After leaving the British diplomatic service because of my commitment to Human Rights, and horror at their abuse by the US and UK in the “War on Terror”, I applied for a job at Human Rights Watch. I travelled to New York for a job interview, which was chaired by Kenneth Roth. Rather to my surprise, it revolved almost entirely around Israel, and whether I would agree with the proposition that Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis were a major threat to human rights, which HRW should work against.

I replied that any criminal attack on a person was in effect an intrusion on their human rights. That in my view “terrorism” consisted of activities which had always been illegal, such as murder or conspiracy to murder, and that the “anti-terrorism” industry was already massive without Human Rights Watch joining in. I felt that HRW could best operate by continuing to expose abuse of power by authorities.

I didn’t get the job.

Anyway, HRW have now produced a useful paper cataloguing the fact that all recent “terrorist plots” in the United States have been agent provocateur operations initiated by the massive anti-terror industry to keep itself in business. Some convicted terrorists were even ideologically opposed to terrorism before being brainwashed into it by FBI agents.

This is all important and true, but the problem is that most of us have known this for years. HRW also steer clear of some of the glaring inconsistencies in the Tsarnaev narrative.

A completely different subject, but another example of the mainstream catching up with this blog eventually, Scotland on Sunday
has noticed the fact that Jean-Claude Juncker supports Scotland’s membership of the EU. The interesting thing is that the journalist, Andrew Whitaker, has apparently spoken to the same source that I spoke to two weeks ago, and got almost precisely the same answers.

“However, a high-ranking EU official last night stated Junker “would not want Scotland to be kept out”. The source said: “He’d be sympathetic as someone who is from a smaller country…

Scotland would be “exempt” from the process as it is already a signatory to core requirements for nation states in areas as such employment rights and equality legislation because of its 40-year membership of the EU as part of the UK.”

The fact is that the source I spoke to (apologies convention is they can’t be named) was absolutely the obvious place to go. Plainly James Cook of the BBC and now Andrew Whitaker eventually got there, but only after the entire media in Scotland had run with the opposite and entirely untrue story. But it was not at all difficult to discover the truth. It took me twenty minutes, ten days before any journalist even thought of it. Now we finally have some belated journalism happening by people who, unlike me, are actually paid to do it.

Massive demonstrations have taken place all over the UK against the continuing massacre in Gaza. There appears for the last three decades, to be a massive gulf between the attitude of the population of the United Kingdom towards the continuing genocide of the Palestinians, and the attitude of the political class across all mainstream political parties.

The divorce of the political class from the people – commonly referred to in the media as the decline of trust, as though it were the people’s fault – has been a huge phenomenon of recent times. In the case of the vocal and unreserved support of the political class for Zionism, it really does seem to be as simple as the constant pumping of pro-Zionist money to the politicians. Actually, this makes it a useful marker for how the entire rotten system works.

CNN just announced that Israeli is launching a ground invasion “after ten days of Hamas attacks by land air and sea.” There was no questioning of that quite incredible statement. Talk about the big lie.

In a strange way I prefer this to the continued aerial bombardment, because at least the Palestinians will be able to fight back to some extent. I do hope the Palestinian defenders have a good deal of success against the Israeli tanks. Let us hope the IDF get a bloody nose like they did in Lebanon 2006.

UPDATE

The heroic Israelis have killed a five month old baby with a tank. Hope they are very proud of themselves.

Grief is the only appropriate reaction to the death of so many people on Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17. The point scoring and guessing games are macabre. Of course, some people have to suppress grief and get to work urgently to secure the crash site from interference so there can be a proper investigation of what happened.

We have no idea what evidence lies behind the various statements as to who did or did not shoot down the plane. There is no evidence I have seen that it was shot down at all. This could relate to Ukrainian violence, it could relate to MH 370, it could be an unrelated incident. We really don’t know yet.

What is particularly ghoulish is the false grief, what I might call the triumphalist shroud waving, of those seeking gleefully to blame the side they do not support in the Ukrainian conflict. In the current total absence of evidence, this is abominable behaviour.

Most of the Stockholm hearing into the Assange case yesterday was held in secret. It is plain from comments on my blog that many people have not grasped this point: if Assange goes to trial in Sweden it will be mostly held IN SECRET. There will be no jury. There will be a judge and two assessors. The assessors are nominated one each by Sweden’s main political parties.

