Craig Murray's Blog, page 46

Your Man in the Public Gallery: the Assange Hearing Day 6

I went to the Old Bailey today expecting to be awed by the majesty of the law, and left revolted by the sordid administration of injustice.

There is a romance which attaches to the Old Bailey. The name of course means fortified enclosure and it occupies a millennia old footprint on the edge of London’s ancient city wall. It is the site of the medieval Newgate Prison, and formal trials have taken place at the Old Bailey for at least 500 years, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. For the majority of that time, those convicted even of minor offences of theft were taken out and executed in the alleyway outside. It is believed that hundreds, perhaps thousands, lie buried under the payments.

The hefty Gothic architecture of the current grand building dates back no further than 1905, and round the back and sides of that is wrapped some horrible cheap utility building from the 1930’s. It was through a tunneled entrance into this portion that five of us, Julian’s nominated family and friends, made our nervous way this morning. We were shown to Court 10 up many stairs that seemed like the back entrance to a particularly unloved works canteen. Tiles were chipped, walls were filthy and flakes of paint hung down from crumbling ceilings. Only the security cameras watching us were new – so new, in fact, that little piles of plaster and brick dust lay under each.

Court 10 appeared to be a fairly bright and open modern box, with pleasant light woodwork, jammed as a mezzanine inside a great vault of the old building. A massive arch intruded incongruously into the space and was obviously damp, sheets of delaminating white paint drooping down from it like flags of forlorn surrender. The dock in which Julian would be held still had a bulletproof glass screen in front, like Belmarsh, but it was not boxed in. There was no top to the screen, no low ceiling, so sound could flow freely over and Julian seemed much more in the court. It also had many more and wider slits than the notorious Belmarsh Box, and Julian was able to communicate quite readily and freely through them with his lawyers, which this time he was not prevented from doing.

Rather to our surprise, nobody else was allowed into the public gallery of court 10 but us five. Others like John Pilger and Kristin Hrafnsson, editor in chief of Wikileaks, were shunted into the adjacent court 9 where a very small number were permitted to squint at a tiny screen, on which the sound was so inaudible John Pilger simply left. Many others who had expected to attend, such as Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, were simply excluded, as were MPs from the German federal parliament (both the German MPs and Reporters Without Borders at least later got access to the inadequate video following strong representations from the German Embassy).

The reason given that only five of use were allowed in the public gallery of some 40 seats was social distancing; except we were allowed to all sit together in consecutive seats in the front row. The two rows behind us remained completely empty.

To finish scene setting, Julian himself looked tidy and well groomed and dressed, and appeared to have regained a little lost weight, but with a definite unhealthy puffiness about his features. In the morning he appeared disengaged and disoriented rather as he had at Belmarsh, but in the afternoon he perked up and was very much engaged with his defence team, interacting as normally as could be expected in these circumstances.

Proceedings started with formalities related to Julian’s release on the old extradition warrant and re-arrest under the new warrant, which had taken place this morning. Defence and prosecution both agreed that the points they had already argued on the ban on extradition for political offences were not affected by the superseding indictment.

Magistrate Baraitser then made a statement about access to the court by remote hearing, by which she meant online. She stated that a number of access details had been sent out by mistake by the court without her agreement. She had therefore revoked their access permissions.

As she spoke, we in the court had no idea what had happened, but outside some consternation was underway in that the online access of Amnesty International, of Reporters without Borders, of John Pilger and of forty others had been shut down. As these people were neither permitted to attend the court nor observe online, this was causing some consternation.

Baraitser went on to say that it was important that the hearing was public, but she should only agree remote access where it was “in the interests of justice”, and having considered it she had decided it was not. She explained this by stating that the public could normally observe from within the courtroom, where she could control their behaviour. But if they had remote access, she could not control their behaviour and this was not in the “interests of justice”.

Baraitser did not expand on what uncontrolled behaviour she anticipated from those viewing via the internet. It is certainly true that an observer from Amnesty sitting at home might be in their underwear, might be humming the complete soundtrack to Mamma Mia, or might fart loudly. Precisely why this would damage “the interests of justice” we are still left to ponder, with no further help from the magistrate. But evidently the interests of justice were, in her view, best served if almost nobody could examine the “justice” too closely.

