Craig Murray's Blog, page 28

Diplomacy Is Always an Option

You are conditioned to believe that killing more people is a better solution than negotiating a compromise. This is despite the fact that it is self-evidently a psychopathic notion. Let me give you a homespun analogy.

I have this week been dealing with an incident where somebody feels their share of a limited income should be increased, due to the amount of work they have put in. Others felt the person was underestimating the amount of work they had also put in. It became quite a difficult discussion. Happily in the end a compromise has been reached that everyone can live with. At no stage did anybody turn to me and say “we should kill them, that will solve it”. (And to anticipate the trolls, no I do not get any income myself from it).

There may be differences of opinion within a village on whether a wind turbine should be built next to it. The matter will be resolved, one way or another. Nobody suggests the answer is to smash anybody into bloody pulp on the ground with bombs and automatic weapons fire.

Yet when the question is whether that village ought to be in Ukraine or in Russia, inflicting horrible, painful death on those who disagree is seen not only as legitimate, but as heroic and noble. Boasts are continually being made by both sides about how many of the “enemy” have been killed, as though they were orcs rather than human beings with their own hopes and dreams, no different to those they are fighting.

I do not wish to understimate the differences between being in Ukraine and being in Russia. But they pale compared to the difference between hundreds of thousands of people being alive, or hundreds of thousands of people being dead. The problem is much more comprehensible when you accept that there are a significant minority of people within Ukraine’s official borders who really do want their district to be in Russia, and in some limited number of eastern localities they are a majority. That is not a Russian invention.

Diplomatic solutions to territorial solutions always end with a certain amount of population movement to areas where people can be with “their” side in perceived greater safety and comfort. The second world war shifted territorial boundaries and moved populations to an incredible degree. Western Ukraine was historically Polish. Western and much of northern Poland was historically German.

The simplistic narrative that the Donbass is Russian is just untrue. Pre 2014 the urban populations in the Donbass were very largely Russian. Urban populations are more visible and easier mobilised. But a substantial minority were Ukrainian, almost all rural. While only a small percentaage of those Donbass Russians come from families settled there pre 1946.

The Crimea is even more difficult. The population was historically majority Tartar – Crimea was within living memory a Muslim land – and the Krim Tatars were deported brutally by Stalin. This is not ancient history. Much of the deportation did not happen until the 1950’s. I cannot understand those who join me in wanting the Chagos Islanders to get their country back, but do not take the same view of the rights of the Krim Tatars.

(The same people tend to dismiss the human rights abuses against the Uighurs. Muslim Central Asia is a serious blind spot for many on the left).

Thankfully, diplomatic channels to Russia through Turkey remain open in the Ukraine war, as witness the recent prisoner exchanges. I am happy to see the British mercenaries back home safe in the UK, not least because now we won’t need to hear any more lies about how they were not mercenaries but new Ukrainians who had permanently settled in Ukraine.

Western powers should have used the limited but real advances made by the Ukrainian military in the last fortnight to reach out to Putin at a point where he might have been persuaded to accept a deal based on the ceasefire lines as they existed in 2021. Instead, they have ramped up the Russophobia another notch and persuaded themselves that the total destruction of the Russian army can be achieved and Putin brought down by a colour revolution.

The grim response from Russia, with mass mobilisation, is all too predictable. I am afraid that the notion that opposition to the draft will see Putin ousted is totally unrealistic. It underestimates the power of nationalist propaganda within Russia, and misreads the national psychology.

It really doesn’t help when the Ukrainians paint swastikas on tanks.

Do you believe that the Russians are propagandised into supporting this war but westerners are not? Here is an interesting experiment you can repeat. Go to google and do a google image search on “Swastikas on Ukrainian tanks”. I get this, and I suspect you will get something very similar:

Google Image Search “Swastikas on Ukrainian Tanks”

The large majority of those images link to articles claiming that the “Z” symbol used by the Russian forces is a (previously unnoticed) Nazi symbol.

The one thing google does not give you is any swastikas on Ukrainian tanks, which is what you asked for.

Now go to yandex.ru and enter an identical image search for “Swastikas on Ukrainian tanks”. This is what I get:

Yandex Image Search “Swastikas on Ukrainian Tanks”

That is a rather strikingly different set of images, is it not?

Now which one looks more like what I asked for?

Crucially, the first two images top left on the yandex search link to the German NTV station report that captured the swastika on the Ukrainian tank which Max Blumenthal had tweeted about. That is what I was searching for, to check on Max’s facts. Google hides this; I have no doubt whatsoever that this is deliberate.

It is also worth noting that while the Google results totally exclude any material about Nazi symbols used by Ukrainian troops in the current conflict, the yandex.ru search does include images from pro-Ukrainian sites that claim to debunk these images, rightly or wrongly.

In other words, while the google search results are highly censored to exclude the Russian viewpoint, the yandex results include pro-Ukrainian viewpoints and appear to be much more what you would expect on a random, uncensored internet search on the subject.

As I said at the start, if you are in the west you are being conditioned to support the war, to at least as great an extent as people are being conditioned to support it in Russia. That little experiment with google is the tip of an iceberg of suppression: on twitter, on facebook, by paypal defunding, and by all of western TV, radio and newspapers.

On any matter relating to any aspect of the Ukraine war, you are seeing one side of a story. Russians are seeing only another side. The space for truth is very limited, as the world crashes into full dystopia.

I might add that the chilling effect is so great that I personally have serious qualms about publishing this article, in case its querying of aspects of the western narrative lead to cancellation of social media and paypal accounts.

Many of my regular readers are annoyed when I point out that Russia is far too weak a country to be a military superpower that can challenge NATO. It has an economy the size of that of Spain or Italy, and a military crippled by corruption. It has an economy that is not only small but woefully undeveloped and reliant on raw commodity export, be it energy, cereal or mineral.

To historians, the most significant thing about Putin may be his failure to develop manufacturing industry at a time when China raced into world manufacturing domination.