It will not be like the Oscar Pistorius trial, where justice is open and society can form a fair view of the strength of the evidence against the member of society who has been accused. It will be a secret proceeding in which you will hear little more than the verdict. You will never know what the evidence was. All this is to “protect” the false accusers from the public obloquy they so richly deserve.

I have yet to hear a single one of those jumping on the “Assange should face a fair trial” bandwagon address the point that it will be a secret trial, stitched up in advance by Sweden’s political parties who are, to say the very least, CIA-friendly.

I am not therefore in the least surprised by yesterday’s Swedish court verdict, which Assange’s lawyers will appeal, probably pointlessly. The fix is well and truly in.

For me, the most important point at yesterday’s trial was about disclosure. The defence was applying to see the hundreds of texts from and between Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen in the possession of the prosecution, including texts they sent when at the police station making their complaint.

Now in every other legal system I know, those would have to be shown to the defence. Weirdly, in this case they were shown briefly to defence lawyers, but they were not allowed to have copies or write anything down. What on earth can be the purpose of that? Can anybody explain to me any principle of law that might explain why defence lawyers should be allowed very quickly to read them but not have copies or ever see them again?

In the UK, the US, France, Spain, South Africa, Ghana and Russia those texts would have to be available to the defence. Anyone with knowledge of other jurisdictions would be welcome to contribute. The EU has made plain that the ability of Swedish prosecutors to hide evidence tending to innocence is contrary to the human rights of citizens. Accordingly, Sweden has been obliged to amend its law for the first time, to bring it a step towards civilised practice and institute disclosure. This has just happened, and this appeal by Assange was viewed as an important test case for the new duty of disclosure.

The Prosecutors however said that the new Swedish legislation makes plain that they do not have to disclose the case file to the defence. That appears to make some sense, in that the prosecution has to be free to set out its case in court. But it cannot possibly mean that the prosecution can make the EU obligation a dead letter, simply by hiding any evidence that tends to innocence inside the “case file”. That would negate the entire purpose of the new law, and Sweden plainly is still not meeting its international human rights obligation. The hiding of these texts should be a severe concern to anybody whose concern is genuinely for justice.

Finally we have the strange question of the refusal of the prosecutors to advance the case by taking up the offer to conduct initial interviews with Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy. It is perfectly known procedure for investigative authorities to
travel to conduct interviews in other countries. It happens pretty frequently.

The question here is, what do they have to lose? If they travel to interview Assange in London, and they believe the interview clears up the questions outstanding, that may resolve the case. If they feel it does not clear up the case, then they are still a bit further advanced than they were before, having conducted the interview, and the difficulty of Assange’s physical location will have been no better of worse than today. For the cost of a short haul air ticket, it is truly worth a try.

The prosecutors’ argument against interviewing Assange smacks of desperation. They could not compel Assange to take a DNA swab in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Well, have they asked him if he is willing to provide a sample? Knowing Julian he will happily agree. (You would, incidentally, have to be extraordinary naïve to believe that the security services have not had Assange’s DNA on file for years.)

But what is the DNA sample for. There is no question of identity in this case. Nobody has ever argued that the man who Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen eagerly got into their beds was Julian Assange. The argument concerns the wearing of condoms whilst there. Anna Ardin produced a torn condom, not at her first police interview but several days later, and by then weeks after it had allegedly been used by Assange. She had told police at interview that she “might” be able to find it. One does have to wonder about her sanitary habits that she was able to find an allegedly used condom weeks after the event. Strangely, the torn condom she eventually brought in had nobody’s DNA on it but her own.

Secret courts, no jury, no disclosure of evidence tending to innocence, refusal to interview Assange in London. To believe that this is a genuine attempt to pursue a crime, you need to have had every critical faculty removed.

The trolls will be out big time on comments now. I am more than happy for contrary opinions to be addressed, provided the commenter actually includes a response to the specific points which I make above. Otherwise they will be simply deleted.

This blog exclusively broke the news that Juncker was much more friendly to Scottish independence, and that was a major reason for Cameron’s bitter opposition.

Unionists were in frenzies of delight this past 24 hours at Juncker’s statement that he saw no further enlargement of the EU for five years. Wings Over Scotland has done an excellent job of summing up the triumphalism of the media and of every senior Unionist politician you can think of.