The next “housekeeping issue” to be addressed was how witnesses should be heard. The defence had called numerous witnesses, and each had lodged a written statement. The prosecution and Baraitser both suggested that, having given their evidence in writing, there was no need for defence witnesses to give that evidence orally in open court. It would be much quicker to go straight to cross-examination by the prosecution.

For the defence, Edward Fitzgerald QC countered that justice should be seen to be done by the public. The public should be able to hear the defence evidence before hearing the cross-examination. It would also enable Julian Assange to hear the evidence summarised, which was important for him to follow the case given his lack of extended access to legal papers while in Belmarsh prison.

Baraitser stated there could not be any need for evidence submitted to her in writing to be repeated orally. For the defence, Mark Summers QC was not prepared to drop it and tension notably rose in the court. Summers stated it was normal practice for there to be “an orderly and rational exposition of the evidence”. For the prosecution, James Lewis QC denied this, saying it was not normal procedure.

Baraitser stated she could not see why witnesses should be scheduled an one hour forty five minutes each, which was too long. Lewis agreed. He also added that the prosecution does not accept that the defence’s expert witnesses are expert witnesses. A Professor of journalism telling about newspaper coverage did not count. An expert witness should only be giving evidence on a technical point the court was otherwise unqualified to consider. Lewis also objected that in giving evidence orally, defence witnesses might state new facts to which the Crown had not had time to react. Baraitser noted that the written defence statements were published online, so they were available to the public.

Edward Fitzgerald QC stood up to speak again, and Baraitser addressed him in a quite extraordinary tone of contempt. What she said exactly was: “I have given you every opportunity. Is there anything else, really, that you want to say”, the word “really” being very heavily emphasised and sarcastic. Fitzgerald refused to be sat down, and he stated that the current case featured “substantial and novel issues going to fundamental questions of human rights.” It was important the evidence was given in public. It also gave the witnesses a chance to emphasise the key points of their evidence and where they placed most weight.

Baraitser called a brief recess while she considered judgement on this issue, and then returned. She found against the defence witnesses giving their evidence in ope court, but accepted that each witness should be allowed up to half an hour of being led by the defence lawyers, to enable them to orient themselves and reacquaint with their evidence before cross-examination.

This half hour for each witness represented something of a compromise, in that at least the basic evidence of each defence witness would be heard by the court and the public (insofar as the public was allowed to hear anything). But the idea that a standard half hour guillotine is sensible for all witnesses, whether they are testifying to a single fact or to developments over years, is plainly absurd. What came over most strongly from this question was the desire of both judge and prosecution to railroad through the extradition with as little of the case against it getting a public airing as possible.

As the judge adjourned for a short break we thought these questions had now been addressed and the rest of the day would be calmer. We could not have been more wrong.

The court resumed with a new defence application, led by Mark Summers QC, about the new charges from the US governments new superseding indictment. Summers took the court back over the history of this extradition hearing. The first indictment had been drawn up in March of 2018. In January 2019 a provisional request for extradition had been made, which had been implemented in April of 2019 on Assange’s removal from the Embassy. In June 2019 this was replaced by the full request with a new, second indictment which had been the basis of these proceedings before today. A whole series of hearings had taken place on the basis of that second indictment.

The new superseding indictment dated from 20 June 2020. In February and May 2020 the US government had allowed hearings to go ahead on the basis of the second indictment, giving no warning, even though they must by that stage have known the new superseding indictment was coming. They had given neither explanation nor apology for this.

The defence had not been properly informed of the superseding indictment, and indeed had learnt of its existence only through a US government press release on 20 June. It had not finally been officially served in these proceedings until 29 July, just six weeks ago. At first, it had not been clear how the superseding indictment would affect the charges, as the US government was briefing it made no difference but just gave additional detail. But on 21 August 2020, not before, it finally became clear in new US government submissions that the charges themselves had been changed.

