Craig Murray's Blog, page 3

Dystopia UK: Genocidal RAF Squadron Targeted by Palestine Action is Owned by a Hedge Fund

If you thought RAF jets were owned by the RAF, think again.

The RAF squadron targeted for a repaint by Palestine Action due to its involvement in supplying Israel’s genocide, does not in fact belong to the RAF at all. It belongs ultimately to Polygon Global Partners LLP, a Hedge Fund.

Through a chain of seven cutout companies, which I will take you through, the direct ownership is with Airtanker Ltd, which gives its address as RAF Brize Norton. It owns, maintains and operates the RAF’s Voyager refuelling aircraft, which have been providing mid-air refuelling to the Israeli Defence Forces as well as carrying, in their cargo role, munitions to the IDF.

 

Note that Airtanker Ltd states that five of the Voyager aircraft while available to the RAF: “can also be made available to other parties. This can include providing military capability to other nations…”.

Whether the aircraft have been operated by the RAF on behalf of the Israelis, or whether they have been “provided to” the IDF direct, is an interesting question. Is this designed to build in plausible deniability for the UK government?

Eight of the Voyager Aircraft though fully painted in RAF livery, actually are the property of Airtanker Ltd.

It is not plain whether the other six – also the property of Airtanker Ltd but only occasionally used by the RAF – are also in RAF livery. The company does not show any photographs of jets not in RAF livery.

So who owns Airtanker Ltd? Well, the “person with significant control” on the Companies House register is Airtanker Holdings Ltd. They own over 75% but less than 100%. It would be interesting to know who owns the rest.

So who owns Airtanker Holdings Ltd? Well, it is owned – more than 25% and less than 50% – by Airbus, which provides the actual aircraft, and more than 25% and less than 50% by Equitix Capital Eurobond 6 Ltd, which presumably provides finance. As both own under 50% it would be interesting to know who owns the rest, and why.

 

So who owns Equitix Capital Eurobond 6 Ltd? Well, Equitix Capital Eurobond 6 Ltd is owned by Equitix Holdings Ltd, a company at the same address in the City of London.

So who owns Equitix Holdings Ltd? Well, Equitix Holdings Ltd is owned by Pace Bidco Ltd, a company curiously enough also at the same address.

So who owns Pace Bidco Ltd? Well, Pace Bidco Ltd is owned by Pace Topco Ltd, a company which turns out to be also at the same address!

So who owns Pace Topco Ltd? Well, here, we finally get the name of a human being. It is a Mr Reade Griffith whose address is given as Polygon Global Partners LLP, 4 Sloane St, London.

On another page of the register a Mr Reade Eugene Griffith is given as a Director of Pace Topco Ltd, presumably the same person. This would also appear to be the same individual as the E Griffith Reade who is listed as – amongst other interests – the 10% owner of Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc.

Polygon is a hedge fund. It would appear likely from the register to be either Polygon or Griffith’s umbrella hedge fund Tetragon that owns these liveried RAF aircraft. We have therefore simply no idea who the investors are: it could be anyone from BlackRock to Kim Jong Un. The true ownership is deliberately shrouded in secrecy.

This spaghetti tangle of ownership of RAF aircraft is rather surprising to those of us who naively believed that RAF military aircraft belonged to the RAF, and that the hundreds of billions of pounds the state lavishes on “defence” was used to do things like buy military jets, rather than make rich financiers still richer.

The long tree of subsidiary companies is not only to disguise ownership. At every single stage it provides opportunity for tax avoidance and for other forms of corruption, like consultancy contracts or directorships handed out to the contacts or nominated go-betweens of the politicians and senior civil servants. If you saw a company called Pace Bidco Ltd were giving a remunerative consultancy to the son of an ex-government minister, or to a firm registered to his local landlord, why would that ring alarm bells or connect to the RAF?

To be plain those are entirely hypothetical examples. I am not accusing Pace Bidco Ltd of anything. I merely explain the system.

Defence spending is more prone to corruption than any other form of spending and that is why venal politicians are always extremely keen to boost it. No UK politician has ever proposed to increase defence spending by more than Keir Starmer, who wants to lift it by £120 billion a year.

The RAF’s Voyager aircraft are effectively being provided under the Private Finance Initiative. Exactly how much money the hedge fund managers and this string of companies are taking out of the defence budget is hard to know.

One particularly surprising fact is that it is plain that the private companies are also providing the RAF ground crew. Who employs the flight crews is not entirely clear.

That such an obviously rotten and corrupt arrangement exists in the RAF I had no idea. Some British military personnel are in fact contracted mercenaries. It gives new context to the active RAF involvement in the Genocide in Gaza.

Palestine Action’s excellent act of resistance in vandalising this Hedge Fund Air Force has brought all of this to our attention. Which is yet a further reason to be grateful to Palestine Action.

 

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The Phantom Ceasefire

The Phantom Ceasefire is simply Trump’s off ramp. He announces a ceasefire and bows out, having been advised that regime change would only be achievable with extreme military commitment and massive cost in lives and treasure.

You can never trust the Israelis – or indeed the Americans – with either a ceasefire or a negotiation. Reuters reported that a senior Iranian official had confirmed the ceasefire had been agreed. Israel then repeated precisely what I had seen in Beirut – massive carpet bombing of the city just before the 3.30am deadline for the Israel/Iran ceasefire.

 

That picture is Beirut literally minutes before the ceasefire came into effect. Israel then proceeded to violate the ceasefire anyway, and has done so virtually every single day in the past months of ceasefire, often several times a day, racking up over 1,000 violations.

The Iranians very sensibly responded to last night’s carpet bombing with a missile salvo. Israel has claimed a violation of the ceasefire (as ever the aggressor is the “victim”) and fighting has resumed.

I believe this may be for the best. Although it does benefit Netanyahu – who for domestic reasons is desperate to avoid peace – the Israelis would never have observed a ceasefire and would have used it to replenish their exhausted missile defence systems, with help from the USA, UK and the other genocide participants.

The Iranian “attack” on the US airbase in Qatar was purely performative. They used old, expendable, low-level missiles certain to be shot down and warned that they were coming. It was part of the structure of Trump’s off ramp.

So the question now is whether Netanyahu can drag Trump back into the war. I am hopeful he will not. Trump will be able to say that he has, with his strikes on Iran, redeemed the hundreds of millions of Zionist dollars that got him elected. I guess we will discover in the next week or two whether that money really is all that was motivating him, or whether Musk was right about Trump’s appearance in the Epstein files. For what it is worth, I think that Trump’s street cunning and independent access to East European models were probably enough to keep him out of that trap. But we will see,

Without the USA, Netanyahu has opened a war that will not remain popular very long. Keeping Israel’s settler colonists – who are hilariously cowardly when faced with anybody who can actually fight back – locked in as human shields is going to have interesting social consequences for the terrorist entity.

Meanwhile the shooting of Palestinians in the Gaza food queues and the dispossessions and killings in the West Bank continue apace.

The UK government is sending planes to bring back dual UK/Israeli nationals. That includes active IDF participants in genocide.