What limited military power Russia does command was used very effectively in Syria, where I credit Putin for ending the momentum of Wahabbist jihadi violence, promoted by the USA and Saudi Arabia, that had so traumatised the world for the first two decades of the twenty first century. But those who extrapolated that into a general ability for Russia to counterbalance the USA were very wrong.

For my entire lifetime, the western military industrial complex and its national and NATO functionaries have exaggerated systematically the “Russian threat” in order to justify their own bloated budgets. I have explained this throughout the Ukraine crisis and again and again I have said that Russia does not have the ability to conquer Ukraine – it is therefore utterly ludicrous for NATO propagandists to claim we have to squander fortunes to defend against Russia sweeping through all of western Europe.

What I have always found bitterly amusing is western left-wingers who do the NATO propagandists’ work for them by exaggerating Russian power.

The logical fallacy of western politicians cheering Ukrainian advances around Kharkiv, and in the same time saying that still trillions more need to be spent on defence against Russian invasion by the USA, Germany, France, UK and others, would be obvious to a five year old. Yet peculiarly I don’t believe I have ever seen or heard the fallacy queried in the media.

Putin’s reaction appears to be escalation. The conscription is a huge statement internally which probably does make major military reverse not politically survivable, even for Putin. The proposed referenda in occupied districts also make any backtracking very problematic.

No reasonable person can believe that a time of war and military administration can be adequate conditions for a referendum vote. The situation now is even more extreme than when the Crimea “referendum” was held in 2014. No doubt we would see similarly risible 97% referenda results now. In real life, in a genuinely free vote you would not get 97% on a referendum for free ice cream. Yulia Timoshenko won about 18% of the vote in Crimea in the Ukrainian presidential election of 2010, on a stridently Ukrainian nationalist and pro-western platform.

While I knew the Russian military to be far weaker than we were being told, what is more surprising is the spectacular failures of Russian intelligence services, which were traditionally very good.

The spectacular failure to predict the Ukrainian counterattack around Kharkiv is worth considering. Given the scope and range of modern surveillance techniques available, from satellite, drone and aircraft imagery through computer hacking and communications intercept, that Russia did not pick up the build-up of Ukrainian forces for the north-eastern attack is, in this day and age, very strange.

It follows the massive Russian intelligence failure at the outset of this invasion, where both the strength and morale of Ukrainian forces around Kiev were massively underestimated, as was the attitude to invasion of the Ukrainian people. Vast sums given to the FSB to bribe key Ukrainian politicians and officials proved to be wasted (and the Kremlin believes to a sgnificant extent the funds were purloined by corrupt FSB personnel).

So what is the solution? Borders are not immutable. The borders of sovereign Ukraine only lasted 21 years before Russia annexed Crimea. A Ukrainian victory that retakes Crimea from Russia would involve a long war and a death toll rising into the millions.

There really are – and remember I worked over twenty years in British Foreign Office, six of them in the senior management structure – people in NATO, and in all western governments, who have no problem with the notion of hundreds of thousands of dead people, particularly as they are nearly all Eastern Europeans or Central Asians. They are not even particularly perturbed by the risk the conflict could turn nuclear. They are delighted that the Russian armed forces are being degraded and vast sums pumped into western military budgets. That is worth any number of dead Ukrainians to them.

I do not believe the USA, UK nor NATO has any political will for peace. This is a disaster. The question is whether the economic pain their populations will feel this winter will force the western politicians to consider the negotiating table. This war can only end with at least de facto international recognition of Russian control of Crimea, and with some kind of special status for the Donbass. The alternative is a war so destructive as to bring disaster across the entire world economy, with the possibility of nuclear escalation.

China remains remarkably unassertive on the world stage as it increases its economic dominance. If there were ever a time for China to assert international leadership it is now. There are no signs of such initiative at present.

How many thousands of people is it right to kill for control of Izium? How many millions of people worldwide should plunge into dire need for the same cause?

There is a solution that leaves a free and now much more united Ukraine with the vast majority of the territory it has enjoyed in its very short current existence, and lets go some populations who determinedly do wish to be Russian. People need the courage to say so.

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Cool Observation of Mass Hysteria

When the so-called “Leader of the opposition” opposes protest against a new unelected head of state, out of respect for the previous unelected head of state, you know you live under totalitarianism.

Except almost all dictatorships do at least have the form of an election. Indeed, some of the worst dictators in modern history have been genuinely elected, an unfortunate fact we generally prefer to elide.

Over a week of mob hysteria in the UK helps us to understand how.

The psychological phenomenon of societal emotional spasm is fairly well studied but still not necessarily fully explained. How we get to a stage where, in 2022, newspapers are seriously promoting as miraculous clouds that “look like the Queen”, double rainbows or meteors, is a difficult question.

What is not in the doubt is the tendency of deluded mobs to turn on those who do not join in – and the capacity of the unscrupulous to exploit that power.

Attempts to intimidate people out of protesting against the monarchy appear broadly to have succeeded. We saw some hideous attacks on free speech over the last week, including people arrested for holding up placards, for peacefully expressing vocal dissent, or even for carrying eggs or blank pieces of paper.

A number of figures have stood up to come out arguing for freedom of speech – Andrew Marr, Martin Bell, John Sweeney, David Davis, Joanna Cherry, Michael Russell. These are all figures who broadly represent a liberal consensus in society that seems to have gone. As I know all but one of them, I hope they will forgive me for saying they tend to be slightly passé.

Nobody in power, in Westminster or in Scotland, has asserted the importance of freedom of speech, while opposition leader Keir Starmer has done the opposite, emphasising “respect” for authority as more important than freedom of speech, a position taken by anti-democrats everywhere.

There are two arguments used against freedom of speech at present:

1) We should honour the dead, and respect the sanctity of the mourning period.

I do not in general dismiss the value of all societal convention, and I have a certain sympathy for this approach. However, the difficulty is that the accession of a new monarch happens at the moment of death of the old monarch. The latter cannot be used to stifle all protest at the former.

The Establishment quite deliberately conflates the two in order to prevent protest. We have the extraordinary and macabre spectacle of the corpse of the late Queen being carted around the country and her coffin put on public display.

