As Godfather to Prince William, heir to the British throne, Prince Charles chose his close friend and adviser Laurens van der Post. A paedophile.

Van der Post raped a 14-year-old girl who had been given into his care for the sea voyage from South Africa to London. He then installed her in a flat in London as his mistress, but abandoned her when she became pregnant age 15 (though he sent a monthly payment). She was not the only one. The victim later stated that van der Post was “sick” and “he knew how to pick his victims”.

In a sycophantic authorised biography of then-Prince Charles written thirty years ago, Jonathan Dimbleby wrote that “for Prince Charles there was a missing dimension”, that he felt his life lacked a spiritual awareness. At age 25 Charles sought out Van der Post after reading his books, and Van der Post became his spiritual Guru. Charles continually sought his advice and absorbed his mystic teachings. Not only is Van der Post William’s Godfather, he gave marriage counselling to Charles and Diana and was a frequent guest at Highgrove, Sandringham and Balmoral. On his death Charles initiated the Van der Post Memorial Lectures, held inside St James’s Palace.

There is a question which will run throughout this article, which is how much did people know? In the 1970s and 1980s it was not public knowledge that Van der Post was a paedophile. But then Charles was not the public. Then as now, if somebody becomes very close to the heir to the throne with frequent access to Royal palaces, they are going to be under close investigation by the security services.

I find it wildly improbable that the security services did not find out about Van der Post’s predilection for young girls and that he had been paying the expenses of an illegitimate daughter originally fathered on a young teenage mother. There is also the question of Van der Post’s wider lies. It is possibly neither here nor there that in fact Van der Post had only ever spent a fortnight with The Bushmen of the Kalahari when he penned his famous book, full of lies and plagiarism.

But that he was actually a Lieutenant (and at times acting Captain) rather than a Lieutenant Colonel as he claimed, would have been instantly discovered. It is worth noting here that Van der Post’s famous military memoir, which became the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence starring David Bowie, was massively embellished, not just in terms of his rank.

The Royalist defence of Charles’ associations rests, rather peculiarly, on the claim that any huckster and paedophile can just get entry to the Palace inner circle without any checks. That is just not true. What appears to be true is that paedophilia was treated as a peccadillo.

Before Van der Post, the man credited by all biographers as the greatest influence in shaping Charles’ character was his great uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Born in Austria as Prince Louis of Battenberg, Charles can hardly be blamed for Mountbatten, who was thrust upon him as a child.

I hope not too literally.

Mountbatten was a paedophile, which was an open secret in upper class society – including the diplomatic service – long before his death. He benefited from the lifetime protection of the inner Royal circle, which was absolute in his lifetime. It has only become mainstream acknowledged in the past very few years.

That is deliberately phrased as “acknowledged”, not “knowledge” – there was not a Fleet Street Editor in 50 years who did not know; they just did not publish it. Mountbatten’s paedophilia was fuelled by his access to underprivileged children, from New Delhi to Rabat to Kincora Boy’s Home.

Mountbatten spent more time with Charles in his childhood and early adulthood than Charles’ own parents did, including encouraging and coaching him to have as much sex with as many “non-marriageable” girls as possible, and providing a venue for it in his homes. After he died Charles said, “Life will never be the same now that he is gone”. It is not a stretch to think that Van der Post – whom he first met four years before Mountbatten’s death – filled the emotional void.

A 1944 FBI dossier described Mountbatten as “a homosexual with a perversion for small boys”. This was two years before his appointment as Viceroy of India, where the open debauchery of the Mountbattens was an open secret in high-level Indian society.

It is worth noting that in this period his military aide-de-camp was one Willie McRae. I have always believed that the murder of McRae by the British state was related to his knowledge of Mountbatten and elite paedophile rings: in this context McRae’s ties with Irish Nationalists may be relevant, as they assassinated Mountbatten over the abuse at Kincora.

In Mountbatten’s case there is no doubt at all that the security services knew all about his paedophile, and covered for him.

So at the death of van der Post in 1996, Charles had lost two men he viewed, exclusively, as guides and spiritual mentors, and from whom he took the most intimate personal device. There is nobody else who fits this description. Both were extremely vicious and calculating paedophiles, shielded by class privilege from the consequences. So, in 1996, to whom did Charles turn as his new “mentor”?

Jimmy Savile was introduced to a 17-year-old Charles in 1966 by Mountbatten, who vouched for him. The official story is that Mountbatten had met Savile through military veteran fundraising.

You can believe that was the primary shared interest of two prolific paedophiles, if you so please.

Savile cultivated the relationship long-term, and by the 1980s was corresponding assiduously with Charles, which continued for over 20 years. Savile was yet another person to whom Charles turned for marriage counselling. In scores of letters, it is always Charles seeking Savile’s advice and adulating him. There is no record of Charles using the word “mentor” to describe his relationship with Savile, but Diana literally stated that Savile was a “sort of mentor” to Charles.

I presume I do not have to explain that Savile was throughout this period one of the most prolific paedophiles in British history. It is widely believed the royal cachet helped to protect him from prosecution. A huge amount was known to the police, to BBC managers and to various other branches of the British establishment, but Savile was untouchable.

In 2000 Charles constructed a chapel at his home at Highgrove, and a stained glass window in it commemorates Laurens van der Post. Before that window, Charles kneeled for long prayer vigils with his new spiritual guide, Bishop Peter Ball – who was also a friend of Jimmy Savile. It was Savile who introduced Ball to Charles.

Rather like Epstein, Ball was a known paedophile who had got off the first time without incarceration. He had, in 1993, accepted a police caution for a ceremony in which he had forced a 17-year-old novitiate, Neil Todd, to kneel naked in the snow for hours, whipped him, and then forced him to perform a sex act. The police also investigated at that time numerous other allegations, including two very similar ones.

The decision to caution was taken on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service. As the Independent Inquiry into Child Abuse Report 2022 primly noted (p.378):

The first report on the Anglican Church investigation – The Anglican Church Case Studies 1. The Diocese of Chichester 2. The Response to Allegations Against Peter Ball Investigation Report – was published in May 2019. It considered the Diocese of Chichester, where there were multiple allegations of child sexual abuse, and whether there were inappropriate attempts by people of prominence to interfere in the criminal justice process after Bishop Peter Ball was first accused of child sexual offences.

I cannot, though, identify the passage referred to of the Diocese of Chichester Report.

Yet immediately after this, and for the next 17 years, Charles provided Ball with rather splendid rent-free accommodation on Charles’ estate. Ball was suspended by the Church of England as a priest and, astonishingly, Charles asked him to officiate at services and perform the Eucharist at his personal chapel in Highgrove, as reported in the Church Times. Ball was frequently in his company and was a personal guest at Charles’ 2005 wedding to Camilla.

In 2015, Charles gifted Ball £20,000. This was said to be simply a friendly gesture – exactly why is unclear. Charles is very definitely not known for personal generosity.

In 2015, Bishop Ball was finally convicted of 12 horrific instances of sexual abuse of boys and young men, all under the guise of religious ritual. Prince Charles put out a public denial that he had interfered in the 1993 decision not to prosecute. My surmise is that he had not done so directly, but rather let it be known through others. That is how it works.

The BBC actually reported that:

Ball’s court case heard that a member of the royal family – who has never been named – was among a host of public figures who supported him when he avoided charges in 1993.

The article goes on to carry this extremely over-specific and narrow denial from the Crown Prosecution Service:

The Crown Prosecution Service has publicly stated that it had neither received nor seen any correspondence from a member of the Royal Family when Ball was under investigation in 1992–93.

Note this very deliberately does not rule out a word in the ear at a function, a phone call, or – as it would be done – getting a friend known to be close to Charles to give the message.

Charles in fact in 1997, two years after his police caution, told Ball that he would directly intervene against Ball victim Neil Todd. “I will see off this horrible man if he tries anything again,” Charles wrote to Ball.

Todd did not live to see Ball ultimately convicted. He committed suicide in 2012. This was convenient for Ball, but there were plenty of other victims who testified in 2015.

I have no doubt the Royal Family will have known about Uncle Louis’s sins – he had an official entourage and was plugged in to the system. The immediate civil servants and close protection officers always know everything. I have already explained why I do not believe van der Post’s paedophilia was unknown. That goes double for Savile – about whom authorities had a huge amount of knowledge, but whose royal connections were a key part of his protection.

While there is no doubt whatsoever Charles knew about Bishop Peter Ball, Ball’s royal circle protection appears to have broken the surface.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, I do not know any paedophiles – but none of us can be absolutely certain we do not. Of one thing, however, I feel extremely confident. The four most-valued advisers in my life, the people whose advice I have most craved and to whom I have turned in times of crisis, are not all paedophiles. I should be astonished if any of them were.

You just can’t have your four closest non-official life guides as paedophiles by accident. You just can’t. It has been put to me that Charles, by nature of his role, knows vastly more people than ordinary folk. That may or may not be true (there is a counter-argument about privilege and protection). But it if were true, it does not improve things. If there is a much larger-than-normal pool from whom Charles could have chosen, it makes it even weirder he chose four prolific paedophiles.

To be clear, prolific paedophilia is extremely abnormal behaviour.

What I do not understand is why paedophilia appears so prevalent and attractive to politicians and the ruling class. People who have much more power and wealth than the rest of us, have the ability (rightly or wrongly) to get attractive adult consenting partners more easily. So why do they, apparently in disproportionate numbers, seek to prey on the young and defenceless?

It is more than time we got rid of the Medieval system of monarchy. That will not solve the corruption of corporate interests controlling the state, or redress the appalling inequality of wealth. It will not even do much to end elite class paedophilia. But as one clear demonstration of the rotten nature of British society, the tale of the King’s four paedophile mentors is extremely instructive.

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The draft Your Party constitution is for a highly centralised, London-based party which echoes the Labour Party. It “devolves” – they literally use the word – power from the centre to non-autonomous entities in Scotland and Wales.

We need a Federal party – a completely different approach – where authority lies with the members, and is granted to the executives firstly of the Scottish, Welsh and English parties, and then to the Federal executive, as the members wish.