FCDO official guidance reads:

Lammy has made a decision to airlift back those Israeli passport-carrying colonists who are also British nationals. This directly contradicts British government longstanding policy of not assisting dual nationals in their country of second nationality. This policy is normally rigorously enforced, even (and perhaps especially) in times of war. There is a huge contrast between the red carpet for Israeli war criminals returning to the UK and the appalling treatment of thousands of British Sudanese families in the 2023 evacuation from Khartoum.

The Iranians have already done a great service to humanity by puncturing the facade of Israeli invincibility. They have also laid bare the appalling Zionism of Arab ruling elites and their sectarian propagandists, in a way which they believe the Arab populations understand. The ramifications of the last two weeks following Israel’s attack on Iran will play out over years. But this is part of the process of the disintegration of the colonial settler state.

 

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

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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You Cannot Negotiate with the Zionist West

Israel and the USA have each attacked Iran in the middle of negotiations. Iran must not fall for it a third time. Negotiation is dead.

Israel attacked Iran during negotiations between Iran and the US, with the next scheduled meeting just three days away – including assassinating the lead negotiator.

Trump then gave Iran a two-week ultimatum to agree a peace deal. Iran held one foreign-minister-level meeting with the UK, Germany and France and scheduled a second meeting. Trump then attacked Iran with 11 days of the ultimatum still to run.

Plainly the Zionist West not only has zero interest in peace, it is engaging in morally abhorrent levels of dishonesty and deception, attacking under a false flag of truce. The idea that Iran should now return to “negotiation” with such appallingly deceitful interlocutors is risible.

It is also plain that the USA has no intention of stopping the attacks. Trump’s statement said that further attacks will follow unless Iran stops fighting. Plainly the objectives of the USA are not in truth merely the destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme, but total victory for Israel in the war it has started with Iran. Trump’s demand of “unconditional surrender” still stands and the aim remains, as I have stated, regime change to install the “Shah” with a Sunni Prime Minister.

Zionist regimes have been installed in Lebanon and Syria in the last six months. They already existed in the Gulf states and Jordan. The aim to install a Zionist regime in Tehran is overreach by Netanyahu and Trump. You cannot bomb the Iranian people into Zionism.

The extent of bombing, and the extent of death, that would be required for regime change in Iran is astonishing. Contrary to neoliberal expectation but obvious to anyone with a brain, the attacks on Iran have rallied support for its government. I find nothing more nauseating than the Western “feminists” who are campaigning for war against Iran to bring about regime change.

Not only would regime change involve the deaths of hundreds of thousands of women in war, there is no doubt whatsoever that Western destruction of Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Iraq made the lives of women in those countries much worse, both in terms of infrastructure and conditions of life and also in terms of women’s position in society.

The attempt to gaslight the public with abject lies about Iran’s nuclear weapon capability is so blatant a repeat of the Iraqi WMD scam that I am astonished they dare to try it. The attacks on Iran are completely illegal – and I am quite sure will in fact lead to Iran changing its mind and deciding to possess a nuclear weapon, which will be achieved within five years.

You can have watched or listened to hundreds of hours of BBC broadcasting on the current war on Iran, and never have heard once that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. The levels of propaganda are truly extreme.

The attacks on Iran are illegal. There is no doubt of that. Iran faces a monumental struggle, but has no choice but to fight.

In the meantime not a single day has passed when Israel has not shot and killed Palestinians in Gaza in the queues for food. The Genocide goes on, and the US and Israel have succeeded in turning the world’s attention and bringing their Western satraps back into line, just when the Gaza Genocide was alarming politicians internationally by its blatancy.

I see much futile discussion as to whether Israel is controlling the US or the US controlling Israel. Plainly the answer is both; there is a deep symbiotic relationship of the political classes in both places. The key point is that the Israel settler colony carries an insupportable weight in the policy decisions of Western politicians. Like all colonialism – and as outlined by Lenin and Hobson – this is because colonialism benefits the personal interests of the wealthy and military classes but is a burden on working people.

I find Hobson offers an invaluable perspective to look at the Israel settler colony. Long-term readers will know that I have stated that J A Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study had more effect on my understanding of the world than any other book. I strongly recommend it (there is a new edition with a foreword by Jeremy Corbyn).

I am a thinker and writer who tries to use my experience to explain and analyse what is happening. I am also a campaigner and activist. What I am not is a political organiser. Those who put together the March to Gaza or the Freedom Flotilla have my admiration, and have skills which I do not possess.

I therefore put forward this idea with no apology that I am not the man to organise it. The British sovereign base at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus is fundamental to the logistics of the attacks on Iran for the UK, USA and Israel. A gathering of thousands of activists in Cyprus to close down the base appears to me the most viable and useful option to cause real problems for the neoliberal genociders.

The Akrotiri base has a very large perimeter and far too few RAF Regiment troops to guard it against thousands of determined activists. The government of Cyprus is unlikely to defend the British sovereign base from peaceful activists. Cyprus is a very easy place to reach.

As our panicked rulers seek to ban Palestine Action as a “terrorist group” – despite the fact they have never injured anybody – it seems to me essential we continue and indeed increase the resistance. The very notion of “terrorism” has been debased to include journalism and peaceful protest. We must not be terrified into allowing fascism to prevail.

 

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

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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War With Iran

For 18 years, the Iranian nuclear programme has been one of the top 10 targeting objectives of the US intelligence services. In 2007 they first conducted a formal inter-agency review. It is done every year. This is not a minor process. A great deal of input is received from dozens of Washington stakeholders, led by the CIA.

The result has been the same every single year. Iran is not currently seeking to produce an nuclear weapon. Many people know that Tulsi Gabbard delivered this assessment in spring this year. Not many people realise that this was in no sense specific to Tulsi Gabbard and she was delivering the same assessment, through the same process, that Directors of National Intelligence under both Republican and Democrat administrations had given.

Nothing changed. The only thing that changed is Netanyahu’s attack on Iran. Trump appears able to get away with simply stating that he does not care what the intelligence agencies say. It is harder for Starmer to do that.

British and American armed forces are already in this war, shooting down Iranian missiles, refuelling Israeli bombers (alongside the Germans) and providing targeting information. Military supplies are shipped to Israel through RAF Akrotiri – which is a British sovereign colony on Cyprus – and Israeli bombers have certainly landed there in the last week; whether starting bombing runs from there, I cannot currently confirm.

There is no public opinion in the UK supporting British participation in an attack on Iran, despite massive and continual propaganda on all state and corporate media. I do not believe anybody informed solely by the mainstream media this last fortnight would have any idea that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, or that there is no evidence Iran was producing them.

The British government has a massive parliamentary majority – gained on just 31% of the vote – and a Conservative “opposition” even more keen to attack Iran than the crazed Zionists Starmer and Lammy. I do not see how they can be prevented from attacking Iran. But they will try hard to fix public opinion. It is therefore essential that MI6’s view, that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon, is kept quiet.

When Blair produced a dossier of “intelligence” lies to justify the destruction of Iraq, he was fortunate in having Richard Dearlove as Head of MI6, who was not just the most right-wing ideologue ever to hold the position, but one of the most right-wing men anywhere in England. Dearlove believed the moral case for the war was more important than the truth about Iraqi WMD.