The BBC deserves the massive criticism it has been given for unionist bias, but James Cook of the BBC deserves credit for asking Juncker’s office whether his statement included Scotland. The reply could not have been more clear. Juncker did not include Scotland in that statement. As Juncker had said before, Scottish independence is a matter for democratic decision and is an internal EU matter. Juncker was talking abut the length of time it would take applicant nations to meet the acquis communitaire, or body of EU law, regulation and obligation. Scotland, by definition, already does meet the acquis.

All this Juncker’s office told the BBC explicitly. What is implicit, and self-evidently true, is that Scotland’s independence is not an enlargement, it is just Scotland remaining in, requiring some internal readjustment.

This ought to be good news for everyone – including the unionists.

I can understand that there are people who genuinely love Scotland, but wish for reasons of history to retain the United Kingdom. I even understand some of those honestly believe Scots will be wealthier and happier in the UK. I think they are very wrong, but entitled to that view and some people hold it sincerely.

But such genuine Unionists, should they lose the referendum, would surely wish Scotland to remain in the European Union? That already guarantees the continuance of all the most essential links between England and Scotland, in particular full freedom of movement and settlement and trade and citizens’ rights. It is also important for Scotland’s future prosperity.

Surely a real unionist would want to retain the Union, but still want Scotland to remain in the EU if it became independent?

But instead, every professional unionist politician was gloating at the entirely fictitious prospect of Scotland being kicked out of the EU. They were absolutely delighted at the prospect. They really hate Scotland.

There are decent unionists. But the professional politicians are not decent unionists. They were delighted at the very idea that Scotland might be kicked out of the EU. Because actually they hate, despise and fear Scotland and the Scots. For them, Scotland only exists to pay for their very comfortable public funded lifestyles. The idea they may lose their power, influence and above all their money, horrifies them.

“You are going to vote for the Union!! You are going to vote for me!! If not, you are going to SUFFER, you bastards, SUFFER!!!”

I have a prize of two hundred pounds available to the first person who can show me an instance of the media reporting Juncker’s clarification with the same prominence, space and energy they devoted to splashing the Unionist scare story.

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Egypt’s bloodthirsty military dictatorship, installed with CIA and Israeli support, offers to mediate. What’s not to trust?

I have repeatedly said that Peter Oborne is the best journalist working in the UK today.

Left and right are issues of economics over which well-meaning people can legitimately have a discussion and disagreement. A much more fundamental political divide is between those who serve the establishment of the super-rich who are mulcting the people, and those who oppose them. That is a question of right and wrong, not of the best way to achieve the general good. And on that vital measure, Oborne is firmly on the side of the angels.

Oborne has an important article in the Telegraph here on Cage Prisoners. I would only add to this that I have spoken at fund-raising events for Cage before, and will without hesitation do so again.

In the UK, the Tories have edged into the lead in the latest Guardian/ICM opinion poll. While New Labour’s support for benefit cuts, government spending plans and the entire neo-con agenda means it makes no difference who is in power at Westminster, residual voter tribal loyalty to these moribund and corrupt parties remains the basic fact of “mainstream” politics, even after the voters have twigged the politicians are almost all self-serving crooks.

That is important for Scotland, as the perception of continued Tory rule at Westminster will increase the independence vote. By the Autumn it is going to be very clear the Tories are in power until 2020. But will that perception enter the public consciousness before September 18 2014? Charles Clarke, ever anxious to stab his colleagues in the back – a defining Labour trait – is doing his best to make it clear.

It is a mystery why the Observer failed to name Lord Greville Janner as the paedophile abusing boys from care homes. The facts of this particular boy’s continued molestation, and the existence of the letters to him from Janner, have been public knowledge for decades. I can only presume that Britain’s appalling libel laws, which function solely to protect the very rich from exposure of their misdeeds, are the reason for the Observer’s reticence. My own view is that the gross suppression of freedom of speech in the UK has been insufficiently considered as a major reason for the impunity which the wealthy and the powerful have enjoyed for so long.

Janner of course was for decades the leading spokesman for Zionism in this country. His response to the last major massacre of Palestinians in Gaza was to visit an Israeli settlement and blame Hamas rocket attacks. It is interesting to contrast Janner’s protection by the media with the case of David Mellor. For decades the media knew that Janner buggered boys from care homes, and did nothing about it. He remained the whole time the chosen spokesman for UK Zionism.