If people really cared for her, I would have thought it much more respectful to bury her, but the monarchist hysteria has to be dialed up past 11 for the longest possible period, and the excuse for suppressing dissent has to be maintained.

Young Rory, who was viciously, physically attacked for heckling sexual abuser Prince Andrew at the Edinburgh procession and then arrested, handcuffed and charged, was widely condemned by the media for disturbing a funeral. But it was not a funeral. That funeral is still not until Monday, when this farce finally ends.

The correct word for what we have witnessed so far is not a funeral but a series of bizarre obsequies. The state is demanding that all citizens be obsequious.

There is a reason that word has such negative connotations, and if the UK had educated journalists rather than state stenographers they might explore it.

So much has been entirely irrational. One moment that stuck in my mind was criticism of Liz Truss for failing to curtsy to the coffin of the Queen when it arrived at RAF Northolt. This was described as “grotesque” – as though curtsying to a corpse were not itself an image straight out of Edgar Allan Poe.

The concomitant of stretching out the period before poor Elizabeth is finally put to rest, is to use that period to maximum political advantage for the introduction of the new King, while his mother’s aura still shines.

We have the deliberate confusion of the two processes. Both the man in Oxford who merely asked “who elected him?”, and the woman in Edinburgh who held the sign saying “Fuck imperialism, abolish the monarchy”, were at the specific proclamation of the accession of King Charles III – events separate to the obsequies. Yet both were condemned for lack of respect for a dead Queen.

We also have the extraordinary spectacle of Charles, immediately after the death of his mother, abandoning his mourning and bottling his grief while shuttling furiously around Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales for entirely political events.

This did not have to happen. This is absolutely not a tradition. Nothing remotely like it has ever happened before.

There was no reason whatsoever why Charles had to visit the Scottish parliament, the Welsh assembly or the assembly in the north of Ireland, now. This could have waited until after the funeral. He could even have had a week of rest and reflection after the funeral before embarking on a tour of the nations.

There was a deliberate decision to hold these political events in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff, aimed at strengthening the monarchy and union, while the corpse was still metaphorically warm, in order to maximise the political bounce for the monarchy from Elizabeth’s death.

Part of this calculation was that, if Charles’ first visit as King was after the funeral, there would be political protest at the accession in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, possibly quite substantial.

There is absolutely no modern precedent for a royal tour between the death and the funeral of the previous monarch. It is, when you think about it, disrespectful.

Edinburgh is explicable in terms of Elizabeth dying in Scotland, but Belfast and Cardiff?

Which tells us that “King Charles III” would have still taken advantage of the mourning period to make his power consolidation visit to Edinburgh, no matter where his mother had died.

There is nothing more cynical. We are whipped up to observe emotional mourning, while those who you would expect truly to be in mourning are engaged in cold, political calculation.

One of the darkly amusing things about the last few days was to witness all of the deluded monarchists on social media excusing Charles’ extraordinary tantrum in Northern Ireland about a pen, on the grounds that he must be exhausted making this tour when his mother had just died.

But the answer of course is that he did not have instantly to dash to Northern Ireland at all, leaving behind the rites for his mother. He was doing so for political gain.

It is a capricious God who supports a royal family so much he makes clouds in their image and celebrates them in rainbows and comets, yet makes pens leak on them “every stinking time.”

2) Protest May Cause a Breach of the Peace

This is a truly sinister argument. What it amounts to is this:

The mob is encouraged to beat up dissidents, so the expression of dissent is illegal.

It is quite literal fascism, the exertion of violent force by thugs in the street to quell dissent, with the state backing the thugs and criminalising the dissidents. That is precisely how all fascist regimes operate.

It is now being used shamelessly. None of the thugs who attacked Rory in Edinburgh has been charged. Rory has been charged with a breach of the peace.

If a breach of the peace is an action likely to provoke disorder, then the persons to be charged should be those who decided to put on display in positions of great honour a man who avoided a trial on sex trafficking by payment of £12 million pounds.

One sign of how emboldened the dregs of society are by this period of mob rule, is the quite extraordinary number of people on social media actively defending Prince Andrew, something that was extremely rare before the death of the Queen.

On twitter, it is interesting how many of those defending Andrew show the characteristics I identified of British government troll units. These are very low follower numbers for an account claiming to have been in existence at least ten years, and a timeline consisting entirely of retweets.

The rehabilitation of Andrew is another of the political purposes to which Elizabeth’s death is being put, to which we are not allowed to object on grounds of “decorum” and “respect”.

Now I would not personally have done what Rory did, in the presence of a coffin. But that is a question of etiquette, taste and demeanour, not of the criminal law.

Anybody who had been paying attention ought not be surprised that the Scottish prosecutorial service is happily channeling this fascism and people are coming up for trial for breach of the peace, including the young woman who did nothing but hold up a placard at the outdoor, public proclamation ceremony.

On Sunday, Police Scotland have banned Yestival, an annual Independence rally in George Square, Glasgow, on the grounds that the Queen’s funeral is on the next day, 400 miles away.

The organisers have quietly rescheduled the event, but I shall turn up anyway to bear witness to my beliefs, because I object to being told I may not express my political opinions. I don’t expect there will be more than a dozen of us and nothing in particular is organised to happen – no stage and no microphones. Unless the mere fact of my existence is held by the fascists to be a breach of the peace, I am not sure how it would be illegal. But they may find a way. This is Scotland 2022.

In the long term I am not downhearted. Propaganda works, and I have no doubt whatsoever that monarchism and even unionism will get a measurable opinion poll boost from the current shenanigans.

But it will not be true that the replacement of a popular monarch by an unpopular one will, in the medium term, strengthen the monarchy. Public and press access will be stifled to suppress awareness of Charles’ appalling high-handedness and temper and the way he treats staff

But you can’t make this man popular, and his Queen Consort will be a constant reminder of how he treated his unfortunate first wife.

As for the mob hysteria, I am of the generation that was sent to church every Sunday of my childhood. I recall the sermon every Palm Sunday pointing out that the same rapturous crowd that hailed Jesus into Jerusalem, called for his death five days later.