Blair also had Sir John Scarlett as Head of the Joint Intelligence Committee and next Head of MI6. Scarlett passionately believed that the case for advancing the career of John Scarlett was more important than the truth about Iraqi WMD.

It is worth noting – and a prime example of how the neoliberal world works – that the next head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, is now an executive of British Petroleum. That company controlled Iran for decades, installed the fake Pahlavi “Shah” in 1921 and engineered and financed the coup that ended democracy in Iran in 1953. The appalling dictatorship of the Shah after that led directly to the theocratic revolution.

BP desperately want Iran’s oil back, so ex MI6 Head Sawers has been all over the airwaves advocating war on Iran. Meanwhile it is not an accident that two days ago, a new Head of MI6 was chosen and installed. Starmer has found his Dearlove.

The appointment was made by David Lammy. Blaise Metreweli was chosen ahead of more obvious candidates, who had served longer in MI6, had more operational experience, and were better analysts or better managers. However Metreweli – who spent much of her career in the Middle East – is a fanatical Zionist. She worked closely with Israel on technologies for surveillance and assassination.

Metreweli developed projects with both Pegasus and Palantir and was intimately connected to Israel’s use of new forms of attack in Lebanon and Iran. She was strongly endorsed to Lammy by Mossad as the next MI6 head. MI6 and the FCDO are inextricably connected. They work literally cheek by jowl in Embassies around the world, and MI6 HQ staff in London have cover jobs in the FCDO.

[image error]

FCDO officials are extremely unhappy with the UK’s cooperation in Genocide in Gaza, with hundreds of them having been told by Lammy to shut up or resign. There is consternation at Mossad having designated the next Head of MI6. I asked my contact – a senior FCDO figure – whether Metreweli had involvement in the pager attacks in Lebanon. The reply was “Not 100% sure, but probably yes.”

Expect an imminent announcement that MI6 has determined that Iran was indeed about to produce a nuclear bomb.

The government appears to be justifying its current military involvement as the need to defend an “ally”, Israel. Emily Thornberry, a senior government MP and a lawyer, stated last night on BBC Newsnight that the legal right to take military action rested on our “right to defend our friends”. She did not use the word “ally”, and there is no such right as Thornberry posited.

Starmer and Lammy both frequently call Israel an “ally” but there is no public treaty of alliance available. There is a secret UK/Israel Defence Co-Operation Agreement of 2020. It is not known whether this amounts to a treaty of mutual defence.

Such treaties are supposed to be public and registered, not least because part of the alleged purpose is deterrence. You can read all the founding treaties of NATO.

The notion that the UK may go to war on the basis of a Treaty of Alliance that is secret from the British people, is so morally abhorrent it ought not to be able to be mooted, let alone acted upon. But democracy is dead in the UK, to the extent that people have forgotten its meaning.

Much worse, of course, is that this is not a case of mutual defence but of mutual offence. It was Israel that attacked Iran.

In standing alongside Israel, as in standing alongside Ukraine, the UK is condoning terrorist tactics such as the use of car bombs by both Ukrainian and Iranian “allies”. On what moral ground therefore does the UK stand in condemning the use of car bombs on the streets of London, when it supports our “allies” in their use?

You may recall that I recently published two posts focusing on remarkable fake terrorism plot narratives being heavily promoted by the UK security services in the mainstream media. Both revolved around alleged actions against Iran International, an extraordinary Saudi- and CIA-funded fake media organisation that promotes the return of the Pahlavi Shah in alliance with Israel and Iranian Sunnis.

From the Assange campaign, I have contacts on the libertarian side of MAGA that might surprise you, some actually in the Administration. I am told that the endgame being proposed in Washington by Israel and Saudi Arabia is Iranian regime change with the return of the Shah and a Sunni Prime Minister.

Remember there was no war with Iran yet, at the time I wrote those two articles about the remarkable happenings involving the security services and Iran International. This from my first article:

The connections all now click perfectly into place.

The UK has dived deep into the depths of immorality in which Zionism thrives. The consequences will be appalling.

 

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

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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Starmer and Lammy are Terrified

Western governments’ abandonment of the very system of international law which they created was embodied in a tweet from the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which sought to justify the illegal Israeli attack on Iran as “Targeted strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities”.

The former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Authority, Mohammed El-Baradei, was left to point out that far from a justification, it is specifically against international law to target nuclear facilities.

He refers to Article 56 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions. While we are on the subject, you might also wish to see article 54:

It is worth noting that the exception on destruction of foodstuffs at Article 5 refers to the right of a country which is defending against invasion, not which is invading another country. It means that it is not illegal for a country to destroy crops and stocks of its own, on its own territory. Which is to say a scorched-earth policy against an invader is legal. It does not give the right to refuse supplies to a population under occupation.

The German justification was of course just part of a chorus of Western support for the Israeli attack on Iran, in which numerous Western leaders all parroted a co-ordinated line about “Israel’s right of self-defence”, even as Israel conducted an entirely illegal and unprovoked attack on Iran during peace talks.

There are dozens of examples, but I give you the openly genocidal von der Leyen as one:

Spoke with President @Isaac_Herzog concerning the escalating situation in the Middle East.

I reiterated Israel’s right to defend itself and protect its people. At the same time, preserving regional stability is vital.

I urge all parties to act with maximum restraint and work…

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) June 13, 2025

On Thursday, before Israel attacked Iran, I attended the UN General Assembly debate on Palestine. This had limited utility as it mandated no specific measures and did not suspend Israel from the United Nations, the one truly useful action the General Assembly has the power to implement.

The motion called for an immediate ceasefire and for states to take “all necessary measures”, but that is the last we shall hear of it. It passed by 150 votes to 12, with opposition from the United States, its de facto colonies and the small far-right collection of Argentina, Paraguay etc.

But there was one interesting point in the Statements, known as Explanations of Vote, of the national delegations. These too were very routine, with Arab states that have not the slightest intention of actually doing anything, condemning Israel and western nations all launching blood-curdling condemnations of Hamas (yes, really, that was still their priority, 60,000 dead Palestinian civilians later).

But the UK explanation of vote made one point that absolutely nobody else made. It stuck out like a sore thumb. The British Ambassador to the UN stated that

“While the UK voted in favour of this resolution, we wish to clarify that our long-standing position remains that there is no legal obligation on states to ensure respect for international law by third parties.”

When the EOV was published, this part of the statement was bolstered by a reference to Common Article 1 of the Geneva Convention. I do not recall her actually saying this and it is not in my notes.

Common Article 1 (so called because it is present in every one of the Geneva Conventions) reads:

Article 1
The High Contracting Parties undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.

So why did the UK, and the UK alone, say that it is not responsible for ensuring that other parties comply with international law, adding later a specific reference to the Geneva Conventions?

It is perfectly simple. Starmer and Lammy are terrified about future charges of complicity in Israeli war crimes. So the UK, only, feels it necessary to emphasise that they do not bear legal responsibility for Israel’s actions.

