On the face of it the English High Court ruling that the Palestine Action proscription is unlawful makes the decision that the proscription remains in place pending appeal utterly illogical. But what if the High Court ruling is deliberately designed to fail at appeal?

I believe that it is. They chose an extremely narrow path to rule that proscription was unlawful and produced an extremely weak judgment. This gives an impression of fairness in the judicial system – except that nothing has changed, the ban remains in force. And it remains in force because the judgment is designed for the government to win at appeal.

The judgment for the most part is precisely what you would expect from three hand-picked, known right-wing, judges. They:

• State that Palestine Action is a terrorist group within the meaning of the 2000 Terrorism Act (para 134);
• State that they do not accept the United Nations assertion that the UK definition of Terrorism is incompatible with international norms (para 141);
• State that in any case international law has no impact on English statute law (para 142);
• State that all those arrested for showing support for Palestine Action – specifically including for holding placards – were rightly arrested as they were deliberately committing a criminal act (para 118);
• State that there was no need for Yvette Cooper to consult before the proscription (para 60);
• Repeat the Crown’s assertions of the Filton case as fact with no reference at all to the findings of the jury (paras 34, 139);
• State that comparisons with Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are not valid as those organisations have not carried out serious property damage (para 144);
• State that the motive of Palestine Action in trying to stop Genocide is not “material” (para 70);
• Argue that the interests of national security and protection of the rights and freedoms of others justify the interference with freedom of speech and assembly (para 128).

The judges have therefore supported the government on almost all of its key propositions. You may well ask, how did they find all that and still find the proscription unlawful?

Well, they chose a deliberately narrow and precarious path through. They first found that the proscription was unlawful in that it contradicted the Home Office’s published policy on how the discretion of the Secretary of State would be applied in deciding whether to proscribe a terrorist organisation.

It is important to understand this. The ruling is that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation, but that the Secretary of State is not obliged to proscribe all terrorist organisations but may use her discretion.

I have read the judgment again and again and it is incredibly obscure as to in what way the Home Secretary did not follow her policy. It seems to be that she did not consider the factors peculiar to Palestine Action, but merely proscribed as though that automatically followed a determination that an organisation is terrorist. Rather than consider the question in the round, she merely looked at the “operational advantages” of proscription.

I assume the underlying assumption is that this means she failed to take into account the disadvantages of proscription, but it does not say that. I don’t think I am being obtuse. You try.

92. This conclusion may appear to rest on a very narrow basis – the Home Secretary had, after all, formed the belief that Palestine Action is an organisation concerned in terrorism and in these proceedings the claimant does not challenge that decision. However, this conclusion is a direct and necessary consequence of the policy the Home Secretary has applied to the exercise of her discretion to proscribe such organisations. The purpose of the policy is that not all organisations that meet the concerned in terrorism requirement should be proscribed.

93. Any decision-maker who adopts a policy for a particular purpose is at liberty to disapply or modify that policy in a particular case, but any such disapplication or modification must be express and must be for a sufficient reason. In this case, the Home Secretary’s approach was to apply the policy (a policy of long-standing, dating back to the time the 2000 Act was enacted), without modification.

94. The operational consequences and advantages of proscription is not a factor consistent with the policy for the obvious reason that such consequences and advantages will apply equally to any organisation that could be proscribed – i.e. any and every organisation that meets the requirement to be an organisation concerned in terrorism. In principle the position could be otherwise if in a particular case, by reason of an organisation’s structure, membership, activities or otherwise, the measures in the 2000 Act that are the consequences of proscription would be unusually effective. In such a case, it could be consistent with the policy to regard the operational consequences of proscription as an “other factor”. But that is not the present case. There is no such evidence so far as concerns Palestine Action. Nor in the present case could it be contended that the reliance placed on the consequences of proscription was immaterial to the exercise of the discretion or the application of the policy. Both in the note of the meeting of the Proscription Review Group and in the 26 March 2025 ministerial submission, the operational advantages are relied on as providing a clear case to use the discretion to proscribe. Each suggests that it is an important matter going to the exercise of the discretion, if not the central consideration in that exercise in that case.

