covid-19 vaccines are a fundamental threat to the world’s health seems to have as little evidence behind it as the argument that covid-19 was such a threat that economies had to be fundamentally harmed.
Vaccines should be voluntary and no sanctions imposed for not taking them. But I regard taking the vaccine, and sharing in any associated risk as well as any associated benefit from herd immunity, as the correct moral position.
I do not claim that I am uniquely right or particularly expect you to agree with me. But I am not in either of the two binary camps.
I am not in the camp that supported every authoritarian crackdown and wanted to put anyone in jail who did not wear a mask, nor in the camp that thinks it was all a sinister government plot.
As with Ukraine I urge you not to switch off your brain and join one “camp” or the other “camp”. Do not sign up to a pre-ordained set of opinions.
Forge your own opinions.
The other issue I want to explore today, on which what passes for “thinking” appears ridiculously polarised, is that of trans rights.
On the one side we have people who argue that it is an inalienable human right to live in the gender of your choice, and that all societal institutions and infrastructure must be organised around that individual choice, which may never be questioned or subjected to scrutiny.
On the other side we have people who argue that sex is immutable and determined at birth, that safe spaces and positive discrimination provisions for women are dependent on strict application of biological sex, and that much of the trans movement is motivated by sexual perversion.
A lack of any willingness to try and synthesise rights and obligations, and take account of the desires and motives of others, seems the defining characteristic of almost everybody actively engaged in this debate.
My own starting point is a libertarian one. I believe people should behave as they wish to behave and be treated as they wish to be treated, wherever possible, and that people should be kind to one another.
Therefore, if somebody presents themselves to me as male or female, I shall treat them as such in society. That seems to me polite. It is not for me to check their genitals, much less to make a judgment on their aesthetic appearance.
I am frequently challenged over this and asked, do I believe that a man can actually become a woman? The answer to which is, that I neither know nor care. It is a matter of human interaction. Life is not a science exam.
The debate is currently focused on Adam Graham aka Isla Bryson, a convicted double rapist who is currently held in a female prison in Scotland, having declared himself a trans woman.
It is worth noting that this has happened not under Scotland’s new Gender Recognition Reform legislation, which is not in force, but under existing UK wide legislation, as interpreted by the Scottish Prisons Service under Justice Minister Keith Brown.
I have to confess, this seems to me self-evidently ludicrous.
There are no absolute rights in our society, beyond the right to breathe. The state can incarcerate you and effectively remove all your rights, for criminal acts or if you are dangerously insane.
That rights are not immutable meets with general acceptance.
I see no reason why trans rights should be different. Anybody who chooses to rape women will lose a lot of rights. They will be incarcerated. Subsequently they will be on a register and unable to live in certain locations, and barred from certain employments.
It seems to me entirely sensible that a rapist or sexual assaulter of women should lose the right to transition in law to another gender. It should be amongst those societal rights they forfeit by their heinous act.
The problem is, this kind of practical approach is unacceptable to both extreme ideologies.
On the one hand, you have those that believe that some people have a right, that may never be gainsaid, to an inner gender identity only they can identify, and that their sincerity may never be questioned.
On the other hand, you have those who believe that everybody should be forced to live a gender role determined by their physical characteristics, whether they want to or not, and no matter if they never hurt anybody in trying to do the opposite.
I am very conscious that it is wrong always to discuss this matter in terms of sexual offence, and the very large majority of trans people are entirely peaceful and innocent.
But that itself is why banning rapists and other serious sexual offenders from changing gender does not affect the principle: a few serious criminals are nothing to do with genuine trans people.
I find some of the “debate” simply baffling. I am sorry I cannot find it now, but I saw one tweet from a lady who had used a unisex toilet and was horrified to have to walk behind the back of somebody using a urinal.
Has she never left the UK? What is offensive about a man’s back? The extraordinary thing is, there were scores upon scores of replies about how disgusting it was to walk past a urinal.
I find myself genuinely baffled by this and by what has become an entire sub-genre about potential behaviour by trans women in changing rooms and toilets, where all of the projected behaviours would remain criminal with or without a gender recognition certificate.
I don’t claim any expertise or genius on the subject. I reject the strange absolutism of both extremist positions.
I do not accept either that we are forced to live in a role according to our physical make-up, nor that a professed personal gender identity may never be queried for sincerity in a criminal.
In comments two articles ago I was called both a transphobe and a pro-trans hater of women, by gender extremists on either side over the same article.
Now on none of these three issues did I set out by looking at varying positions of different camps and trying to find a middle ground. I simply considered the arguments on Ukraine, on Covid and on trans rights on their merits, and came to my views as the best policies for achieving maximum human happiness in difficult situations.
In doing so I find myself at odds with public discourse on both subjects which revolves around clearly defined camps, holding sets of received opinions and arguments to which they stick, and intolerant of anybody who does not subscribe to the same set.
This is a sorry state of public discussion, made much worse by the fact that in each case the government, media and ruling establishment is entirely signed up to one of the binary camps, and itself refuses to entertain any debate or nuance.
Indeed, those who query the Establishment line on any of these issues are subjected to ridicule, ostracism and even legal threat. That may be one reason why opposition is itself so unsubtle in its response.
It is also the case that on all these arguments people become angry, exasperated or impatient that anybody should hold a different view to their own.
The idea that reasonable, well-motivated people need not agree on everything and may agree to disagree on certain issues, is a fundamental basis of a tolerant society. It is an increasingly rare value.
I find that the market for nuance is small, and diminishing.
I want to stress again I am not claiming I have everything right. But I am claiming I have thought through the facts and arguments for myself, as best I can.
I hope this is of some assistance to you in doing the same.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Scotland has no shortage of dreadful right wing judges, but as the very epitome of reactionary conservatism, one gobsmacking judgment from Perth Sheriff Michael Fletcher stands out.
In a major rowing back of Scotland’s right to roam legislation contained in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, Sheriff Fletcher ruled that plebs must not be allowed within many acres of rich people’s mansions, because the thieving commoners may rob the rich people.
That really is precisely what he ruled.
53] While I accept that it is quite possible that the average proprietor of Kinfauns Castle might not have the resources or the tastes or the interests of the pursuer in this case it is I think legitimate to infer from the nature of the premises and in particular its value and cost to run that any person using the premises as a private house would require to have very substantial resources. It is also legitimate to infer from the evidence that such a person would be likely to be the possessor of valuable objects of some kind be it furniture or pictures or jewellery or at least to infer that outsiders including those of a criminal disposition might think that the owner of the Castle would have valuable possessions. If that is so then any such proprietor would have concerns as to whether their premises were secure and thus the evidence relating to security assumes some significance. It may be that the reasonable proprietor of the Castle might not have the same finely tuned concerns about security that were offered in evidence on behalf of the pursuer and might not require elaborate precautions such as tamper detectors and other electronic devices, but I think it can be inferred from the evidence that any owner would have greater or lesser security concerns more highly developed than most other householders in the country.
….
[55] No one in my view would have their enjoyment of their private house ensured if they were concerned about the security of the premises either from the point of view of theft or some sort of attack. If I am correct that most inhabitants of such a house would be persons with substantial assets then I consider that all such persons would have some concerns about security and it would be expected that their enjoyment of the house would be able to be ensured only if they were happy that the security of the premises was taken care of.
“Taken care of” specifically meaning by excluding the public right to roam for many acres around their house. Because they have a big house and so are “persons with substantial assets”, and thus the law should treat them differently to the plebs.
He further ruled that, where there had been a fence erected before the passing of the 2003 right to roam legislation, that fence should be respected as the boundary where the right to roam legislation did not permit access, as that fence would indicate where the historic castle owners reasonably believed it was necessary to exclude the public in order to protect their own privacy.
Yes, he specifically stated that the Land Reform legislation could not alter the boundaries to public access previously set by estate owners’ fences, and it is historic estate owners’ opinion on where they should exclude the public, that is the only opinion that counts.
[56] Another consideration arising from the characteristics of the house seems to me to arise from the evidence again unchallenged of Mr McCleary that the fence erected by the pursuer was erected following at least for some of the way but probably for most of the way a fence which was already in existence albeit in poor condition. Mr McCleary described it as what I think could be described as a stob and wire fence with perhaps two wires and about waist height. Such a fence could not be described in any respect as a security fence but it is significant in my view that the fence was not one which surrounded the whole of the property owned by the owners of the Castle but travelled at least part of the way through the property so that property owned by the Castle was both inside and outside the fence. Counsel for the respondents argued that there was no significance in the fact that there was a fence there partly because it was erected at a time when it was perfectly possible to own land privately. I consider that it is legitimate to take into account that the fence was built on the line of an original fence, or more precisely a previous fence. It is clear that the fence would not have prevented anyone who desired to do so from entering the premises but standing its condition it was probably erected at a time when the existence of such a fence would indicate to the vast majority of people that they were coming to land owned privately. When one is trying to assess what is sufficient land adjacent to the house to afford reasonable measures of privacy in the house and to ensure the enjoyment of the persons living there is not unreasonably disturbed it seems to me to be not unreasonable to take into account the boundaries established by persons not influenced in any way by the new rights created by Parliament in relation to access across private property at least as an adminicle of evidence. It is I think legitimate consider that such boundaries were placed there on the basis that persons considered that ground within the boundary would be required to secure their privacy and enjoyment of the property especially when the fence was not erected automatically on the boundary of the land owned by the house. For these reasons I have taken the line of the fence as being a pointer to what might be considered by persons occupying the house as reasonably required for the enjoyment of the house.
Sheriff Fletcher, in a ruling since quoted by estate owners all over Scotland, ruled that Ann Gloag was entitled to fence off 12 acres around her castle as “private garden”, and keep out the little people.
He did not stop there. In a pointer to roll back the Act’s victory over repressive rulings of criminal trespass, Sheriff Fletcher stated that Mr Morris of the Ramblers’ Association should have been charged by the police with breach of the peace when he entered the gates of the estate to check on compliance with the 2003 Act, and refused to leave when asked to by a land manager in a Land Rover.
Sheriff Fletcher plainly felt that for ramblers to disobey orders from people in Land Rovers is the first step to Marxist insurrection and the guillotine.
The case was brought in 2007 by Ann Gloag, owner of Kinfauns Castle against Perth and Kinross Council and the Ramblers’ Association, to stop walkers from transiting or just enjoying her estate of Kinfauns Castle, outside Perth.
Ann Gloag’s Perth home, Kinfauns Castle. (Please see Gordon Currie story 01738 446766). NO BYLINE TO BE USED WITH IMAGE. COPYRIGHT: Perthshire Picture Agency. Tel. 01738 623350 / 07775 852112.