They claim they are not responsible for what Israel did with the supplies of UK munitions, which the UK increased to fuel the genocide.

They claim they are not responsible for what Israel did with the targeting information they gave Israel on a daily basis from RAF Akrotiri flights over Gaza.

They claim they are not responsible for the Israeli use of weapons flown in through the UK and Akrotiri.

They claim they are not responsible for use of the F-35 jets attacking Iran now, which they continue to supply with UK-manufactured spare parts.

We simply do not yet know what else they have done to support Israel based on the secret UK-Israeli defence treaty, but whatever it is, Starmer and Lammy want to make absolutely plain that the UK had no responsibility to prevent Israel from committing war crimes.

The claim that this is longstanding British policy is of course a rather frivolous bit of gaslighting. Indeed given that this argument runs completely counter to the doctrine of “the responsibility to protect” – of which the UK was the leading international proponent – it is simple nonsense.

[As it happens I always opposed the “responsibility to protect” argument because it is used as an excuse for Imperialism, cf. the destruction of Libya.]

The Genocide Convention in fact explicitly does create a duty on states to prevent genocide by third parties.

Article I of the Genocide Convention reads:

The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

So the declaration by Starmer and Lammy of not bearing responsibility really does not wash. The interesting thing is that they felt compelled to make it.

The evening after the debate I attended receptions hosted by both the British Ambassador and then by the Russian Ambassador, and I spoke to a large number of Ambassadors to the UN. Of course we discussed the debate, and everybody had noticed both the extraordinary and unusual addition to the UK statement and its motive.

They all specifically realised it was an effort to back away from responsibility for complicity in Israeli crimes.

I understand and share your disappointment at the collapse of international law. But I can tell you that the prospect of eventual retribution at the Hague still terrifies Starmer and Lammy.

Netanyahu’s desperate gamble in attacking Iran is an attempt to force the USA to join the war on Israel’s behalf, and to prevent peace talks.

It is of course simply untrue that Iran was about to produce a nuclear weapon. Every Spring a CIA-led US intelligence exercise formally reviews the situation, and the firm position of Five Eyes intelligence remains that Iran genuinely was not seeking to make a nuclear weapon.

I hope that Iran learns the lesson of Southern Lebanon. There, over many months, Israeli air superiority enabled them to substantially degrade missile systems of various resistance factions. Israel does – not least because of the traitors ruling Jordan and Syria – have air superiority over Iran. In a long war of attrition, Israeli bombing raids could do real damage to Iranian capabilities.

Iran’s best strategy would be to view this as the existential crisis, and seriously unload its missile capacity on Israel without restraint. The period of measured tit-for-tat reprisals is at an end. The decision of nuclear-armed Pakistan to stand behind Iran was extremely helpful. These are early days in the Israeli-Iranian war. I do not sense any popular enthusiasm in the USA to be involved. Even the mainstream American media is characterising Iranian attacks as “retaliation” and the Israeli victim card is no longer as Platinum as it used to be here in the USA.

Germany has been refuelling Israeli jets en route to attack Iran, and the UK may also have been doing so. Starmer and Macron have both expressed determination to defend Israel with their own military but both would face massive popular resistance.

We wait to see what happens next. But having lived through vicious Israeli bombardment of Beirut, having been menaced by drones in the Bekaa Valley, having stood on the line at Kfar Kila while a twelve-year-old boy was shot standing next to my producer, having witnessed 100,000 Lebanese homes destroyed, I have no sympathy left for Tel Aviv.

 

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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The UK Rebukes the UN and Bows to the Israeli Embassy over “Terrorism” Arrests of Journalists

There is a stunning contrast between the access given by the UK to the Israeli Embassy to influence prosecutions of anti-Genocide journalists and protestors, and the repudiation by the UK of United Nations querying such prosecutions.  The UK has rebuked the UN for “outside interference”.

I cannot state enough how unusual it is for the UK to give direct access to the Israeli Embassy to the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, in order for the Israeli government to influence the prosecution of UK citizens. This is not about extradition, in which case there may be treaty arrangements for direct contact between prosecutors. It is just not normal nor right for an Embassy to be involved with domestic prosecutions in this way.

This is one of a series of heavily redacted emails seen by the Guardian, Middle East Eye and lawyers for Palestine Action.  They show the Israeli government being granted direct influence with UK police and prosecutors, to urge the prosecution of UK citizens protesting in the UK, against a genocide for which Israel stands accused at the International Court of Justice, with her leaders indicted before the International Criminal Court.

There is no British precedent for this situation and it is very much against international practice, although comparators may be found in influencing prosecution decisions in Vichy France or the Eastern European communist bloc by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union  –  though there were instances of pushback even there.  By contrast the UK system is openly influenced by the Israelis.

There is no reticence from the UK government in  forwarding Israel influence. Although all released correspondence has been heavily redacted, it is plain that individual cases have been discussed  with the Israelis, including those of Palestine Action.

The United Nations has written to the UK on the subject of its treatment both of pro-Palestinian protestors and journalists and the abuse of anti-terrorism legislation. It is almost certain that some of the same cases the UN cites are those the Israeli Embassy has been involved in. The contrast between the UK’s treatment of the Israelis and of the United Nations could scarcely be different. The Israelis are invited in, while the Starmer regime has repudiated the United Nations.

This is stunning hypocrisy. It is characterised as being in the interest of those being persecuted by the UK and Israel, to prevent “interference from international organisations” such as the United Nations. This is beyond the pen of Orwell or Kafka. You can imagine the authors sniggering as they wrote it.

But the truth is the exact opposite of the UK government line. Unlike the Israeli Embassy, the United Nations really does have a right to interfere. The Special Procedures mechanisms by which the United Nations approached the UK are a well established part of international law, and the UK is a party to them. These are instituted by the Human Rights Council, and it has always been the position of the UK that all nations are subject to them.

In addition the UK is since 1971 a full party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is monitored by the Human Rights Committee and to the provisions of which the UN Special Rapporteurs specifically referred in querying the UK’s actions in this matter.

So the Israel Embassy has no right to interfere, and the United Nations has a direct right to interfere; yet the UK has encouraged the illegitimate while repudiating the legitimate. This is a classic example of the way that zionism has fundamentally poisoned public institutions in the UK, and also of the profound zionist capture of New Labour.

Yesterday’s revelation that David Lammy has lied to parliament and the country about suspending trade talks with Israel, while UK “trade envoy” Lord Austin is actually there, should be no surprise.

The hypocrisy does not even end there. The UK has been the most vociferous of countries in weaponising the UN Special Procedures against its own designated enemies, such as Russia and China. For the UK now to repudiate these UN investigations as “interference” is precisely to adopt the position of those states it has long argued against.

I have no doubt that this has been duly noted by any dictatorship the UK may seek to criticise in future.

You will recall that I am among a number of journalists about whose detention under the Terrorism Act and the seizure of whose electronic equipment, and thus correspondence, the United Nations interrogate the UK. You can read the UK government reply in full here.

ukgovtreply

Since the UN wrote, there have been further high profile arrests of journalists, including Sarah Wilkinson and Asa Winstanley. The basic UK response is that the UK should not interfere, but one point of detail the UK states is particularly worth noting. Detentions and confiscations such as mine under the Terrorism Act specifically do not require the police to have any “reasonable grounds of suspicion”.

