Craig Murray's Blog, page 151

The Victory Paradox

Just as the SNP sweeps to utter domination of the Scottish presence at Westminster, the future of Scottish nationalism must move to a rejection of Westminster rule as illegitimate. That is the victory paradox.

There is no doubt that this is the best possible election result for achieving Scottish independence in the near term. The one thing that I believe might have postponed independence for decades, was a Labour Party government of the UK with SNP support, governing as Tory Lite but making the dreadful repressive UK state that little bit less openly vicious, the abuse a little bit more disguised, the wealthy corporate elite less openly triumphalist.

I know that Tory rule is going to be dreadful for many decent people who are struggling to make ends meet, that the heartlessness of benefits sanctions will cause despair and suicide, that asylum seekers will be detained and abused. But Scotland has absolutely rejected the entire Tory system, and the scene is now set for the kind of extra-parliamentary resistance that we saw to Thatcher’s poll tax. We have to refuse to let Westminster do this to people. In this circumstance, those SNP MPs are relevant insofar as they use their platform to help build the popular resistance, not in terms of anything they do in that appalling haw-haw club.

Labour would have lost and we would have a Tory government even if Labour had won every seat in Scotland. Labour’s abject failure was in no sense caused by the SNP, whatever the appalling journalists of BBC Scotland may say or imply. And Labour is now going to underline, still more than the Tories, the urgent need for Scotland to be independent. The airwaves are already buzzing with London comment that Labour’s problem was that it was not right wing enough for English opinion. The next Labour leader must be more Blairite, they say. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper or Chuka Umunna are touted to fit the bill, they suggest. This is completely a false analysis. If England were given a chance to vote for an SNP style, more left wing, offering then very many of the English would vote for it. But it will not happen. Labour will lurch ever further to the right and it will become undeniable that the Scottish people can only express their political aspirations through independence.

Even the best people are still human, and I have to confess that I am absolutely delighted that the SNP leadership have been neatly removed by this election result from any temptation. Exercising power within the United Kingdom state can be heady and addictive. An insidious agenda was quite blatantly propagated by Alex Bell in Bella Caledonia, a man who has been very close to the party leadership, and who actually celebrated the idea that:

The fascinating story of this election is how the SNP is ‘Britishing’ itself, gently playing down the big constitutional stuff in favour of real power over the austerity agenda.

Mr Bell goes on to make the ludicrous proposition that to support the creation of a small state is in itself a conservative agenda. He is profoundly wrong. To dismantle an aggressive imperialist state is not a remotely conservative agenda. I have frequently expressed the fear that there is a careerist core in the SNP who are more concerned with troughing in the political class and being big-wigs in the UK than with achieving independence. Bell’s insidious unionism – very lightly disguised as support for “utilitarian nationalism” – had the potential to be much more corrosive to the cause of independence than anything which the Tories can do. Fortunately Bell’s thesis is totally stuffed by the election result, and his pseudo-intellectual rationalisations of the status quo can now be safely confined to the dustbin of irrelevance. The SNP has no “real power over the austerity agenda” and has zero chance of gaining any within the United Kingdom.

There is now no course to take but root and branch opposition to the consequences of a Tory rule which Scotland has just declared anathema. The only way forward is now independence and the only route is through a mounting extra-parliamentary opposition over the next few years. I am absolutely delighted for all those SNP MPs, of whom a large number are personal friends. But if you want to remain relevant, you have to forget about Angus Robertson telling you what suits to wear or how to put an approved knot in your tie (yes, that really happened), and you have to inspire the street in the way so many of you did during the referendum campaign.

Jim Murphy and Dougie Alexander

I am off to get very very drunk!! Hurray!!!!

Independence Here We Come!!!!!

Wow! If the exit poll is right, Independence is a nailed on certainty. New Labour a total busted flush, and a Scotland firmly behind the SNP being ruled by David Cameron and a Tory, UKIP and Democratic Unionist coalition. Get down the bookies tomorrow and put your house on independence within five years. We won’t need a referendum. Put your mum’s house on UDI.

Destruction of Evidence

We are getting to the time when the postal ballots are mixed in unidentifiably with other ballots before counting. This is on the instruction of the electoral commission. This destroys all evidence of fraud – if you get batches of hundreds of postal ballots all for the same candidate, or if the balance of postal votes is vastly different from the balance of secret ballots, there is no way of observing it.

I have tried again and again to discover any rationale for this mixing in, other than the facilitation of fraud. I asked the Electoral Commission when I was a candidate, and was told it was an additional precaution against individual votes being identified. That is complete nonsense – there is no way that counting the postal ballots separately would enable you to identify individuals.