By contrast, David Mellor was the last British minister who ever told the truth about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. The immediate result was a tabloid campaign about Mellor’s perfectly legal, consensual and adult sex life, which destroyed Mellor’s career.

What do you think caused the extraordinarily different media treatment of the playful Mellor and the sinister child-buggerer Janner? Why is the Observer still protecting his name yesterday?

Despite the major evidence against him, there will be no prosecution of Janner because the establishment has accepted an argument that he is too senile. Interestingly enough, a man who knows a very great deal about the much more recent sex secrets of the establishment, “Lord” Edward Davenport, has just been allowed out of jail seven years early on the grounds of ill-health. I was in charge of British relations with West Africa as Deputy Head of the Equatorial Africa Department at the FCO, when the Sierra Leone Embassy was sold to Davenport, under very peculiar circumstances indeed, to become a kind of fantasy sexual pleasure palace for the upper classes.

The whole was one of the weirder things I had encountered in my life. At the time there was in effect no functioning government in Sierra Leone, and the flogging off of the extremely valuable building by the Ambassador was very obviously corrupt. Among the many strange things I was told at the time was that the purchase was funded by Freemasons to whom the building was important. I should say I have no idea if that was true or not, and took little notice at the time. I was told very firmly the FCO had no locus to intervene.

Do not worry, I am not myself going senile. The goings-on inside the former Sierra Leone Embassy after its sale link in to this topic in a number of ways, not only Davenport and Janner’s shared immunity from punishment on grounds of ill-health. But I should make plain I am not accusing Davenport personally of paedophilia or of organising it.

I received an email from a respected friend accusing me of stoking a wave of hysteria. I certainly do not wish to promote a witch hunt. But given that there has very obviously been a culture of impunity in this country for generations, under which the rich and powerful are simply let off criminal activity, a little hysteria is not harmful. Especially when ironically it has been caused by the establishment’s constant cries of paedophilia as their excuse for ever increasing state surveillance of ordinary people. Hoist with their own petard!

The impunity if still there. Where are the scores of bankers going to jail for involvement in Libor-fixing, or the dozens of other illegal scams they have run? It is an accepted thing that, once you are inside the golden circle, a blind eye is turned to a great deal. They all support each other. Whoever replaces Dame Lady Queen Sloshed-Butler, it won’t be one of us, it will be one of them.

I am an anti-militarist. But I believe violence in defence can be justified. The Israeli mass killings by bombing in Gaza are absolutely unjustified. I also oppose the random and ineffective rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel. But when Israeli ground troops actually move into Gaza, it is my sincere hope that the Palestinians kill as many as are necessary to stop them. That is justified, legal and necessary.

This is Lord George Murray, painted in 1745. He is wearing a kilt.

This is the piper of Clan Grant in 1714. He is too.

Tartan type designs go back thousands of years among Celtic tribes, becoming more complex over time as technique developed. The kilt evolved from the belted plaid. Kilting – the sewing in of the pleats rather than gathering them under the belt – was an obvious convenience for people who could afford a separate blanket and apparel. Lord George’s 1745 costume is certainly kilted. The appearance of the small kilt – cutting off the piece over the back and shoulders – came in from about 1700.

Yet generations of Scots had it drummed into them that the kilt is not real at all, it is an entirely phoney Victorian invention dreamed up by the Prince Regent and Walter Scott. This denial of their own culture comes out viscerally, as in the reaction to the uniforms for the Commonwealth Games. Take Kevin McKenna in the Guardian:

“The modern kilt is a fey and ridiculous representation of the robust Highland dress in which the Jacobites went into battle against the Hanoverians”.

That is simply not true. Here is a light article on the kilt I wrote for the Independent a few years ago. If you look at the comments underneath, people simply spluttered and asserted the same denigrations they had been told. Scottish culture never existed. Bagpipes and kilts were Victorian inventions for shortbread packets.

Does it matter? Well, yes. It matters because it is a small part of a long term mis-education of a people about their own history and culture. It is of a piece with the absolutely untrue, but widely held belief, that there were more Scots on the English than Scottish side at Culloden (the real ratio was over 4 Jacobite Scots to every Hanoverian Scot in the battle), that the Jacobites were Catholic (less than 25%), that Charles Edward Stuart believed in the Divine Right of Kings (he explicitly did not). Most pernicious of all has been the airbrushing from history of the avowed aim of Scottish independence of the large majority of both the leaders and followers of the 45, including Lord George Murray.