All the great religions contain a lot of good sense within their mysticism.

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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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The post Cool Observation of Mass Hysteria appeared first on Craig Murray.

The Question of The Day

I have just spoken to the media office of the Scottish government, and followed up with this email.

I shall let you know the response.

The post The Question of The Day appeared first on Craig Murray.

That’s Enough Monarchy Now

No doubt millions of people felt a heartfelt attachment to the Queen, which will be displayed fully in the next few days. But the anachronistic nature of monarchy is also fully on display, in the obvious absurdities and pantomime procedure, with Heralds Pursuivant and Royals buckled with the weight of their unearned medals.

Yesterday some BBC stenographer had to type with a straight face the strapline “The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Are Now the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and Cambridge”, which would even fifty years ago have already been absurd enough to be a line in a Monty Python sketch. Still more absurd is the millions in feudal income that goes with that title, all real money paid by actual ordinary people as feudal dues.

The plans for the Queen’s demise were organised decades ago, and it shows. The BBC, ITV and Channels 4 and even 5 stop all entertainment in favour of pre-prepared sycophancy, as though we still lived in a world where people could not switch over and watch Gordon Ramsay on Blaze instead – and that’s ignoring Netflix, Amazon and the entire internet.

I watched a few minutes of the BBC last night, up until a “royal commentator” said that people were standing outside Buckingham Palace because the nation needed to draw together for physical comfort in its great grief. There were a couple of hundred of them. Broadcasters kept focusing on a dozen bouquets left on a pavement, in a desperate attempt to whip up people to produce more.

I do not doubt this will all work and there will indeed be big crowds and carpets of flowers. Many people felt a great deal of devotion to Elizabeth II, or rather to the extraordinarily sanitised image of her with which they were presented.

I witnessed her at very close quarters working on two state visits which I had a major part in organising, to Poland and to Ghana. She was very dutiful and serious, genuinely anxious to get everything right, and worried by it. She struck me as personally pleasant and kindly. She was not, to be frank, particularly bright and sharp. I was used to working with senior ministers both domestic and foreign and she was not at that level. But then somebody selected purely by accident of birth is unlikely to be so.

Key staff organising a state visit get by tradition a private, individual audience of thank you. They also get honours on the spot. I turned down a LVO (Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order) in Warsaw and a CVO (Commander of …) in Accra. Because of the unique circumstance, I am one of very few people, or possibly the only person, who has ever refused an honour from the Queen and then had a private audience at which she asked why! I must certainly be the only person that happened to twice.

(I had earlier in my career been asked if I would accept an OBE and said no. As with the vast majority of people who refused an honour, I very much doubt the Queen ever knew that had happened.)

Anyway, in my audiences I told the Queen I was both a republican and a Scottish nationalist. I should state in fairness that she was absolutely fine with that, replied very pleasantly and seemed vaguely amused. Instead of the honour, she gave me personal gifts each time – a letter rack made by Viscount Linley, and a silver Armada dish.

I later auctioned the letter rack to raise funds for Julian Assange.

The purpose of that lengthy trip down memory lane is to explain that I found the late Queen to be personally a pleasant and well-motivated person, doing what she believed to be right. We are all shaped by our environment; I would have turned into a much more horrible monarch than she had I been born into it, certainly a great deal more sybaritic (as the rest of her family appear to be).

So there is no personal malice behind my prognostication that the party will be over very soon for the monarchy. It is not only that the institution and pageantry seem ludicrous in the current age; so does its presentation. The BBC is behaving as though we are in the 1950’s, and apparently will do so for many days. The entire notion of a state broadcasting platform is outmoded, and I suspect a lot more people will see that.

29% of the people of the UK want to abolish the monarchy, excluding Don’t Knows; in Scotland that is 43%. In the UK as a whole 18 to 24 year olds are 62% in favour of abolition of the monarchy, excluding Don’t Knows. They will be further alienated by the outlandish current proceedings. Only the loyal will be reinforced – a large section of the population will snigger as the absurd pomposity grows. I found myself yesterday on Twitter urging people to be a bit kinder as the Queen lay dying.

Think seriously on this. 29% of the population want to abolish the monarchy. Think of all the BBC coverage of the monarchy you have seen over the last decade. What percentage do you estimate reflected or gave an airing to republican views? Less than 1%?

Now think of media coverage across all the broadcast and print media.

How often has the media reflected the republican viewpoint of a third of the population? Far, far less than a third of the time. Closer to 0% than 1%. Yes, there are bits of the media that dislike Meghan for being black or are willing to go after Andrew. But the institution of the monarchy itself?

There can be no clearer example than the monarchy of the unrelenting media propaganda by which the Establishment maintains its grip.

The corporate and state media are unanimous in slavish support of monarchy. Thailand has vicious laws protecting its monarchy. We don’t need them; we have the ownership of state and corporate media enforcing the same.

One final thought; I do not expect this will amount to much, but it is fun to speculate. King Charles III has let it be known he intends to attempt to wield more influence on government than his mother. He comes to power at the same moment as a new government under Liz Truss, which is utterly anathema to Charles’ political beliefs.

Charles is a woolly liberal environmentalist with a genuine if superficial attachment to multi-culturalism. He has let it be known he deplores deportations to Rwanda. He is now going to be fitting into his role while government in his name is carried out by crazed right-wing ideologues, who want a massive push to produce more fossil fuels. Could be worth getting in the popcorn.

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Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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Caught in a Cycle of Despair and Exploitation

So the UK today gets its fourth successive Tory Prime Minister, despite the fact the previous three all crashed in failure, even in their own terms.

After presiding over crippling austerity as a policy response to Gordon Brown’s massive handover of public money to the casino bankers, David Cameron’s attempt to control the lunatic right of his party by offering a Brexit referendum backfired spectacularly. Theresa May was brought down by that same right wing when she attempted to devise a Brexit deal which allowed for a sensible trading relationship with the European Union. Johnson realised that governing from the far right was the only way to handle the Conservative Party, but the lies and corruption of his government led to him being quite exploded, like Bunbury.