Undoubtedly some readers of this blog will be observers at various counts. Ask the returning officer or their staff at what stage the postal ballots are mixed in unidentifiably, how, and why. I should be most interested to see reports of the responses. If we see a substantial difference between Labour’s performance in Scotland and the opinion polls, this is how it will be achieved.

The Odious Smith Commission

From the warm embrace of passionate citizen activism, Scotland’s future passed to the cold hands of hardened political hacks in closeted rooms. It is a physical impossibility that all 14,000 submissions from the public received by mid-October were even read, led alone properly considered. I am willing to bet most were not even opened.

No, this was the very worst kind of deal-making by callous political operatives, where party interests came first, second and last. I do not give a fig for the result. Income tax devolution is of minimal use if other major taxes are set from London and most income still comes from a Westminster “grant”. Revenue from oil and whisky will still be treated in government accounts as “UK” rather than arising in Scotland. It is far short of the quasi Federal powers which No voters were promised and the Lib Dems pretend to believe in.

Actually, I do not give a fig for the Smith Commission. I want to live in a country where the Westminster establishment does not send our children to fight and die in illegal wars, and which does not harbour weapons of mass destruction. I want a country where governance is decided by citizens and not cooked up the way of this sordid, sordid deal.

That is not to say we should not take advantage of any minor opportunities for increasing social fairness in Scotland that may accrue. But given the continued Westminster stranglehold on overall funding levels, they will be minor indeed.

Nor will I disdain the amusement afforded by the total intellectual mess into which the Labour Party has landed itself. If non-Scottish MPs in Westminster cannot vote on Scottish levels of income tax, it would be absolutely wrong for Scottish MPs to vote on English, Welsh or Northern Irish levels of income tax. That is unanswerable, yet the Labour Party cannot bring itself to acknowledge it. This should be fun.

For those wanting a detailed analysis, we have the excellent Stuart Campbell.

Gordon Brown the Big Feartie

I do not claim any direct link between my declaration in Kirkcaldy that I was seeking nomination as a SNP Westminster candidate and fancied taking on Gordon Brown, and his subsequent decision to let the media know he intends to stand down and not fight! But it is an act of remarkable political cowardice from a man who so spectacularly promised No voters massive devolution of powers to the Scottish parliament. That Brown promise was given more publicity by the mainstream media than any other event in the entire referendum campaign. The fact that Brown never had any locus to deliver what he was promising was bound at some stage to become acutely embarrassing. He now escapes responsibility for the cynical lies of his pledges, by simply running away.

Brown was always a feartie. He was scared to stand against Tony Blair for leader, scared to call a general election early when he could have averted Labour’s electoral disaster. He was even scared to stick to his guns when for once he got something right and called that dreadful woman a bigot.

Brown contributed directly to the crippling poverty of millions by his disastrous deregulation of the City of London and years of giving the bankers everything they desired. Nor must we allow the mainstream media unchallenged to cement the lie that there was no alternative to trillions of pounds in grants and effective subsidies from taxpayers being given direct to the fatcat bankers, which have crippled the public finances for generations. Letting bad banks go bust and bad bankers go on the dole (or hopefully jump) was a far better option. Contrary to the Brown myth, world recession was not averted. It happened, massively. The only thing saved was the multi-million incomes of the people whose greed and stupidity had caused the collapse.

Brown remains the greatest friend the bankers ever had.

Brown and Darling lead a large phalanx of Labour MPs who realise their best career move is to transit to the benches of the House of Lords while the going is good, and start pocketing their 300 pounds a day allowance for doing nothing but hoovering up comfy directorships.

I fear that they will find that Scottish independence is coming sooner than they think and that gig will soon get cut short too.

As for Brown’s devolution promises, frankly I don’t give a damn about the Smith Commission. Holyrood control of income tax is meaningless if most other taxes are set in London. Fiscal autonomy can only work if Scotland is given all its taxes, including those from hydrocarbons and from whisky. That will never happen. Any tax and spend devolution which reserves oil and whisky taxes to the UK Treasury will be perverted by Westminster, to only result in further public spending cuts for Scotland. Besides, if Westminster can still send our children to fight and die in illegal wars, the money is immaterial.

Which brings us back to Gordon Brown. Remember not only did he first deregulate the bankers then give them huge transfers from poor families’ taxes, he backed Blair to the hilt over the invasion of Iraq. Without Brown’s support, Blair could not have done it, and hundreds of thousands would not have died – nor would we have ISIS and linked chaos now.