What kind of state makes a point of empowering its police to act unreasonably?

But read this further from the UK government reply:

I was detained and my electronics seized under Section 7. That means the UK government is claiming that I was “concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism”. Just digest that for a moment.

I might say that nothing in my questioning – which was roughly equally split between the subjects of Wikileaks and Palestine – related in any way to the potential commission of any acts of terrorism. Is the government really pretending that, in travelling home from an Assange campaign meeting in Iceland, they truly suspected I was preparing to commit terrorism? This is ludicrous.

It has often been noticed that despite Sarah Wilkinson, Asa Winstanley, Richard Medhurst, Johanna Ross, John Laughland, Vanessa Beeley, Kit Klarenberg, Ernest Moret, Richard Barnard, Tony Greenstein and Natalie Strecker all being swept up under the Terrorism Act in a campaign against journalists this last two years, there has never been a single mention in UK mainstream media of the UK’s arrest of journalists under the Terrorism Act.

Even following the United Nations intervention to question the UK on the arrest of journalists the UK did not mention it. Even the UK’s tiny number of licensed licensed anti-genocide voices in the mainstream media, such as Owen Jones, have never mentioned it.

Yesterday Asa Winstanley won an important legal victory at the Old Bailey where a senior judge ruled that the police raid on his home and seizure of his equipment was unlawful. That is an important and rare legal victory, and I am tempted to attribute it part to the turning of the tide of Establishment opinion against sacrificing all principles of law to the interests of Israel.

You may perhaps not be surprised to learn that this victory, too, has not been covered by the mainstream media. This conspiracy of silence over extreme abuse of police power against journalists is deeply troubling.

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The post The UK Rebukes the UN and Bows to the Israeli Embassy over “Terrorism” Arrests of Journalists appeared first on Craig Murray.

MI5 Take Us For Fools

Imagine my hilarity when the front page headline new “Iranian plot”, trailed by MI5 as involving weapons stores, attacks on the Israeli Embassy and on Whitehall, turned out to be yet another faked “surveillance operation” against Iran International, the “media company” that is dodgier than Al Capone’s accountant.

The BBC still made it the second item on Saturday’s main news, as “Iranian Terror Plot discovered”. Three men have been charged and remanded on bail before a hearing at the Old Bailey on 6 June.

This is another exercise of the UK’s draconian new legislation, the openly fascist National Security Act 2023, where it is an offence to gather information, whether classified or not, as “Engaging in conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service”.

This is an incredibly low bar – prosecutors don’t have to prove there is any actual contact with a hostile power. So if you take a photo of Downing Street, as many tourists do, that can be an offence as it could be “useful” to non-existent “Iranian terrorists” or others. We already have one person in jail for taking photos of Iran International despite absolutely zero evidence that he had ever had any kind of contact with Iran.

One man – Mostafa Sepahvand – is also charged with “open source research” with a view to committing violence. Again the bar is incredibly low: no evidence of actual plans to commit violence are requiured.Personally, I have difficulty with imprisoning people before they commit a crime on the basis that they might be going to. This kind of prevention certainly works, in a sense. If you locked up the entire population, for example, there would undoubtedly be no crime committed, except for crimes committed in prison. But I find charges of thinking about a terrorist attack, without any evidence of ever having communicated such a thought to anybody, a large number of steps too far.Please read my last article which went into MI5’s Iran International scam in depth. An “Iranian terrorism in the UK” narrative is being created to justify UK involvement in a US/Israeli attack on Iran. I did not expect MI5 immediately to pull the same scam again.On the theme of articles immediately being vindicated, a number of people doubted my story from a Foreign Office source a month ago that al Jolani would recognise Israel next year in return for the lifting of sanctions. Three weeks later Trump announced the lifting of sanctions and met with al-Jolani. I believe this blog still has a truly useful role to play in explaining what is happening behind the scenes – what the mainstream media does not tell you. 

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

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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The post MI5 Take Us For Fools appeared first on Craig Murray.

MI5’s Fake Terror Plots

Back in the “War on Terror” days, the UK security services fabricated multiple fake terror plots. There was, for example, the 2009 Easter Bomb Plot in Manchester, taking entire front pages of newspapers. Gordon Brown as PM hyped it as a “very big terror plot”. It was a total fabrication, nobody was convicted and it eventually emerged that the trumpeted “bomb-making ingredient” the police confiscated from kitchens was sugar – in normal quantities.

The Great Ricin Plot in in 2003 was again kitchen obsessed, and the media that ran screaming headlines about the discovery of ricin did not bother to later report that the amounts the police announced they had discovered turned out to be the almost undetectable trace which might be found in any kitchen.

The propaganda was the purpose, all ramping up Islamophobia to justify the Western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. When the Manchester Arena attack eventually did happen, it turned out that MI5 had been the perpetrator’s sponsor and he and his father had been ferried from Libya by the British armed forces. Sponsorship of terrorism abroad is always likely to result in blowback at home.

The propaganda is now being ramped up again to promote the Islamophobia intended to drive public support in the UK for the Genocide in Gaza and a forthcoming attack on Iran.

MI5 Head Ken McCallum is arguably the most prolific and sustained liar in the history of the UK public service. He has not yet generated the deaths with his lies that Alistair Campbell caused, but give McCallum time for his Goebbels-like repetition to pay off. McCallum has a much more compliant media landscape to work with than existed a quarter of a century before.

I have to remind myself that my continued outrage at the destruction of millions of very real and ordinary people in the Middle East from 2003 onwards, to secure hydrocarbons for rich and evil men and based on total lies about Iraqi weapons, is something extremely vivid and fundamental to me, but the average university student was not even born at the time.

The myth of a “good” West continually self-propagates. The media distracts and obfuscates in a constant and prolonged process of attrition of the truth; it is tempting to believe that the Genocide in Gaza has awoken a public consciousness which may be a historic break of the system. But it is already becoming harder to access true news from Gaza. Fewer images are available as the murder of countless citizen journalists and the throttling of internet in Gaza takes effect.

Social media suppression of the reach of pro-Palestinian accounts and massive boosting of Zionist accounts are reinforced by systematic state persecution of pro-Palestinian voices.

Even as Israeli ministers openly proclaim their Genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, European ministers continue to deny it. I am reminded of Harold Pinter’s great acceptance speech for his Nobel prize, speaking in particular of the lies and atrocities of the Iraq War:

This is the reality of power. Power does not have to justify itself. Power does what it wants, and the rest of the world is expected to accept it.But there is another reality, one that is rarely reported. The reality of resistance. The reality of people who refuse to accept the lies, who refuse to be silenced. In every country where the United States has intervened, there have been people who fought back – not just with weapons, but with words, with ideas, with courage.These voices are often ignored by the Western media, which prefers to focus on the narrative of American benevolence. But they exist, and they are growing. From Latin America to the Middle East, people are standing up to imperialism, to exploitation, to lies.