95. The consequence and conclusion of this point is that, notwithstanding the latitude that the policy provides, the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was not consistent with her policy. The closed material does not affect our conclusion on this ground.

There are two problems with this aspect of the judgment.

Firstly it seems so obscure that it is designed to fail at appeal.

The notion that its proscription was unlawful because the Secretary of State had failed to follow, not the established law, but the precise procedures in some buried Home Office policy document that nobody had ever read, is not one that I would have expected to carry the day compared to all the other issues.

It is indeed an established legal point, but one used in objections to planning applications rather than cases of alleged terrorism. Which is what I believe the Court of Appeal will say.

Secondly it leaves it open to the Secretary of State just to change the published policy, then proscribe again.

The second ground on which the court found against the government is that the proscription is incompatible with Articles X and XI of the European Convention on Human Rights – Freedom of Speech and Assembly.

But again this is not what you think.

Remember the judges found that the 2700 people arrested for opposing the ban have been quite rightly arrested, as expressing support for Palestine Action is a criminal act. The court does not hold that their right to freedom of speech is infringed.

In fact the court rehearses all the ways that speech will be chilled and people will be de-platformed as a result of the proscription, but does not find they are unreasonable to combat “terrorism”.

128. The Home Secretary’s pleaded case is that the purpose of proscription was to “disrupt and degrade PA so as to protect the rights of others and maintain national security”. The submissions on behalf of the Home Secretary sought to define the objective as “controlling terrorism” or “controlling terrorist organisations” through proscription of organisations that engage in “terrorism” as defined in s.1 of the 2000 Act. It seems to us that the latter is a description of the means of obtaining the objective. The identified legitimate aims of the proscription decision are “the protection of the rights and freedoms of others” and “the interests of national security”. Those aims appear in each of articles 10(2) and 11(2), respectively and are objectives that, in principle, are capable of warranting an interference with each Convention right.

129. Although the claimant raised the question whether there is a rational connection between the means chosen and the aim in view, no basis for suggesting there is not a rational connection was put forward. Proscription is rationally connected to the objective of disrupting Palestine Action so as to protect the rights of others and the interests of national security. That is so whether the objective was limited to curtailing actions by Palestine Action causing serious property damage within the meaning of section 1 of the 2000 Act, or extended more broadly

When after all this support for the government, the judgment finally delivers the key paragraph on why the proscription was unlawful, it suddenly leaps out at you: the result of a proportionality exercise the judgment had not previously defined or given a methodology.

140. Considering in the round the evidence available to the Home Secretary when the decision to proscribe was made, the nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities, so far as they comprise acts of terrorism, has not yet reached the level, scale and persistence that would justify the application of the criminal law measures that are the consequence of proscription, and the very significant interference with Convention rights consequent on those measures.

It is a goal entirely against the run of play in the previous 139 paragraphs. I am afraid to say that I think the marked lack of intellectual underpinning again makes it a structure designed to fail.

Three known very conservative judges were appointed at the last moment to replace the liberal judge Chamberlain, who was unceremoniously booted off the case. It seemed astonishing that these known sympathisers with the security state had found the proscription unlawful.

But they cannot really think both that it is unlawful, and that it should continue pending appeal. That is utterly illogical.

They cannot really think it is an unlawfully disproportionate interference with freedom of speech, and that those arrested for holding placards opposing it were criminals and rightfully charged.

That is a logical impossibility also. Yet both sit side by side in this judgment.

The judges are not stupid. It can only be that they do not really mean it when they state one of those opinions. All the signs are that it is para 140, swinging entirely unsupported and exposed and waiting to be struck down, that they do not really mean.

If they believed in their own judgment, the judges would have quashed the proscription pending appeal.