The current draft reflects the British nationalist ideal that the UK is essentially England and that Scotland and Wales are some sort of add-ons for which special provision must be made. Therefore there are supposed to be Scottish and Welsh subsidiary – not equal – parties, whereas England does not have a separate party but is presumed to be the main body of the organisation.

Scotland and Wales are treated separately as “nations” while England isn’t. It is just assumed to be identical with the party as a whole. This is typical of the unthinking Anglocentrism of the authors.

I do not see how any Scot can respectably subscribe to the party on its currently drafted constitution.

I have therefore sent my written suggestion for Amendment to a true Federal format.

This is the original:

This is the amendment which I have submitted:

The draft constitution does not include the north of Ireland at all. I do not know if the party plans to operate there. I assume the omission means not.

I would urge members – not just those in Scotland and Wales – to support this fundamental change in the way the party is structured. Unless there is a genuine federal structure, Your Party will be dead in the water in Scotland. The pledge it will not be a “branch office” needs to have concrete form.

———————————

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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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I am taking the plunge into Your Party. My worries remain about its centralist tendencies and lack of democracy, but I will work against those from within.

Your Party is not a unionist party. It does not yet have a policy on Scottish Independence. I shall of course be striving for it actively to support Scottish Independence. I feel fairly confident that this will succeed.

The Left in Scotland is overwhelmingly pro-Independence, just as the Right is overwhelmingly anti-Independence. There do exist Scottish unionist socialists, but they are a small and shrinking minority. It may turn out they are disproportionately represented in Your Party, but I do not believe that is likely to be the case.

More to the point, for years opinion polls have shown that at least a third of Scottish Labour voters support Independence. There is now a major and consistent gap in opinion polls between support for Independence – averaging around 52% – and support for the SNP – averaging around 31%. 21% of Scottish voters support Independence but will not vote for the SNP. That is a significant source of potential support for a viable alternative pro-Independence Party.

It is worth recalling that ten years ago support for the SNP and support for Independence were very tightly correlated. That is now absolutely not the case, for the simple reason the SNP pays no more than lip service to Independence.

A Corbyn-linked, pro-Independence Party in Scotland would have the capacity to destroy the Scottish branch of the Labour Party – which is already in deep trouble and polling around 15%.

There have been a number of attempts to provide a home for the Independence voters disillusioned with the SNP. The Scottish Greens currently show good polling figures, but they are a rather strange party, entirely separate from the English Greens, and far more interested in gender issues than in anything else.

I was a member of the Alba Party until the leadership made very plain I was unwanted, for reasons that don’t seem any more profound than their personal ambitions. While led by Alex Salmond, Alba was the obvious vehicle for Independence support, but since his demise it has torn itself apart. There are others – including the Independence for Scotland Party and Liberate Scotland – which contain some great people, but are currently very small.

Your Party can become a vehicle for a socialism that, as part of its universal commitment to anti-Imperialism, supports Independence for Scotland and Wales and supports the reunification of Ireland. I see that as a transformative position in British politics and a truly radical response to the need for fundamental change in the British state.

I might add that I have never heard Jeremy Corbyn express any personal opposition to Scottish Independence. He supports self-determination and anti-Imperialism around the globe and supports Irish reunification. I think those who note he did not support Scottish Independence whilst leader of the Labour Party are being obtuse. It was not the position of his party. He now has a different party, and I am very confident he would follow the party position.

The rather shadowy leadership cadre of Your Party is anxious to fudge the issue by adopting a policy of “the right of the Scottish people to decide”. This is basically to say that they support a second independence referendum. That is slightly useful, but it is a peculiar abnegation of responsibility – and very easy to say in the knowledge Westminster will not agree.

Of course the Scottish people have the right to decide. That must be the starting point for any socialist party. But that is not a policy. You might as well state that the people have the right to decide whether utilities should be renationalised. Of course they do. But our policy is to renationalise utilities.

A party that just says “we believe in the will of the people – whatever that may be. We don’t actually have an opinion” is not much of a political party.

Which leads me on to the question which I think is driving Your Party’s lack of discernible structured democracy and voting process so far: Israel.

The leadership seem desperate to avoid a commitment to a single state of Palestine, from the river to the sea. The reason for this is that Jeremy is still surrounded by the same group of “soft” zionists who wrecked his leadership of the Labour Party, by continually attempting to placate the zionist lobby through apology after apology. They committed expulsion after expulsion of lifelong antiracists and socialists.

The preferred formula of proponents within Your Party of the Bantustan two-state solution is: “Let the Palestinian people decide”. Often accompanied by the plausible-sounding “it is not for us to decide for the Palestinian people”.

The problem is of course the Palestinian people have a gun to their head. Literally. They have no free will to decide anything. And of which Palestinian people are you going to take the word? Universally reviled Abbas and the Palestinian Authority? Some US-installed puppet administration under the Gaza fake Peace Plan?

No. The only solution any socialist should support is a Palestine free, from the river to the sea. Then it should indeed be for the Palestinian people to decide. Within the free, secular, democratic state of Palestine for which we should strive – and which now has more support from the people of the world than ever. If the free people of Palestine voluntarily then decide to give some land for a Jewish ethno-state, so be it.

Finally, it seems to me that Your Party needs to support massive socio-economic change.

Late-stage capitalism has resulted in inequalities of wealth which are simply staggering. These are not the natural order of things. They are a result of deliberate, state-imposed structures, including the creation of currency within the banking system, the state paying banks interest on currency of which the state itself licensed the creation, taxation structures where the burden of payment falls upon the poor, enterprise ownership structures that promote wealth accumulation, and a housing market tending to ever-greater concentration of capital and the permanent subservience of working people to a landlord class.

The economic changes required are profound. The Greens have adopted one idea I have consistently promoted: limits on CEO pay and benefits relative to the workforce. They have I think suggested 10 x the average salary in the enterprise, whereas I suggested 8 x the lowest salary in the enterprise, but it is the same policy.

Rather to my amazement there was a really good editorial in the Observer yesterday suggesting some policies that directly start to tackle a number of the problems I have outlined, not least the state borrowing its own currency from the banks.

I used to favour a modified capitalism where share ownership lay largely with workers, but as states have evolved into far more complex financial systems where huge volumes of financial transactions do not relate to the purchase of goods and services, that approach is now only a small part of the answer, and the role of the state needs to increase. I am not sure I have quite finished reconciling this with my libertarian instincts, nor yet fully integrated those parts of modern monetary theory which are self-evidently true. But I am working on it.

To return to Your Party, I profoundly distrust the “Assemble” model of meetings split up into little groups. These avoid votes or any genuine effort to actually determine the will of the meeting. Instead they give the power of divining the “consensus” to unseen central figures. I have been told this system combats patriarchalism. That is obvious nonsense – I am pretty sure you will find patriarchs behind the curtains, dictating what was “decided” by the touchy-feely groups. And if they are matriarchs, that would be no better.

The national Conference is to be on the basis of sortition. The key question is this: Who gets to be there without going through the sortition process? How many and who are they? That seems to me essential to know. I have already seen direct evidence that a very large number of the little political groups who are dictating matters behind the scenes will avoid sortition by being present as “stewards”. As though stewards could not have been forthcoming from among those selected by sortition.

There are also officially going to be “VIPs” not subject to sortition. Who chooses them? Will a list be published?

The sortition itself, according to the documents circulated to members, will be fixed to make sure groups are fairly represented. What sort of groups? Ethnic? Gender? Political? This undermines the entire basis of sortition itself.

I have the deepest possible reservations about the manipulation of “democracy” within Your Party. But there are bound to be teething troubles at the start, and while there is plainly a huge amount of plotting for control, I don’t see anything we the members – and I am now one – cannot sweep aside as we get the party going.

———————————

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This is more video of me than anybody would ever want to see, but here are three interviews I did over the weekend.

The first covers the legal action against the proscription of Palestine Action, Starmer’s summary courts for peaceful protestors charged with “terrorism”, UK and US efforts to legalise the Israeli occupation of Gaza through the UN Security Council, and French colonial occupation of New Caledonia.

The second covers the campaign to further the cause of Scottish Independence through the United Nations.

and the third covers the Gaza Trump peace plan and the future of the “ceasefire”

Should anyone have the time to download and clean up the YouTube transcripts I will gladly post them (they usually have a lot of errors).

Fundraising for the challenge in the Scottish courts to the proscription of Palestine Action is not going as fast as I would hope. Through all routes it is totalling £13,120, which will just get about get us to the starting line but not much further. The freedom of thousands of peaceful protestors could hang on this action, so please donate if you can, though as ever we do not want anyone to cause themselves hardship.

We now have a crowdfunder which pays money direct to the legal team. I understand that most people of goodwill have donated and donated to numerous causes in these terrible times. If you cannot donate, please help by spreading the crowdfunder.

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Those charged with terrorism for supporting Palestine Action will have no jury in trials limited to 36 minutes each, with prison sentences up to six months. These are the plans for Starmer Courts for mass trials of anti-Genocide protestors.

The plans are devised by Justice Michael Snow. He is the epitome of judicial prejudice. When Julian Assange appeared before Snow in the first hearing after being dragged from the Embassy, Snow called Assange a “narcissist” even though Assange had said nothing but to confirm his name, and no evidence had been led.

Snow has now decreed that those 2,000 people charged under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act with supporting Palestine Action, will be tried in batches of five at the rate of ten people a day – giving 36 court minutes for each defendant. This is a farce, a spectacle of mass show trial. The 36 minutes includes both prosecution and defence cases and cross-examination.

At a scheduling hearing on Wednesday, one of the accused, 72 year old Deborah Wilde, objected that these trials would be far too short to present a proper defence.

Snow snapped back “I’m satisfied that the time is sufficient. I am not going to give more time. Your only remedy is the High Court”.

As I am sure Snow realises, ordinary people cannot afford to go to the High Court. The worrying thing is that the trials will be held before judges including the appalling Snow, with no jury.

Here is the relevant part of Section 13 of the Terrorism Act.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this draconian legislation is that arousing suspicion is actually the offence. It does not matter if the suspicion turns out to be well-grounded or not. The suspicion could be totally wrong, but if you aroused the suspicion on “reasonable grounds” in a policeman’s head, you are guilty.