We are still standing up, but the lies keep coming, the exploitation keeps coming and the murder keeps coming.

Now let us return on to the arch-propagandist Ken McCallum and his latest invented plot. This is a biggie – the largest state-promoted terrorism scare for twenty years.

As usual, there is not any actual evidence. This straight propaganda piece from the Guardian accidentally makes that plain:

Of course, the weapons the police are searching for may yet magically turn up under the bed. I recall the search of Charlie Rowley’s house after the death of poor Dawn Sturgess. The police searched the home for five days, looking for a small phial of liquid, with no luck. Then it amazingly turned out that the perfume bottle had been sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter all along!

That perfume bottle obviously had miraculous qualities and could materialise and dematerialise at will, because it had also sat undetected inside a regularly emptied charities’ donation bin for over three months. I suppose an RPG may yet materialise under the settee in the current search; when the British police and security services are involved, the laws of physics are frequently suspended.

As usual, Ken McCallum’s “five plots” last year had not resulted in any convictions, or indeed evidence, and in fact the claim was modest for McCallum – who has claimed that MI5 had foiled “twenty plots” since 2022. Even that was not his record.

McCallum reminds me of the man walking around St. James’ Park scattering rubber bands “to keep the elephants away”. When told there are no elephants, he stated “See, it works, doesn’t it?” McCallum has kept vast amounts of Iranian terrorism at bay in a similar fashion.

But, unusually, in 2023 one of McCallum’s fictional “Iranian plots” did result in an actual conviction, and I would like you to look at this one as a window into the twisted psyche of the security services.

In a crowded field, Iran International is probably the world’s dodgiest media channel. A Saudi Arabian-funded niche Farsi language operation, it caters to those Iranians who support Israel, support the restoration of a Shah and support Saudi Arabia.

As I said, it is very niche.

Yet this tiny media operation was set up with a Saudi investment of a quarter of a billion dollars. Yes, you did read that properly, 250 million dollars. Just where all that money really went is an interesting question. There have been persistent rumours of money laundering and of ties to Eastern-European-organised crime.

There was a brief period, after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, when the UK media would print disobliging things about the Saudis. In that short window, this article appeared in the Guardian.

Iran International, perhaps unsurprisingly, specifically supports a Sunni Arab terrorist organisation operating within Iran: the “Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz” – ASMLA. This is a Sunni ethno-nationalist group conducting armed struggle for the secession of certain Arab districts of southern Iran from the predominantly Persian and Shia state.

ASMLA has exactly the same covert backers as HTS in Syria: namely, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Israel, and Western security services.

In September 2018 ASMLA carried out an attack in Ahvaz which killed over 60 people (ISIS also claimed the attack, but the two organisations are linked). Iran International carried an interview with an ASMLA spokesman which very definitely supported ASMLA, and where he insisted on ASMLA’s right to armed resistance and specifically claimed responsibility for the attack as a victory.

In an era where Western activists are routinely arrested for supporting “terrorism” if they oppose the Gaza genocide, you might imagine that this would be an offence by Iran International. But supporting Western- and Saudi-backed terrorists is not only tolerated, it is official British government policy, and in response to complaints OFCOM found that Iran International were entitled to interview the advocate of the right sort of terrorism.

So how does this relate to the single conviction from all of Ken McCallum’s alleged terrorist plots?

Somebody from Iran International has been convicted of glorifying terrorism, right?

Don’t be silly. Iran International is pro-Saudi and pro-Israeli, and in December 2023 it opened a second HQ in Washington DC with additional CIA funding. Remember they are on the same side as HTS. Iran International are the “victims of terrorism” here.

The conviction under the Terrorism Act was for taking photographs of the Iran International HQ building in Chiswick.

In December 2023 Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev, a Chechen with Austrian citizenship, was sentenced to three and a half years in jail for photographing Iran International HQ in Chiswick, which was deemed to be in preparation for a terrorism offence.

The prosecution case was specifically that Dovtaev was operating on behalf of the Iranian Government.

This is the important bit. No evidence of any kind was presented in court of connections between Dovtaev and Iran. There was nothing on his phone and nothing from surveillance. He had not spoken to any Iranians or mentioned Iran.

The prosecution argued – and I kid you not – that Dovtaev was Chechen, which is in Russia, which is geopolitically allied to Iran, and therefore he was probably acting on behalf of Iran. That was it. It really, really was.

This ultra circumstantial argument is a reach enough anyway, but ignores several individual factors.

Dovtaev is a Sunni, therefore not aligned to Iran. He is definitely not one of those Chechens allied to Russia. His family arrived in Austria as refugees from the Chechen war of Independence and he is an anti-Russian Chechen nationalist and an Austrian citizen. He was actually wearing Chechen Independence gear when caught photographing the building.

The prosecution argument, that Dovtaev must be working for Iran because of Russia’s links to Iran, is therefore complete and utter nonsense. But it fits the official anti-Iranian narrative we are being force-fed. And it was rammed down the throats of the jury.

I might add that the evidence that Dovtaev was indeed casing the joint for some ulterior purpose was very strong, and I do not doubt it. But there was no evidence of any kind that it was for Iran, or for terrorism, as the prosecution alleged. The judgment is not published, which is why I do not link it.

That is the one conviction for Iranian terrorism for all McCallum’s false claims – and no connection at all to Iran was shown.

Which leads me to the only other actual arrest – though not yet conviction, until this week – in all of McCallum’s so-called Iranian terrorist plots. Two young Romanians were extradited from Bucharest to London for stabbing in the leg an employee of … you guessed it, Iran International.

Nandito Badea, age 19 and George Stana age 23 were arrested for stabbing in London the Iran International presenter Mr Pouria Zerati. The assault was captured on CCTV.

Now, you might remember that I said at the beginning that there are alleged links between the dodgy finances of Iran International and Eastern-European-organised crime? Well, the story reported from Bucharest is that the defendants admit to the stabbing but say it was a warning with regard to a business debt. Which, when you think about it, makes far more sense. The CCTV shows that the attackers could have killed the victim, but stabbed him in the leg instead. That is a gangland warning, not a state operation.

The notion that Iran is hiring random teenage Romanians to slightly wound people is a nonsense. Furthermore, does not the “business dispute” narrative make infinitely more sense in the case of Dovtaev, who had no links to Iran? The gangster scenario would fully explain why he would keep his lips firmly sealed about who really hired him and what he was doing, even at the cost of a harsher “terrorism” sentence.

So that is all the concrete evidence, or lack of it, in existence about McCallum’s multiple Iranian terrorist plots. This is now, of course, augmented by this new screamed narrative about a planned Iranian attack on the Israeli Embassy in London.

As the Gaza genocide proceeds, you could write a long essay about the ethics of attacking an Israeli Embassy (and Israel has not shown restraint in attacking other nations’ diplomatic premises, but I shall let that pass as not relevant to the current case).

You have to ask, “cui bono?”. Iran has shown tremendous restraint in avoiding being dragged into a wide war over Gaza in face of continued attacks, and is in the midst of a tense negotiating process over its nuclear programme. The idea that, at this moment, it would attack the Israeli Embassy in London is crazed.