There were now new charges that were standalone and did not depend on the earlier allegations. Even if the 18 Manning related charges were rejected, these new allegations could still form grounds for extradition. These new allegations included encouraging the stealing of data from a bank and from the government of Iceland, passing information on tracking police vehicles, and hacking the computers both of individuals and of a security company.

“How much of this newly alleged material is criminal is anybody’s guess”, stated Summers, going on to explain that it was not at all clear that an Australian giving advice from outwith Iceland to someone in Iceland on how to crack a code, was actually criminal if it occurred in the UK. This was even without considering the test of dual criminality in the US also, which had to be passed before the conduct was subject to extradition.

It was unthinkable that allegations of this magnitude would be the subject of a Part 2 extradition hearing within six weeks if they were submitted as a new case. Plainly that did not give the defence time to prepare, or to line up witnesses to these new charges. Among the issues relating to these new charges the defence would wish to address, were that some were not criminal, some were out of time limitation, some had already been charged in other fora (including Southwark Crown Court and courts in the USA).

There were also important questions to be asked about the origins of some of these charges and the dubious nature of the witnesses. In particular the witness identified as “teenager” was the same person identified as “Iceland 1” in the previous indictment. That indictment had contained a “health warning” over this witness given by the US Department of Justice. This new indictment removed that warning. But the fact was, this witness is Sigurdur Thordarson, who had been convicted in Iceland in relation to these events of fraud, theft, stealing Wikileaks money and material and impersonating Julian Assange.

The indictment did not state that the FBI had been “kicked out of Iceland for trying to use Thordarson to frame Assange”, stated Summers baldly.

Summers said all these matters should be ventilated in these hearings if the new charges were to be heard, but the defence simply did not have time to prepare its answers or its witnesses in the brief six weeks it had since receiving them, even setting aside the extreme problems of contact with Assange in the conditions in which he was being held in Belmarsh prison.

The defence would plainly need time to prepare answers to these new charges, but it would plainly be unfair to keep Assange in jail for the months that would take. The defence therefore suggested that these new charges should be excised from the conduct to be considered by the court, and they should go ahead with the evidence on criminal behaviour confined to what conduct had previously been alleged.

Summers argued it was “entirely unfair” to add what were in law new and separate criminal allegations, at short notice and “entirely without warning and not giving the defence time to respond to it. What is happening here is abnormal, unfair and liable to create real injustice if allowed to continue.”

The arguments submitted by the prosecution now rested on these brand new allegations. For example, the prosecution now countered the arguments on the rights of whistleblowers and the necessity of revealing war crimes by stating that there can have been no such necessity to hack into a bank in Iceland.

Summers concluded that the “case should be confined to that conduct which the American government had seen fit to allege in the eighteen months of the case” before their second new indictment.

Replying to Summers for the prosecution, Joel Smith QC replied that the judge was obliged by the statute to consider the new charges and could not excise them. “If there is nothing proper about the restitution of a new extradition request after a failed request, there is nothing improper in a superseding indictment before the first request had failed.” Under the Extradition Act the court must decide only if the offence is an extraditable offence and the conduct alleged meets the dual criminality test. The court has no other role and no jurisdiction to excise part of the request.

Smith stated that all the authorities (precedents) were of charges being excised from a case to allow extradition to go ahead on the basis of the remaining sound charges, and those charges which had been excised were only on the basis of double jeopardy. There was no example of charges being excised to prevent an extradition. And the decision to excise charges had only ever been taken after the conduct alleged had been examined by the court. There was no example of alleged conduct not being considered by the court. The defendant could seek extra time if needed but the new allegations must be examined.

Summers replied that Smith was “wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong”. “We are not saying that you can never submit a new indictment, but you cannot do it six weeks before the substantive hearing.” The impact of what Smith had said amounted to no more than “Ha ha this is what we are doing and you can’t stop us.” A substantive last minute change had been made with no explanation and no apology. It could not be the case, as Smith alleged, that a power existed to excise charges in fairness to the prosecution, but no power existed to excise charges in fairness to the defence.