It is an offence of strict liability. Your intent is not considered; you may have been most concerned to stop a Genocide, or to oppose the destruction of free speech. Judge Snow and his ilk will not care. They only want to know if some half educated cop suspected you of supporting a terrorist organisation. There is no jury to whom you can explain your actions – and which would be highly likely to sympathise.

I have seen it, as an offence of strict liability, likened to possession of Class A drugs. But actually it isn’t. The correct analogy would be a crime where the offence was arousing a suspicion you possessed Class A drugs, whether you actually had any or not.

The experience of watching 2,000 upstanding citizens, most of them elderly and many of them infirm, hustled through this slaughterhouse queue of mass justice and into prison, with little opportunity to defend themselves, will be a defining moment in the UK’s headlong slide into fascism.

The best available way to fight this ridiculously unjust process which has been directly opposed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, by Amnesty International and by Liberty, is through the legal challenge to an absurd and oppressive law. This is being done in both England and Scotland, which are separate jurisdictions. I am the “petitioner” in the Scottish case.

There are precedents for different decisions in the different jurisdictions. The Scottish courts found Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament illegal; the English courts, legal. Ultimately the Supreme Court decided in favour of the Scottish courts. It is also possible that Palestine Action should simply operate legally in one jurisdiction and not the other – the law is frequently different in the two countries. The rationale of the legal case is explained here.

We desperately need funds. We now have a crowdfunder which pays money direct to the legal team. I understand that most people of goodwill have donated and donated to numerous causes in these terrible times. If you cannot donate, please help by spreading the crowdfunder.

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I have started legal action in Scotland against the UK government over the proscription of Palestine Action, in coordination with Huda Ammori and her team in England. The petition has been accepted by the Court and served on the Solicitor General. They now have 16 remaining days to respond.

The rationale is well explained in this article by Gabriel McKay from The Herald newspaper:

“A former British diplomat has filed a legal challenge seeking a judicial review, under Scots law, of the decision to proscribe the group Palestine Action.

A petition has been lodged to hear a case in the Court of Session over the decision by the UK Government to make being a member of, or expressing support for, the group a terror offence.

If the court agrees to hear the case, and if it then declares the proscription unlawful, it would cease to apply in Scotland while remaining in place in England and Wales unless the High Court in London makes the same finding in a separate challenge.

Craig Murray is the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, an ex-rector of the University of Dundee and a political activist who was jailed in 2021 for contempt of court relating to the trial of Alex Salmond.

He has served notice to the Advocate General for Scotland, Baroness Smith of Cluny KC, as the law officer representing the interests of the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Shabana Mahmood, in Scotland.

In his submission, Mr Murray argues that he has standing as someone who, prior to its proscription on July 5, expressed support for Palestine Action and took part in protest activities organised by the group.

A petitioner must show “sufficient interest in the subject matter of the application”, usually interpreted as being directly personally affected or raising an issue of general public importance.

Scottish courts are generally seen as taking a liberal and pragmatic stance on the issue of standing. For example, in the 2012 case Walton v Scottish ministers, Scottish Ministers and local councils argued that environmental campaigner William Walton lacked standing for a judicial review because he was not personally affected by plans to build a new Aberdeen bypass as he did not own property near the road or suffer direct loss.

However, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that he did have standing as it “is sufficient that the applicant has a genuine concern about the legality of the act or decision, and that the issues raised are of general public importance”.

Mr Murray’s petition for judicial review asks the Court of Session to declare the decision to proscribe Palestine Action ultra vires (beyond the legal power or authority of the home secretary) and have it reduced, i.e to have the order annulled in Scotland as it relates to the group.

It rests on three arguments: that the passing of the order was procedurally unfair; that it violates article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (freedom of expression); and that it violates article 11 of the ECHR (freedom of association).

On the first, the petition argues that Palestine Action was not consulted ahead of proscription, thus depriving the group of the chance to argue for proscription being unnecessary which undermines the requirement for “a high degree of procedural fairness”.

The second ground argues that Mr Murray previously expressed support for Palestine Action but is now legally prevented from doing so, interfering with his right to freedom of expression.

The petition compares the direct action tactics of the group to those of Greenpeace and Just Stop Oil, namely that it “is not an organisation engaged in acts of violence to the person” and therefore proscription is disproportionate and a violation of the right to freedom of expression.

The third ground argues that Mr Murray’s freedom of association has been infringed due to the decision to criminalise both being a member of Palestine Action and engaging in meetings with members or supporters of the organisation.

The petition points to case law which found a measure which will cause the outright dissolution of an association may only be taken “in the most serious cases”, and the court must assess whether it is “exceptionally justified” by “relevant and sufficient reasons”.

Mr Murray’s legal challenge is separate to the Judicial Review in England and Wales brought by Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, which is taking place in the High Court in November 2025, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

If the Court of Session hears the case, and reaches a different decision, campaigners say this would provoke a ‘constitutional crisis’.

There is precedent in that area in the decision by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson to advise the Queen to prorogue parliament for five weeks in 2019.

An appeal to the High Court ruled it was not justiciable as it was a political matter, but the Court of Session found the prorogation unlawful as it prevented parliament from carrying out its constitutional functions.

That was ultimately ruled on by the Supreme Court which upheld the verdict of the Court of Session, finding that the decision to prorogue parliament exceeded the government’s constitutional limits.

While national security, including terror laws, are reserved a Scots court can still review how UK laws are applied in Scotland, for example under things like human rights compliance.

If the Court of Session agreed to hear Mr Murray’s case and found in his favour, there could arise the possibility of a territorial split in the application of a UK-wide anti-terrorism order, an inconsistency which would then have to be resolved by the Supreme Court.

He said: “It is a maxim in Scots law that the law cannot be absurd. To claim that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation is plainly absurd.

“This proscription is a politically motivated action in support of a genocide and it is poisoning Scottish civil society. Entirely peaceful protestors are being arrested and charged as terrorists.”

A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries added: “The proscription of Palestine Action has already spectacularly backfired on the Westminster Government, with the world looking on in dismay at the sight of thousands of elderly and disabled people in Britain being dragged away by police for holding seven word cardboard signs.

“Labour’s anti-democratic crackdown on domestic direct action groups leading to international condemnation, from global human rights experts and the United Nations. Over 2,000 people have been arrested across Britain, including people in Scotland detained only for wearing t-shirts which say ‘Genocide in Palestine. Time to take action’.

“We wholeheartedly support this legal challenge and the Scottish people’s right within their legal system to seek to overturn this absurdly authoritarian ban which has been imposed by Westminster.

“With Scotland’s legal system prioritising the rights and sovereignty of the people rather than the English doctrine of the supremacy of Parliament, this legal challenge is on strong legal footing. The potential for a constitutional crisis created if Scottish and English courts reach different decisions, further demonstrates that this ban is simply not enforceable.

“Defend Our Juries will be escalating the mass defiance of the ban next month, with peaceful mass sign-holding actions taking place from 18th-29th November across Britain.

“Throughout history civil disobedience has been used to overturn unjust laws. The movement against this draconian proscription is growing day by day – there are too many thousands of people who refuse to accept this unjust law and will not stop defying it until it is lifted.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Palestine Action has conducted an escalating campaign involving not just sustained criminal damage, including to Britain’s national security infrastructure, but also intimidation and, more recently, alleged violence and serious injuries to individuals. That kind of activity puts the safety and security of the public at risk.

“Violence and serious criminal damage has no place in lawful protests.” ”

I thought that article was worth considering in full because it is balanced and introduced a couple of things I did not know myself, such as the Supreme Court decision on standing in Walton vs Scottish Ministers.

Yvette Cooper had a duty in law to consult before the proscription. She consulted the Israeli Embassy, Jewish groups and weapons manufacturers. She did not consult any Palestinian individual or organisation, human rights groups or consult with Palestine Action themselves.

What is more, Cooper consulted nobody in Scotland. Not the Scottish government, not Police Scotland. Nobody in Scotland.

Here is an extract, released under a Freedom of Information Act request, from the Scottish CONTEST (counter-terrorism strategy) programme board meeting of May 2025. The Scottish CONTEST programme board consists of the Scottish Government, Police Scotland, MI5, COSLA and others.

Note the wording; “has not been close to meeting”.

Crucially this assessment was made after the action at the Thales plant in Scotland and the consequent convictions. Yet although both Police Scotland and the intelligence services assert Palestine Action in Scotland has “not been close to meeting” the bar of terrorism, Yvette Cooper cited the Thales action as one of three (out of 385) events which she asserted did meet the bar of terrorism.

Following its proscription of Palestine Action, the UK government has now intimated its intention to place further restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly, notably proposing to ban “repeated” protests.

The proscription of Palestine Action has led to mass arrests. Being charged with a terrorist offence is life-changing. It leads to loss of employment, debanking with loss of savings, and travel bans. This is being visited on those engaged in non-violent protest against Genocide.

We have to fight back using whatever avenues we can exploit. This Scottish legal action is one. However legal action costs money, and I have to appeal to everybody who supports this fight to help me fund it. To date I have personally contributed £5,000 and Liberation Scotland has contributed another £5,000 to uphold the Scottish people’s historic legal rights to freedom from oppressive and arbitrary government.

The sums needed to mount a successful legal challenge to the power of the state can be eye-watering. But we are the many. Every penny helps, but please do not cause yourself hardship.

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

We have discussed with crowdfunders including those which pay the money direct to our lawyers, but compliance issues re a proscribed organisation have held this up for several days. We hope to be able to offer that further donation option soon.

In not quite one year since the ceasefire deal in Lebanon, Israel has broken the ceasefire 4,600 times. It has killed hundreds of people, including infants, demolished tens of thousands of homes and annexed five areas of Lebanon. It was supposed to withdraw completely.

After a series of attacks throughout the night, the Israelis today at dawn bombed a café in the town of Houla, Lebanon, reducing it to rubble. This is an act of terrorism and further ethnic cleansing. pic.twitter.com/loNvRPhmuI

— courtneybonneauimages (@cbonneauimages) October 8, 2025

This situation is being replicated in detail in Gaza. In particular, the ceasefire in Lebanon is “guaranteed” by the USA and France and overseen by an international committee referred to as “the Mechanism”. The “Mechanism” is chaired by the USA. Accordingly the guarantors have refused to acknowledge a single breach of the ceasefire because the US-controlled “Mechanism” calls them counter-terrorist operations aimed at disarming Hezbollah.

