Craig Murray's Blog, page 163

They Really Do Hate Scotland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaza Conundrum

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

Cage Prisoners and the Police State

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

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

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

Five More Years of Tory Rule

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

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

Hysteria versus Impunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not a Pacifist

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

Scots Self-Hating Myths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Absence of Liberalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Camping on the Indus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I need to do novels?

Water Damage

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

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

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

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