Immediately Summers sat down, Baraitser gave her judgement on this point. As so often in this hearing, it was a pre-written judgement. She read it from a laptop she had brought into the courtroom with her, and she had made no alterations to that document as Summers and Smith had argued the case in front of her.

Baraitser stated that she had been asked as a preliminary move to excise from the case certain conduct alleged. Mr Summers had described the receipt of new allegations as extraordinary. However “I offered the defence the opportunity to adjourn the case” to give them time to prepare against the new allegations. “I considered of course that Mr Assange was in custody. I hear that Mr Summers believes this is fundamental unfairness”. But “the argument that we haven’t got the time, should be remedied by asking for the time.”

Mr Summers had raised issues of dual criminality and abuse of process; there was nothing preventing him for raising these arguments in the context of considering the request as now presented.

Baraitser simply ignored the argument that while there was indeed “nothing to prevent” the defence from answering the new allegations as each was considered, they had been given no time adequately to prepare. Having read out her pre-prepared judgement to precede on the basis of the new superseding indictment, Baraitser adjourned the court for lunch.

At the end of the day I had the opportunity to speak to an extremely distinguished and well-known lawyer on the subject of Baraitser bringing pre-written judgements into court, prepared before she had heard the lawyers argue the case before her. I understood she already had seen the outline written arguments, but surely this was wrong. What was the point in the lawyers arguing for hours if the judgement was pre-written? What I really wanted to know was how far this was normal practice.

The lawyer replied to me that it absolutely was not normal practice, it was totally outrageous. In a long and distinguished career, this lawyer had very occasionally seen it done, even in the High Court, but there was always some effort to disguise the fact, perhaps by inserting some reference to points made orally in the courtroom. Baraitser was just blatant. The question was, of course, whether it was her own pre-written judgement she was reading out, or something she had been given from on high.

This was a pretty shocking morning. The guillotining of defence witnesses to hustle the case through, indeed the attempt to ensure their evidence was not spoken in court except those parts which the prosecution saw fit to attack in cross-examination, had been breathtaking. The effort by the defence to excise the last minute supervising indictment had been a fundamental point disposed of summarily. Yet again, Baraitser’s demeanour and very language made little attempt to disguise a hostility to the defence.

We were for the second time in the day in a break thinking that events must now calm down and get less dramatic. Again we were wrong.

Court resumed forty minutes late after lunch as various procedural wrangles were addressed behind closed doors. As the court resumed, Mark Summers for the defence stood up with a bombshell.

Summers said that the defence “recognised” the judgement Baraitser had just made – a very careful choice of word, as opposed to “respected” which might seem more natural. As she had ruled that the remedy to lack of time was more time, the defence was applying for an adjournment to enable them to prepare the answers to the new charges. They did not do this lightly, as Mr Assange would continue in prison in very difficult conditions during the adjournment.

Summers said the defence was simply not in a position to gather the evidence to respond to the new charges in a few short weeks, a situation made even worse by Covid restrictions. It was true that on 14 August Baraitser had offered an adjournment and on 21 August they had refused the offer. But in that period of time, Mr Assange had not had access to the new charges and they had not fully realised the extent to which these were a standalone new case. To this date, Assange had still not received the new prosecution Opening Note in prison, which was a crucial document in setting out the significance of the new charges.

Baraitser pointedly asked whether the defence could speak to Assange in prison by telephone. Summers replied yes, but these were extremely short conversations. They could not phone Mr Assange; he could only call out very briefly on the prison payphone to somebody’s mobile, and the rest of the team would have to try to gather round to listen. It was not possible in these very brief discussions adequately to expound complex material. Between 14 and 21 August they had been able to have only two such very short phone calls. The defence could only send documents to Mr Assange through the post to the prison; he was not always given them, or allowed to keep them.

Baraitser asked how long an adjournment was being requested. Summers replied until January.