The United Nations defers to “the Mechanism” and thus to the USA, and the presence of UN peacekeeping troops in Southern Lebanon is therefore useless. Lebanon is now under control of the US/Israeli puppet administration of General Aoun and effectively being run by US Special Envoy Tom Barrack.

Barrack stated that the borders of Israel and Syria are meaningless and that “Israel will go where they want, when they want, and do what they want to protect the Israelis and their border to make sure on October 7th it never happens again”. This is from the “guarantor” of the Lebanese ceasefire agreement.

There can be no doubt that Trump’s US-chaired “Board of Peace” for Gaza will take exactly the same line as “the Mechanism” in Lebanon. It is axiomatic that Israel will never honour any agreement. They never have.

BREAKING! “Ceasefire”, in Israel’s dictionary: you cease, I fire.

Just hours after the deal – as in January – Israel shoots at Palestinians waiting to return home.
Before any next step, member states must ensure that Israel honours the ceasefire. https://t.co/ne0YvhrVOj

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) October 9, 2025

What we know from Lebanon is not just that the Israelis will break any agreement, but that the American “guarantors” will support their continued violence as “counter-terrorism”. While the Gaza peacekeeping force may not be UN blue-helmeted, it will also almost certainly have terms of engagement that defer to the US-chaired “Board of Peace”.

Back in February I discussed the failure of the Lebanese ceasefire agreement with the UN spokesman in Lebanon, and the primacy of the “Mechanism”. In light of the Gaza agreement negotiations, it is worth revisiting that interview.

Hamas were right to enter the ceasefire negotiations and the prisoner exchange is a good thing. I am not supportive of Hamas’s policy of taking prisoners, other than active service personnel, and I do not believe it has done their cause any good these last two years, particularly as Israel had taken more hostages than they have released in exchanges. The “hostage” narrative, however twisted and unfair, has muddied the waters and hurt the Palestinians. So I shall be pleased to see the end of that phase, and of course welcome the release of Palestinians.

Israel will still hold over 9,000 Palestinian hostages after the releases, and possibly many more.

I will not go through the 20 points of the Agreement, all of which are just headings requiring the substance. But the Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza is of course fundamental, and entirely obscure in its timing and completeness. The “first stage” still leaves the Israeli military in over 60% of Gaza.

Netanyahu has made plain to the Israeli public that he has no intention of the Israeli military leaving Gaza, or of agreeing to a Palestinian state. That this agreement is a phoney is not hidden at all – Israel is not pretending it will honour it.

But if the process gets three things into Gaza – food, journalists and peacekeepers – that will be a major improvement. I do not think you should underestimate the impact on world opinion once journalists can actually get into Gaza, witness the destruction and interview people. There is nobody more cynical than I about the mainstream media, but they are not going to be able to prevent the truth from bleeding into their coverage.

The victory for Palestine will take a few years. Israel is now a pariah state in the eyes of the majority of the inhabitants of this globe, and that will accelerate. Hamas are negotiating from a position of weakness, it is true. We are apparently going to see formal colonialism restored in Gaza for a while. There is more pain to be endured. But the balance is shifting.

I have two quotes for you, one from the West and one from the East.

The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.

They plan, and they plan, but Allah is the best of planners.

 
———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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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Yesterday saw two announcements. Starmer is to introduce compulsory digital ID cards in the UK, and Tony Blair is put forward by the White House to be the colonial administrator of Gaza for five years.

The political economy of the world appears locked in a vertiginous downward spiral. You don’t have to scratch very hard to find that Tony Blair’s hand is also behind the compulsory ID plan. He has been pushing it for nearly thirty years, and now it comes with added links to Larry Ellison, Palantir and Israel.

The government will be able to garner and centralise knowledge of everything about you. Every detail of your financial transactions, your DNA, your family, your medical records, your education, employment and accommodation. It will be a very short time before the digital ID is linked to your social media accounts and your IP access to monitor your browsing.

There is already the intention to control us through our access to financial services. I have spoken with one of the women charged for protesting outside the Leonardo factory in Edinburgh. She has had her bank accounts cancelled – simply losing the money in them – and cannot open a new account. You may recall they tried to debank Nigel Farage. The campaign to defend Julian Assange suffered multiple banking cancellations.

The desire of the state to control people politically through their ability to carry out ordinary transactions is not in doubt. It is demonstrated. Once you have a compulsory digital ID linked to transactions – which will follow very swiftly, I am quite certain – they will be able to simply switch off your ability to pay for anything. Add this to a digital currency which tracks all of your expenditure – all the key elements of which are already installed – and total control will be in place.

Starmer is trying to dress up a digital ID as an immigration control – whether you support immigration control or not, the notion that it will make a significant difference is nonsense. Landlords, employers, banks and lawyers already have to check the ID and status of their clients. For those bent on evasion, one more piece of bureaucracy will make little difference. It is the law-abiding who will be enmeshed in the system of control.

Increases in state surveillance and restrictions on personal freedom are always falsely framed as protection against a terrible threat – paedophiles or fraudsters or immigrants or Russians. Yet despite an ever-shrinking area of personal freedom, none of these real or invented threats ever actually recedes.

Starmer is the most unpopular PM in history. Attempting to force through this deeply unpopular measure is going to cause him real difficulties in parliament. The calculation is that Reform will oppose the measure on libertarian grounds, and that this will allow Starmer to show himself as tougher on immigration than Reform. The breathtaking cynicism of this is typical of the Starmer government, which believes in nothing except their own power.

As for Blair being made effectively Governor of Gaza, this is so sickening as to be beyond belief. The man who killed a million Iraqis on the basis of lies about WMD, who has made hundreds of millions of pounds through PR services to dictators, whose Tony Blair Institute has drawn up “Gaza Riviera” plans for Trump, and who has been discussing with western oil companies the takeover of Gaza’s gas field, is touted to administer the mass grave which Gaza has become.

In any reasonable world this would be impossible. The degeneration of western society is profound. There are no ethics in play beyond the dominance of power, wealth and greed. Blair manages to embody these in one person.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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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Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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The outgoing Head of MI6 Richard Moore has formally admitted in a public speech in Istanbul that MI6 has been cooperating with HTS in Syria – a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act – for years.

The government is arresting little old ladies for holding signs supporting one proscribed organisation, Palestine Action, while it admits it has been actively supporting another proscribed organisation. HTS was proscribed as a division of Al Qaida, as shown on the government website:

As I learnt while in Lebanon, the British support for HTS included intelligence support, training and weapons, based at secret UK bases in the Bekaa valley, including inside the Rayak airbase. It also included support via an NGO named Inter-Mediate, run by current British National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, who is Tony Blair’s old Downing Street Chief of Staff.

In the UK neither the government nor the security services stand above the law. The fact that neither Moore nor Powell nor any of those on the ground directly involved in actively and substantively supporting HTS – a proscribed organisation – has been arrested, while people are arrested for holding a placard supporting Palestine Action because it is a proscribed organisation, is the very definition of arbitrary and oppressive government.

The impartial rule of law in the UK has collapsed completely. All of this was material support to a proscribed organisation.

Powell with al Jolani

Meanwhile we have Starmer’s hollow gesture of recognising Palestine. This is designed to placate those in the Labour Party who are horrified by the Genocide in Gaza.  As it is accompanied by zero intention to limit or even acknowledge the Genocide, it is the very definition of a useless gesture.

Palestine was already recognised by three quarters of the nations of the world.  What Starmer believes he has furthered is a Bantustan state, hopelessly divided between an obliterated Gaza, small and isolated remnants of the West Bank and what remains of East Jerusalem. That these fissiparous remnants could ever constitute a viable state is plainly impossible – which is the idea.

Furthermore Starmer attacks the very definition of a state by insisting that the Palestinians can be told who they must have to rule them. The notion that the traitor Abbas and his Palestinian Authority would ever be chosen by the Palestinian people is utter nonsense. Furthermore Macron and Starmer have both specified that a Palestinian state must be disarmed, have no armed forces, and lie prey to the genocidal state next door at all times. The Saudi/French plan even states that Israel should have vetting control over the appointment of individual Palestinian police officers!

The only virtue to this act of recognition is that it will make it more difficult politically for the UK not to react with the first genuine sanctions against Israel once Israel formally annexes Gaza or the West Bank. It is thus a very minor political improvement. With the British government already having repudiated the UN Commission of Inquiry’s finding of Genocide, the attack on Gaza in full flow, and the Global Sumud Flotilla very likely to be met by Israel with deadly force, Starmer is, as usual, completely out of touch with public opinion if he believes he has reduced political pressure over his complicity in Genocide.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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.

Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

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

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MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
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There are serious threats to “Your Party” from those attempting to exert undemocratic control, and they attack as trying to destroy the party, anyone who tries to improve things.

The Labour Party is now centre-right and the large majority of us to the left of it were delighted when Jeremy took the plunge to launch a new party. It is not that parties of the left did not exist; it is that only Jeremy Corbyn has the stature to break through into mass voter support. That seems to me undeniable.

My own view is that it would be crazy for anybody other than Jeremy Corbyn to be the first leader of Your Party.

Of course, “left” is a broad concept, and like most of my friends I have signed up for the new project in order to take part democratically and endeavour to shape a party whose policies I can broadly support. If that does not materialise, I can leave, but I do not expect to agree with every single policy. Any party whose members all agree with every policy is deeply unhealthy.

I have friends in Scotland who will not join on the assumption it will be a unionist party. That of course can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I do not think it will be.

The rumours circulating about tensions at the top of “Your Party” are broadly true and often remarkably accurate. I could write a great deal about individuals and their positions, but I want now to issue an urgent alert and call to action, without names.

Simply put, I believe most of us had assumed that Your Party would be a one member, one vote democracy with major decisions taken by all members with online voting. That includes major policy decisions and election to all the main positions in the party, both central and local.

In fact, those in charge are actively working to limit, to an extraordinary degree, one person one vote democracy in the party. That is the major reason why “Your Party” is still not actually a political party and still has zero members. It only has 850,000 people who have signed up to express interest, many of whom have paid money, but none of whom have any legal standing, democratic rights or say in how the money is spent – or crucially whom it employs.