I do not want you to misunderstand me. I have no yen for the Stewarts – my concern is how to get rid of the monarchy. But the generations of denigration of Scotland’s history, its reshaping to suit a Unionist agenda where the backwards and benighted Scots were brought in to the political and economic glories of the Union and British Empire, underlies so many of the attitudes to Scottish Independence today. Every culture has a right to reference its roots and history without ridicule – and the denial of the authenticity of genuine popular cultural heritage is a particularly pernicious form of ridicule, especially when it is built on lies drummed home in schoolrooms over centuries.

The overruling of a European Court judgement to assert individual privacy, and the anti-democratic rushing of emergency legislation through parliament where no emergency exists, are the antithesis of liberalism. So of course is the jettisoning of all the Lib Dem manifesto pledges on civil liberties.

It is not news that Nick Clegg has become the poster boy for a politics utterly devoid of principle, organised purely around the desire of individual politicians for wealth and power. But even with all that background, I found Clegg’s enthusiastic ratcheting up of the fear factor over the “need” to protect us from virtually non-existent threats, utterly reprehensible.

At his press conference with Cameron, Clegg actually quoted the non-existent “liquid bomb plot to bring down multiple planes” as the reason these powers were needed. He even made a direct claim that telephone intercepts had been instrumental in “foiling” the “liquid bomb plot”. That is utterly untrue. The three men eventually convicted had indeed been under judge approved surveillance for a year. In that year, they made no reference to a plan to bring down airplanes, because there was no such plan. The only “evidence” of a plan to bring down multiple airplanes came from a Pakistani torture chamber. There never was a single liquid bomb. 90% of those arrested in the investigation were released without charge or found not guilty.

The three found guilty had done little more than boast and fantasise about being jihadis. That is not to say they were nice people. They may even have done some harm, though if Clegg were in any sense a Liberal he would not be supportive of imprisoning people in case they one day do some harm. But they had never made a liquid bomb or made a plan to bring down multiple airlines.

The point is, that while any ordinary member of the public could be forgiven for believing in the Liquid Bomb Plot, given all the lies of the mainstream media, Clegg has to be aware that he is spreading deliberate lies and propaganda to justify this “emergency legislation”.

Still more ludicrous was the failure to address the elephant in the room – Snowden’s revelation that the NSA and GCHQ indulge in vast mass surveillance, of the communications of millions of people in the UK, with absolutely no regard for the legal framework anyway.

In the last few weeks there has been a concerted effort to ratchet up the fear of the extremely remote possibility of a terrorist attack. We have seen, as first lead on the news bulletins and front page headlines, the jailing of two young men for “terrorism” for fighting in Syria, when there was no evidence of any kind that they had any intention of committing any violence in the UK. We have the absolute nonsense of the mobile phone in airports charade. We had days of the ludicrous argument that ISIS success in Iraq will cause terrorist attacks in the UK. Now we have the urgent need for this “emergency legislation”.

Why is the fear ratchet being screwed right up just now? What is this leading up to?

Burnes was to live a great deal of his life camped in tents, and it is important to have an idea of what these camps looked like. British officers generally had large, individual tents. These would normally be taken on by bearers and pitched a day’s march ahead, ready for the officers’ arrival in the evening. Their escort and servants would have numerous tents around them. The camp would be very diffuse, as men of differing castes could not share a tent together or cook their food together. The campfires were therefore numerous and small. Horses and baggage animals would be pegged or coralled just on the margin of the camp.

The kind of tent which Burnes slept in would have been large and complex. It would have had both an inner and an outer tent; valets and bodyguards were sometimes allowed to sleep in the space between. At the entrance and ventilation points would be hung additional cloth screens called tatties, which were kept soaked in hot weather to provide cooling through evaporation. In very hot weather the British normally sunk a pit under the tent. The floor was covered with rich carpet.

Burnes has not left a description of any of his tents, but a contemporary traveller in India, Charles Hugel, had a tent with poles 25 feet high – the size of a British telegraph pole. The outer roof alone of Hugel’s tent weighed 600 lbs, and the fabric needed 6 horses to carry it.1

Hugel was not an army officer, but military tents appear also to have been very large. William Hough wrote that when a Regiment’s tents were brought down by a storm, sleeping officers were in danger of being killed by falling tent poles – which indicates that, like Hugel’s, these were very substantial. There are numerous references throughout this period to the marches of armies being delayed by heavy rain, because when wet the tents were simply too heavy to be lifted by the draught animals.