For the US government, Mark Lewis QC replied that more scrutiny was needed of this request. The new matters in the indictment were purely criminal. They do not affect the arguments about the political nature of the case, or affect most of the witnesses. If more time were granted, “with the history of this case, we will just be presented with a sleigh of other material which will have no bearing on the small expansion of count 2”.

Baraitser adjourned the court “for ten minutes” while she went out to consider her judgement. In fact she took much longer. When she returned she looked peculiarly strained.

Baraitser ruled that on 14 August she had given the defence the opportunity to apply for an adjournment, and given them seven days to decide. On 21 August the defence had replied they did not want an adjournment. They had not replied that they had insufficient time to consider. Even today the defence had not applied to adjourn but rather had applied to excise charges. They “cannot have been surprised by my decision” against that application. Therefore they must have been prepared to proceed with the hearing. Their objections were not based on new circumstance. The conditions of Assange in Belmarsh had not changed since 21 August. They had therefore missed their chance and the motion to adjourn was refused.

The courtroom atmosphere was now highly charged. Having in the morning refused to cut out the supervising indictment on the grounds that the remedy for lack of time should be more time, Baraitser was now refusing to give more time. The defence had called her bluff; the state had apparently been confident that the effective solitary confinement in Belmarsh was so terrible that Assange would not request more time. I rather suspect that Julian was himself bluffing, and made the call at lunchtime to request more time in the full expectation that it would be refused, and the rank hypocrisy of the proceedings exposed.

I previously blogged about how the procedural trickery of the superseding indictment being used to replace the failing second indictment -as Smith said for the prosecution “before it failed” – was something that sickened the soul. Today in the courtroom you could smell the sulphur.

Well, yet again we were left with the feeling that matters must now get less exciting. This time we were right and they became instead excruciatingly banal. We finally moved on to the first witness, Professor Mark Feldstein, giving evidence to the court by videolink for the USA. It was not Professor Feldstein’s fault the day finished in confused anti-climax. The court was unable to make the video technology work. For ten broken minutes out of about forty Feldstein was briefly able to give evidence, and even this was completely unsatisfactory as he and Mark Summers were repeatedly speaking over each other on the link.

Professor Feldstein’s evidence will resume tomorrow (now in fact today) and I think rather than split it I shall give the full account then. Meantime you can see these excellent summaries from Kevin Gosztola or the morning and afternoon reports from James Doleman. In fact, I should be grateful if you did, so you can see that I am neither inventing nor exagerrating the facts of these startling events.

If you asked me to sum up today in a word, that word would undoubtedly be “railroaded”. it was all about pushing through the hearing as quickly as possible and with as little public exposure as possible to what is happening. Access denied, adjournment denied, exposition of defence evidence denied, removal of superseding indictment charges denied. The prosecution was plainly failing in that week back in Woolwich in February, which seems like an age ago. It has now been given a new boost.

How the defence will deal with the new charges we shall see. it seems impossible that they can do this without calling new witnesses to address the new facts. But the witness lists had already been finalised on the basis of the old charges. That the defence should be forced to proceed with the wrong witnesses seems crazy, but frankly, I am well past being surprised by anything in this fake process.

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My coverage of Julian’s case is entirely dependent on your financial support. 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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Media Freedom? Show me the MSM Journalist Opposing the Torture of Assange

Today, the corporate media that cried “Media freedom” when Extinction Rebellion blocked the billionaire owned propaganda presses, is silent as Julian Assange’s Calvary for bringing real truth unfiltered to the public moves on to its next station; the macabre Gothic architecture of the Old Bailey.

The Tories appeared remarkably tolerant in the days when Extinction Rebellion were causing general disruption to the public. But to threaten the interests of billionaire paymasters is something against which the entire political class will unite. At a time when the government is mooting designating Extinction Rebellion as Serious Organised Crime, right wing bequiffed muppet Keir Starmer was piously condemning the group, stating: “The free press is the cornerstone of democracy and we must do all we can to protect it.”