This is not an accident and no, it does not take months to set up a structure to convert these people into members. The delay is absolutely deliberate, preventing any locus standi for democratic control of the establishment process.

Incredibly, this is not an issue that divides the different factions at the top of the party. One thing that unites them is a desire to run the party through easily manipulated structures; they just differ over who should control those structures.

There have been a number of formative meetings held around the country. There is no area in the entire UK where all of those who have signed up and joined the list, or even all those who have paid money, have been invited along to a meeting to discuss setting up the local branch. In every case local members of small political parties and groups within trades unions have hand-picked whom to invite.

The only time that all those in an area who signed up have been invited, has been to a small number of leadership rallies with Jeremy Corbyn.

If I may just give Glasgow as an example. Your Party has 42,000 people signed up in Scotland. We can therefore estimate those signed up in Glasgow as over 5,000 people. But the “founding meeting” of the party in Glasgow was of 120 people, invited by “word of mouth”.

The other 5,000 people who had signed up had not the slightest idea the founding meeting was happening.

On a larger scale this control by selective invitation is to play out at what is billed as the party’s “Founding Conference” in November. Ordinary members will not be able to attend the conference. It will consist of delegates selected by tiny political parties and local groups, most of which the large bulk of the members in that locality will never have heard of.

There will be no way for a member simply to put themselves forward for election by all the other members in their region as a conference delegate. It is entirely a self-selecting process among established left wing factions, just like the Glasgow meeting writ large.

Let me try to bring home to you the vast gap between the membership and those who are manipulating the system. The main organising component in Scotland is a small party that initially stayed (rightly!) loyal to Tommy Sheridan after he was traduced by Murdoch, as part of the split between the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity. This group then split again as a smaller splinter off from Solidarity.

I can’t even recall what they call themselves now – the Socialist Party of Scotland or something – and I have no reason to doubt they are great people. But they and a couple of groups of similar size – groups which without the Corbyn name would not combined be able to fill Blairgowrie town hall for a meeting on a wet Tuesday evening – are attempting to lead by the nose 42,000 people who would like to have a say in the matter.

Those 42,000 in Scotland deserve the rights and privileges of members. Now. As do those who signed up throughout the UK.

I cannot stress to you enough that this is not a glitch; it is a feature. Nor is it a teething problem. Those who currently hold the reins are determined to make sure those reins cannot be voted out of their hands. I have had a number of conversations with people actually in charge of instituting all this, and the prevention of direct democracy and the structuring of the party instead through controlled committees and caucuses is for them a given.

Part of this is because, far from being a fresh start, most of those actually running the putative Your Party come from the byzantine world of the Labour Party. Others come from small parties which are avowedly revolutionary vanguardist and entryist. Large putative memberships willing to pay money are a resource to be exploited and turned to the purpose of the group, rather than comrades to be considered as equals.

Which brings me to the second, and to me more worrying, aspect of Your Party, which is conduct of meetings. Aside from the careful selectivity of who gets to be at the meetings, those currently directing Your Party seek to avoid normal democratic rules of debate and – above all – to avoid votes at their meetings. This is how the local meetings are actually being conducted.

The first method to disempower the membership at a meeting is to disassemble them, into “working groups”. Each working group is led – and the word “led” is important here – by a “moderator” who has been chosen in advance and trained. That “moderator” gives an impression of communitarianism by asking the group what they wish to discuss from a list of prepared topics, or to some degree participants can choose the topic group to join.

The conversation is then led by statements introduced by the moderator. In Glasgow this was done on the basis of WhatsApp messages allegedly sent in – though who had selected the people who sent the WhatsApp messages to this unadvertised meeting was not plain. The moderators then distil the collective view of the participants through a process of alchemy, and later the moderators amalgamate the view of the meeting.

This method of “consensual” discussion of policy, avoiding debate and opposition, echoes the strategies employed within groups like Occupy! and Extinction Rebellion. It draws those who arrive full of idealism into a novel and apparently communitarian process, and anybody wishing to express a radically different opinion – or to challenge the methodology – is immediately not a legitimate member putting an opposing view in debate, but a disruptor and an outcast.

When I gave a talk to the Occupy! encampment at St Paul’s many years ago, I wrote afterward that these trendy methods of decision making actually did the opposite of what they said on the tin. They empowered charismatic individuals to lead the group much more effectively than the structured rules of normal debate, and effectively created a cult following. I was unsurprised shortly afterward to discover that encampment had, precisely through the control of charismatic individuals, seen sexual abuse of female members, resulting in convictions.

The notion that normal debate, with speakers for and against and proper votes, is bourgeois or undemocratic is entirely wrong. The great E P Thompson opened The Making of the English Working Class with the insight that the structure of the London Corresponding Society was in itself an act of working class assertion. An equal subscription and one member one vote was a revolutionary notion in an era where public gatherings consisted of listening to the priest, the magnate or his underlings.

The democratic conduct of meetings is actually embedded in common law, and represents the accumulated achievement of popular control. There is nothing outdated about proper debate and one person one vote.

There is now the opportunity to update this, with online debates available to all members, and online voting on all issues available to all members. When Your Party spoke of a new and modern form of popular democracy, I presumed mass online debate and online one person one vote is what they meant. I did not for a second imagine that replacing voting with New Age cult metaphysics was meant.

I want to emphasise this to you. I have spoken to scores of people, including some very directly involved. The avoidance of debate and of votes is a deliberate policy to maintain the control of a small group of people. In what would already be the UK’s biggest political party if they had allowed people actually to become members.

I am not mentioning names because my motivation is to heal this and make Your Party the force it should be.

I signed up immediately, to support Jeremy, and paid a small sum. I have never at any stage been invited to any of the meetings, steering groups or other activities involved in organising the party. I have never received anything from them except one vague email asking me to suggest the party’s name.

This can all be rescued. But those who have signed up need to get active now. Do these things:

a) Write to the party (reply to the email about the name) asking that formal membership be opened up immediately and stating that you wish to become a member.

b) State that you wish to attend the founding conference or at least to have a vote for delegates to attend the founding conference, with a right to put yourself forward for election if you so choose.

c) State that you wish to be invited to any meetings of the party in your area.

d) If meetings happen without you, kick up a fuss.

e) At those meetings, insist on some general discussion and the right to vote upon things. Resist the splitting up into small groups and manipulation of consensus.

f) In writing, make absolutely plain that you expect Your Party within this calendar year to have online one person one vote elections for all major positions, local and national, within the party. That includes the General Secretary or equivalent position.

g) State that going forward you expect Your Party to enact direct democracy, with one member one vote online on all major policy issues.

A popular movement depends on the people and we have the people. We now need to empower them.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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.

Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
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“President” Isaac Herzog last night entered his hotel – the Intercontinental Park Lane – through a service door and kitchens.

He did not transit any of the public areas of the hotel, where I was stationed disguised as an elderly Scottish drunk at the bar. I carried out this role with great dedication.

It also allowed me to wander around the basement areas as a well-spoken elderly Scottish gentleman, slightly befuddled and looking for the toilet. Finding no end of lurking policemen – who were all very helpful – I was able to confirm this was indeed where Herzog was staying and a demonstration was whistled up.

Watch| Activists protested in front of the hotel where Israeli President Isaac Herzog is staying in London, demanding his arrest for his role in crimes against the Palestinian people.#Israel pic.twitter.com/p3dznsgcvm

— Al-Jarmaq News (@Aljarmaqnetnews) September 10, 2025

The demonstration was very loud and effective inside the hotel and definitely well worth doing again. The police attempted to move the demonstration away under the Public Order Act.

Greta Thunberg was acquitted last year in exactly these circumstances when charged for protesting outside this exact same hotel. The magistrate ruled that police instructions to move on were “unlawful”. That is worth remembering for the next couple of nights.

I had dashed down from Edinburgh, literally just dropping everything and heading to the station, on hearing that Herzog’s visit was starting a couple of days earlier than expected. I attended the PSC demonstration outside Downing St. Frankly it was disappointingly small – not much more than one person for every mile I had covered to get there.

The change of date, short notice and a tube strike all contributed, but I do hope protest will grow during Herzog’s three day visit. Be inspired by this precedent:

In 1848-9, Hapsburg General Julius von Haynau crushed uprisings in Hungary and in Brescia with extreme force. In Brescia about 1,000 were killed, both revolutionaries and civilians, including women and children, with widespread rape, floggings and executions.

In Hungary about 2,000 revolutionaries were killed across four “battles” and a slightly larger number of civilians were massacred, again with widespread rape, flogging and looting.

In 1850 Haynau was on a private visit to London and touring the Barclay and Perkins brewery in Southwark. He was recognised by some draymen who pelted him with refuse and chased him from the brewery, where a larger crowd joined in.

Eventually Haynau took refuge in the George Inn on Borough High Street, where he hid either in a waste bin or under a bed (accounts differ). Eventually he was rescued by the police but nobody was arrested.

Generations of schoolchildren – myself included – were taught that the Haynau incident was something to be proud of and an example of how foreign “tyrants” should be treated in London. The government of Prime Minister Lord John Russell – grandfather of Bertrand Russell – refused to prosecute the draymen, to the fury of the Austrian government.

Herzog is of course actively participating in a Genocide far worse than anything Haynau did, and was directly quoted by the ICJ as indicating intent of genocide.

Starmer is meeting Herzog today for the second time since the ICJ cited Herzog as showing intent of Genocide, and since Herzog signed bombs to drop on Gaza.

There is no diplomacy being pursued on this visit. Nor was it initiated by Starmer. It is the Israelis emphasising their control of the British Establishment, and demonstrating that they can do what they wish – commit genocide, bomb Qatar, bomb Tunisia, and much more. It is simply a visit to underline who is the boss, and that we can do nothing about it.

Let us summon the symbol of the draymen of the Barclay and Perkins brewery. It is the people, not Starmer and his corrupt, grasping clowns, who embody moral conscience.

———————————

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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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Humans are naturally cooperative creatures. The ability of people to dominate other life forms on the planet, to produce a built environment structured to their needs, to ensure food and water supply, to develop complex civilisations and produce all kinds of structures and objects designed to enhance interest and comfort, and to interact on a social plane that includes communication of abstract thought – all of it is a result of coordinated endeavour.