Palestine Action was a proscribed organisation before this judgment and it is a proscribed organisation after this judgment. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

That is why it is essential that the Scottish judicial review goes ahead. I for one am very interested to discover whether the paragraph

142. We doubt that the consensus claimed exists: see and compare R v Gul (Mohammed) [2013] UKSC 64, [2014] AC 1260 per Lords Neuberger and Judge at paragraphs 44 – 51. In any event, this submission faces the further obstacle that, when taking her decision, the Home Secretary was entitled to rely on the definition of terrorism in the 2000 Act. Indeed, she was required to apply that definition. Had she purported to rely on any other definition for the purposes of her decision she would have acted unlawfully. A “consensus” in international law is not a trump card in English law; any such consensus cannot permit either disregard of or derogation from an English statute save to the extent permitted by statute.

which specifically references “English law”, applies equally in Scotland. The English legal tradition is that the “Crown in parliament” is sovereign and may do absolutely anything it wishes, irrespective of international law, individual rights or any other consideration. The Scottish legal tradition is that the people are sovereign and protected from arbitrary or oppressive executive action.

Should Huda Ammori again win at appeal, Shabana Mahmood will certainly appeal to the Supreme Court. It would be extremely difficult for the Supreme Court to rule against the highest courts of both England and Scotland. So there is reason to continue the Scottish action even if the English case continues to win.

Should the UK government win at appeal in England, the Scottish case becomes still more crucial.

The UK government has succeeded in postponing the Scottish case, in order to give time to prepare for the admission of secret evidence. This is an incredible authoritarian procedure where they can submit “intelligence” to the court, which neither I nor my legal team will ever be permitted to know about, let alone have a chance to reply.

My interest will be “represented” by a “special advocate” with whom I shall never be able to communicate and thus will have no ability to give them the answer to whatever lies the UK government has put forward – probably about non-existent Iranian funding or entirely invented bomb plots.

This system is simply fascist. We have no idea to what extent the “secret evidence” used in the English case contributed to the court’s agreement that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation.

We push on. I hate to say this, but we are now desperately short of funds to continue this action. I cannot keep asking the same supporters to give more, but if you know people who can afford it and will contribute, please activate them.

You can donate through the link via Crowd Justice, which goes straight to the lawyers, or through this blog.

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Alternatively by bank transfer:

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As the trial finished at Woolwich Crown Court of the six Palestine Action activists who entered the Filton factory to destroy Israeli killer drones, Starmer, Cooper, Lammy and Mahmood are left bereft of a single guilty verdict in the case on which they relied heavily to label Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

I could not, on pain of imprisonment, tell you this during the trial. One item produced by the prosecution as evidence was the notebook of Charlotte Head, on which she had written details from her training session with Palestine Action and of the proposed direct action against Elbit’s drone factory.

The first ten pages of her notes were about the Israeli weapons company Elbit, their footprint in the UK, their corporate structure and the weapons they manufacture, and the evidence of the use of their weaponry in the genocide in Gaza.

The jury were shown the notebook but were specifically not allowed to see the first ten pages. Throughout the trial anything that referred to the crimes of Elbit, their role in the mass killing and mutilation of women and children, and their cosy relationship with the British government, was excluded from the jury. The judge continually stopped the defence lawyers from asking or saying anything about who Elbit are or why their property was being attacked.

The defendants were not permitted therefore to explain to the jury why they did what they did – which you might have believed was a pretty fundamental right. The jury were additionally, in effect, instructed by Judge Johnson to convict on the least serious charge, that of criminal damage.

But despite the state taking every possible precaution to ensure that the state got its convictions in this show trial, the jury refused to find that trying to stop Genocide is a crime.

This trial was fundamental to the government’s argument that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation. And the key to that was the accusation that Palestine Action from the start intended harm to people, not just to property. That is why these defendants were all charged with “aggravated burglary”.

Aggravated burglary is an extremely serious charge, carrying a potential life sentence. It is the offence of breaking into a property with the intent to use a weapon. On aggravated burglary, all six defendants were found resoundingly Not Guilty.