It is surely time we stopped talking about “free press”, as if it was Thomas Paine or William Cobbett distributing pamphlets. Print media is now the subject of phenomenonal ownership concentration. It broadcasts the propaganda of some very nasty billionaires to a shrinking audience of mostly old people. The same ownerships have of course moved in to TV and Radio and increasingly into new media, and have a political stranglehold over those who control state media. At the same time, the corporate gatekeepers of Facebook and Twitter purposefully strangle the flow of readers to independent online media. The idea of a “free press” as an open marketplace of democratic ideas has no real meaning in modern society, until anti-monopoly action is taken. Which is the last thing those in power will do.

Quite the opposite, they are actively seeking to eliminate dissent even from the internet.

I do not want permanently to close down the Sun or the Telegraph; neither do Extinction Rebellion. But their excellent action is an important opening to the debate about controlled public narrative, not least on climate change. The highly paid stenographers to power have been quick to protest. Murdoch mouthpiece David Aaronovitch tweeted out that in fact 99% of the time there was no editorial interference from Murdoch. But that is the point. Murdoch employs reliable right wingers like Aaronovitch; he does not need to tell them what to write.

Show me the Murdoch journalist who has more than once published about the human rights abuses against the Palestinians. Murdoch ejected his own son from his media empire because James was insufficiently enthusiastic about the slow genocide of the Palestinians, and does not believe that the market will magically fix climate change.

The corporate media selects its mouthpieces. Scotland has become an extreme example, where 55% of the population support Independence, but only about 5% of state and corporate media “journalists” support Independence.

Julian Assange has been a light in this darkness. Wikileaks have opened a window into the secret world of war crime, murder and corruption that underlies so much of the governance we live under throughout the “free” world. Coming in the wake of the public realisation that we had been blatantly lied into the destruction of Iraq, there was a time when it seemed Assange would lead us into a new age where whistleblowers, citizen journalists and a democratic internet would revolutionise public information, with the billionaire stranglehold shattered.

That seems less hopeful today, as the internet world itself corporatised. Julian is in jail and continuing today is an extradition hearing that has been one long abuse of process. The appalling conditions of solitary confinement in which he has been kept in the high security Belmarsh Prison, with no access to his legal team or a working computer, to his papers or to his mail, have taken a huge toll on his physical and mental health. The UN Special Representative has declared he is subject to torture. A media which is up in arms about the very dubious attack on Navalny, has no emotion for state torture victim Assange other than contempt.

It is constantly asked by Julian’s supporters why the media do not see the assault on a publisher and journalist as a threat to themselves. The answer is that the state and corporate media are confident in their firm alliance with the powers that be. They have no intention of challenging the status quo; their protection from those kicking Assange lies in joining in with the kicking.

I hope to be in court today, and throughout the extradition hearing. The public gallery of 80 has been reduced to 9 “due to Covid”. 5 seats are reserved for Julian’s family and friends, and I have one of these today, but not guaranteed beyond that. There are just 4 seats for the general public.

Journalists and NGO’s will be following the hearing online – but only “approved” journalists and NGO’s, selected by the Orwelian Ministry of Justice. I had dinner last night with Assange supporters from a number of registered NGO’s, not one of which had been “approved”. I had applied myself as a representative of Hope Over Fear, and was turned down. It is the same story for those who applied for online access as journalists. Only the officially “approved” will be allowed to watch.

This is supposed to be a public hearing, to which in normal times anybody should be able to walk in off the street into the large public gallery, and anyone with a press card into the press gallery. What is the justification for the political selection of those permitted to watch? An extraordinary online system has been set up, with the state favoured observers given online “rooms” in which only the identified individual will be allowed. Even with approved organisations, it is not the case that an organisation will have a login anyone can use, not even one at a time. Only specifically nominated individuals have to login before proceedings start, and if their connection breaks at any point they will not be readmitted that day.

Given these restrictions, I was very conscious I may need to queue from 5am tomorrow, to get one of the 4 public places, if I drop off the family list. So I went this morning at 6am to the Old Bailey to check out the queue and work out the system. The first six people in the queue were all people who, entirely off their own bat, without my knowledge and with no coordination between them, had arrived while London slept just to reserve a place for me. I was swept up by their goodness, their trust in me and by their sheer humanitarian concern about Julian and the whole miscarriage of justice. I chatted cheerily with them for a while, then came back to write this, but just got round the corner when I burst into floods of tears, overwhelmed by all this kindness.