This cannot be achieved without altruism. Ever since humans have existed, people have contributed to the communal good or to the individual good of other humans through acts of social solidarity.

It is of course possible to construct an argument that selfless acts are performed on the basis of expecting wider advantage to oneself or one’s descendants from the fruits of societal advancement, but it is not necessary to believe that empathy and kindness are a manifestation of subconscious selfishness. In fact it is rather perverse to do so.

The argument was popular in the West in the 1980s when dismantling the intellectual underpinnings of the welfare state was a prime mission of those in power. But it is counter-intuitive, does not survive introspection nor observation, and it is unnecessary.

In fact it is not merely in seeking directly to help others that humans may act without selfish motive. There have always been those, for example, who seek to advance the frontiers of knowledge for its own sake, because they are intellectually fascinated, without seeking to derive any personal advantage or even practical benefit to humanity from their area of research.

The quest for spiritual enlightenment or for artistic expression is often followed with no thought of gain.

Poor people, who can hardly afford to, give to charity. Those hundreds setting sail today on the Sumud flotilla to bring aid to Gaza put their lives in danger, from an opposition to social evil.

None

Personally, when I investigated Israeli crimes in Southern Lebanon under Israeli drones and in the sights of Israeli snipers, or when I went to jail for revealing the truth of the conspiracy to imprison Alex Salmond, I cannot convict myself of any ill motive. I was acutely aware of my own danger and of my own responsibilities. A belief in the need to oppose the wicked actions of those controlling the power of the state, and a belief that knowledge of the truth is an essential public good, drove me in both circumstances.

I sat with Ghassan Abu Sitta in a Beirut cafe discussing the fortune he could be making as a plastic surgeon in London when instead he had chosen to work in circumstances of the most extreme professional stress and personal danger on earth, striving to save lives in Gazan operating theatres.

Ghassan is a Palestinian Scot; and there are dozens of healthcare workers with no cultural or ethnic connection to those they serve who have braved the terrors of Gaza to save lives.

Can you imagine how much more common altruism might be if the entire state were not constructed in order to teach us that it is abnormal?

Yet we live in a neoliberal society of which the carefully structured and regulated social model operates on the assumption that everyone wishes to gain maximum resources to themselves, and that the activities of a tiny percentage – who often do little discernible work in production – are hundreds of thousands of times more worthy of reward than those of ordinary workers.

It is not an accident. It is not the natural order of human society. All kinds of human societies have existed, and all have been constructs. They can be patriarchal or matriarchal, communitarian or hierarchised, religious or secular, aggressive or pacific.

Modern neoliberal society is structured around monetary systems that store wealth, in currencies that largely exist as digits in computers, and which are allocated to institutions and individuals through state-regulated systems that in no sense capture societal value as the basis of reward.

Take the UK’s richest citizen, Jim Ratcliffe. What is the basis of his wealth? Did he invent something? Did he pioneer a new form of management? Did he build vast new industrial plants that employed tens of thousands of people?

No, he did none of those things, and indeed arguably he did the very opposite of those things. All he did was accounting tricks with digitised currency units, and then indulge himself in football clubs and Land Rover nostalgia.

I have still never seen a satisfactory explanation of Epstein’s wealth, yet nobody finds it strange to associate with people whose billions have appeared through mystical financial structuring.

For a period of approximately half a century from about 1930, the primary function of states was seen to be ensuring the welfare, comparative economic well-being and social mobility of the vast bulk of its citizens.

From the Reagan/Thatcher era that changed, and the prime activity of states became the fine-tuning of the systems of finance and resource-holding in order to increase the concentration of capital. In other words the state became the facilitator of the relentless accrual of the assets of the nation into the hands of the already wealthy.

As a result we live in an incredibly unequal society, and one in which the living standards and income security of the majority are highly precarious, with disastrous social consequences of scapegoating and xenophobia.

It is at this moment that the major social disruptor of Artificial Intelligence has arrived.

Those of my generation did not usually foresee the impact of the internet. I remember typing green text on a black screen in Dundee in 1979 and being amazed I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with somebody in Manchester.

A decade later we had home computers that made noises I will never forget as they connected down the phone line; if you were lucky you would get a good enough connection to send a plain email.

There are those who foresaw the decline of city centres, the delivery culture, the fall in in-person business and social activity, the growth of corporate knowledge gatekeepers, state control of personal data, and all the other things that happened since.

I was not one of them. Similarly many people were talking about the effects of AI long before I started to give it serious thought. I remember visiting Julian Assange in Belmarsh and listening to his main views on the subject, realising that despite being isolated in jail he understood the subject far more than I did.

He was particularly worried about the centralised power that would arise from the concentration of resources required to achieve AI, and the potential for further abuse and population control by ever-expanding state power. I have to confess at the time I was hazy about what he was stating.

In short, I am not much of a seer. But I want to look for the moment at the more prosaic question of AI’s capacity to replace people in the workforce.

You can’t sit on an AI, and one isn’t going to convey the children to a camping trip: nor can you eat it. Manufacturing and food production will not be massively affected by AI (though design of course will).

What AI will be able to replace is the kind of financial pimping service for world oligarchs in which the UK specialises. Investment managers, insurance underwriters and several score kinds of banker are no longer going to be needed as humans. Vast swathes of civil service employment and administrative employment in the private sector are under threat.

I want to make, for now, just two very obvious points. The change is going to be much bigger in service-based economies like the UK and the other Western “post-industrial” economies. They have imported their needs from the non-West in return for payment based on their services earnings that will be largely redundant. I see AI as contributing to the shift in economic power from the West.

That is potentially a good thing.

The second point is that any advance that increases productivity with less labour ought to be a boon to all mankind, enabling people to work less and society still to receive as much in goods and services.

But as the AI revolution is starting at a time of maximum inequality, and where states are structured to reinforce that inequality; this of course will not happen. Unemployment will rise and people will be driven into desperate poverty, while all the productivity gain will be harvested by the billionaire class.

That is our immediate future.

The need for a more egalitarian society is urgent. The need to break away from systems that enshrine and glorify selfishness and greed is urgent. Otherwise the future is bleak.

We need a politics of altruism and empathy.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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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Here are Tim Norman, Patrick Henningsen and myself discussing the Skripal charade, at the Beautiful Days Festival near Exeter. At the start 90% of the audience said they believed the official narrative. At the end 80% had changed their mind.

I am particularly proud of this because we were comparatively close to Salisbury and it was mostly an apolitical audience of interested locals.

I look like I had been sleeping under a hedge for four days. Well, I more or less had. It was a music festival. In a sense convincing so many people, when I could not have looked less like an authority figure, is still more satisfying.

Tim Norman has a much longer version of his presentation and we shall try to do this together again soon, hopefully actually in Salisbury.  Patrick Henningsen is a journalist of great integrity: he has been consistently interested and engaged in this story.

I had plans to make a documentary which were put aside during covid. I might try to run a conditional crowdfunder in a little while, where the money is withheld unless enough is collected to deliver the project.

Attention of course moves on, but the Salisbury lie still features in Starmer’s Russophobic and militaristic rhetoric, and in a sense this story is more important than ever.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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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In late November, a judge in the High Court of England and Wales will hear a judicial review into the legality of the proscription of Palestine Action.

That court has no jurisdiction in either Scotland or Northern Ireland and does not take into account the law of either place, which is different to English Law.

Yet the proscription of Palestine Action applies to the whole UK and the result of the English judicial review will apply to the whole UK – which is a direct violation of Scottish legal rights.

My attempts to raise this point in London have been met with a haughty colonial arrogance, which amounts to “so what?”

Two grounds have been granted for the judicial review in English and Welsh law. Firstly the judge will consider whether the effect of proscription is contrary to the rights of free assembly and free speech protected by the European Convention on Human Rights Articles 10 and 11.

The ECHR applies UK-wide and the arguments will be the same were the case heard in London, Edinburgh or Belfast. An English or a Scottish judge may come to a different conclusion, not only for reasons of individual judgment, but because of the way the basis of law is considered differently in the two jurisdictions.

But the English judge will also consider whether due process was followed in the proscription according to English and Welsh public law. The argument is whether or not Palestine Action ought to have been consulted, or others likely to be affected by the proscription ought to have been consulted – in a situation where the views of Israel and of weapons manufacturers were in fact consulted.

Now, that common law is entirely different in Scotland to England and Wales. In fact the Scottish legal system has a very different tradition to the English system, and the Scots system is not really based on common law, though precedent is cited.

While the English and Welsh legal system is grounded in common law, relying heavily on judicial precedent and case law, the Scottish legal system is rooted in Roman law principles, emphasizing codified statutes and a civilian tradition that distinguishes it from common-law jurisdictions.

I should pause to exonerate the Welsh. When the English conquered, raped and colonised Wales, they simply destroyed its existing administrative and legal systems and imposed their own. Therefore when I speak of “English and Welsh law” I am merely reflecting the current jurisdictional reach.

An important point has to be grasped, which requires a dropping of the colonial mindset.

It is perfectly possible that the banning of Palestine Action might be found lawful in English and even EU law, but is still unlawful in Scotland under Scots law.

I should emphasise that this argument applies not only to Palestine Action but to every English High Court judicial review of a Westminster government action.

You may be surprised to hear the point is probably non-controversial amongst lawyers.

Given five minutes to think about it, I am not sure any Scots lawyer would say it is untrue that UK-wide government action might be lawful in England but not in Scotland. But such is the Establishment cringe of pretty well the entire Scottish legal profession, I cannot think of an example of it ever being tested.

One fundamental difference between English and Scots law has a firm statutory basis – which is that between the English Bill of Rights and the Scottish Claim of Right.

Here the key distinction – and this is a hoary old truism – is between the English tradition of parliamentary sovereignty and the Scottish tradition of popular sovereignty. Scots law contains protections against oppressive executive acts, whether or not imposed by parliament, in a way which English law does not.