So the attempt to portray Palestine Action as an organisation involved in violence against persons has fallen flat on its face. Because the jury could see it was stupid and obviously untrue.

When it comes to events after the activists were attacked by security guards, three of the six were found not guilty of the charge of “violent disorder”. On three others the jury could not reach a verdict.

Most interesting of all perhaps was the charge of criminal damage to Elbit’s machinery and instruments of genocide. Here Judge Johnson to all intents and purposes had instructed the jury to convict. Yet enough of the jury could not accept that stopping Genocide is a crime.

The final question was the charge against Samuel Corner of Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent. This was the famous incident where the security guards attacked the defendants with weapons and there was a melee as they defended themselves.

It is worth stating that the tabloid stories and right-wing meme of “a policewoman’s spine was fractured” was always utter nonsense. As the defence closing speech stated:

The prosecution have said it was a fracture to the spine, a deliberate choice of words which although technically accurate, conjure up a break, a snapping of the spinal vertebrae. Maybe that’s what the jury had in mind until they saw the CT scan – it was actually an injury that wasn’t obvious. The doctors looking at the first X-rays didn’t identify any bone damage, nor in an MRI later.

The injury didn’t require surgery and Sergeant Evans was advised to take painkillers and do physiotherapy. The agreed facts state from medical evidence that you’d expect such a fracture to heal in six to twelve weeks, with full healing in three to six months, and no long-term consequences.

The unfortunate policewoman suffered no damage at all to her spinal cord. She had a possible hairline fracture to the wing of one vertebra. That there was any fracture at all was never definitive from the X-rays and MRIs. Whether it reached the bar of grievous bodily harm was disputed; how it was caused was disputed; and whether there was any intent to harm was disputed. The refusal of the jury to convict was completely consistent with the evidence heard in court.

This has driven right-wingers into a frenzy with completely false claims about the extent of the injury, and continued reference to a highly edited brief video clip.

That video clip is extremely important because it represents the height of the state’s attempt to use this incident to demonise Palestine Action. The police were permitted, during the course of the trial, to release a single and highly edited clip of video said to represent the injury of Sergeant Evans by a sledgehammer. A great deal of other video evidence was not released. This resulted in a massive media frenzy.

Even before this, Yvette Cooper and Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Mark Rowley had caused massive prejudice by stating that a policewoman had been attacked with a sledgehammer.

None of these deliberate attempts to affect the trial was censured by the judge nor resulted in any proceedings for contempt of court. Yet we were strictly told we absolutely could not mention that the judge was withholding the evidence about Elbit from the jury, as that would prejudice the trial and we would face contempt of court proceedings.

On Sergeant Evans, she has become a cause célèbre for the right, but I should say there is no evidence she is herself whipping this up. Her behaviour on the night was admirable. She was not herself involved in the excessive use of force – and, despite her own painful back, tended to others after the event quietened.

In my view, this prosecution was doomed by the overcharging and exaggeration used by the government to demonise Palestine Action. The “aggravated burglary” charge was ludicrous. To attempt to claim that the activists entered the factory with the intent of using weapons against people, went so far against the evidence it was bound to fail.

The massive over-exaggeration of the extent of Sergeant Evans’s injury has successfully whipped up right-wing hysteria, but did not really meet the threshold of grievous bodily harm, and the decision to add intent to that charge was again not backed by evidence.

On criminal damage, the jury plainly refused to accept the destruction of weapons of genocide was a crime. For that, I salute them. For the rest, they simply applied robust common sense to the evidence before them.

The “policewoman attacked with a sledgehammer” nonsense of course featured heavily in the English judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. In the Scottish judicial review, they cannot really use this – not without a caveat that a jury did not agree with them.

The Filton result is great news for the Scottish judicial review. We have to submit all the paperwork for that, in just seven working days. I hate to say this, but we are now desperately short of funds to continue this action. I cannot keep asking the same supporters to give more, but if you know people who can afford it and will contribute please activate them.