So now the Queen swears in the fourth Tory Prime Minister, and does it in Scotland, a nation where the Tories have been overwhelmingly rejected by the electorate throughout this period (and indeed, for seven decades). A Prime Minister elected by 80,000 people mostly in South East England, to govern 66,000,000 throughout the UK, receives office from an old woman, elected by nobody, dwelling in a castle.

Liz Truss won the Tory member electorate by promising yet anther shift still further right. The Tory party has now moved so far to the right as to be invisible to the naked eye. I should have thought it were impossible to have a more brutal Home Secretary than Priti Patel, for example, and then they pull the crazed Suella Braverman up to the office. Expect refugee deportations to the Antarctic.

During the Tory leadership campaign it was impossible to protect Liz Truss entirely from scrutiny and questioning, therefore it became blindingly obvious that she is actually pretty stupid. She cannot deliver a script at all, and when asked to think off script, a look of panic enters her eyes, a crazed smile freezes on her lips, and she says the very first thought that fights its way out of the dense matter that sits where her brain ought to be.

But now the carapace of deference and protection that surrounds a Prime Minister closes around her. The media are already changing the narrative. Journalists have not previously felt the need to hide their amusement at her intellectually challenged demeanour. Now, in the past 48 hours, I have heard correspondent after correspondent tell us that she is “hard working” and always “masters her brief”. That is plainly the approved narrative.

It is interesting how, when push comes to shove, the neoliberal political class stick together. I have actually heard two senior Labour figures reinforce this new line on finding Truss hard working. Look out for further instances.

We are now going to see immediate action on a freeze on gas prices, though the details remain obscure. Remember, that is a freeze at already through the roof prices. (That was entirely serendipitous, but “through the roof” was an apt phrase, as that is where most of the energy goes in the insulation-poor UK).

Truss’s conversion to action on energy prices is not motivated by a sudden concern for poverty or the needs of ordinary people. I learnt of it on Sunday night, before her U turn was briefed, from senior Foreign Office (FCDO) sources. Government polling has indicated a substantial fall in public support for NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, due to unsustainable energy prices at home.

This is rather comforting as it shows the public are not daft and understand cause and effect, even when the media try to hide it.

Liz Truss’s motivation for an energy price freeze is therefore to maintain public support for fueling the Ukraine War, the overwhelming neoliberal priority. After losing the proxy war in Syria, defeat again by Russia in Ukraine is the gun barrel down which NATO is currently staring. Rather than a negotiated peace, yet more weapons and more brinkmanship are the preferred way forward.

Remember the huge increase in energy prices means incredible profits for the energy companies. Their costs have not increased. The price hike is caused purely by competition from Russia being restricted by the war. This is war profiteering.

As usual, there may be some pretence at difference of detail by the controlled opposition. But do not be surprised to see all the neoliberal parties – Tory, Labour, Liberal, SNP – broadly agree in the next week over a deal on energy bills. They are doing it for their joint promotion of war – whichthough will keep the super profits of both the arms and the energy companies rolling in.

Ultimately, they will expect you to pick up the tab, either through deferred bills or increased taxes; they are merely extending the timescale of your exploitation by war profiteers.

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The Great Clutching at Pearls

I have never considered myself a Marxist. I came to adulthood at the end of the one, forty year long, period in the history of Western civilisation when there was a reduction in the chasm between the rich and ordinary people.

In consequence I believed that a tolerable society might be achieved by simple measures to ameliorate capitalism. I grew up with public ownership of utilities, natural monopolies and strategic industries, with free healthcare and medicines, free university tuition with good maintenance grants, schools under control of elected local councils, controlled fair rents including the private sector, and significant public housing. We thought it would last forever.

In 1973 I joined the Liberal Party. Much of the 1974 Liberal Party manifesto I could still believe in now. The above things like public ownership of utilities and major industries and free education were not in the manifesto because they did not have to be – they already existed and were the basic structure. The manifesto added things like a basic guaranteed income for everybody in society, compulsory worker shareholdings in those industries not nationalised, workers’ councils, and a rent freeze in both public and private sectors.

I am not claiming it as a great socialist document – there were signs of right-wing thought creeping in like a shift to indirect taxation. But the truth is that the Liberal Party manifesto of 1974 was at least as left as Corbyn’s manifesto. Some of its ideas were far ahead of their time – like the idea that continuous economic growth and increasing consumption is not sustainable or desirable. Believing in essentially the same things now, I find myself on the far left – without ever having moved!

Here are a couple of extracts from the 1974 Liberal manifesto which may surprise you. This kind of language you will not hear from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – indeed it would probably get you thrown out:

That Liberal Party is of course gone, along with the radical, anti-war, anti-unionist traditions of British liberalism. They were diluted by the merger with the SDP and finally killed off by Nick Clegg and the “Orange Bookers” who turned the hybrid party fully neo-liberal, a doctrine with almost no resemblance to the liberalism it claims to reassert.

Those hardy souls who follow and support this blog are witnessing the last knockings of the legacy of political thought that was bestowed by John Stuart Mill, William Hazlitt, John Ruskin, John A Hobson, Charles Kingsley, Bertrand Russell, William Beveridge and many others, seasoned by Piotr Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I don’t imagine any further generation attempting to be active in politics will develop their worldview with those thinkers as their primary motivators.

But the point of this self-absorbed drivel is that I am not a Marxist and do not come from an organised labour or socialist background or mindset.

The key thought towards which I am plodding through this morass of explanation is this: I grew up in the one era when capitalism was sufficiently moderated by palliative measures that it seemed a reasonable way to conduct society. That ended around 1980 when the doctrine of neo-liberalism took hold of the Western world. In the UK, that doctrine now firmly controls the Conservative, Lib Dem, Labour and SNP parties and is promoted relentlessly by both state and corporate media.

The result of this neo-liberal domination has been a massive and accelerating expansion in the gap between the ultra wealthy and the rest of society, to the extent that ordinary, once middle-class people struggle to pay the bills required simply to live. The situation has become unsustainable.