Sheriff Fletcher also stuck the Council and Ramblers Association with £160,000 of Gloag’s legal costs. Probably as a result the case was never appealed – that was also a realistic assessment of the predelictions of Scotland’s estate weekending senior judiciary.
The Gloag judgment remains a huge bleeding hole in the intent of the 2003 Land Reform Act on public access to land.
Politicians huffed following this judgement about the need to amend the Act to make plain the precedence of public access –
As the Guardian reported at the time:
Yesterday, senior figures in the ruling Scottish National party, which has championed land access legislation, said the act must be reviewed and if necessary tightened, while the ramblers urged the Crown Office, which oversees Scottish courts, to issue guidance to clarify the legal position.
Roseanna Cunningham, a nationalist and the local MSP, put down emergency questions on the case at Holyrood yesterday. “If the Queen doesn’t require fences at Balmoral, I’m not entirely clear why they’re needed at Kinfauns. I hope we’re not going to sit by and watch this being eroded,” she said.
But nothing happened, in Scotland’s timid parliament of the bought. Instead we got the exact opposite, with the Scottish Government incoporating the Gloag judgment in its countryside access code, as a restriction.
That is just another heart-rending example of the gap between what the SNP claims to stand for, and how it behaves in government.
Anyway, “Dame” Ann Gloag, who detests human traffic across her property, has now been charged with human trafficking related to the operation of her African oriented charities, and persons brought to Scotland.
One effect, of course, of the extensive privacy and large right of access exclusion zone granted to Dame Ann Gloag, is that all domestic servants and other persons working at the castle, in whatever capacity and voluntarily or not, would be removed from the possibility of public view.
It would therefore be most interesting in terms of Sheriff Fletcher’s judgment if any of the alleged trafficking activity relates to the Kinfauns estate. Watch this space.
On the other hand I view the Crown Office, to which Police Scotland have handed the dossier, as entirely corrupt and shall be most surprised if there is a prosecution.
I ran across Ms Gloag’s interests when I lived in Ramsgate in Kent from 2007 to 2014. My home was under two miles from Manston Airport, at that time a struggling commercial airport on which many local jobs depended.
In November 2013, with the close involvement of Thanet District Council, Ann Gloag purchased Manston Airport for just £1, on the assurance that she would keep it running for at least two years.
Within a very few months Gloag had closed down the airport, with substantial harm to the local economy, and submitted plans for an extremely profitable scheme to build 1,000 homes – the first phase on just part of the massive site.
Gloag turned down a £7 million offer to buy the airport from a company willing to keep it open.
You can still find online this introduction to an ITN investigation into what happened:
Meridian investigation has discovered that after private meetings with senior officers from Thanet District Council, Manston Airport owner Ann Gloag believed there was the potential for large-scale house-building on the site.
Was that why she rejected a £7m buyout offer that would have kept the airport operational and saved 140 jobs? John Ryall has this exclusive report.
Sadly the investigation itself has disappeared. I wonder whether Dame Ann Gloag’s legal friends have been at it again?
You will gather I am not a fan of Dame Ann Gloag. But then why would she care what we think? We are not permitted within acres of her home.
Yet everything I have written above obviously is a complete fiction, because according to the BBC’s James Cook, the human trafficking charges against Ann Gloag are an incredible shock because she is the most saint-like and unimpeachable human being the world has ever known.
She is vouched for by Gordon and Sarah Brown, for goodness sake. (Gordon Brown not being at all a war criminal complicit in the awful deaths of millions of people in Iraq and across the Middle East). She is vouched for by lots of heads of charities who get six figure salaries for patronising Africans.
In fact James Cook could find nothing at all worrying or controversial to write about Dame Ann Gloag. Her cupboard is apparently full of Christ like charity and zero skeletons.
Dame Ann has been charged with human trafficking. Now I am not an expert on media contempt of court, except that I am the only living person in Scotland ever to have gone to jail for it. But now that Dame Ann has actually been charged, is it really OK for James Cook to publish that:
“A source close to Dame Ann told the BBC that the family were “victims of collusion” and had endured “a Kafkaesque nightmare for the last two years.”
The source added: “Everybody is bewildered by these accusations and the level of this investigation.
“It is deeply ironic that Dame Ann actually funds an Eastern European charity called the Open Door Foundation whose job it is to stop the trafficking of poor women into sex crimes.
“She is very attuned to the real dangers that are going on in this world.
“This is bizarre. We are dealing with technicalities.
“There are countless people who are stepping forward to support Dame Ann from around the world.”
Is that not material likely to influence a jury? And if James Cook is allowed to publish this, am I allowed to say that my position on Dame Ann Gloag’s saintliness is one of extreme scepticism?
Do read James Cook’s piece. It really is quite astonishing hagiography of somebody with so much controversy in their past, now charged with a serious crime by Police Scotland.
It is astonishing hagiography even coming from Scotland’s smarmiest sycophant and stager of false incidents.
Incidentally, I do not mean to make too much of this next as it is probably simply a muddle arising from Cook’s inability to make coherent sentences, but I did a double take on this sentence in his piece.
I give you Dame Ann Gloag. Fit to stand alongside Baroness Michelle Mone as exemplars of titled Scottish businesswomen.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Logic often appears in short supply in politics. This is because great decisions of state are not taken on the merits of the ostensible subject matter, but according to what best advances the career interest of the politicians with the power to decide.
Scotland has left the European Union against the will of a large majority of its voters, expressed in a referendum. The ridiculously “hard” Brexit has caused real economic damage to virtually everybody in Scotland.
Yet Brexit was not sufficient to motivate the SNP leadership to make any genuine move for Independence. Because any genuine move for Independence brings real risk to the political careers of the SNP leadership.
By contrast to Brexit, which affects everybody, gender reassignment affects only a very, very small proportion of the Scottish population. Unlike the EU, which remains very popular in Scotland, the measure to reform gender reassignment lately passed by the Scottish parliament is distinctly unpopular.
One sure sign of how unpopular gender self-ID is, is that Keir Starmer is rowing away from it at the speed of light. Starmer believes in nothing but power and wealth for himself. Having been told self-ID is not popular, Starmer has absolutely no care about throwing Anas Sarwar and Scottish Labour under a bus, and opposing a Scottish law that Scottish Labour voted for in Holyrood.
Starmer is simply following Starmer’s career interest.
My personal view, for what it is worth, is that the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill passed by the Scottish parliament is still better than the status quo ante, though I would have preferred some of the safeguarding amendments to have been passed.
But I realise I am not on the popular side of the argument.
So how can it be possible that, having failed to move for Independence over EU membership, which is popular and affects everybody, the SNP may move for Independence over self-ID, which is unpopular and affects a tiny number of people?
The answer is astonishing and, if you are not a very close follower of Scottish politics, I understand it may be difficult to believe.
The first and crucial point is that Nicola Sturgeon has always been much more interested in identity politics than in Scottish Independence.
I think that is generally accepted now. I claim the Cassandra Prize for reading the entrails way back in March 2015.
I had a counterbalancing doubt at the back of my mind about this enthusiasm for – as Nicola Sturgeon put it – “Improving” the UK. I don’t want to improve the Union, I want to end it. Power has a fatal attraction to politicians, and I think I detected that exercising power in the United Kingdom is today gleaming brighter in the dreams of some professional SNP politicians than is independence for Scotland.
The other thing I did not like was the machine politics and management of it all. The entire first day there was not a motion that was passed other than by acclaim, and there was not a single speech against anything, though there were a couple of attempts at referral back. The only item permitted on to the conference agenda, in closed session on day 2, that was in the least likely to cause controversy was the adoption of all women shortlists – and the only reason that was on the agenda was that the leader made it abundantly plain she wanted it. I incline to the view that as a short term measure it is justified, but I abstained because I did not like what I saw of the way it was managed.
It was the only debate the leader sat through, and it was very plain she was watching carefully how people were voting. There was a definite claque of paid party apparatchiks and organised feminists occupying front centre of the hall. There was a strong suspicion, voiced by Christine Graham, that deliberately weak and left field speakers had been chosen against women shortlists. And for the vote, party functionaries including Angus Robertson and Ian McCann stood at the side of the hall very ostensibly noting who voted which way and making sure that the payroll vote performed. I was right next to where Angus Robertson stood as he did this. He moved into position just before the vote, made it very obvious indeed what he was doing, and left immediately after. I found myself regarding the prospect of a whole raft of new MPs, their research assistants and secretaries providing 200 more payroll votes, as depressing.
All women shortlists of course became permanent, and other manifestations of identity politics followed. We have the SNP National Executive dominated by representatives of identity groups.
We also have the “gender balanced” cabinet, which is the only explanation for the idiot Shirley-Anne Somerville being a minister.
Actually I take that back, there is no possible explanation of Shirley-Anne Somerville being a minister. She would fail the interview for Deputy Manager of a branch of Superdry.
We have the appointment of a Lord Advocate on the basis that being the first female in this key role outweighs being a diehard unionist.
This deserves greater consideration in this discussion of politics and logicality.
It is a fascinating fact that Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain was prepared to certify the Gender Recognition Reform Bill as not in conflict with UK legislation and thus the Scotland Act, when it obviously is in conflict.
Yet Bain refused to certify a referendum bill.
The Lord Advocate was appointed by Sturgeon and sits in her cabinet. What is plain is that what is and what is not certified by Bain is, by happy coincidence, in line with Sturgeon’s political priorities.
Bain helped Sturgeon avoid the referendum she has been “promising” for seven years, and enabled the GRR legislation which is so very close to Sturgeon’s heart.
Is it not lucky that Bain’s entirely independent and sincere legal opinion always falls just as Nicola Sturgeon would wish?
Bain is also key to Sturgeon’s next gender identity moves which, together with GRR, Sturgeon believes will cement her legacy. They are the abolition of jury trials in sexual assault cases, openly pursued to increase the conviction rate rather than the just verdict rate, and the establishment of misogyny as a “hate crime”.
There have been many other defining “identity politics” features of Sturgeon’s rule, particularly “cutting edge” early age teaching on sexuality and gender in schools.
But the identity politics initiative which caused most publicity was of course the conspiracy of lies and liars, orchestrated from Nicola Sturgeon’s office, to harness the #MeToo movement to jail her heterosexual male predecessor, an inexorable proponent of Independence.
When that plot was foiled by an honest Edinburgh jury, the abolition of juries moved high up on Sturgeon’s agenda.