However, the narrative very strongly serves the UK interest, as support for the Genocide in Gaza dwindles further, especially among Labour Party supporters, and of course such an attack, or even the allegation of a planned attack, also boosts the perpetual Israeli narrative of victimhood. MI5’s arrangement of this fake plot now is totally predictable; in fact I have been predicting false-flag operations since the genocide started.

My guess is that there is probably an agent provocateur operation at the base of this, where some poor young men have been entrapped into agreeing with wild statements or a fantasy plan. Alternatively, as usual it will prove to be a complete propaganda invention to influence public opinion at a key moment.

It is worth noting that the United States has this last few days currently concentrated four B-52 and six B-2 bombers on Diego Garcia. This is an extremely rare concentration and indicates preparedness for a major operation; Iran is the most likely target. This kind of force is very much greater than anything deployed against Yemen to date. This anti-Iranian propaganda is not being ramped up right now to no purpose.

 

———————————

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

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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The post MI5’s Fake Terror Plots appeared first on Craig Murray.

The Strange Death of Social Democratic Britain

The UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system can have some remarkable results and is capable of enacting extraordinarily quick political revolution, as in the triumph then rapid fall from power of the great Liberal Party in the first quarter of the twentieth century. We are in such a moment now.

The Labour Party today has a Commons majority of 165 seats, slightly down from the 174 majority on election night. This was almost identical to Tony Blair’s 1997 majority of 178. But extraordinarily, the 178 majority was won on 43.2% of the vote, while Starmer’s 2024 174 majority was won on just 33.7% of the vote — the smallest vote share for any single-party majority government in British history, and yet producing one of the largest majorities.

The system is throwing up perverse results as never before. The reason is that 2024 saw the lowest combined Conservative and Labour vote share since 1910, at 57.4%. This is fundamentally different from the threat to the two-party dominance by the Liberals and Social Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s, when the combined Labour-Tory vote share never fell below 70.0% (1983). So if you are thinking you have seen this before, you are very wrong. This is a far greater shift in voter behaviour.

In the 2010 general election, the combined Labour/Tory vote fell to 65.1%, but 2024 was a further step-change down. Every single opinion poll since has shown that this is a systemic decline, not a blip.

Then we get to the local elections held in England last Thursday, where the combined Labour and Tory vote was 37%, with Labour at just 14%. While these were predominantly (but by no means all) non-metropolitan English elections, Labour suffered near wipeout, losing 65% of the seats they had held under Starmer’s leadership in 2021 in an already devastatingly low performance.

It is important to note that these results for both Labour and the Tories were much, much worse than their local election performance in 2013 at the height of UKIP success, the previous low point for Labour and Tory performance in local elections. Again, you may think, “Oh, I have seen this before. It will pass.”

You have not seen this before, and it will not pass.

The BBC and Sky both made psephological projections for how the local elections would reflect in a general election. These are complicated calculations based on voter movement and with calculated compensation for the kind of seats being fought. It is not a simple projection from irrelevant types of Tory areas to the whole nation. The BBC projection to general election vote share was Reform 30%, Labour 20%, Liberal Democrats 17%, Conservatives 15%, Greens 11%, and Others 7%. The Sky projection was Reform 32%, Labour 19%, Conservatives 18%, Lib Dems 16%, Greens 7%.

Neither the BBC nor Sky projected this to general election seats, but it is undoubtedly the case that both Labour and the Conservatives are steering into the abyss, the tipping point where first-past-the-post massively punishes those who have substantive support but are not winning constituencies (the Liberal Democrat and, to some extent, the Green position for decades). Which of Reform, Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Green parties will emerge on top in England is a genuinely open question. Before going on to institutional and policy questions, I might say that my own thought is that the tendency of first-past-the-post everywhere to encourage two-party systems may well lead to Reform and the Liberal Democrats being those two parties; and that is certainly as probable as any other combination.

Institutionally, the Labour Party seems very strong, in that it is rooted in the trade union movement which created it and still funds it. Even under the lurch to the right under Starmer, the Labour Party retains some progressive policies which relate specifically to the rights of those in employment, and increases in the minimum and living wage and the Employment Rights Act reflect this. These are the inescapable tribute to the union paymasters, and a good thing too. Starmer’s right-wing economic policies rather focus attacks on those receiving benefits (some of whom are, of course, in work).

But institutional backing does not in itself ensure continued primacy. The Liberal Party had the active backing of a great many of Britain’s landed and industrial magnates. It did not founder for lack of institutional finance and muscle. Let us merely note that the Conservatives are in more jeopardy than Labour as their finances are reliant on contributions from wealthy individuals and companies which are ad hoc rather than institutional and susceptible to frictionless switching to Reform.

So what are the actual politics of this? Well, Reform voters are primarily motivated by dislike of immigration. While there are respectable economic arguments over the desirability of immigration, the simple truth is that most Reform voters are rather motivated by racist dislike of foreigners. I know that I have commenters here who like to deny this, but frankly, I do not live under a rock, I have fought elections, I used to live in the then-UKIP hotspot of Thanet, and I do not have a romanticised regard for the working class, and I have no doubt that Reform primarily channels racism.

But the interesting thing is that does not mean that Reform voters are “right-wing” in an economic sense. Opinion polls have found that most Reform voters favour renationalisation of public utilities, for example, and Farage has appealed to this by advocating for the nationalisation of the water industry and backing the nationalisation of the steel industry. Reform voters also favour rent controls, employment protections, and minimum wage legislation. On the left/right axis in economic policy, Reform voters are very substantially to the left of their party leadership, who almost certainly do not really believe in any of those things at all, though they may sometimes pretend.

George Galloway with the Workers’ Party has attempted to provide the mix of social conservatism in culture wars, including anti-immigration messaging, combined with left-wing economic policy, which might define a kind of left-wing populism, but failed miserably in Runcorn. It is only fair of me to make my own position clear, having stood for the Workers’ Party in the General Election on the issue of stopping the genocide. I do not support the culture wars agenda of the Workers’ Party and would not associate myself with the “Tough on Immigration, Tough on the Causes of Immigration” messaging the party used in Runcorn, even with the second half of that message emphasising an end to imperialist destabilisation of vulnerable countries. It is still too dog-whistle for my taste.

It remains my belief that Starmer has always been a deep-state operative and that he is deliberately driving the Labour Party to its own destruction. Among the strongest evidence for this, in my view, is the fact that all of the documentation on his involvement in the Assange case, the Savile case, the Janner case, and other high-level paedophile cases while he was Director of Public Prosecutions was allegedly destroyed by the state while the Conservatives were in office and Starmer in opposition. The Deep State was protecting him and preparing his way to power.

It is also interesting that the only time the mainstream media really turned on Boris Johnson during his premiership was in attacking Johnson for referencing Starmer’s involvement in the Savile case, which brought a torrent of media abuse of Johnson in defence of Starmer, even though it was one of the rare occasions where Johnson actually told the truth.