In short, it turns out Marx was right. The crisis of capitalism is now upon us. Neo-liberalism (another word for designing state systems deliberately to lead to incredible concentrations of wealth amid general poverty) is coming to the end of its course. There are no palliative measures that will make the situation bearable. A radical change in the ownership of assets is the only thing that will address the situation – starting with public ownership of all energy companies, from hydrocarbon extractors like Shell and BP, through gas, electricity and fuel generators and manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

That is only one sector and only the start. But it is a good start. I frequently pass the Grangemouth refinery and am amazed that all that land, massive equipment, all those chemicals and processes, go primarily to the benefit of Britain’s richest man, Jim Ratcliffe, who is considering buying Manchester United as his latest toy, while his workers protest at another real-terms pay cut. This obscenity cannot continue forever.

Wars are not incidental to neo-liberalism. They are an essential part of the programme, because untrammeled consumerism requires massive acquisition of natural resources. Constant war has the helpful side benefit for the global elite of massive profit to the military industrial complex. The cost in human misery and death is kept at a discreet distance from the Western world save for refugee flows, which meet with a response increasingly founded in the denial of humanity.

The promotion of continual war has led to the acceleration of crisis. Much of the current cost-of-living explosion can be directly attributed to the provoked, prolonged and pointless war in Ukraine, while neo-liberal doctrine forbids control of the horrendous associated profiteering of the energy companies.

There is going to be public anger come spring of a strength and reach not seen in my lifetime. The ultra wealthy and their political servants know this, and therefore strong action is being taken to forestall public protest. The new Policing Act is one of a raft of measures being brought in to clamp down on avenues for free expression of public discontent. Demonstrations can simply be banned if they are “noisy” or an “inconvenience”. The 2 million person march against the Iraq War in London, for example, could have been banned on both grounds.

I met and talked last weekend at the Beautiful Days festival with the admirable Steve Bray; we don’t agree on everything but his public concern is genuine. He is getting used to being removed by police from Parliament Square after being specifically targeted in legislation. I reminded him – and I remind you – that the Blair government had also banned protest near the Westminster parliament. Intolerance of dissent is a feature of modern neo-liberalism, as people in Canada and New Zealand are also witnessing – or as Julian Assange might tell you.

But in addition to legislative and state attack on protest, the neo-liberal state is also ramping up its more subtle elements of control. The security services are continually being expanded. The media is not only increasingly concentrated, it is increasingly under direct security service influence – the Integrity Initiative, the Paul Mason revelations, and the barely disguised spookery of Luke Harding and Mark Urban all being small elements of a massive web designed to control the popular imagination.

The splitting of the political left by identity politics has been the go-to weapon of the state for several decades now. The replacement of horizontal class solidarity by vertical gender solidarity being the most obvious tool, epitomised by the notion that it was better to elect the multi-millionaire, corrupt, neo-liberal warmonger Hillary Clinton than the class politics espousing Bernie Sanders, simply because the warmonger was a woman.

A specific use of this tool has been the weaponisation of fake sexual allegations against any individual likely to be a threat to the state. You see this in the cases of Julian Assange, Tommy Sheridan, Scott Ritter and Alex Salmond (they tried it on me when I left the FCO but had to drop it because they could not find – despite massive efforts – any woman who knew me who would say anything bad about me). Those in power know that the portion of the left who identify as feminist, which is almost all of us, are highly susceptible to support alleged victims due to the extreme difficulties of real victims in obtaining justice. This makes sexual allegations, no matter how fake, very effective in removing the support base of anti-establishment figures.

The propaganda narrative against Assange, Salmond, Ritter and Sheridan depends on the idea that at the very moment that each of these men reached the peak of a lifetime’s endeavour and posed the maximum threat to the state, they lost focus, lost their marbles and acted very wrongly towards women, despite no previous history of such behaviour. It astonishes me anybody does not see through it.

Rather quaintly, they use different methods on women. Brigadier Janis Karpinski was the chosen patsy to take the blame for the USA’s Abu Ghraib atrocities (entirely unfairly – she had no role or authority in the CIA controlled portion of the jail where the atrocities took place). Dismissed from her post, she was prepared to testify to a memo personally signed by Donald Rumsfeld authorising torture.

How did the US security services fit up a woman, not a man, who threatened the powers that be? Shoplifting. The day after her enforced resignation, Karpinski was “caught shoplifting”. Because of course, when at the eye of an international storm and under CIA surveillance, you immediately go out and steal some clothes.

The trans debate has taken the art of using identity politics to split the left to a whole new level, and in particular to alienate the younger generation from traditional left feminists. It has also been used successfully – and remarkably – to neuter the most potent current threat to the UK state, by driving both the non neo-liberals and the ardent Independence supporters out of the SNP.

The post The Great Clutching at Pearls appeared first on Craig Murray.

Ever Further Right

Well over 70% of migrants arriving in small boats are eventually found by the British state to be genuine refugees seeking asylum. I know this from a quite remarkable speech by Lord Kerr.

John Kerr is something of a mystery to me. I came across a video of this simply superb speech he made in the House of Lords last November (I missed it as I was in jail). It is well worth reading:

It really is not a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Desai, because he raises the bar far too high. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, for this appallingly well-timed debate, to which I would just like to contribute three sets of facts. First, overall refugee numbers are currently running at about half of where they were 20 years ago. We are not the preferred destination in Europe. We are, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, well down the list of preferred destinations.

Secondly, yes, small boat numbers are up, partly for the reason the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, adduced — the fences, patrols and heat sensors around the train tracks and marshalling yards mean that people are now driven to the even more dangerous sea route. But the principal reason clandestine numbers are up is that official resettlement routes are shut. Our schemes, in practice, no longer exist. We have closed the Syrian scheme, we have scrapped the Dubs scheme, we have left Dublin III and we have not got an Afghan scheme up and running. The largest group crossing the channel in the last 18 months, by nationality, were Iranians. In the last 18 months, 3,187 Iranians came. In the same period, one got in by the official route. How many came from Yemen in these 18 months? Yemen is riven by civil war and famine. None came by the official route — not one.