In using her position as First Minister to advance the identity politics agenda, the one thing causing stress to Sturgeon has been the existence of members of her own party who believed the party should rather be achieving Independence.
Sturgeon has famously kept party members following her for over eight years by continuing dangling the carrot of a referendum before them – a referendum she has never had the slightest intention of holding, and never will hold.
This extremely skilful feat of party management has been achieved by driving out of the SNP those members who were primarily interested in Independence. The tens of thousands who have left were the long serving backbone of the party.
For some reason I have never understood, there has been a peculiar alignment in Scottish Independence politics.
Those Independence supporters who support trans rights are strongly correlated with “gradualists”, those who are happy with devolution and see Independence as a distant aspiration.
Those Independence supporters who oppose self-ID on gender are strongly correlated with those who see Independence as an urgent need now. Hence the Alba Party.
By making support for trans rights, in the most uncompromising and ideological form, a flagship policy of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon drove out almost all the hardline Independence supporters from the SNP.
The remaining membership who are driven by anything resembling a belief, are driven by identity politics. But as the SNP has become firmly established as the font of political power and paid position in Scotland, it has also attracted a new membership, often ex-Labour, who are interested in money and career.
I have never understood why there was this correlation between trans rights and gradualism. I was one of the very few individuals you could point to who both supported trans rights and supported urgent Independence now.
Until now.
Suddenly Nicola’s shock troops, the trans activists who have dominated the SNP and Green parties, see Independence as urgent, following Westminster’s veto of Gender Recognition Reform.
In two months, the SNP will hold a special conference designed by Sturgeon and Murrell to vote to kick down the road for a few more years Nicola’s promise to hold a plebiscitary election should Westminster not allow the Independence referendum.
But since that conference was called, Nicola’s gender identity troops, who were happy with the devolution system that they believed had delivered what they wanted, suddenly find Independence is needed after the Westminster veto.
That fundamentally changes the equation. By a delicious irony, those people Nicola weaponised to get rid of the supporters of Independence, are now the ones pushing her to move on Independence.
This is hilarious.
Sturgeon is attempting to stave them off by her old trusty method of taking court action against Westminster; which as always she will lose when it finally reaches the Supreme Court in London.
Sturgeon held off parliamentary action on Gender Recognition Reform for years, while she used it as a wedge issue inside the party.
Now the legislation has finally passed, I very much doubt the committed activists into whose hands she placed her political future, will be prepared to wait for another couple of years while a doomed court case plays out.
The end for Roman Emperors generally came when their Praetorian Guards turned against them.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
UPDATE It is astonishing how many people are incapable of comprehending the following phrase from the article below:
The account still exists and is visible online
Yes, I know the account is still there. The problem is I am locked out from my account and bizarrely, when I try to recover it the process ends with an automated meassage saying there is no such account.
An extraordinary number of people in comments on Facebook, Twitter and below the line here are triumphantly posting that they can still find the account, with the implication I am not blocked. I know it is still there. I said that. I have been locked out of it.
END OF UPDATE
I appear to have been banned from Twitter. For over a week I have not been able to log in to my account.
When I enter the password it takes me automatically to the Help Centre, where an automated message tells me the account @craigmurrayorg does not exist. When I enter my email address and phone number it tells me it has no record of them.
All this on a 15 year old blue tick account with 110,000 followers.
The account still exists and is visible online, though very difficult to find because of extreme shadowbanning.
Although my account has been heavily shadowbanned for years, until now this has never shown up in the shadowban test sites.
The reason for this is that my account has been previously limited by twitter not showing my tweets to my followers, which the shadowban test sites cannot test for. It has not previously been shadowbanned from searches, which they can test for.
The additional shadowbanning on the account has come into place at approximately the same time Twitter locked me out, which seems to rule out the removal of my account access being a technical glitch.
The wordpress to twitter function has also been blocked, by which posts on this blog were tweeted out on my twitter account. That is an entirely different mechanism to the normal login, so again this is not a technical password glitch.
This was my last tweet before I was banned. With no other information from Twitter, I can only presume this tweet prompted the ban.
Every attempt to use the appeal mechanisms that exist when a twitter account is suspended or banned, are closed off by a message that the account does not exist and they have no record of my contact details, which is absolutely not true.
Over half the traffic to this website comes via twitter. On this website I express in mild and sometimes intellectual terms my dissent from the neoliberal world view.
In the past two years this has caused me to be jailed, to be interviewed about leaks on another matter by the Police, to be thrown out of the National Union of Journalists, to have two laptops stolen, to have my facebook account hacked and my twitter account blocked.
The warning bells for the freedoms of speech and dissent we took for granted in western society could not be ringing louder nor more clearly.
I cannot of course take to twitter to tell people I have been blocked by twitter. I should be most grateful if those of you with twitter accounts could tweet about this and link to this post. Please do the same on any other social media which you use.
May I ask if you have thought about subscribing to support this blog and my work, that you do so now? The efforts to cut off my social media reach and traffic to this site are also of course a threat to the income which supports me.
But the site will as always remain free and open, and the content is free to republish and repost elsewhere, including in translation.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
The next morning I stayed in the Aparthotel writing, while Niels went out to the airport, to pick up the BMW 4×4 he had hired. Our destination was Halle an der Saale, near Leipzig. It was, I think, our first – and overdue – foray into the former East Germany.
Hotel rooms in Halle were thin on the ground and again very expensive. But as we were now hiring a vehicle, there was no need to be in the city centre, and for a change I booked us in to the Schloss Teutschenthal, a hotel about 8 miles outside the city.
At just 75 euros a night it was a fraction of the cost we had been paying, and given the choice I much prefer rural surroundings.
About 11.30am Niels phoned and reported a problem. He had been unable to collect the car. Neither the firm he had booked nor any of the others had availability.
He had argued long with the agent, who had explained to him that the agencies are franchises. The brand name company itself is a separate entity and the online booking site is a third separate entity. Because the online site took your money did not mean there was a car in fact available. They frequently oversold.
At busy times like just before Christmas, cars were in very short supply. The railway lines were in crisis, which also increased demand. We were looking to hire in Bremen and drop off in Berlin five days later. But the Berlin drop off was to another company within the same franchise; each franchisee wanted their own vehicle back, they were not interchangeable. Arranging that at times of high demand was very difficult.
So, no car, and over 70 euros spent on a wasted taxi ride to the airport and back. We had to dash to the railway station, and the itinerary for 7 December was 12.33 pm RE82022 Bremen to Hamburg, 14.04pm ICE1007 Hamburg to Halle (Saale) arriving 17.16pm.
Without a car, having booked in to Schloss Teutschenthal was a mistake, because it meant we would arrive in the city centre at 17.16, then have to get a taxi out to the Schloss to check in, then come back in again, while the event started at 18.00.
Our normal format was for me to do an introduction, then Ithaka would be screened, then Niels and I would take questions and lead discussion after the screening.
Today our trains ran to time, which was fortunate as we really needed them to. As we pulled in to Hamburg where we had to change, I observed an incident through the window of a carriage on the opposite side of the platform.
A stout Muslim lady, heavily swathed in grey hijab, was being escorted off the train by a female police officer. Two other police officers were waiting on the platform for her.
The Muslim lady had a child in a pushchair and another, about four years old, clinging to her skirts. Her pushchair was festooned with bags looped around the handles. None of the police were assisting her with children, pushchair or bags as she got off the train.
It was a small incident, but crystallised a sense of unease within me.
Germany is not a country at peace with itself. The closure of Dusseldorf Christmas market, the guard yelling at the young man with the wrong ticket, the aggressive begging everywhere, the man scouring the litter bins in the first class carriage for deposit bearing bottles, the heavy police presence on every station, the complete lack of surprise at the theft of my two laptops. You can add in to that the substantive dysfunction in the railway system.
I was just passing through everywhere, seeing nothing in depth. But Germany did not feel as I expected it to feel – tolerant, efficient, prosperous and content. It felt like a society under real stress. No doubt I am reading too much into a succession of small incidents, and my mood was rattled by the loss of my laptops. But such was my sense.
Hamburg station was very crowded, and the first escalator we came to where we could change platforms was blocked off by police, for reasons that were not plain. We walked along to a further escalator, up which was a concourse with a row of shops.
Niels spotted a car hire agency and went in to speak to them, but again they had nothing available. So we got on the ICE to Halle, which went right through Berlin, and arrived there after darkness had fallen.
The taxi driver had never heard of Schloss Teutschenthal, and entered it dubiously into the satnav on his telephone, which he proceeded not to follow very often, as we headed out of Halle and on to unlit country roads.
It was a dark night and there were no other vehicles around. A surreal picture unfolded. We were surrounded on all sides by red lights in the air, like fields of magic giant poppies.
At first I thought we were amongst the airport landing lights, but there were too many of them, and they were the wrong colour – all the same deep red – and far too widespread. As the car sped along and parallax took effect, I realised that, although on all sides, they were further away, and thus much larger, than I had realised.
The driver got hopelessly lost, largely because he kept deviating from his satnav route on lanes that he thought looked to be shortcuts, but kept turning away in the wrong direction.
We eventually arrived in Schloss Teutschenthal, checked in, left our baggage and dashed back to the car. We meandered back through the giant poppies, and then as we hit Halle heading to the cinema we again became lost, this time in the city itself. I noticed more than once we passed back the way we had come.
I do not think the driver was taking us for a ride, to increase the fare, I think he was lost. The atmosphere in the cab had become rather tense. Niels had texted the organisers who had put back the start time from 18.00 to 18.15, but when we were still not there at 18.20 it was decided to start the film and do the speaking afterwards.
Generally, this does not work well. If you get to speak before the film, you can convince the audience you are interesting and informative enough for it to be worth staying for the discussion afterwards. Otherwise they tend to rush for the door at the end of the film.
Niels and I were chatting to the taxi driver to defuse the tension in the cab, which was affecting the driver as well. He had switched the meter off. He came from Bosnia, and had only been driving the taxi a few weeks. He said apologetically that he knew Halle well but not places outside the city. We were too polite to point out his deficiencies in Halle itself.
The film having started, I have no idea why we felt the urge to arrive as soon as possible to make our apologies to the organisers, but we did. The cinema was in an imposing Gothic building at the top of quite a steep hill, which we dashed up as quick as we could.
Arriving breathless, we found a very pleasant young woman from Amnesty International, the organiser, standing outside the cinema. She was a little testy at our delay, exacerbated by the fact that Amnesty had booked and paid for a hotel for us in town, which message had not got through to us.