You can donate through the link via Crowd Justice, which goes straight to the lawyers, or through this blog.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/scottish-challenge-to-proscription/

Alternatively by bank transfer:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address NatWest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Or crypto:

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

I have now been here a week and I think that I have absorbed enough to attempt a little analysis, as opposed to the simple impressions I gave shortly after arrival.

Those impressions remain valid however: this is not a repressive state. I was on the Randy Credico show live on WBAI New York on Friday, and by chance my friend, the renowned FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley was also on, from Minnesota (where I have stayed with Colleen and her husband in their home).

I was explaining that, in a week of going all round Caracas, I had yet to see a checkpoint, that nobody had at any stage asked me who I am, what I was doing or prevented me from going anywhere, and that the shops, bars and restaurants are all functioning normally.

Colleen reported from Minneapolis that there were checkpoints everywhere, that the streets are full of heavily armed men, that people are frequently stopped, questioned, asked to produce documents, and diverted, and that many shops bars and restaurants are closed because the staff are afraid to venture out into the streets. Colleen is heavily involved in detainee support and in getting supplies to people sheltering in their homes.

Remind me again, which of us is in a supposed dictatorship?

I want to tell you a couple of things to help explain Venezuela. I visited the mausoleum of Simon Bolivar, a genuinely heroic man. He has now been removed from the main Venezuelan Pantheon into a connected dedicated modern mausoleum. The Pantheon itself contains the remains of many of the heroes of the Venezuelan War of Independence, and monuments to all of them.

The Venezuelan War of Independence was, of course, in many respects similar to the United States war given the same name. It was a war between colonial elites and their metropolitan masters. Unlike the founders of the USA, Bolivar himself was genuinely opposed to slavery, but that was not true of many of his key allies.

So the Pantheon as originally conceived in the late 19th century was inhabited by the remains and memories almost entirely of those heroic people of Spanish descent who fought against the colonial control of Spain. This is the great founding ideal of Venezuela.

When Chavez and Maduro came to power, they made a very important change. They added a monument to the liberated slaves who had fought against the Spanish. Then Chavez and Maduro each added an extra monument: to leaders of the Native Americans who had fought against Spanish invasion in the first place.

This caused outrage among right wingers furious that the purity of the Pantheon, the great focus of Venezuelan nationalism, was being desecrated for what they viewed as political purposes. Which brings me to what I think is a fundamental observation. Politics in Venezuela are basically racial.

I am treading on eggshells here, but in 2019 I published this post noticing the contrast between opposition and government group photos. The leadership of the right wing are basically whiter. That is simply who they are.

Of course the divide is not absolute, and individual exceptions exist. But it is there. Politics in Venezuela are strongly class based, and in this post-colonial society it is difficult to disentangle race from class.

What the opposition want is simply to turn back the clock and restore economic apartheid in Venezuela. I had a very interesting talk with Ricardo Vaz of Venezuela Analysis. He explained how Chavez’s revolutionary policies had brought people into political discourse who had always been ignored in what was historically an extremely unequal society:

“The rulers, now the opposition, suddenly found that their cook, their cleaner, their driver and even their gardener were learning to read and write and starting to get political ideas. They did not like this at all”.

They still don’t like that. It is not possible for me here now to capture what happened exactly in the 2024 elections. Plainly the opposition performed relatively well, though I do not in the least believe they got 68% of the result. Maduro’s closing rally had 1 million people while the opposition’s had 50,000.

For the government to remain in power against the will of 68% of the population would require a degree of state repression which simply does not exist here. There is very little surveillance compared to Western states, let alone to acknowledged dictatorships. There are no politicised police or militias in the streets. There are no restrictions on people moving around and mingling.

Machado has discredited herself, as effectively as she has discredited the Nobel peace prize. Giving the prize to Trump made her look foolish and suppliant, and praising the bombing of her own country which killed fellow citizens has really not gone down well at all, even with opposition supporters.