I give this detail because my own mental picture of Burnes in his tent and camp had been quite wrong.

One reason my book on BUrnes still is not finished is that I am absolutely fascinated by the detail. The above is riveting compared to some of the sections I have written on how Burnes had to account for his expenses. But I love to learn the process. I fear that the number of people who are as interested as me by this, or by how precisely a letter got from Montrose to Dera Ghazi Khan in 1837 and how the revenue was split, is very small. Actually I struggle to explain why this degree of authenticity is so important to me. It is not that I have not written screeds on the broad sweep of imperial expansion and its drivers. I have. I just have a constant urge to recreate a realistic sense of how it was to live in the world I am describing.

Maybe I need to do novels?

The FCO claim that records of extraordinary rendition flights to Diego Garcia were destroyed by water damage is an insult to all our intelligence. The FCO is refusing to say where the records were at the time, or what else was damaged in the (presumed) flood. This is of a piece with, but much more serious than, the “accidental” shredding of all Tony Blair’s parliamentary expenses claims. It is not that they expect us to believe them – they just don’t care. They have the power, and we don’t.

Just as much an insult to our intelligence is the new scheme of security measures at airports. These are all to do with maintaining the fear levels that keep the population compliant, and nothing to do with aviation security. If you have some kind of bomb inside an electronic device, you need a power source to trigger it. The last thing a bomber wants is a flat battery.

It is over twenty years now since I went on a MI6/SAS hosted course at “the Fort” near Gosport. One of the things we were shown and had explained to us, was a laptop which had been converted into a very effective bomb incorporating a slim sheet of semtex. That laptop could switch on and work absolutely normally. The laptop battery was the power source for the detonator.

Explosives detectors at airports would today pick up the semtex. That a mobile phone with no power source could be a bomb, in a way not immediately spotted by x-ray or explosives detector, is a nonsense. If you want to cause real damage on a plane, buy two one litre bottles of 50% strength premium vodka in duty free and set fire to them. You would be surprised at the extreme heat that can produce in a confined space.

The BBC has … started its news broadcast as usual from Ashkelon in Israel, highlighting rocket attacks on Israel. There is no mention on the BBC – there has never been any mention on the BBC, or anywhere in the Western mainstream media – that for at least 4,000 years Ashkelon was an Arab town, until in 1948 the entire, Arab population of 12,000 was driven out by armed force, many being massacred. Doubtless some older inhabitants of Gaza are refugees whose home is Ashkelon.

Israel is exercising its right of self-defence in precisely the same sense that Hitler was exercising the right of self-defence in Normandy in 1944 – ie not at all. Why the world puts up with this blatant ethnic cleansing and prolonged, agonizing genocide of the Palestinian people, I have no idea. It is not just about bombs and rockets and deaths now. It is about the shepherds being pushed out of their village in 2012 as part of the same process as the massacre of Ashkelon in 1948, all a process of genocide of the Palestinians in which Obama, Clinton, Cameron and Hague, as two whole generations of western politicians before them, are actively complicit.

I blogged this on 21 November 2012. Today every single BBC News bulletin leads with precisely the same trick, from precisely the same stolen Arab village. There is evidently a BBC policy to bias coverage of massacre in Gaza by basing it in the stolen town of Ashkelon. Every single BBC news programme is led by a report of the terror of people in Ashkelon at the rocket attacks which have killed and maimed – precisely nobody. There is then a brief “balancing” mention of the continual bombing of Gaza, which sometimes does and sometimes does not mention that at least 25 people have been killed, and hundreds maimed. Of the five reports I have seen, not one has mentioned that many of the Palestinian dead are women and children (although I once saw it on the strapline underneath). Rather the BBC says that “the Israeli government states it is targeting militants and weapons factories”.

The time given to the attacks on Palestine is abut 25% of that given to the rocket attacks on Israel. The coverage is also very different – we see human interest coverage of Israelis hiding from rockets in cafes. There is nothing remotely similar of the Palestinians under infinitely more deadly attack. There was one showing of funeral footage from Gaza, not of any of the women or children killed but of someone the BBC told us was simply a “militant”.

It is so blatant it is absolutely sickening. There are decent people I know in the BBC. Why do they put up with this?