Brown is an evil man.

Save the Fatcats

These are the top salaries at the Save the Children fund.

CEO Justin Forsyth £139,950

COO Anabel Hoult £139,950

COO / CFO & Strategic Initiatives Rachel Parr £131,970

Global Programmes Director Fergus Drake £113,300

Fundraising Director Tanya Steele £112,200

Marketing & Comms Director Sue Allchurch £111,920

Policy & Advocacy Director Brendan Cox £106,029

CFO Peter Banks £102,000

HR Director Paul Cutler £100,980

The UK average salary is 26,500.

StC has just given Tony Blair its “Global Legacy” award. What kind of people like Tony Blair? People who earn over 100,000. I am not sure that if you put money in a tin, or bought from their charity shop, you thought you were paying that many fat salaries. There are also gold plated pensions and other benefits. Justin Forsyth, the CEO, of course worked in Tony Blair’s neo-con policy unit.

As I have written before, very few charities are in any sense independent any more. Save the Children Fund gets 176 million pounds – over half its income - in grants from various governments, including over 80 million from the British government. That compares to 106 million in donations from the public. In 2012 over 70 million pounds was spent by Save the Children UK on its own staff costs. This was reduced on paper to 44 million in 2014 by the expedient of transferring some Headquarters staff from Save the Children UK to Save the Children International. I have an uneasy feeling about some of Save the Children’s accounting presentation. Justin Forsyth’s and Annabel Hoult’s salary of 139,950 sounds a lot better than 140,000 doesn’t it? Rachel Parr’s 131,970 sounds less than 132 grand.

Save the Children’s highly paid and very numerous HQ staff work in a swanky office for which they pay a staggering 6.5 million pounds a year lease. Do they really need their HQ in ultra expensive Central London? I suppose all those high earners have to get home to Islington. Their HQ costs more than all their other premises put together, including all their shops.

I wonder how much all of this is known to the 13,000 good-hearted volunteers who work many hours for nothing to support these people.

I give regularly to charity, by standing order. I am sure so do many who read this blog. If you are giving to Save the Children, I do urge you to re-target your charitable giving.

May hem

Theresa May announced the security services have foiled forty major terrorist plots in the last decade. They also successfully prevented Rotherham FC from winning the Champions League and the sky from turning into plasticine.

We have had, on average, a major “anti-terrorism act” curtailing vital liberties every 20 months in that period, to the point where it is illegal for me to give a talk in Westminster (see last post). We have security theatre of the absurd, everywhere. Air travel is a misery due to the war on toothpaste, but I can carry two litres of extremely flammable duty free 50% spirit on board a plane. At Waverley Station in Edinburgh a taxi can no longer enter due to “terrorism”, but they can drop me outside and I can take my 60 kg of plastic explosive in two suitcases down the elevator.

The disaster of universities today is corporatism and managerialism. It is not an excess of freedom of speech. Academics dare say very little – they spend their entire time wracking their brains as to how to produce research that will attract finance, and thus meet cash targets and not lead to redundancies and departmental closures. Universities see themselves overwhelmingly as businesses, not as self governing academic communities and centres of intellectual inquiry. In Scotland, every University Principal is on over 300,000 a year and every University Secretary on over 200,000. There are no poets or philosophers on University Courts – bean counting is the only discipline deemed relevant to university governance. A tiny number of eccentric academics are devoted to their teaching, but there is no income stream of any kind dependent on teaching quality.

Now Theresa May is going to make doubly sure no student ever hears anything interesting or inspirational, by giving University administrations – who want nothing but a profitable business – a “duty to protect” students from extremist thought. This idea is so illiberal it makes me physically vomit. The net result will be a cumbersome system of vetting for every external speaker, having to submit texts for approval in advance, to be seen by the University administration. The result will be a firm intention to discourage external speakers from appearing at all, in order to avoid the cost of this bureaucracy.

I speak frequently in universities and certainly am not going to submit my talks for pre-vetting (I always speak off the cuff anyway). In fact, if this legislation goes through, I am going to undertake spontaneous guerrilla lectures in universities, just popping up and starting talking, with no prior approval at all. I hope others may join me. We need a flying squad to preserve the very notion of academic intercourse without political constraint.

Craig Murray, Criminal

Here I am making an illegal speech to an illegal gathering.