But even that has not harmed her nearly as much as her remark to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee that 60% of Venezuelans are involved in narcotics or prostitution. This is not quite what she said, but it is near enough and it really annoyed people here:

We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60% of our populations, and not only involving drug trafficking, but in human trafficking, in networks of prostitution. So this has turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas…

Which takes me back to personal impressions. I have, as those who follow me would expect, assiduously been checking out the bars of Caracas. I have found some very beautiful ones – Juan Sebastian Bar is one of the most lovely bars that I have ever seen. A piece of stunning interior design. I took these photos before it opened one evening. It serves mojitos even better than you can get in Havana.

That is not a mirror, those are two grand pianos!

The point is that not in my hotel, not in any bar, not on any street, have I seen a single person who appeared to be operating as a sex worker. Not one – and I might perhaps be viewed as a pretty archetypal target. Similarly I have not seen any sign at all of narcotics abuse. In two days in Salisbury investigating the Skripal hoax I was shocked by how many obvious drug addicts we saw on the streets. There is nothing of the kind in Caracas.

While I appreciate that the allegation is that Venezuela exports narcotics rather than consumes them, you always get clusters of addiction around production points and transit nodes. I just see no evidence that the common tropes about Venezuela and Venezuelans are true: and I am a trained and seasoned observer.

Sanctions against Venezuela did not start after the disputed 2024 election; they have been applied by the Western powers more or less since the very start of Chavez’s socialist experiment. The repression of socialism in Latin America has been US policy for a century, and the more Chavez succeeded the more the West sought to suppress it. France refused to provide spares for the Mirage jets of the Venezuelan air force, and equally refused to supply spare parts for the trains of the Metro service.

The gold and foreign currency reserves abroad of the government of Venezuela have simply been stolen by foreign governments, and the blocking of Venezuela from the Swift bank transfer system for a while caused havoc. It has however spurred BRICS to develop an alternative, not fully adopted, not finished but working in Venezuela, which accounts for the full stocks in the shops and ultimately might represent a significant moment in international economics.

Slowly, unwillingly, the Socialist Party under Maduro has been forced precisely by the crippling effect of sanctions to allow more space for the private sector and move from a fully socialist to a more social democratic model – though to describe the reforms under Maduro as “neoliberal” is ridiculous. It may theoretically be possible to build socialism in one country, but if the major economic powers join forces to destroy you, it becomes very difficult indeed.

A dangerously simplistic narrative about what has happened in Venezuela has taken hold in the West, fuelled by Trump, CIA and Machado/Miami sources.

On this reading, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez is in collusion with Trump, betrayed Maduro and stood down defences on the night of his kidnap, and is now instituting neoliberal policies, including a new petroleum law which states only the USA may ship Venezuelan oil and that payments for it will go exclusively through the US in Qatar.

In fact this is not true at all. Venezuela’s new petroleum legislation contains no provisions banning oil exports to China or Russia and no provision for payments to be routed through the USA. The new petroleum law is in fact legislation which sets out a new commercial basis for the operation of the Venezuelan petroleum sector on the same kind of concession, licensing and royalty basis as pertains in almost every other oil producer.

The key point is that the legislation was drafted under Maduro, with extensive consultation and debate. It came for its first reading to the Assembly literally the day after Maduro was kidnapped. That was already scheduled, not a result of the kidnapping. The notion that Maduro opposed the legislation and Rodríguez had to get rid of him to get it through is patent nonsense.

The legislation is unrelated to the United States’ current hijack of the sale of Venezuelan oil. This is proceeding through simple piracy. Trump decreed that only two companies, Vitol and Trafigura, would be allowed to load Venezuelan oil, and those companies would pay for the oil to the United States, into a special account held in Qatar under Trump’s name.