She asked, in a wondering rather than accusatory way, why it had still taken us another 20 minutes to arrive when Niels had said we were in a taxi 5 minutes away. I found myself explaining that the taxi driver had got lost repeatedly and that he was new to the city, having just arrived from Bosnia.
It just came out wrong. I realised immediately I must sound like some kind of horrible racist. I tried to disentangle, explaining that the problem was not that he was Bosnian but that he did not know Halle, but it was one of those situations where anything you say just sounds unconvincing and digs deeper.
I retreated to cover my confusion, saying (truthfully) that Niels and I had eaten nothing since breakfast and needed to find something before the speeches. We went down the hill again to a very good local restaurant.
I felt a bit better after a very good schnitzel and a few glasses of wine. It was possibly the only occasion I have been glad that Ithaka is almost two hours long.
Which is a good place to mention that even modern electronic copies of films have frames – it seems capturing motion still works the same way, a series of still images not a seamless whole, even without physical film.
The length in time of a film differs depending on the frame rate at which it is played, and the convention on this differs from country to country. Therefore Ithaka was about seven minutes shorter in Germany than in the UK.
At least, I think that is how Niels explained it.
There was a very good audience, notably with many young people and happily they fairly well all stayed for a very lively discussion. Niels spoke particularly well that night.
I had noticed that German audiences seemed to warm to Niels more readily than they did to me. I seemed to have a difficulty forming that empathetic connection with German audiences that is so essential to good public speaking.
Feeling the response of your audience, which presumably comes largely through a process of interpreting and aggregating signals of body language, and then adapting to it, is an ability I have prided myself on my entire adult life.
Any experienced political speaker will tell you there is an intuitive element – the emotional reaction of the audience communicates itself back to the speaker in a way that we do not always understand.
This is not just projection. When the audience is feeling intense personal sympathy towards Julian and his young family, or anger at the way he is treated, you pick that up as you face them.
I know it is not just projection of my own emotion onto the audience, because occasionally you pick up that you are failing to carry the audience’s feelings in the direction you wish. It is also not just visual, because my eyesight is awful.
When I speak to a Scottish audience about the clearances, and about the need for land reform today to return the land to the people, I feel this sentiment strongly reflected, emotionally, back to me from the audience. On other subjects, such as gender reform, I have felt emotional barriers come down and resentment of me from the audience, although nobody else is speaking but me.
It is intuition. I have found it best expressed in fiction by Isaac Asimov in the character “the Mule” in his Foundation trilogy.
You may, if you like, take this with a pinch of salt purely as an expression of the way I feel about audiences and public meetings, and just more evidence that Craig Murray is eccentric.
But the feeling I got back from our audiences in Germany was one of rather austere respect, as though I were at a remove, some exhibit generally acknowledged as valuable, rather than a warm human being with whom you might interact.
Niels on the other hand appeared effortlessly to be on the same wavelength as the German audiences, and they seemed to warm to him instinctively. His speaking style is much more intellectual than my own, but he also was very effective at conveying the pain of the family he witnessed while filming Ithaka, and the inhumane and degrading treatment of Julian in Belmarsh.
In Halle, Niels gave a simple description of the terror of Julian’s infant children at being subjected to internal oral inspection while visiting Belmarsh, and sniffed and pawed by Alsatians taller than them. He delivered it in a quiet voice and low tone, and it has stayed with me.
This photograph after the talks rather nicely captures Niels as the star of the show that evening.
I did however come away with a great deal of chocolate given me as presents. I am very easy to cheer up.
After chatting with activists and being photographed in an excellent reproduction of Julian’s Belmarsh cell, complete with authentic harsh prison soundtrack, we returned to the very comfortable Schloss Teutschenthal.
The hotel was completely dark and apparently deserted, so we went to our beds for an early night.
Daylight the next morning and I found that the Schloss reminded me very much of the von Trapp family home in the film of the Sound of Music.
We had breakfast in the magnificent dining room. We were the only guests in the hotel, although it was quite busy with staff preparing the ballroom for a banquet that evening. The hotel functions chiefly as a conference centre and wedding and events venue, though you can just check in as we did.
In that dining room in November 1943 the estate’s owner, Carl Wentzel, had hosted a grand dinner for leading German industrialists. The discussion centred on the urgent need to get rid of Adolf Hitler.
Wentzel went on to be actively involved in the Wolf’s Lair assassination plot of July 1944, and he was hung by the Nazi regime on December 20, 1944. Most, possibly all, of the participants in that November 1943 dinner were also executed around that time.
The hall was hung with a painting of Wentzel referencing his fate.
The estate and mansion, now hotel, is back in the hands of the Wentzel family, having been in communist East Germany during the cold war period.
In Germany, restitution of lands confiscated by both Nazis and communists has been patchy post reunification, but seems to have been achieved in this case; presumably Carl Wentzel’s history helped the case.
In neighbouring Poland I had visited many such properties in the early 1990s, and there they had generally been turned into party rest and recreation centres or sanitoria during the communist period.
There were no accessible staff in Scholls Teutschenthal who spoke English, but it appeared to me this had been the case here too. Two large hostel blocks had been built in the grounds, by the look of them in the 1970s, and were now derelict.
In Poland in the early 90s there had been complete and full scale restitution to property owners, in those parts of the country which had been Polish pre-1939.
I supported this as part of my job in the British Embassy, but privately I viewed it as disastrous. Massive tracts of country were restored to the same hopeless and bickering aristocrats who had made Poland unviable for centuries.
The current elegant “Schloss” dates from about 1880 but the original medieval castle still stands in substantial ruins and looked fascinating, but was blocked off. After a walk in the grounds with Niels after breakfast, I went to do some writing – I later learnt he had then climbed a wall into the old castle. I fear my wall-climbing days are behind me.
In taking a taxi back into Halle station in daylight, the mystery of the giant poppy lights was revealed.
We were in the middle of a vast wind turbine plantation, by a long way the largest I had seen in Germany. Each of the huge turbines was topped by a red warning light for aircraft. They were indeed much bigger and much further away than it had seemed in the dark, while the sails had been completely invisible – Niels’ picture near the top of this article conveys the illusion rather well.
We were now heading back into Berlin. Our itinerary for 8 December was 13.06 Halle ICE800, Berlin HBF 14.25.
As this was a short hop, I decided this was the moment to save a day on my Interrail pass and buy a ticket. Much to my surprise, it was 85 euros for a first class ticket. German trains are not cheap.
This train returned to the tradition of being very late, and it behaved oddly. It came into the station faster than you would expect, and seemed to have difficulty stopping, ending up much further down the platform than the marked positions indicated. It seemed to have difficulty stopping at subsequent stations too.
In Berlin we were staying at Viktor’s Residence, a very grand but slightly quirky establishment we had chosen as very close to the cinema. Our rooms had kitchenettes, but a notice sellotaped to a cupboard door stated that they were only equipped with cookware, crockery etc for guests who stayed over two weeks.
There was not so much as a kettle or cup. In fact, almost none of the hotels I stayed at in Germany provided kettles. They all had those little Nespresso machines or equivalents, which provide you with a thimbleful of lukewarm gunge.
Viktor’s Residence did not even provide one of these. Perhaps unless you were staying a fortnight.
The event that evening was in a venue with the intriguing name of “musikbrauerei”. The first challenge was finding it.
The hotel reception kindly gave me a map, together with an explanation that the musikbrauerei was not actually at the location marked, but on the next street. Google Maps had another idea completely.
When I arrived at the general area, in the back streets of some flats amongst some unlit commercial buildings, I could find nothing indicating the musikbrauerei and no signs for the event.
One building had some structured red uplighting which made it stand out, so I went there. I walked around it, but it appeared deserted. Just as I was about to about to leave, a basement door opened and a man walked to the top of the stairs to have a smoke. He confirmed it was the musikbrauerei and let me in through the basement door.
Once inside, a very large doorman was difficult to convince I did not have to pay. He was in a room with rows and rows of very industrial looking coat racks, all empty. I then was shown to a flight of stairs leading down from the basement into a series of chambers even further underground.
This was becoming surreal. The rooms were equipped for exactly the kind of strange party you see in films (at least that is the only reference I have). The bachelor party scene in Succession comes to mind.
It was a very strange and wonderful space. I could post a dozen photos, but these two give you the idea:
Well Toto, I said, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
It was 2.30am in Bochum before Niels finished setting up his security and self destruct mechanisms on my new laptop, as we sat in my gloomy little box of a room in the Mercure Hotel.
About a decade ago, chain hotels universally abandoned the idea of a central bright light to illuminate a bedroom, in favour of scattered little lights at bedsides, desk and in an odd corner, all of which require separate switches to be tracked down, and each of which struggles to reveal objects within a two foot distance. They mostly act to accentuate the overall murk.
At least it led my colour changing keyboard to feature sharply, brightening my mood. When Niels had locked within a passworded box, within a passworded box, on a passworded Wikileaks server, somewhere inside an Icelandic volcano, the ages long password to the last of my programmes he was protecting, he finally got up with a Nordic huffy noise and went off to his own bedroom.
I then spent until about 6am going through all my accounts for signs of intrusion and sending warning emails to key contacts. It felt like I had just put my head down on the pillow when the door was ruthlessly banged and the telephone simultaneously shrilled, to tell me it was 11am and I should have checked out.
Bochum railway station was not a very welcoming place that morning. It was about minus 5 degrees, the snow was whipping into my face and I was regretting still more keenly the loss of my gloves.
At least we had a very simple trip that day, to Münster. The itinerary for 3 December was 12.42 RE89719 Bochum to Hamm, 13.20 RE89978 Hamm to Münster arriving at 13.47. It was to be our first day riding on regional trains in Germany.
Since we had started the tour, new dates had been continually added and rest days been wiped off, so that it seemed likely the 15 travel days on my interrail pass would not be enough. You cannot extend the pass. I considered saving a day by buying a ticket for this short journey, but decided my brain was too frazzled by events of the past 24 hours for any extra complication.
Niels had a solution. It is fair to say that my determination to do the journey to the continent and the whole tour by rail, to help save the planet, was regarded by others involved as somewhat eccentric. From the start, Niels had been looking up hire cars and lovingly showing me pictures of BMW or Mercedes SUVs and describing their comfort levels.
Freezing in the driven snow on Bochum station and watching the board announce ever increasing delays, it was impossible not to have a certain sympathy for this view.
It is time to say something about German station clocks, as I was spending so much of my life staring at them. Germany has magnificent analogue clocks in its railway stations, but they have a most peculiar mechanism.