For those that may doubt that what I am saying is established law, here is an extract from an article by retired European Court of Justice judge Professor Sir David Edward in the Supreme Court Yearbook Volume 6, entitled “Scotland’s Magna Carta. The Claim of Right and the Common Law” (not available online):

It follows that that which is lawful cannot be arbitrary or irrational – a principle already present in the Wednesbury criteria and developed in more detail from EU administrative law (derived from German law) insisting on the objective justification and proportionality of executive action.¹⁰ For recent examples of how this idea is being given effect, see in particular the Judgments of the Supreme Court in R v Gul¹¹ and Beghal v DPP¹² which illustrate the evils of over-broad discretionary powers, as well as the importance of not relying on answers given under compulsion.

The reference in the Claim of Right to the Estates as `a full and free representative of the Nation’, whether or not it reflects the constitutional philosophy of George Buchanan, cannot surely be interpreted as a demand for `sovereign’ Parliamentary power, still less the power of the Parliamentary majority for the time being. It is, rather, an assertion that ultimate power rests with the `Nation’…

That the Westminster parliament cannot just impose on Scotland any law it wishes was spelt out explicitly by Lord Cooper in his 1953 judgment in MacCormick v Lord Advocate:

The principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctly English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law…

Now, I am fully aware that the bulk of the Claim of Right represents the establishment of anti-Catholicism in the state. But that does not obviate its useful provisions. Of which the most (but not only) relevant one is this:

That the causing pursue and forfeit persons upon stretches of old and obsolete laws, upon frivolous and weak pretences, upon lame and defective probation, as particularly the late Earl of Argyll, is contrary to law.

The Claim of Right is still the law of Scotland (and is not the law of England). It was not revoked by the “Union” of 1707 and indeed here it is on the UK government’s definitive website of currently active legislation.

Now, there could not be a starker example of “causing pursue and forfeit persons… upon frivolous and weak pretences” than claiming Palestine Action, a non-violent protest and civil-disobedience organisation, is a terrorist outfit.

Even more absurd is to claim that those decent people who have been pursued by the executive all over Scotland for opposing genocide, are supporters of terrorism.

There is the clearest case that the proscription of Palestine Action and subsequent repression are precisely the kind of executive persecution and injustice which are outlawed in Scotland by the Claim of Right – and are outlawed irrespective of parliamentary authority.

It is precisely an arbitrary and irrational executive act, which cannot be lawful in Scotland, whatever the views of the Westminster parliament. Nor can the Westminster parliament invoke the alien doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty in Scotland, to impose arbitrary and irrational executive action under the rubric of “reserved powers”.

Palestine Action may yet succeed in their judicial review in England. But a separate judicial review must be launched in Scotland that both challenges this extreme Zionist act in support of genocide – directly contrary to overwhelming public opinion in Scotland – and asserts the continued existence of Scotland’s popular and communitarian legal tradition.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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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This post initially included a corridor photo which was fake. My fault, but that made no difference at all to the argument.

It will definitely be good if the war in Ukraine draws to a close. Too many have died or been maimed, too many civilian assets have been destroyed. However the cynicism with which the conclusion of the war is being driven is quite extraordinary.

I am not sure there has been a sight in modern history equivalent to the way Europe’s “leaders” were pictured in the White House.

This is not an accident. There really is a craft to diplomacy; many countries in the world have foreign services consisting largely of people who have a degree in it. I have personally organised two state visits for the former Queen as well as head of government visits.

These things follow a careful choreography and an absolutely key part of that is to present a picture of equal status between state parties. Who will enter first, whether there will be a handshake, the precise spot where the handshake will happen, the setting of the table they meet around, flags of equal size, all that is plotted in great detail. It is fundamental to the job.

If I had put Robin Cook, for example, in a position where he was seated on a chair in front of an interlocutor enthroned behind a desk, I would have received a very fierce bollocking indeed. Yet here we have European Heads of State and EU leaders seated before a desk in the Oval Office.

This is just unthinkable to anybody familiar with the craft of diplomacy. I realise you don’t have to be a diplomat to feel there is something wrong in this picture: but you are probably not quite as stunned as I am.

The unequal interpersonal relationships are just the immediate physical manifestation of Trump’s instinctive ability to maximise the brutality of realpolitik. The deal which is being put together to end the war in Ukraine is a remarkable testimony to Trump’s ability to seize economic advantage for the USA, or at least for the class of people in the USA he cares about.

Trump’s Presidency is marked by an undisguised willingness to leverage the massive economic advantages which come from possessing the world’s reserve currency, which means you can just invent money to purchase any good you want from another country, the economy of which becomes addicted to this “cash” flow.

Trump’s trade war has displayed an ability to force other states to make enormous concessions, including reinvesting hundreds of billions of dollars back into US industry, rather than face tariffs which would make it harder to give up their goods as tribute to the USA in return for token dollars.

The reserve currency is essentially a confidence trick. It always works, if and only if the world believes in it. The world was starting to lose its faith in the power of the dollar, and Trump was smart enough to know that the way to maintain a confidence trick is to double down and be still more assertive.

Trump has undoubtedly prolonged, at least a little, American economic supremacy.

The Ukraine deal is a related trick. Part of the “guarantee” of Ukraine’s security is that the Europeans will purchase US $100 billion worth of weapons from US arms manufacturers in order to give said weapons to Ukraine.

It is not planned that any European weapons will be in the deal or that the USA will finance any weapons. A senior FCDO source tells me that Keir Starmer is saying the UK will put “well over” £10 billion into the pot to buy US weapons for Ukraine.

The hope on the European side is that they will be able to pay for this merchant-of-death bonanza with stolen Russian money – assets seized under sanctions. There are two obstacles to this. The first is the international courts, which are most unlikely to agree. The second is Vladimir Putin.

I have never bought into the notion that Russia is militarily infallible and about to triumph quickly and simply. I have certainly never accepted the nonsensical propaganda that the initial disastrous Russian strike at Kiev was just a ruse or feint.

But Russia is indeed now winning and was always going ultimately to prevail on the battlefield. The delusional rhetoric of European leaders over the last few weeks, including from Keir Starmer, attempted to ignore this obvious reality.

Ukraine’s lines in Donetsk are now so untenable that Putin is able to attempt to insist on being given territory he has not conquered yet, because everybody knows that conquest is both unstoppable and imminent.

This is a realpolitik as hard as Trump’s.

The team Trump took to Alaska had substantially more officials connected with commercial policy than with military or foreign policy, and we should not underestimate the extent to which this attempt at agreement is cash driven.

Putin, who is winning the war, will insist on the lifting of economic sanctions and is simply not going to agree to US weapons being purchased for Ukraine by the Europeans with Russian money.

As support for the Ukrainian military is an essential part of the mooted “security guarantee” structure – as opposed to mutual defence commitment – funding will have to be found. This despite Rachel Reeves’s entire philosophy being to please the money markets by austerity.

My FCDO source tells me that plan B, for when the idea of paying with Russian money fails, is for the private financing of the UK’s purchase of US weapons for Ukraine. This has been an important point of preparation.

Just as with the aircraft flying out of Brize Norton, the idea is that a private equity consortium would finance the purchase of the weapons for Ukraine, with repayment by the UK over a twenty-year period.

This means that £10 billion of weaponry would eventually cost the UK about £38 billion. Yes, you read that right. BlackRock and Trump himself are among a variety of investors who would be brought into the scheme as financiers.

There is of course no industry like the weapons industry for corruption: backhanders, directorships, service contracts to front companies, post-retirement jobs. Politicians love the defence industry.

That US $100 billion for weapons will provide lots of lovely pork for absolutely everybody in the picture. Look at the wealth of Tony Blair. Come back to me in ten years’ time and discuss what personal wealth was eventually amassed by each of the people in this photo.

Zelensky is probably the biggest profiteer of all (though he also has bosses to pay off).

I explain in specific detail in both my memoirs – Murder in Samarkand and The Catholic Orangemen of Togo – that international affairs is always driven not only by control of natural resources, but by the corrupt interest of politicians in the companies that acquire them.

That I found first-hand to be true for oil and gas in Uzbekistan and for rutile and diamonds in Sierra Leone.

With Trump, these background motivations step out of the shadows and into the spotlight. So here we have a war which appears, thank goodness, to be drawing to a close, but on the basis of overtly commercial deals.

I expect those European leaders will cheer up. Cash can buy a lot of indignity.

As I have stated frequently, it was and is simply impossible for Ukraine to recover all of its territory of 1991, without a NATO-fuelled war being waged on a scale that would have been certain to escalate to nuclear conflagration.

There will now be border adjustments, be they de facto or also de jure, with the integration of some Russian-speaking areas of Eastern Ukraine into Russia, including Crimea and at least the large majority of the Donbass.

It is simply a statement of fact that there had never existed a Ukrainian state prior to 1991, and that there had never been any state with anything like the borders of 1991 Ukraine. I don’t know why people find incontrovertible historical truth so offensive.

We are going to have a modestly smaller, Western-aligned Ukraine. That seems to me something those Ukrainians who want to be Western-aligned ought to be celebrating. The percentage of the land area of Ukraine likely to be retained by Russia – something under 20% – is a fair approximation to the percentage of the Ukrainian population who would prefer to actually be Russian.

If the putative peace deal can be delivered, it will undoubtedly be better than continuing war. It will be slightly less advantageous to Ukrainian nationalists than the deal that was available in Turkey over two years ago, but which NATO vetoed.

Hopefully Ukrainians have noted that sacrificing an entire generation as cannon fodder for NATO is not a good policy.

European leaders are still attempting to strut their stuff by threatening Putin with further sanctions if a deal is not reached. This simply does not work; Moscow is fine. It in no way counters the military advantage now enjoyed by Putin.

I should like to believe that peace in Ukraine might lead to a reduction in Russophobic hysteria across Europe. But the truth is, that Cold War-style scaremongering is really all these failing European leaders have with which to terrify and control their disgruntled and impoverished populace at present.

They will, however, be ever less convincing.

———————————

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Yvette Cooper has continually lied about Palestine Action in a panicked attempt to defend the proscription of a direct action protest group which is opposing a Genocide in which Cooper’s government is deeply complicit.

Cooper and other government ministers have repeatedly claimed:

• Palestine Action attacks people, not just weapons-making equipment
• Palestine Action is funded by Iran or another hostile power
• Palestine Action attacks Jewish-owned businesses based on racism
• Palestine Action has plans for future unspecified appalling terrorist acts

In fact none of this is backed up by the assessment of the government’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre which forms the basis of the proscription of Palestine Action.