This new scheme has been enforced by simple piracy. Any tankers carrying oil not owned by Vitol and Trafigura from Venezuela have been illegally seized at sea by the US Navy, sometimes assisted by the UK government. The United States has been claiming that Venezuela agrees to this arrangement. That is not true. Or it is true in the sense that a hostage held at gunpoint agrees to stay put, rather than get a bullet through the skull.

The Venezuelan government simply has no physical ability to prevent the United States Navy from seizing oil tankers.

Nor is it true that the Venezuelan government gave the United States information on non-Vitol and -Trafigura tankers and requested their interception. Obviously the United States could get the information on “rogue” tankers from Vitol and Trafigura.

Trafigura have featured in my writing for decades as the archetypal extremely corrupt Western corporation. Their record for deliberate pollution and corruption in Africa is appalling, including in Angola and Ivory Coast. They have frequently been involved in CIA schemes for regime change.

How Vitol and Trafigura came to be the beneficiaries of a duopoly, and what backhanders that may have involved, is another question. In fact this is the one area of domestic pressure that has forced a step back from Trump, and last Friday it was announced that the arrangement will be expanded to include more companies.

It is worth noting that the system has not just been invented for Venezuela. It is almost identical to the system imposed on Iraq after its destruction by the United States and its allies, with payments for Iraqi oil made to the USA and a percentage of them returned to the Iraqi government.

The difference is that the Iraqi revenues were paid to the US Treasury, whereas the Venezuelan funds are going to a Qatar account under Trump’s personal control, removed from the reach of Congress. At its most charitable reading, it gives him a massive slush fund to pursue policy outside the United States legal framework. It is like Iran-Contra on a massive scale.

To reiterate: none of this sales arrangement has been agreed by Rodríguez and none of it is contained in the new Venezuelan hydrocarbon legislation on concessions and royalties. There are two separate things being widely conflated.

The line that Delcy Rodríguez agrees both to the kidnap of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia, and to the hijacking of Venezuelan oil sales and revenues, has been deliberately spread by the US and its acolytes, despite Delcy Rodríguez’s furious denials.

If Rodríguez really was Trump’s placed woman, then boasting about it would fatally undermine her within Venezuela and bring about her downfall – which obviously would be entirely counterproductive were there any truth in the claim.

So why is this rumour being spread? Well the obvious reason is precisely to undermine Rodríguez and destabilise the government of Venezuela.

But perhaps a more important factor is Trump’s obsessive need to claim victory. He gathered a massive military force off the coast of Venezuela, and stood in danger of mockery as the Grand Old Duke of York if he simply sailed it away again.

The seizure of Maduro has in fact changed nothing in policy terms within Venezuela, but it has provided a spectacular operation for Trump to claim as a victory. In truth, as a demonstration of the capabilities of the United States’ offensive military technology, it was indeed technically impressive.

For the removal of Maduro to be portrayed as a triumph, Trump has to claim that Rodríguez is solidly pro-USA, even though this is plainly not true. It is merely a part of the parade of triumph that is an essential component both of Trump’s ego and of the bombastic Trump method.

What now happens to Maduro and Cilia is, on this reading, not really relevant. The entirely false narrative of the non-existent Cartel de los Soles has already been abandoned as part of the prosecution. In the USA’s misnamed “justice” system, they have a variety of witness accusations from diverse figures prepared to sign nonsense against Maduro as part of a plea bargain agreement. These include rococo Trump-pleasing standouts such as testimony that Maduro was involved in fixing the 2020 US Presidential election on behalf of Biden.

My prediction is that Trump will “pardon” Maduro before the prosecution gets too silly, and present that as another part of his triumph. But who can predict a madman?

That is precisely the conundrum now facing Delcy Rodríguez. She is dealing with two imponderable equations.

The first was already difficult enough. Historians and ideologues will debate for centuries whether Chavismo could have succeeded economically with its full-on socialist programme, had the Western world not determined to destroy it with crippling sanctions.