The minute hand does not glide smoothly and continually. The second hand goes round until it reaches the top of the dial, at which point the minute hand clicks forward one notch.
But there is a correction involved. The second hand evidently travels slightly fast, so when it reaches the top it pauses and there are a couple of seconds when no hand is moving, until the minute hand jerks its notch and the second hand starts its journey again.
I am almost, but not quite, certain there is another peculiarity. The second hand appears to glide smoothly rather than jerk, but in fact pauses momentarily at every second mark before gliding on to the next one.
At first I thought this was an optical illusion caused by the black tip of the second hand becoming hard to discern as it passes in front of the black second mark on the dial, but after acute observation from a variety of angles I think this momentary pause is really happening.
I am not sure what is the purpose of this observation, other than to illustrate that Germany’s horribly unpunctual train service can drive you nuts.
As we waited on the platform, we were approached twice by beggars. This happened on almost every station. Niels commented that they were much more aggressive than in the UK.
This is true, not in the sense of threatening physical violence, but in the sense of intruding forcefully into your personal space and being unapologetic in their demands. It really was not very comfortable.
Anyway, eventually we had one of those hurried last moment platform changes and caught what was supposedly an earlier train than the one we were booked on, which was running over an hour late, but with no change needed for Münster.
This particular privatised train service was run by the UK bus company National Express. It was a double decker train, clean and comfortable. We did not bother to go upstairs to first class.
I was not paranoid about a third laptop getting stolen on the train in the slightest…
The journey was uneventful save for an incident where the guard was arguing with a passenger over his ticket. The thin young man, who was wearing jeans and a hoodie, was thrusting his ticket forward towards the short, bull-necked guard who was refusing to look at it, alternating between shaking his head and yelling ferociously.
It was very noisy and the levels of anger on both sides seemed wildly disproportionate to the subject. I could not understand anything said, but even assuming the passenger was indeed trying to cheat on his fare, the level of aggression from the guard, who was attempting to corral the passenger against a door, was extraordinary.
In the end the passenger pushed past the guard and moved to the back of the short train. The guard seemed to be looking around for support, while the other passengers were pretending nothing was happening. I do not know how this confrontation eventually played out.
Stella was joining us again in Münster, having been lobbying in Berlin and elsewhere in the interim. It had been very difficult and very expensive to book hotel rooms in Münster. In fact, Stella, Niels and I were all in different hotels, as we could not find rooms together.
I was in the Mauritzhof hotel, another building of stunning ugliness on the outside. It looks like a fortified police station in a particularly incendiary area of a troubled city.
In fact the hotel was very warm and pleasant inside, with a big open fire in a cocktail bar with a wide range of malt whiskies, and particularly friendly and helpful staff.
By contrast Niels was in one of those self-catering places where you get in through a combination for a key safe and discover nothing is clean, nothing works and there is nobody to talk to for assisatance.
Stella was in the impressive sounding Kaiserhof hotel, which somehow managed to be even more expensive than the Mauritzhof, but which was staffed by people who all appeared not only to be on their first day working in a hotel, but to be entirely unbriefed on what a hotel is.
Niels and I had a late lunch at the cinema with our hosts, who included the university branch of Amnesty International, several of whom were students of public international law.
I was able to discuss with them the international law aspects of Julian’s case, and particularly the judgment in Julian’s case affirming that the UK is not bound in law by international agreements or treaties not incorporated into UK domestic law.
In Julian’s case, political extradition is specifically forbidden by Article 4 of the 2007 UK/US Extradition Treaty. However the courts have ruled that the Treaty has no effect in UK law as it has not been incorporated in UK domestic legislation.
The British courts argue that the Treaty depends for its force on the 2003 Extradition Act, which does not exclude political extradition. But the 2003 Act is an enabling act on which subsequent treaties depend. It does not dictate the provisions of those treaties and it most assuredly does not say those treaties may not exclude political extradition.
The argument is extraordinary that the extradition is only taking place at all under the UK/US Extradition Treaty, but that Article 4 of the Treaty is not operative – but all the other articles are.
The rest of the Treaty is no more incorporated in UK domestic law than Article 4 is. It is a nonsensical argument, tying knots of legal sophistry to justify the extradition.
What interested the German students even more than the individual instance was the extraordinary general claim that the UK is not bound by provisions of international law in treaties it has ratified.
The accepted procedure in international law is that there is a two stage process, signature and ratification, for accession to international treaties.
A treaty is signed by the governmment of a state, as a statement of agreement and intent. Only when all necessary approvals have been obtained – which generally means when the Treaty has been through approval by the legislature – is the ratification stage then completed.
The UK, however, ratifies agreements on Crown prerogative without its legislature having passed them as domestic law. It then argues that because of the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament, the ratification by the Crown does not bind the UK to abide by the provisions of the Treaty it has ratified.
This bizarre situation really is true. I am not making it up.
This is known by lawyers as a “dualist system” (“dishonest” being too straightforward a description) and is the subject of an immense academic literature – one of many possible starting points is here – and a large number of UK legal judgments.
That the UK government does not consider itself legally bound, not only by customary international law but even by treaties it has actually ratified, was astonishing to the German students.
I later received an email from one of them saying they had found it hard to believe, so had asked a lecturer who confirmed it for them.
The cinema seemed everything an independent cinema should be, with a really good slate of arthouse and documentary films and a quirky, very busy cafe bar full of interesting people. The next screenings were shown on an old railway departure board that clicked over noisily. In fact the cinema is part of a chain owning much more conventional multiplexes.
On the top shelf of the bar, high up amid some very obscure liqueurs, was a glass globe about twelve inches high with a glass looped valve on top, containing a startlingly clear liquid with an ultra violet tinge. We asked what it was, and the barman did not know, so we ordered two of those.
It was some kind of grappa, but extremely smooth, though highly potent as it burnt the back of your throat. It was immensely satisfying so we had another two. There was no label of any kind on the glass globe, which sat in an iron stand. Perhaps most strange of all was that the barman said he had been there two years and nobody had ever asked for it: it looked irresistible.
The large cinema was full for the screening, and Stella spoke passionately and well, particularly on the obscenity of sending Julian legally to a state which had tried to kidnap and assassinate him. It was a good, full audience and a lively discussion that left me feeling warm and useful. The gladhanding afterwards felt especially heartening all round.
We then went out into Münster and walked around the Christmas markets, which are particularly famous. We were told that a million visitors come to Münster for these markets, primarily from the Netherlands. This explains why a night in a hotel costs as much as a car.
While the fairy lights and wooden huts were again all very pretty, it still all boiled down to huts selling sausages and gluhwein. At every large church, crowds shuffled round the outside in a circuit, forming knots around the alcohol stalls which had long queues. We braved these a few times for gluhwein, which we all enjoyed.
St Lambert’s church tower is decorated with three cages, in which were hung the tortured corpses of the Anabaptist leaders after the revolution and siege of 1534/5.
When I was 14 years old I read with great relish Norman Cohn’s great book, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Cohn’s life work was to try to understand the phenomenon of Nazism in the context of other historic movements that practised mass extermination in the name of ideology. His riveting account of the siege of Münster has stayed with me for half a century.
The great city walls of the siege were demolished and are now a promenade, the Church of St Lambert was substantially rebuilt in 1901 and again after World War II, and the dangling cages don’t look nearly old or crude enough, but still I was now there, on the spot I had visualised so clearly in my teens.
The Anabaptists preached equality of wealth as well as religious iconoclasm, and looked to divide the property of the very wealthy city of Münster with all who joined them. They practised ardent polygamy; sexual ecstasy was an important part of their revolution.
However they had no qualms about executing those who did not accept their adult baptism, and they did not care about the wild impracticability of most of their governance, as they believed the second coming of Christ to be literally imminent.
What is perhaps truly extraordinary is not just that the Anabaptists gained full control in Münster, but that they came close to doing so and held real influence in broad swathes of Northern Europe. It is important not to be seduced by their professed communism into overlooking the fact they were extremely violent, religious nutters.
The revolutionary millenarian wave that swept Europe in the early 1530s was the product of the usual famine and disease, but also fueled by the economic dislocation caused by emergent nationalisms disrupting the free trading of the Hanseatic network. I throw that in for you to draw your own modern parallels.
History is one long roll of ironies, one of which is that it was the genuine tolerance of Münster’s Catholic Prince Bishop Waldeck which had allowed Anabaptist doctrine to spread and made Münster an international haven for dissenters. It was the same ex-tolerant Waldeck who later hung the Anabaptist leaders in those cages (or their originals) after their slow execution by red hot shears.
The whole is a fascinating story. I recommend Cohn’s book. I was told by the hotel that there was a German TV mini-series thirty years ago of the Münster uprising, starring a young Christoph Waltz. I would love to see that. But for now it was good to walk through the holiday crowds in the snow and take in the town, imagining those events, in good company and with brandy-laced gluhwein.
The next day, Sunday 4 December, we left Münster for Dusseldorf on the 10.25 RE10212 which went direct. Again it was a two decker National Express local train and it was actually on time.
We went up to the very comfortable first class upper deck, where we were alone. The only incident of note occurred when a burly man came down the train, flicking something at each table with a metallic clang. Niels explained the man was opening the metal bin covers, on the lookout for discarded bottles which might have a deposit he could reclaim.
That seemed a lot of effort for little reward for a middle aged man. He made no attempt to disguise what he was doing, and presumably ought not have been in the first class carriage. It led me to recalculate the odds of my laptops having been simply taken as opportunistic thefts on the train.
It is worth noting at this point that all the trains now had parties of men in vests marked “security”, patrolling up and down to ensure that everybody was wearing a face mask. Their general demeanour was not very friendly.
Stella would be leaving to fly back to London and her children, after the early evening screening in Dusseldorf. Niels and I were staying in the Stage 47 Hotel, which again was really delightful.
The hotel has been carved out of space from the adjoining theatre, and the reception is crammed into the narrow entrance corridor in a way that looks very unpromising indeed on first arrival. But the rooms are beautifully planned and all different, each one named after and containing a massive photographic portrait of, a star who has appeared in the theatre.
My room had the bed on a mezzanine level and loads of space, which was great but not designed for a man with bad eyesight likely to need to fumble his way down the tight spiral staircase from the mezzanine in the dark for a 3am pee, whilst not entirely sober.
The hotel was very much in a Turkish area. A Turkish travel agent was next door, a Turkish shop the other side, then a kebab shop, and there was a substantial looking Turkish restaurant just opposite. Leaving Stella’s suitcase in Niels’ room, we repaired to the Turkish restaurant for lunch.