The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) is not a committee which meets occasionally, but a permanently staffed organisation with premises inside MI5 HQ in Millbank. The JTAC consists of representatives of:

MI5 – the Security Service
MI6 – the Special Intelligence Service
GCHQ – electronic and communications surveillance
DIS – the Defence Intelligence Service
Customs & Excise Special Operations
The Border Force
Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command
The Home Office
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The Ministry of Defence
The Department of Transport

Ten other ministries are included on an ad hoc basis.

All reports of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre must be approved by consensus of all involved.

It is of course vitally important that all of these bodies are under ministerial control. The object of the exercise is to produce the result desired by ministers, i.e. proscription, justified only on available true facts and a legally tenable argument under the current legislation.

I attach the declassified version of the JTAC report, which has been “gisted” for use in court proceedings.

“Gisted” means it has gone through a process known as “sanitisation”. This means that all the key information has been retained, but in a form which protects the source.

Before I explain this to you I should explain that I once headed the FCO section of an extremely similar operation, not JTAC but ESC. The Embargo Surveillance Centre had very similar membership, was composed of almost exactly the same parties and was also primarily involved in assessing and producing reports and “action-on” from top secret intelligence.

I wrote daily gisted reports and cleared the “sanitisation” with the intelligence service representatives on a daily basis.

The purpose is to protect your source. You cannot give out information so specific that it can cause those under surveillance to say “Oh no my phone is tapped!” or worse “Wow the only person who knew that is Jimmy. He must have told them. Jimmy is an MI5 spy”.

So you have to reduce the level of information down to something that might have a more generic origin. Rather than saying “This group is planning to carry out an attack on Ladies’ Day at Ascot”, for example, you might say “This group is planning an attack in England”.

The object is to give the highest level of information the intelligence services are comfortable in giving.

That might end up being as vague as “This group plans attacks on civilians”. But that information would obviously be vital to the court and it would be given.

In fact there is nothing whatsoever in the JTAC assessment which backs up any of the claims being put out in a panic by government ministers.

The JTAC report makes absolutely clear that its assessment of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is based only on the definition in the Terrorism Act, of a group that commits serious damage to property in order to influence government policy.

I pause here to note that the United Nations has intervened in the case to state that this does not meet international standards for defining terrorism. Damage to property should only be terrorism when the intent is to endanger life, such as damaging an air traffic control centre.

The JTAC report in fact notes that Palestine Action stresses its philosophy of non-violent action against people. Much is however made of one single attack (out of 385) where substantial violence against persons is alleged (though hotly denied).

But even here the JTAC report notes that the sledgehammer and axe were intended for use against machinery, an obvious fact.

I have blanked out a very small amount of the JTAC report which explicitly relates to this action in Bristol, because it is the subject of an upcoming trial and publication would be in contempt of court. The blanked-out sections take police allegations entirely as fact, even though they are hotly denied and subject to trial.

I have done this despite the fact that both government ministers and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police have repeatedly made assertions about these events which are absolutely prejudicial to a fair trial, and were undeniably in contempt of court.

Equality before the law has disappeared in the UK.

So here is the official, otherwise unvarnished JTAC report on Palestine Action. It makes plain that government ministers are simply lying about their information. I publish it as a journalist who has been given this document and sees an overwhelming public interest in the truth being known about a matter which has caused the arrest of some thousand people in recent weeks.

• If Palestine Action deliberately attacked people
• If Palestine Action had foreign funding
• If Palestine Action attacked random Jewish businesses
• If Palestine Action planned a big terrorist act

the JTAC report would say so. It says nothing of the sort.

Palestine Action is what it says it is: a non-violent direct action group which targets the Israeli weapons industry and its support and supply line.

It states that its actions are not terrorism but direct action to prevent Genocide – and when given the chance, juries have usually sided with Palestine Action against the government.

The reason Yvette Cooper has proscribed Palestine Action is that she is a member of Labour Friends of Israel and has received £215,000 from the Zionist lobby – which is £215,000 more than Palestine Action ever received on behalf of a foreign power.

Ministers are lying to you. I have provided a little antiseptic daylight.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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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If I were living in England, I would join Corbyn’s new party, and I urge people in England to do so. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland there are other factors, which I shall come on to.

I also say this with great respect for my friend George Galloway, whose Workers Party kindly hosted my candidacy for Blackburn in the General Election. I think Jeremy has been wrong in pointedly excluding George from the consultation meetings on setting up the new party.

But the truth is this. At nearly 700,000 signups, “Your Party” has already three times as many putative members as the Workers Party got voters at the General Election. Jeremy has the ability to create a juggernaut which the media and Establishment simply cannot ignore the way they shun George.

My advice to Workers Party members is to join Jeremy’s new party. There are many smaller left-wing parties which appear to be signing up en masse to the new venture – like the CPGB and the SWP – while having no intention of dissolving their own membership and structures.

It is very possible that the rules of Your Party will permit such dual membership.

I am thrilled by the potentially transformative effect of the public actually getting to hear left-wing arguments. This is how Corbyn, even handicapped by the conservative baggage of the Labour Party establishment, managed to get a far higher vote in two general elections than Keir Starmer achieved in his.

The Scottish Independence referendum showed the same effect. Despite massive media bias, the public did actually still get a chance to hear the arguments for Independence that had been kept from them. The result was a step change in support for Independence of 15% or more, which has never been lost since.

Your Party could shift the Overton window, permanently. For the first time in 40 years the public might get some exposure to the arguments of the Left.

We know that renationalisation of utilities, better public services and taxation of the wealthy are popular. When Corbyn led Labour, there was a brief opportunity to vote for those policies with a realistic chance of success, and millions of people took it.

Your Party will not be saddled with the need to compromise with the Blairites, and thus will be able to develop policy platforms of much greater internal coherence.

I think it is safe to assume it will be anti-NATO and favour a pacific foreign policy based on respect for international law. I think it is safe to assume that its policies will not only favour redistribution of wealth, but will challenge fundamental capitalist tenets of the ownership of the means of production.

I have no doubt it will be firmly anti-Genocide and will back BDS measures against Israel including arms sales.

I very much hope it will support a single state of Palestine. It is plain there is no viable two state solution. Palestine has been dismembered, chopped up, separated. The idea that a viable, non-contiguous state can be assembled from the ruins of Gaza, with the West Bank (or parts of it) and East Jerusalem is plainly nonsensical.

It is a Bantustan solution designed to provide cheap labour to service Israel daily. The fact that all the Western government proponents of a two state solution speak of a demilitarised Palestinian state, permanently at the mercy of the genocidal Israeli state, shows how dishonest the plan is.

It has been suggested to me that Your Party will adopt the policy that the Palestinians should decide. I agree with that, but with one caveat. That cannot mean the hated Mahmoud Abbas should decide, and the Palestinians cannot decide with a literal gun to their head.

Let Palestine be free from the river to the sea. Then let the Palestinians decide whether they want to agree to the creation of a separate Jewish state.

The membership must decide the policy. I am reasonably confident of the result.

What cannot happen is an abuse of the central mechanisms of the party to demonise and/or expel people for false anti-semitism accusations, as the Labour Party did under Jeremy’s leadership.

It goes without saying that the ludicrous IHRA definition – equating anti-semitism with criticism of a state that is committing Genocide – must be rejected.

If it is really to be a different, bottom-up type of party, then the party leader ought not to have that type of power. The key salaried positions should also be subject to election rather than just appointed at discretion. Decentralisation must be very real and effective every day.

Which leads me to the nations of the UK.

The Left in Scotland is overwhelmingly pro-Independence. Unionism is very heavily a right-wing thing. There is a rump of left-wing thinkers who oppose Scottish Independence on internationalist grounds with a vision of working class solidarity. But that is a dwindling and far from vigorous strain of thought.

Neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Zarah Sultana has, so far as I can see, said a word about Scotland in talking about the new party. Their vision appears very Anglocentric. I hope that this silence is an acknowledgement that the position of the party in Scotland is, as English people, not their concern.

The existence of the SNP and of Plaid Cymru means that Your Party is entering a significantly more crowded market in Scotland and Wales, where not only is nationalism an extra factor, but the nationalist parties already sit well to the left of Keir Starmer (admittedly not a difficult ask).

In Scotland, I think mistakenly, there seems a widespread presumption that the Corbyn project will fall flat. But disillusionment with Labour in Scotland is enormous, both nationally and locally. As is disillusionment with the SNP.

Those connected to the Corbyn project in Scotland at the moment appear largely to come from the Old Labour establishment, many of whom have been vehemently anti-Independence.

But I doubt the party will reflect that.

Young people in Scotland are overwhelmingly pro-Independence. Another factor which receives insufficient attention is that opinion polls regularly show between 30 and 40% of Labour voters in Scotland are pro-Independence. Those are important recruiting demographics for Your Party.

I have not seen any figures for signups in Scotland. Pro rata with the UK there would be 70,000, which would make Your Party immediately the biggest party in Scotland. I think it is fair to assume there are at least 30,000. Nobody can know where they stand on Independence.

If Your Party is to be a genuinely decentralised organisation, then its Scottish and Welsh parties should be separate legal entities. They alone should decide their policy on Independence.

I suspect that a fudge will be attempted, whereby Your Party supports “the right of the Scottish people to decide”. That is frankly no use to anyone, and proceeds from an assumption that permission has to be granted.

The right of the Scottish nation to self-determination is established in international law. It is not a policy just to state it.

The support for Genocide in Palestine is not a bug, it is a feature of the rogue British state. That imperialist entity needs to be broken up.

So, where do I stand personally on the new Corbyn party?

I have signed up for information. I will make honest and well-motivated efforts to shape it and influence its members, and I encourage other people to join at this stage. I shall work for it to be decentralised in its structures, anti-Zionist and anti-NATO in its views, and for Scottish and Welsh Independence.

Depending on results, I shall decide whether to stick with it. I do hope it will be a broad church and that people will not split over small matters; but on large matters I cannot myself be part of a Zionist or Unionist party.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of 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.

Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

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

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
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Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
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