My third set of facts is as in the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. The Home Secretary says that 70% of channel crossers are

“economic migrants … not genuine asylum seekers”.

That is plainly not true. Her own department’s data show that, of the top 10 nationalities arriving in small boats, virtually all seek asylum—61% are granted it at the initial stage and 59% of the rest on appeal. The facts suggest that well over 70% of asylum seekers coming across the channel in small boats are genuine asylum seekers, not economic migrants.

That is hardly surprising because the top four countries they come from are Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria — not Ghana, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. These people are fleeing persecution and destitution, and the sea route from France is the only one open to many of them. Why not have a humanitarian visa, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said? The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, gave the answer to the objection of the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. Those who had a valid claim for asylum would not be at peril on the sea.

Unless we provide a safe route, we are complicit with the people smugglers. Yes, we can condemn their case and we mourn yesterday’s dead, but that does not seem to stop us planning to break with the refugee convention. Our compassion is well controlled because it does not stop us planning, in the borders Bill, to criminalise those who survive the peril of the seas and those at Dover who try to help them. Of course, we can go down that road. But if we do, let us at least be honest enough to admit that what drives us down that road is sheer political prejudice, not the facts, because the facts do not support the case for cruelty.

That is a great speech and I applaud the humanitarianism behind it.

John Kerr is ostensibly a pillar of the Establishment – the former head of the British diplomatic service. To those people who believe in shadowy world governments and the great reset, John Kerr would appear to be right at the heart of darkness. He was for 12 years secretary of the Bilderberg Group and is a member of the executive committee of the Trilateral Commission. He was for 13 years a trustee of the Rhodes Trust. He was a key architect of the merger that created Royal Dutch Shell plc of which he was Deputy Chairman. I could go on and on.

He is a crossbench member of the House of Lords, meaning not party affiliated.

You do not expect somebody of that background to be making such a strong, unqualified attack on the government in parliament from the liberal left, openly calling Priti Patel a liar:

The Home Secretary says that 70% of channel crossers are “economic migrants … not genuine asylum seekers”. That is plainly not true.

I first dealt with John Kerr in the Foreign Office which he then headed when embroiled in the “Arms to Africa” affair. I must say I liked him immediately – fiercely intelligent, very much to the point, but with a constant twinkle in his eye. I make no claim the liking was mutual. But I also sensed, as you do when discussing policy issues, that the political direction he came from was not that different to my own.

Five years later I was quitting the FCO as a whistleblower, John Kerr having retired in the interim (for what it’s worth, I have always felt that had he still been in post, matters would have been resolved internally and my life have been very different). My split with the FCO over torture and extraordinary rendition was then front page news, and Angus Robertson, then one of the tiny SNP group in Westminster, asked to see me (this was 2004).

I briefed Robertson in Portcullis House on my whistleblowing (having at that time no suspicions of the man). I also spoke to him about Scotland’s maritime boundaries and the international law route to achieving independence, offering any assistance I could to the SNP. He more or less told me that I wasn’t needed, explaining in a conspiratorial whisper “we’ve got John Kerr”. That was much more surprising of Salmond’s more radical SNP than it would be of the corporatist SNP now.

Liz Truss was referring to the FCDO when she said the civil service was “woke” and had “creeping antisemitism”. She was specifically referring to Foreign Office officials minuting Israeli human rights violations.

Truss was also annoyed by Foreign Office officials pointing out Rwanda’s very bad human rights record in relation to the plan to deport asylum seekers there. She has tried to suppress some of these minutes from FCDO officials by public interest immunity certificates, which are today being challenged in the courts.

The political culture of the FCDO is not left wing at all, I can assure you – particularly not after twelve years of Tory governments controlling the top appointments. There does remain, however, a certain level of commitment to honesty which plainly Truss found highly inconvenient. When the government has moved so far right that it cannot work with civil servants who are just carrying out their job, when as conventional a figure as John Kerr is appalled by government cruelty, our society has very plainly moved towards fascism.

The drift to the right has become a surge.

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Insulate, Insulate

Politics in the mainstream media is entirely seen through the prism of the relentless race to the right of the Tory leadership election. The only people who can vote are two football crowds worth of overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, comparatively wealthy, mostly pensionable, overwhelmingly southern, people.

Brexit and the folding of UKIP into the Tory Party has changed the membership profile of the Tory Party. There are not many Dominic Greive comparative liberals still hanging in there. The typical Tory member used to be somebody like Miss Marple and her friends at St Mary Mead. It is now the St Mary Mead racist pub bore with a Jaguar.

The racist is of course key. People here get very upset every time I point out the exhaustively documented fact that the major motive of those voting for Brexit was anti-immigrant. I certainly accept that not all Brexiteers are racists. But all racists are Brexiteers.

The farce of the Tory leadership contest is that the inane Liz Truss is bound to win because of her skin colour. It is an entirely pointless exercise.

The prism of the Tory leadership contest has led the media to devote many column inches to the question of whether the massive energy bill increases should be tackled in part by tax cuts (Truss) or “handouts” (Sunak). Actual solutions, like renationalising the utility companies and imposing a 4% price increase cap as in France, are scarcely mentioned. These need to be adopted now to cope with the immediate emergency and provide the long term way forward.

Mentioned even less is the most obvious and urgent part of the solution – to consume less energy, as climate change roasts the planet.

A massive emergency mobilisation of resource to insulate existing buildings is the obvious first step. Every building should be insulated, at government expense, to the maximum practicable level. The homes of the poor should be the first priority – and are in general the worst insulated. Such a programme, on a wartime scale of mobilisation, would pump demand into the economy as it plunges into recession and provide massive employment opportunity.

This is true of every stage – the tooling up of production facilities and creation of raw materials as well as the actual installation. It seems to me so obvious a move that it is beyond me why the only people pushing it have to glue themselves to roads to get attention.