But even if you do not accept my theory that Starmer may be destroying the Labour Party on purpose, perhaps you might accept that Starmer would prefer to see the Labour Party destroyed than see it in power as a left-wing party. The Thatcherite agenda of austerity, benefit cuts and attacks on the non-working and disabled, monetarism, militarism and jingoism, with anti-immigrant policies allied to unquestioning Zionism, is perhaps a true reflection of Starmer’s core beliefs; as these align precisely with the Deep State agenda, the question of whether Starmer is a true believer or a blank cipher for the Deep State is moot.

With Labour emphasising “stop the boats” and deportations, there simply is no left-wing party among the complex five-party pattern emerging in English politics. It is also worth noting that under John Swinney, the SNP is firmly under control of its own neoliberal right wing in Scotland.

It is tempting to believe that a left-wing party must emerge to fill the gap in what is offered to the electorate, but that is not automatic. We may simply have a position where there is no left-wing choice of any stature. Jeremy Corbyn, for whom I have respect, has never indicated the dynamism and toughness required to drive a new party to success. Furthermore, he remains surrounded by the “soft Zionist” crew who convinced him as Labour leader that his best course was to continually apologise for non-existent anti-Semitism and speed up the expulsion of left-wingers from the party.

While a time of great political change is a time of great possibility, my own view is that what is going to emerge in England is going to be a dark period, with the extraordinary authoritarianism of the UK government, as already witnessed in the Public Order Act, Online Safety Act, and major police harassment of dissidents, becoming even more pronounced.

In Scotland, I am ever more confident of the prospects of Independence to escape from this. Scots do not want a right-wing government, and Reform will only split elements of the Unionist vote — it is no real threat to the Independence vote. As it becomes obvious that Westminster rule is going to be authoritarian right-wing rule for the foreseeable future, Scots will increasingly wish to quit the Union fast. Farage is an English archetype which is deeply unappealing to Scots, and, unlike Sturgeon, Swinney does not have the charisma to lead the Independence movement away from its goal.

My own focus in the coming year is very much going to be in moving forward on Scottish Independence. I hope to be adopted by the Alba Party as a candidate for the Scottish Parliamentary elections in 2026.

We are at the beginning of the biggest change in the UK political system for over a century. Get ready to play your part; inaction is not a sensible option in these dangerous times.

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The post The Strange Death of Social Democratic Britain appeared first on Craig Murray.

Kashmir and the Indus

India’s Hindutva President, Narendra Modi, has used the Kashmir terrorism incident to abrogate the 1960s Indus Waters Treaty – a longstanding goal of Modi. The Indian version of the “terrorist attack”, most of whose victims were Muslim, has largely been accepted by Western governments without evidence.

False flags abound nowadays. You may recall that we were told that the most deadly rocket ever fired by Hamas killed only Palestinians in a hospital compound, while the most deadly rocket ever fired by Hezbollah killed only Druze children. I have at present an open mind about what occurred in Kashmir.

It is however certain that tearing up the Indus Waters Treaty is a long term Modi goal. The Indus supplies 80% of Pakistan’s agricultural water, and the supply is already insufficient, with disastrous salination of the lower reaches of the river as the sea creeps into the areas once occupied by the mighty flow. I visited the area of lower Sind five years ago and witnessed the fields encrusted with white salt.

India controls the upstream flow into Pakistan of approximately 70% of the total water of the Indus, about 55% of all of Pakistan’s agricultural water.

In September 2016 in response to earlier violence in Kashmir, Modi initiated his slogan “Blood and water cannot flow together” and threatened to cut the Indus supply. He increased India’s out-take from the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej tributaries and restarted the Tulbul canal project. In both 2019 and 2022 while campaigning in Haryana, Modi made strong speeches threatening to cut off the water “wasted on Pakistan”.

[image error]

In 2023 Modi issued formal notice to Pakistan of India’s desire to renegotiate the Indus Waters Treaty and repeated this in 2024 when Pakistan did not respond. On both occasions India cited “counter-terrorism” as one of three reasons for review (the others being environmental protection and hydro-electric generation). As counter-terrorism can scarcely be linked to agricultural water allocation, this illustrates Modi’s grandstanding approach.

Modi does not have the physical power to stop the Indus, but does have the ability short term to divert more of the river to Indian irrigation and storage, sufficient to cause some immediate distress in Pakistan. Indian media are already thrilled with the idea. But long term major rebalancing of the river water allocation would require substantive new infrastructure in India. Such projects however would be both economically viable and likely wildly popular with Modi’s Hindutva base both for promoting Indian development and for damaging Pakistan.

In 2019, Modi revoked Article 270 of the Indian constitution which gave special autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir, incorporating them into India proper. He did this despite the Constitution stating it could only be done with the support of the “Constituent Assembly of the State”. That body no longer existed, having been replaced by a “Legislative Assembly”. Modi used another Constitutional provision to replace “Constituent Assembly” with “Legislative Assembly”, which seems fair enough. But having suspended the Legislative Assembly, he then claimed that its powers were now vested in the Governor, a Modi appointee.

Modi then agreed with himself to remove the autonomy of Indian Kashmir – a move that had no significant support among its 97% Muslim inhabitants and was accompanied by a ferocious crackdown – indeed, lockdown – and the destruction of its once thriving tourism industry. He simultaneously repealed another provision preventing non-Kashmiris from buying property in the region. Modi himself is therefore very much the cause of heightened ethnic, political and religious tension in Kashmir.

It is generally recognised that the situation of Kashmir, partly in India and partly in Pakistan with a small portion in China, and the Indian part occupied by deeply dissatisfied Muslims, is a result of the disastrous British partition of India in 1947. But in fact British responsibility for the disaster of modern Kashmir goes back a hundred years further than that, to 1846.

Kashmir was part of the Durrani Afghan Empire from 1758 until 1819, when it was captured by the Sikh Empire of Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Singh was always careful to place Muslim Governors over Muslim lands, including from the Durrani family itself. He allied with the British during the First Afghan War, and sent troops, including Kashmiri levies, to aid the British invasion in 1839. However after Ranjit Singh’s death and civil war over the succession, the British attacked the Sikh Empire to “restore stability”. Following the Battle of Sobraon, the British annexed the land between the Beas and Ravi rivers, while by the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846 the British sold Jammu and Kashmir to the former Sikh wazir, Gulab Singh, for 50 lakhs of rupees.

Gulab Singh was a particularly murderous character who had played an extraordinarily Machiavellian role in the Sikh court of Ranjit Singh and his immediate successors, and had of course looted from the Sikh treasury the money he paid to the British. So he paid the British with stolen money for land the British had just stolen.

This is how the extraordinary situation arose that the Muslim territories of Kashmir and Jammu had a Hindu ruler (Gulab Singh was a Hindu Dogra). That anomaly was the direct cause of the disastrous division of the territory by the British in the Partition 100 years later.

It is extremely frequent that today’s conflicts are caused by the actions of the British Empire reverberating down and continuing their evil over generations. It is equally frequent that it is very hard to find analyses that explain the truth behind the conflicts.

 

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

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

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The post Kashmir and the Indus appeared first on Craig Murray.