I was witness to an extraordinary example of the use of “anti-terrorist” laws to deny democracy. The whole of Parliament Square, College Green and Canning Green were closed off with high Harris fencing, as were other spaces nearby. These were protected by a huge police presence. I counted 37 police vans. All this to counter eighty “Occupy Democracy” protestors wishing to highlight the alienation of the political class from the rest of us. That MPs feel the need to make Westminster look like the Somme 1917, to defend themselves against a few ordinary people, is proof that the concept of “democracy” is now alien to the Westminster system.

Some of this was surreal. There were signs up stating that voice amplification was illegal as was “sleeping equipment”. Just what is sleeping equipment? I have managed to sleep my entire life without such equipment. I just close my eyes and it happens. I didn’t even know you needed equipment to sleep. It is a curious thing that officialdom, when it becomes unreasonable, inevitably resorts to poor use of language. Nobody in normal life speaks of “sleeping equipment”. There is a simple English word, “bedding”. If they mean bedding, why don’t they say so?

The happy band of demonstrators had gathered just outside the entrance to the Supreme Court, in a small unfenced area. I used to sing regularly and seriously. Fortunately this has left me with the ability to speak very loudly at length and still with some modulation. If you consider that video is in an area of very heavy traffic noise and with no (banned) amplification, I hope you are impressed! I started speaking in order to fend off what seemed an imminent move by police to start arresting protestors for breach of the peace. This followed an argument over whether an old sofa and rug constituted “sleeping equipment”. A policeman stated that there were legal rulings that “sleeping equipment” included anything that could be adapted for the purpose of sleeping. I suggested to him that he confiscate my trousers, as these were capable of being rolled up and used as a pillow.

The Police Superintendent had just stated that refusal to give up the sofa constituted behaviour likely to lead to a breach of the peace, when I decided to change the dynamic by giving a talk, which peculiarly led almost all the police to withdraw immediately to about a hundred yards away. If you are interested, you can see something of this, and get a tour of the fencing, from this video by one of the protestors.

I say “if you are interested”, but really you ought to be interested. The fact that in Westminster, people who are obviously very peaceful are not allowed simply to express their political view, ought to worry everybody in the UK very, very deeply. We have slipped away from the fundamental precepts of democracy – freedom of speech and assembly, habeas corpus, freedom from torture. None of those exist any more. Lulled by the mainstream media, most people have not even noticed.

I shall be speaking outside the Scottish Parliament on 29th November, and in Dundee, Perth (and possibly Ayr too if I can work it out) on the 30th. I shall be speaking again in Dundee at the March against Austerity on 6th December.

The Trident Test

The Rochester By-Election further destroys the intellectual case for the BBC’s decision that only male party leaders who support Trident can debate on TV before the UK general election.

The Greens got five times as many votes as the Lib Dems in Rochester, and are ahead of them in several recent national opinion polls. I do not posit the support of Trident as the criterion for inclusion, in any sense as a joke. Support of Trident stands as a good marker for adhesion to the neo-con establishment consensus. The establishment is simply not prepared for more radical views to be put before the public as a serious choice. UKIP is the chosen right wing vehicle into which disillusion with politicians should be channelled.

The BBC justification for including UKIP is that they have shown a “substantial increase in electoral support”, and the BBC argue that the Greens have not done so. There are two major problems with this argument.

The first is that UKIP’s “massive increase in electoral support” has been massively boosted by a huge amount of publicity given to UKIP for the last two years, especially by the BBC. The BBC is citing the effect of its own propaganda as justification for continuing that propaganda. If the Greens had been given as much publicity as UKIP, the electoral climate would be very different.

The second is that this appears to be a one way argument. If UKIP’s massive increase in electoral support can get them included, surely the Lib Dems total collapse in electoral support should get them excluded? The injustice of including the Lib Dems and not the Greens, when the Greens are beating them not just in opinion polls but in real polls, cannot simply be brushed aside.

We then have the SNP. There is a very real possibility that the SNP will have more MPs than the Lib Dems after the next election. Indeed, one recent opinion poll put them ahead of the Lib Dems in polling across the entire UK, even though all those SNP voters were just in Scotland. For the BBC to push so hard the line that we are “Better Together”, and then exclude the party supported by the plurality of Scots from UK debate, is an irony only the BBC cannot see. That some viewers of a UK debate would have no opportunity to vote SNP, would not remove their very real interest in understanding and questioning the views of what will be a major component of the parliament which governs them.

The Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP have female leaders and are anti-Trident, a symbol of their broad radicalism. All are, to use that crude measure, to the left of the parties which will be included. To be in, you have to be led by an identikit posh male and support Trident. That is the BBC test.