What is I think beyond dispute is that the sanctions were so crippling that they caused considerable public hardship, and massive inflation. At the same time, the very fact that Venezuela is not highly dictatorial and both Chavez and Maduro broadly allowed debate, free opposition political parties and media, and the operation of Western-funded NGOs, meant that the Venezuelan population were continually bombarded with Western propaganda which blamed the problems caused by sanctions on the Bolivarian Revolution.

This eroded support for the socialist project, which though still intact, has crumbled at the edges. The Bolivarian government has been obliged to try to mitigate the effects of the sanctions which stole the government’s own capital, and to seek the removal of some sanctions, by the opening up of more space for capitalist investment and operation in the economy, notably but by no means only in the oil sector.

In other words the government has been forced to concede some ground to the West by inching along the spectrum from socialist to social democratic, while attempting to maintain the massive social gains of the Chavez revolution.

This is an exercise in which Nicolás Maduro himself was fully engaged. I believe that both Maduro and Rodríguez have the intention of inching back from social democracy towards socialism over time, once pressures have eased. Theirs is a game of strategy, not of tactics.

To this already extremely sensitive calculation is added the extraordinary factor of Trump. His willingness to simply kill innocent people, to shatter international law, and to impose his will by exploiting massive United States military advantage over a small country, changed all the rules of the game.

The pressure to make changes faster to appease somebody who is plainly mentally unstable, the difficulty of understanding his limits and true goals, is an excruciating experience when the lives and deaths of Venezuelans are in your hands. Trump’s incredible bombast, his wild claims that Venezuelan land and oil is stolen from the USA, are not contained within the realm of normal diplomatic negotiation.

Delcy Rodríguez is not so much walking a tightrope, as navigating an Indiana Jones tunnel full of traps.

One thing that Trump has in fact got right is his contention that Machado does not have the public support to rule. This seems to me indisputable, and an attempt to impose her would result in civil war. This of course in itself undermines the contention that Machado’s team massively won the 2024 election.

Meanwhile life in Venezuela goes on for ordinary people. I had the great pleasure to attend a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra on Sunday. It was very accomplished, and the auditorium was full. The programme was entirely of Venezuelan composers, and I had never heard any of the music before. The opening symphonic poem by Juan Bautista Plaza would stand alongside the European repertoire without blushing.

I make no apologies for bringing little slices of ordinary life to you, because the picture we have been given of Venezuela is so strangely and massively distorted, it requires multiple points of correction.

Chavez instituted a programme of musical education for working-class children that became the envy of the classical music world, known simply as La Sistema. Much more heart-rending examples of Western sanctions might be found, involving medical provision. But as an example of the cruel absurdity of the sanctions regime, the youth orchestra of Venezuela has difficulties getting hold of simple consumables – strings, reeds, plectra – because of sanctions.

In bringing violin strings to a child I should be committing a crime in the United States of America. Let that be a testament to the absurdity of using sanctions to crush human spirit.

I am very aware I have not left Caracas yet and of the limitations of my experience so far. But I am already struck by the great advantage of being here over commentators in the West who I see daily, even when well-intentioned, getting it all wrong. The mainstream media of course produce a fake narrative entirely as a matter of policy.

I am delighted to say that today our new videographer and editor are starting and we will be able to bring you video content. I also hope today to conclude rent of an office/studio space.

We now have a Venezuela reporting crowdfunder. I have simply edited the Lebanese GoFundMe crowdfunder, because that took many weeks to be approved and I don’t want to go through all that again. So its starting baseline is the £35,000 we raised and spent in Lebanon.

I do very much appreciate that I have been simultaneously crowdfunding to fight the UK government in the Scottish courts over the proscription of Palestine Action. We fight forces that have unlimited funds. We can only succeed if we spread the load. 98% of those who read my articles never contribute financially. This would be a good moment to change that. It is just the simple baseline subscriptions to my blog that have got me to Venezuela, and that remains the foundation for all my work.

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of subscription payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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