They did not seem very pleased to see us. It was again very cold, and after some humming and hawing as to whether we could have a table at all, they seated us at the first empty one, right next to the front door.
We were constantly subjected to a vicious icy blast when the door opened, and a persistent very cold draught when it didn’t. Several times other tables emptied and we repeatedly asked if we might move, but were always waved back down.
The food was very good but the service terrible. I do not know whether this was because we seemed to be the only non-Turkish customers, but we all agreed we had the feeling of not being welcome. I have always found Turkish people extremely hospitable, so it seems strange.
I hurried back from lunch as at 2pm I was giving a Zoom talk from my hotel room to Alba International, on the subject of the way forward to Scottish Independence.
The background to this was the UK Supreme Court decision that the Scottish Parliament had no right to hold a referendum on Independence, which you may recall I had attended the Supreme Court to hear, the day before leaving on this European tour.
The discussion was also informed by the excellent work of Salvo, and of Sara Salyers in particular, in defining Scotland’s own historic constitution as an independent state and its continuing legal persistence.
I felt time and distance had given me a useful clarity in considering the Supreme Court decision and its consequences, and in brief, this is what I outlined.
The UK Supreme Court was quite right within the narrow confines of UK domestic law. Plainly the Union of England and Scotland is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act of 1998, and the Scottish Parliament could not hold a referendum on it in terms of that Act.
But UK domestic law is entirely irrelevant. The Kosovo Opinion of the International Court of Justice makes crystal clear that the domestic law of the state being seceded from, is not the determining factor as to whether a secession is illegal.
Whereas the reliance by the UK Supreme Court on the criteria of the Federal Court of Canada in the Quebec judgment, over fifty years old and superseded by the cold hard fact of over 23 non-colonial secessions since, is simply laughable.
But while the right of self-determination of peoples in international law is crucial in the case of Scotland, and while Scotland undoubtedly qualifies as a “people” because it is a long established historic nation with its own legal system, culture and institutions, there is one overwhelmingly important criterion for recognition grounded in pure realpolitik.
It was long accepted as the only criterion for recognition that a state had factual, practical control of its own territory. That position has become softened by more principled considerations since the second world war, but the actual control of the territory claimed remains the most important factor in gaining international recognition.
Why did Catalonia fail where Slovenia, Kosovo and the Baltic states succeeded?
Because realpolitik rules in practice, and the Slovenians, Balts and Kosovans had obtained actual control on the ground of the land they claimed. The Catalans had not.
Physical control is not a sufficient condition for recognition – see the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus – but in effect it is a necessary condition.
The UK Establishment will never agree to Scottish Independence. Scotland’s resources are far too valuable to them. Scotland has to declare Independence unilaterally, and take it.
It is no use doing this like Catalonia, where the Spanish civil guard and judiciary effectively wiped out the nascent state before it could breathe.
A Scottish government, whether arising from the Scottish Parliament or from another body, needs in declaring Independence to ensure it has practical control of Scotland.
That means that the organs of the state have to acknowledge the Scottish state. All taxes collected must go to Edinburgh, not to Westminster. The judiciary must apply Scottish laws and not Westminster ones, where they conflict, and specifically apply all new laws post the Declaration of Independence. The police must answer only to Scottish authorities. Ultimately so must the military stationed in Scotland.
At the time Independence is declared, immediate action must be taken to ensure all civil servants, judges, police and military take an oath of loyalty to the people of Scotland and its new government, and renounce any previous loyalty to Crown and to UK political institutions. Anybody refusing must be summarily dismissed from their positions.
We have the example of Catalonia before us. We also have the example of Egypt’s only ever democratically elected leader, President Morsi, who died horribly in jail after being overthrown by a CIA coup because he failed to take the elementary precaution of dismissing and imprisoning all the military regime’s corrupt judges. He should have learnt from Fritz Bauer.
Let us not make those mistakes.
Ultimately, it boils down to this.
1) Westminster will never agree to Scottish Independence.
2) Scotland therefore has no option but to declare Independence unilaterally.
3) Any independent state must be prepared to defend itself by physical force from foreign attack. So must a newly declared Independent Scotland.
4) All who refuse to serve an Independent Scotland must then be removed from all organs of the state.
5) Once an Independent Scotland has physical control of its territory and resources, international recognition will soon follow. Brexit has completely changed the political atmosphere with regard to the crucial attitude of the European Union to London’s government.
Not to mention that London’s government is an international laughing stock.
Interestingly enough, in the discussion that followed my talk, nobody fundamentally queried the radicalism of this approach. Most of the questions revolved around what I might call the determinism of Salvo’s approach.
To put this another way, no matter how many irregularities there might be in the 1689 Act of Settlement, no domestic or international court is going to annul it now. It is realpolitik again – no state exists whose form and institutions would survive re-examination of all their historic foundations under modern criteria.
I further clarified that while I support the notion of registering a Scottish liberation movement at the UN, it is going to take a lot of evidence of liberation struggle to achieve this. The notion which has somehow got abroad that it just needs 100,000 signatures, appears to me without foundation.
It was a really good 90 minutes discussion with excellent people, after which I had do dash to the cinema and turn my head back towards rescuing Julian.
The cinema had the interesting quirk that to get a big wide screen, the projector was separated from the hall by a number of corridors and offices, with glass windows that the picture passed through. This lent itself to a variety of interesting photos.
Stella was on excellent form. In Dusseldorf she concentrated particularly on the extraterritorial jurisdiction the United States was claiming, in its effort to imprison an Australian journalist for acts of publishing, carried out entirely outside the United States.
Stella also expressed the relief we all felt that finally the Australian government was living up to its responsibilities and directly asking the United States to end the persecution of Julian Assange.
I was not on the best of form, and was perhaps a bit tired. But as usual there were inspiring activists on hand to give me a real boost afterwards. All over Germany, groups are out every weekend for Julian, demonstrating, manning stalls, collecting signatures and bearing witness to the truth.
After the meeting, Bibi gave us a lift back to the hotel, demonstrating in so doing that her definition of “a short walk to the car” was fundamentally different to my own. She then took Stella on to the airport.
I had a sudden and improbable rush of common sense, refusing Niels’ offer to go for a drink, in favour of an early night in my comfortable mezzanine bed.
The next day was a rest day, so we stayed again in Dusseldorf. Not only was it a day off, but the hotel did laundry – the first time since this adventure began!
In the morning I discovered that nobody sold gloves in a six block radius, except for a motorbike shop at astonishing cost, which I declined. I spent the rest of the day reading the Fritz Bauer biography.
About 4pm Niels called and we went out. The receptionist had recommended the winter market on Konigsallee, so we headed there.
We had walked a few metres when a great stream of fire engines and police vehicles came blaring past us. As we approached traffic lights, a number of ambulances came charging down from another direction and for a while there was a veritable traffic jam of emergency vehicles. The cacophony was awful.
New sirens continued to join in from all around us, apparently converging towards us. When we got to Konigsallee it was largely deserted. While the shops all remained open, all of the wooden Christmas market stalls were closed and the shoppers had disappeared.
We wandered around the empty stalls trying to work out what was happening, until policemen started yelling at us in a most threatening manner.
It appears there had been a phoned in terrorist threat of an attack on a Christmas stall, to which the police had overreacted by closing down all of the hundreds such stalls, placed on every shopping street and square in Dusseldorf, and calling out all the ambulances and fire appliances.
It was of course a hoax. It was also another example of my continually landing in unlikely drama on this trip. Niels, who had spent weeks photographing anything that moved, managed to capture almost nothing of the massive security presence closing down the Christmas market. He said he had previous experience that German police do not like cameras.
He did however manage to capture umpteen shots of me looking cold and miserable. My voluminous luggage was well prepared for the winter, except for a lack of boots. The streets were covered in ice and my leather-soled shoes felt distinctly insecure.
From Oxford Street to Princes Street, the UK’s flagship shopping streets have collapsed into tat and squalor, but Germany has maintained its high end shopping districts without apparent loss. So much so that the first shop I entered had no viable boots below 700 euros.
Round the corner I found a more practical shop and bought a pair of Skechers. This troubled me, as I recall my brother Stuart taunting my brother Neil that possessing Skechers was the first step on the road to adult diapers. They were however cheap, waterproof and had deep treads, so I got them and am now a convert.
While the shops had all stayed open, the restaurants appeared to have all been closed by the police alert and we went around for a while before we found a fancy burger restaurant, one of a franchise chain with a rustic, birch tree decor.
This seemed marginally better than starvation, so we ate a couple of burgers, which had a small nugget of meat drowned in various treatments of vegetable, from pickled, through mayonnaise-covered to caramelised, the whole shoved between vast mounds of bread.
The restaurant was very full indeed, being the only place open, and the excitement of the police closures gave the venue a vibrant buzz. We struck up a friendly chat with the manager, who was working the floor because it was unexpectedly busy.
We worked our way right through the cocktail menu and then had the Johnnie Walker Black Label brought down from a high top shelf. It was the worst fake Black Label I have tasted in decades, like cheap vodka with added Bovril, but we drank it all anyway. We had a rollicking time. The drinks bill came to six times the food bill.
We both had horrible hangovers the next day, almost certainly from the fake Black Label. Fortunately we had the morning to recover, then it was up and off again, and our itinerary was 6 December ICE 714 Dusseldorf 13.33 to Bremen, arriving 16.15.
The train was comfortable and more or less on time, and I was able to write up some of the journey for my blog.
The large cinema was very full, I felt I spoke particularly well, and we had a good talk with activists afterwards. Bremen seemed a delightful city and the cinema was in a district surrounded by really good restaurants and bars.
Niels spoke particularly well. He outlined Julian’s vision of responsible, scientific journalism, where references would always be given with links to the original source material which should be made available to the public.
This of course had not happened, and even as mainstream media had been forced to move largely online, they had not taken the opportunity this offered to present the public with links to the actual source materials their journalists were discussing. This level of transparency was expected of bloggers but largely eschewed by the media, despite all their resources.
It was a good point and well put over. It is continually important to think of the work Julian can take forward on his release from jail, not only to think of him as a victim or a symbol.
This was one of the first meetings where the audience had required sequential translation into German. It is always very difficult, given the need to split up your argument into short cadences for translation. But it did not seem to spoil the evening or the enjoyment and interest of the large audience.
We had booked in Bremen into the Aparthotel Adagio. I was by now fairly sick of restaurant food, and wanted to be able to cook myself something very plain and simple. I called in to a local supermarket and was able to make myself a basic tomato and bacon sauce to eat with spaghetti and a baguette. It felt like a great relief.