I shall again be running the bar – the Whistleblower’s Arms – at the Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival from 22 to 24 August at Cardross, Port of Menteith.

I find this festival, which is very much a lifestyle event and features mostly new talent, an extremely life-affirming experience. Last year it brought me back from a very dark place. Some of this blogs most active commenters and helpers have been among the volunteers over the last couple of years, keeping the event going. Personally for me the festival is necessarily centred around Williams Bros and Thistly Cross, but there is a tremendous variety of music:

The event is very family friendly, and also an amazing place to meet new friends. It does not have any specific political orientation, but I might fairly say that the vibe is very much in line with the kind of unconstrained intellectual space promoted on this blog. On top of which Cardross is an extraordinarily beautiful place. The variety of local food on site, ranging from vegan to game, is one of the things I really enjoyed. It is a not for profit event and nobody gets a salary.

Tickets are not expensive by festival standards, and certainly cheaper than a weekend break in a hotel. But there is also the alternative of working your passage – the festival still needs plenty of volunteers.

I am genuinely looking forward to it enormously. Hope to see you there.

We could have built 120,000 new homes, desperately needed. Instead we spent the money on a bloody big ship. To what purpose? An aircraft carrier is of no use to defend the British Isles – land based planes can do that much better. It is to enable our armed forces to operate elsewhere, far from here. In other words, it is not for defence, it is for attack. It was ordered in the Blairite era of enthusiastic invasion of other countries.

Look what that left us. The Middle East in turmoil, half the world hates us, a wrecked economy. Oh and a bloody great ship. Thanks for that.

Not only could 6.2 billion pounds have built 120,000 social housing units around the country, but doing that would have created 200,000 more jobs, and helped cool the housing bubble, as well as giving families nice places to live.

Next time a disabled person has their benefits cut, we can say “Aah, but look, we’ve got a really good boat!”

According to staff at the Dewar’s Centre in Perth – capacity 1,000 – the attendance at David Cameron’s “Rally for the Union” today was just 220. Even the ultra-Tory Dundee Courier only claimed 300.

That the Prime Minister of the UK cannot fill a hall, at least to not embarrassingly empty, at an event billed as a “rally” to “save” his country, at which he stated that to lose the referendum would “break his heart”, is astonishing.

Even more astonishing is the body language of his supporters. Look at the faces behind him in this BBC video. Have you ever seen a body of people look less enthusiastic about anything? Had they been instructed that they must at all costs look sullen and unpleasant? What on earth can be the explanation?

An independent Kurdistan is a difficult sell because it is supported by such horrible people – Benjamin Netanyahu and every far right Republican in the US you can think of. Tony Blair is probably holding back on his endorsement until offered a huge consultancy fee or preferential access to “commercial opportunities” in the country.

Nevertheless, I supported self-determination for the Kurdish people long before the Western attacks on Iraq and I still do so now. That is support for a Kurdistan uniting the Kurdish lands of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Western Iran.

(The exception is the isolated Kurdish population of North East Iran, who are geographically far separated from the other Kurdish lands. The North East Iranian Kurdish community were deported there by the Shah in the early nineteenth century to form a barrier against Turkmen incursion).

The history of discrimination and abuse suffered by the Kurdish people is best known as it applies to Turkey, but in fact has been true in all four countries both recently and historically. The independence of Iraqi Kurdistan would almost certainly increase pan-Kurdish sentiment. This would be an undeserved difficulty for the current Turkish government, which has done a great deal more than its military backed predecessors to reduce discrimination and persecution. Neither Iran nor Syria would ever peacefully accept the loss of Kurdish lands.

The neo-con dream is to create a pro-American little state out of Iraqi Kurdistan that provides American bases, oil contracts and pro-Israeli support in the Middle East. There is no doubt that both the current degree of Iraqi Kurdish autonomy and the new push for an independence referendum are American inspired. But the neo-cons are not nearly as clever as they think they are, and have started processes which they have no hope of controlling. I very much hope to see an independent Kurdistan, and I hope to see it grow. Once established I expect to see Kurdistan in short order kick out the Americans and declare support for the Palestinians.

There is another persecuted people in the region who are distantly related to the Kurds. The subjugation and persecution of the Baloch is a direct result of the British invasion of Kelat in 1839. I also hope to see a free Baluchistan, combining both the Pakistani and Iranian colonised Baloch lands.