There are obvious other things to do, like reinstate attractive feed-in tariffs for domestic solar energy backed by government loans to cover installation costs, and make conversion to heat pumps free for those on benefits.

The Overton window has shrunk so small, the intellectual reach of public discourse is so enchained by neo-liberalism, that there appears no ability of the mind to respond appropriately to crisis. No solution can be attempted unless it makes some billionaires immeasurably richer. Society needs to awaken; people need to shed their chains.

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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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Winners

Saturday will be a proud day for our family, after a very difficult year. Winners, Nadira’s first feature film as Producer, will have its World Premiere as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. To be part of the official selection at the world’s oldest film festival is a real achievement, and to be given the Saturday evening slot in Filmhouse 1 is something of a triumph.

The Director is our good friend Hassan Nazer, who lives in Aberdeen. Nadira and Hassan filmed on location in Iran, with the post-production carried out back in Scotland with the support of Screen Scotland and producer Paul Walsh. The film is in Farsi and subtitled. You can see the trailer here.

The film itself operates on different levels. It is a charming story about two children, their incredible find, and the journey that results. You don’t need to know anything about cinematic history to really enjoy it. But if you are a cinema buff, and particularly of Iranian and Italian cinema, there are all kinds of references you will spot. Then, without being in any sense a political film, the background of social conditions is fascinating.

Without giving too much away, the rubbish-picking children are real life rubbish picking children, not actors. The wedding procession is an actual wedding procession: I find some of the cinematography breathtaking in an extraordinary landscape. The film stars Reza Naji, a great of Iranian cinema, who won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlinale for his role in Song of Sparrows.

Hassan and Nadira’s achievement here as first generation immigrants, and the support they received from Screen Scotland, says something happy about our multi-cultural society. It is good to concentrate on the positive sometimes, and enjoy such moments.

Please do go and see Winners if you are within reach of Edinburgh. Some tickets for the premiere on Saturday 13 August at 20:15 are still available here, and there are plenty of tickets still available for the second screening on Monday 15 August at 13.00 here.

The post Winners appeared first on Craig Murray.

Freedom of Speech and Graham Phillips

The imposition of sanctions against British citizen and journalist Graham Phillips is an appalling violation of freedom of speech – which to have meaning must mean freedom to say things which disagree with the government, the media and/or majority public opinion.

Phillips has for almost a decade published and broadcast from Ukraine material which is openly supportive of the pro-Russian section of the Ukrainian population. He has operated from first Kyiv, then Odessa, then the Donbass. Phillips was sceptical of the Maidan protests and the popular revolution narrative. He subsequently for years covered much that the Western elites do not wish people to know – the shelling of civilian areas held by Russian separatists, the Nazi links of some Ukrainian military and politicians, the discrimination against Russian speakers and banning of Russian media and education.

All that is one side of the story in Ukraine, and the side that western governments and media are extremely keen you no longer can see. The information Phillips was providing was not in general untrue. The facts were selective and the interpretation partial, but that is also absolutely true of the western propaganda to which we are continually subjected.

In some incidents in the current war, it is impossible at a distance to be certain who was responsible for various acts. I see no reason in general to believe the BBC over Graham Phillips, or Graham Phillips over the BBC. It is good to have different sources.

Phillips has been criticised for broadcasting an interview with British prisoner Aiden Aslin, held by Russian separatist forces. The criticism is broadly correct. As I pointed out on twitter in the early days of this war, it is contrary to the Geneva Convention to make public display of prisoners.

This law was broken repeatedly by the Ukrainian side, with blanket footage of Russian soldiers phoning their mothers. Not one (except me) of those complaining about the Aslin interview complained about those. There are mitigating factors for Phillips – the interview was apparently Aslin’s initiative and he appeared pleased to give it. It was however still wrong. It is a good law – you never know what coercion or violence is applied to POW’s off-screen.

Personally there is much in Phillips’ line on Ukraine that I do not agree with. It is plain to me that broadly, the majority of the people of Ukraine genuinely wished in 2014 to move towards the EU rather than Russia, and dramatic efforts by Putin to reverse that process backfired.

But because I disagree does not mean Phillips should not be allowed to put across his view. It is also plain to me that Phillips was correct that the rights of the pro-Russian minority have indeed been trampled by ultra-nationalist Ukrainian forces, and Ukraine is a desperately corrupt and dysfunctional country.

The current proxy war is a disaster. It is not only killing tens of thousands in Ukraine, it is producing economic consequences that seriously damage the poor worldwide. The delight of politicians, the military and the arms industry is evident – and that is true of both Russia and the West. When wars happen, the bad people on all sides profit from them. The people suffer.

So I do not agree with Phillips’ cheerleading for the Russian “side” in this disastrous war. The answer to war is not to take a side but peace, and that is desperately needed.

The war will end with Ukraine ceding Crimea to Russia and perhaps more territory. Had Zelensky negotiated before the war started, Crimea plus the Minsk Agreements would have been enough. The Ukrainian negotiating position radically worsens daily. NATO is cheerfully sending Ukraine to disaster. The Russian invasion was illegal; the response now is immoral. The terms of the eventual settlement are obvious. Let it be reached now, without more pointless death.

But for Phillips, a British citizen, to be severely legally punished for publishing opinions about a war in which his own state is not a party – nor, it is important to state, in formal alliance with any party – is entirely without precedent. If we accept that Phillips supports the Russian side in the war, why should it be illegal to do that? How does this principle play out? Am I to be sanctioned for supporting the Palestinians? What about those who uphold the rights of the Houthis against the Saudi death grip?

What about american journalists who opposed the Vietnam War? Or the British journalists who stood up against the attack on Egypt in the Suez Crisis? What of campaigners against the Iraq War? When you think it through, the implications of this action against Phillips are simply appalling.

The sanctions against Phillips are serious. A British citizen has had his property seized by the state, his assets and bank accounts frozen, his ability to earn a living crashed by the blocking of funding mechanisms. All this for publishing opinions on a foreign war contrary to those of the British government.

This is a truly frightening attack on freedom of speech, whether or not you agree with Phillips’ views.

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