One thing I liked about Germany was that the ambient soundtrack was much more to my taste than I generally heard in the UK. The taxi taking us to the cinema was playing Bachmann Turner Overdrive. The taxi taking us back was playing Fleetwood Mac. The supermarket where I bought the spaghetti was playing Supertramp. None of which was very German.
I had finally relented. The next day we were off to Halle, which was a complicated journey by rail but simple by road, so I had caved in and agreed Niels could finally get his hire car.
As I drifted off to sleep I was sure I could hear him making vroom! vroom! noises in the distance.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Having entirely unexpected cause to become acquainted with the subject, I learn that all main railway stations in Germany have their own police stations. At Bochum, you have to walk round the outside to find a door with a buzzer, which nobody answers.
Heading back into the station, I approach the first pair of policemen I come across (the visible police presence on German stations is also remarkable). I explained to them I had a bag stolen and they walked me round to the police station which, once inside, is full of policemen, all carefully ignoring the buzzer.
I am ashamed by my lack of German and very impressed by the police language skills. But unlike his colleague in Frankfurt, this policeman made no pretence at all of interest in actually finding the thief.
He laughed nervously at my suggestion I was being targeted, having had two laptops stolen in four days. He looked at me suspecting I was not quite sane, and said it happens all the time. He just shook his head when I suggested the CCTV on Duisburg or Bochum stations might show the thief with the laptop bag.
He very quickly completed the theft report and gave it to me. I think he suspected I was engaged in a repeated insurance fraud he could not be bothered investigating, and just wanted me out of his hair.
We were staying in a particularly barren Mercure Hotel in a high block just opposite the station. I was on the 12th floor. Once checked in I decided that despondency would not help, and that I should turn the situation around by embracing the chance for laptop shopping.
Bochum is a city with dreadful problems. Leaving the next day we passed on the train a vast Opel plant which extended for miles and was in varying stages of decay. It closed down five years ago. Shortly before that Nokia closed a major plant in the city. Before that the mines closed.
If you go back further, three quarters of all the buildings of Bochum were destroyed by allied bombing in the Second World War. This was ironic because the city was predominantly Polish, one of those isolated populations left stranded by the tides of European history.
Large numbers of Poles were sent to the concentration camps alongside the Jewish population (many of whom were also Polish) and the rest put to forced labour. Additional slave labour was brought from Poland by the Nazis to keep the industries going.
As a centre of Ruhr heavy industry, Bochum was largely obliterated by the allies but most of the victims were Polish. With this horrible history, it seems churlish to note that the current shopping centre is just horribly modern and ugly.
I went to a large chain shop called Cyberport near the hotel. It had a great range of laptops but the prices were very inflated. Every laptop was marked not just with its price but with an interest free credit offer and the price of monthly instalments.
This explained the prices – it was a rip off, never never shop for computers. It was also an indicator of Bochum’s economic woes.
I next went to a flashy store called Gravis, where a very keen and polite assistant was all over me, but sadly they only sold Apple. I explained to him politely that I didn’t use Macs and was too old and tired to want to learn new systems. He replied they sold accessories not specific to Macs, like mouses and keyboards. I politely declined this rather random offer, and went in search of my next shop.
The streets of the centre were closed off for the Christmas Market, with little illuminated wooden kiosks everywhere and crowds it was difficult to get through.
These were in every city we visited, and great fun. But they had changed since I first saw them in Germany in the 1990’s, with much less selling of handicrafts and decorations, and a much higher percentage of alcohol and sausage stalls.
Bunches of people stood around in the freezing temperatures for hours eating and drinking. Bochum was a bit rowdier than most. It was snowing, and I was very much regretting that the thieves had got the Gore-tex gloves that had been a Christmas present from my sister.
Call me a grinch, but half an hour below zero with the Gluhwein is enough for me. Give me a nice warm pub.
Anyway I pushed my way through to Saturn, Germany’s big chain computer store. It was a huge shop, but the actual range of product surprisingly limited and customer service almost non-existent.
They had no model like the one just stolen. Then my eyes were drawn to a laptop with a glowing back and illuminated keys which constantly changed colour.
Colour-changing keys! I had to have it! It was a brand I had never heard of – Captiva – and it was half price because you were buying the display model.
Niels had helped me set up the Laptop of the Four Days with massive security, so I couldn’t even start up the damn thing. (The first stolen laptop had once been secured by Julian Assange with a process involving a gold plated USB stick. That too had been totally beyond me to get into, and much of that had to be removed).
Niels was horrified by my choice. It was a gaming laptop, he said. The money had all gone into graphics. It absolutely was not what I required.
If you can imagine somebody saying “Colour changing keys” in the voice of Homer Simpson saying “Donuts”, that is how I replied. We bargained them down further from a half price 790 euros to 750 euros, and here I am! The keys were a sexy turquoise when I started that sentence and now they are the deepest ocean blue. What bliss.
Orange! They’ve gone orange!
We then had to get a taxi to the cinema, which was right on the semi-rural outskirts of the city, a lovely little independent venue in an old railway station building. It was a joint screening with Amnesty International, the cinema was full and the audience was not only comprised of committed activists.
I was also pleased to meet Bibi, who had been coordinating these events, and with Irmtrud Wojak, a local campaigner who has written a fascinating biography of Fritz Bauer. He was a great prosecutor who went after not just Eichmann, but the “respectable” Nazis and their enablers, particularly in the legal profession. She gave me an English copy which was to make train journeys pass faster.
The only problem with the location was that it was a long walk to the nearest restaurant and very cold and snowy outside. Niels and I had eaten no lunch or dinner so we were keen to eat while the film was showing, and we ordered pizza delivery.
I was just tucking in to my Hawaiian pizza, amid general comments on my bad taste, when my phone started pinging incessantly. There was a whole stream of codes for two factor identification. They were from my various email accounts, from Facebook, Twitter, my bank, shops – a plethora of accounts. All coming through almost simultaneously.
This meant that somebody had got past the password and fingerprint protection on one of the two stolen laptops, and then got through the passwords on the individual accounts (which had all been changed after the first theft).
The question was, had they access to my phone?
I will confess this put me in a state of some shock. I had been trying very hard not to let the laptop thefts get to me. On the first laptop, I had convinced myself some random thief may have just pinched it when I was in the toilet, even though it was obviously outdated, filthy, cracked and in poor condition.
But the theft today was inexplicable. We had changed into that train at Frankfurt airport station, and that first class compartment was absolutely heaving with expensive luggage.
There were many choices to steal that looked much more potentially valuable than my twenty year old, large and very battered laptop bag. The luggage racks right by the exit doors were overflowing with expensive bags of all shapes and sizes.
The risk and technique required to lift my old bag from the overhead rack right above our heads in the middle of the carriage made no sense as a random theft, when many almost risk free thieving options were available.
At the micro level my bag was next to Niels’ camera bag. The contents of that were ten times more valuable and the bag looked like that would be the case. But it was not taken.
When I blew the whistle in 2005 on extraordinary rendition and torture, I was for a time subject to the very close and obvious attentions of the security services. That died down, but at times flared up again, particularly around interactions with Wikileaks.
In the Spanish case against UC Global for spying on Julian, on his lawyers and on others in the Ecuadorean Embassy, which included spying on me and hacking my phone, and following and burgling several people, Julian’s Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez has told me that the evidence shows the CIA were “obsessed with” me as a target.
So none of this was new to me. Let me put it this way.
I am an admitted whistleblower of Top Secret information (to compare, nothing Chelsea Manning disclosed was above Secret). I collaborate with Wikileaks. I am at the most hardline end of supporters of Scottish Independence. I reject NATO, nuclear weapons, Israel and neo-liberalism. I have high level friends and contacts across the globe. If the security services are not targeting me, what are they doing?
I know the capabilities of the security services, and I have always assumed that they have access to the entire contents of my laptop anyway. Encryption may work for avoiding some mass surveillance, but not for individual targets when the state are prepared to put in the resource.
I also choose openness to my fellow man. I have no desire to view the world through a fug of suspicion. I have read the comments on previous instalments from the wise people who tell me that they never travel without a moneybag around their waist and their laptop bag tied to their legs.
Well, that is simply not who I am. The seven year laptop that was first stolen had been with me everywhere for hundreds of thousands of miles. It had traveled over much of Africa several times. It had been to the United States more than once. It had been simply all over Europe.
I had left it unattended while going to the loo on a train or in an airport lounge, many scores of times. I had left it sitting in hotel rooms in Washington DC. Once or twice I have checked it in to a flight. It had sat at the back of a bar at Doune the Rabbit Hole. It has hung from restaurant coat racks. It has sat in the back of a pick-up in Ghana.
That was just that one laptop. I have used a succession of laptops for around thirty years and always acted in the way I describe. I have lived in Russia and Poland and Ghana and left my laptop bag on seats when I go dance, or on a table in a conference while I have some lunch. None had ever been stolen.
I could have spent thirty years with my laptop tied between my legs, but that would not be me.
If you choose to live that way, do what makes you feel happy and safe. But let me point out the logical fallacy that because you obsessively tie yourself to your laptop, it does not follow that anybody would have stolen it had you not done so.
Anyway, while two random thefts of laptops in four days was not impossible, I do not believe it was that, particularly given the quite extraordinary circumstances of the second theft.
This was also particularly annoying because of the loss of the other contents. The gloves I have noted. I had also lost my reading glasses, which are very essential, my phone charger, my bank verification machine, all the receipts from my trip and a variiety of other letters and documents.
With all those two factor verification notices coming through, I needed to get back to the hotel, set up my new laptop and change every password I have. But the audience was now waiting to hear me speak.
I am nothing if not an old trouper, so I went on. I believe it went very well. But frankly my mind was so frazzled I do not remember anything that evening after the phone started pinging.
Back at the hotel, Niels started setting up my new laptop with dizzying layers of disc encryption and self-destruct mechanisms.
Everything now had passwords of enormous length and complexity, containing characters I had no idea existed, from an external random generator.
Presumably, like the monkeys, if you kept it going infinitely you would get the complete works of Shakespeare.
It was 2am before I could actually start getting into my accounts.
There was no evidence that anybody had got past the two factor identification and actually been inside anywhere. As I say, I had always assumed they can remotely anyway, and I suspect most likely the whole thing is just an attempt at intimidation.
Most importantly of all, none of Niels’ security installations had stopped the keys from changing colour.
Merry Christmas Everybody.
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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
After a two year process, the NUJ Executive have finally rejected the renewal of my NUJ membership based on social media posts I allegedly made which they refuse to show me and of content and subject of which I genuinely have not a clue.
But apparently these social media posts make me not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ.
Murdoch employees are fit and proper persons. The Guardian journalists who produced the front page of lies about Manafort meeting Assange are fit and proper persons. The security service mouthpieces at the BBC are fit and proper persons.
The NUJ even accepts for membership copywriters for corporations working in PR companies. All these people are fine.
But I am not a fit and proper person because of some things I allegedly said on social media, which I am not allowed to see or to explain.
I am also not a fit and proper person because I published the NUJ’s incredibly deceitful handling of my renewal application, when apparently the NUJ believes it should have been secret (why?).
Finally I have failed to produce evidence of my income from journalism. I provided them with a download from Paypal of my monthly subscription totals. Apparently this was not sufficient, but they refuse to say what would be sufficient.
I have appealed against the decision, but given it is plainly politically motivated I do not expect much joy. There appears to be a universal effort across the political establishment to deplatform and isolate anybody who queries official narratives. Given that mainstream media are such a large part of that, it is perhaps not as surprising as it should be to find the National Union of Journalists an enthusiastic part of the process.
I hardly dare to imagine the long-suffering readers of this blog would support yet another legal case, but in the New Year we may need to try.
Craig Murray
Edinburgh
18 December 2022
Thank you for your email of 18 November informing me that my application for renewal of my NUJ membership has been refused, on the grounds that I am not a fit and proper person to be a member, and that I have not provided sufficient evidence of income from journalism.
I wish to appeal this decision.
Point 1 – The Evidence Against Me
The first test of natural justice has been failed by the NUJ. I have no idea at all what are the social media posts and correspondence which you state render me not a fit and proper person to renew my NUJ membership.
I have never seen these. You have never put them to me. I have been given no chance to check if they are genuine nor to explain their context. There are two sides to every story and you have made no attempt at all to hear my side.
I have been very active on social media for 15 years and I have never been suspended nor, to my knowledge, reported for inappropriate content. I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about.
I believe the “fit and proper person test” may here be being used as a tool for an exclusion actually based on difference of political opinion.
I am myself continually subject to unprovoked attacks on social media by mainstream media journalists, many of whom I presume will be members of the NUJ. One that I know is a member is Mr David Leask, because you name him as one of the complainers against me.
Here is a link to just Mr Leask’s latest unprovoked rant against me on twitter, in which he casts aspersions on my linguistic skills for no other reason than to malign me (in fact I passed the FCO’s extremely difficult operational level exams in both Polish and Russian).
I am really not certain why Mr Leask remains a fit and proper person if he attacks my output, but it makes me not a fit and proper person if I attack his? I should be grateful for an explanation on this point. To be plain, I see no reason why sharp disagrrement should bar either of us from the NUJ.
I am equally often subject to unprovoked attack by mainstream media journalists in their publications. Here is a link to one one by Mr Paul Hutcheson of the Daily Record, in which he published a photo of my home next to an article inciting against me, and put me in fear for the safety of my wife and infant children.
It is highly probable that either Mr Hutcheson or some of the editorial chain who approved doing this to me are members of the NUJ. Why does that behaviour not call into question their fit and proper person status, and how is my alleged behaviour – and I still do not know what it is – worse than that?
Again, that is not rhetorical, it is a question to which I should like to see an answer.
Point 2 – Proper Procedure Wilfully Ignored
The NUJ rulebook is perfectly plain that when an application is received, it should be sent to the applicant’s own branch or chapter for comment by members.
This rule was breached in my case. My own branch, Edinburgh Freelance, has still never had sight of my application, plainly contrary to the rulebook. I was a member for three years quite happily, with zero friction or adverse comment.
Instead what happened was that NUJ officials politically hostile to me circulated my application for comment, not to my own branch as the rules dictate, but only to a secret selected cabal of colleagues of similar political persuasion, in order to generate objections.
The chronology is important here – objections were generated before I published the fact of my application.
Point 3 – Publicising My Application
When an organisation is behaving deviously, maliciously and not in accordance with its own rules, it is of the essence of good journalism to publish it – even when that organisation is the NUJ.
I can see no reason at all why a NUJ membership renewal application should be secret if the applicant does not wish it to be. To claim my publicising the NUJ’s extraordinary handling of my application, as in itself evidence I am not a fit and proper person to be an NUJ member, is self-serving nonsense of a particularly devious kind.
Point 4 – Earnings From Journalism
I am really at a loss here. I do get more than 50% of my income from journalism, from subscriptions and donations to my blog. I have provided you with a printout from Paypal showing a year’s monthly subscriptions.
In response your membership department stated that you need to see payment per article, rather than payment by subscription. Is it really the case that journalists in new media who receive their income by subscribers are excluded from NUJ membership? If so, what is the legal basis for excluding this particular method of payment? It is the most common form of new media operation.
My last letter to your membership department specifically asked what further evidence was required, and volunteered to pay my membership fees based on gross subscription income rather than net if that were easier.
I never did receive any reply to my offer to provide whatever proof you need, provided it is also what is asked of others. To simply state I have failed to satisfy, while refusing to advise what would satisfy, is yet further evidence this has been a politically motivated process aimed at justifying refusing renewal.
Point 5 – The Purpose of the NUJ
The NUJ does not exist purely to provide those with comfortable berths in corporate media, the BBC or PR firms with their press cards, It has a particular responsibility to support journalists with views that are disliked by the political establishment, and to uphold their freedom of speech.
The sub-committee agreed that my output of articles does meet the criterion of journalism. I therefore have a right to join the union. The “fit and proper person test” is not meant to exclude people some members dislike or disagree with.
To pretend that I am in any way more aggressive in dialogue with those members objecting than they are with me is a fake made possible only by the outrageous device of the sub-committee never putting the allegations and evidence to me.
Point 6 – Health
It is true that very occasionally I have made social media posts I subsequently regret. I generally apologise very quickly. It is fairly widely known that I have been diagnosed bipolar my whole adult life, and can therefore sometimes be intemperate. That puts me in a class the NUJ should particularly seek to protect. It may well be relevant to the evidence before the committee – I do not know as I was not shown it. Nor was I given the chance to make this, nor any other, point to the sub-committee.
Point 7 – Late Appeal
I hope you will accept this appeal which is just beyond the 28 day cut-off point due entirely to force majeure. My laptop was stolen two weeks ago while on a month long tour of Germany, Austria, Slovenia and France with the Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign – a cause the NUJ supports.
I lost my draft reply to you when my laptop was stolen. Astonishingly, five days later my replacement laptop was also stolen in extraordinary circumstances. At that point I also lost access to my email accounts, including your email and the sub-committee report. I only recovered the material on return home this weekend .
May I conclude by wishing all the best to you and yours in this the festive season.
Yours,
Craig J Murray
Journalist
————————————–
Dear Mr Murray,
Further to you application for membership of the NUJ I wish to advise that the application was considered directly by the National Executive Council in accordance with Rule 3 (b) of the union’s rules.
At a meeting on Friday 11th November the NEC accepted the report of the panel set up to consider your application.
The panel found that you do not meet the membership criteria in relation to proven earnings from journalism.
The committee also considers objections to the application based on published material in the public domain and your conduct towards NUJ members.
The NEC accepted the recommendation that:
you should be considered not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ within the context of Rule 3 of the NUJ Rule Book, specifically the NUJ Code of Conduct and the obligation under Membership Responsibilities.
If you wish to appeal the determination to the Appeals Tribunal you may do so in writing within 28 working days of the decision.
Please address your appeal to the General Secretary by email to [email protected]
For reference I attach a copy of the report to the NEC.
Membership Application: Craig Murray
Background: The NEC appointed a subcommittee to consider the membership application of Craig Murray comprising the Honorary General Treasurer, the Chair of Finance Committee, and the NUJ Vice President. The committee held two meetings and reviewed substantial material relating to the application.
Mr Murray’s previous application, in March 2020 was the subject of a number of objections. It was not processed because the application form was not complete, in accordance with the NUJ Rule Book.
Context: Mr Murray applied for membership on 5th March 2020. In May 2020, the General Secretary appointed the Assistant General Secretary (AGS) to carry out a preliminary investigation into objections to Mr Murray’s application.
Two objectors confirmed that they wished to proceed with their objection in accordance with the provisions of Rule 3 (iii): Chris Diamond and David Leask.
A third applicant had confirmed that they wished to proceed with their objection but
following the decision of the applicant to publish details of private correspondence between himself and the AGS, and the comments made by the applicant in his post and subsequent comments on his social media blog, the third complainant advised the AGS that he wished to request anonymity due to the perceived risk of social media abuse.
Two other members sought to raise objections but requested anonymity.
The objectors raised concerns that their objections and personal details could be posted on social media and that they may be the subject of online abuse or harassment.
An NEC panel was established to review the applications and to consider the complaint.
Since the application did not meet the membership criteria the complaints were moot and not considered at that time.
It was recommended that the complaints be noted and, in the event of a future application by Mr Murray would be considered by the NEC.
New application: A fresh application by Mr Murray was received in February 2022. The application was referred directly to the NEC.
The NEC established a sub committee comprising of the Vice President, Chair of Finance and Hon Gen Treasurer.
The subcommittee considered a significant volume of correspondence between Mr Murray and the Membership Department relating to his application.
The committee also noted correspondence from third parties relating to the application.
It was also obliged to consider previous objections.
The subcommittee was satisfied that, subject to proof of income, Mr Murray would satisfy the requirement for membership in terms of membership criteria.
Mr Murray did not provide sufficient information regarding his earnings from journalism to satisfy the panel as to his entitlement to full membership. On that basis Mr Murray was deemed ineligible for membership.
The subcommittee then reviewed the objections to the original application and the material cited in the complaints, including social media posts and Mr Murray’s blog.
The committee noted with concern Mr Murray’s behaviour towards NUJ members and office holders.
The subcommittee viewed his behaviour towards NUJ members as being inconsistent with the NUJ Membership Responsibilities and the NUJ Code of Conduct.
The committee felt that those who sought anonymity were justified in doing so, given Mr Murray’s published comments and his decision to publish correspondence relating to the investigation while the process was underway.
The committee recommends to the NEC that Mr Murray is not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ within the context of Rule 3 of the NUJ Rule Book.
November 11, 2022
Yours sincerely
Jackie Clark
Head of Finance and Membership
It perhaps goes without saying that this fight to keep alternative media going in face of universal onslaught really does need your financial support, no matter how small your contribution. My work is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going.
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