I have to pull myself together now and get into that court.

——————————————

My coverage of Julian’s case is entirely dependent on your financial support. 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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Novichok, Navalny, Nordstream, Nonsense

Once Navalny was in Berlin it was only a matter of time before it was declared that he was poisoned with Novichok. The Russophobes are delighted. This of course eliminates all vestiges of doubt about what happened to the Skripals, and proves that Russia must be isolated and sanctioned to death and we must spend untold billions on weapons and security services. We must also increase domestic surveillance, crack down on dissenting online opinion. It also proves that Donald Trump is a Russian puppet and Brexit is a Russian plot.

I am going to prove beyond all doubt that I am a Russian troll by asking the question Cui Bono?, brilliantly identified by the Integrity Initiative’s Ben Nimmo as a sure sign of Russian influence.

I should state that I have no difficulty at all with the notion that a powerful oligarch or an organ of the Russian state may have tried to assassinate Navalny. He is a minor irritant, rather more famous here than in Russia, but not being a major threat does not protect you against political assassination in Russia.

What I do have difficulty with is the notion that if Putin, or other very powerful Russian actors, wanted Navalny dead, and had attacked him while he was in Siberia, he would not be alive in Germany today. If Putin wanted him dead, he would be dead.

Let us first take the weapon of attack. One thing we know about a “Novichok” for sure is that it appears not to be very good at assassination. Poor Dawn Sturgess is the only person ever to have allegedly died from “Novichok”, accidentally according to the official narrative. “Novichok” did not kill the Skripals, the actual target. If Putin wanted Navalny dead, he would try something that works. Like a bullet to the head, or an actually deadly poison.

“Novichok” is not a specific chemical. It is a class of chemical weapon designed to be improvised in the field from common domestic or industrial precursors. It makes some sense to use on foreign soil as you are not carrying around the actual nerve agent, and may be able to buy the ingredients locally. But it makes no sense at all in your own country, where the FSB or GRU can swan around with any deadly weapon they wish, to be making homemade nerve agents in the sink. Why would you do that?

Further we are expected to believe that, the Russian state having poisoned Navalny, the Russian state then allowed the airplane he was traveling in, on a domestic flight, to divert to another airport, and make an emergency landing, so he could be rushed to hospital. If the Russian secret services had poisoned Navalny at the airport before takeoff as alleged, why would they not insist the plane stick to its original flight plan and let him die on the plane? They would have foreseen what would happen to the plane he was on.

Next, we are supposed to believe that the Russian state, having poisoned Navalny, was not able to contrive his death in the intensive care unit of a Russian state hospital. We are supposed to believe that the evil Russian state was able to falsify all his toxicology tests and prevent doctors telling the truth about his poisoning, but the evil Russian state lacked the power to switch off the ventilator for a few minutes or slip something into his drip. In a Russian state hospital.

Next we are supposed to believe that Putin, having poisoned Navalny with novichok, allowed him to be flown to Germany to be saved, making it certain the novichok would be discovered. And that Putin did this because he was worried Merkel was angry, not realising she might be still more angry when she discovered Putin had poisoned him with novichok

There are a whole stream of utterly unbelievable points there, every single one of which you have to believe to go along with the western narrative. Personally I do not buy a single one of them, but then I am a notorious Russophile traitor.

The United States is very keen indeed to stop Germany completing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will supply Russian gas to Germany on a massive scale, sufficient for about 40% of its electricity generation. Personally I am opposed to Nord Stream 2 myself, on both environmental and strategic grounds. I would much rather Germany put its formidable industrial might into renewables and self-sufficiency. But my reasons are very different from those of the USA, which is concerned about the market for liquefied gas to Europe for US produces and for the Gulf allies of the US. Key decisions on the completion of Nord Stream 2 are now in train in Germany.

The US and Saudi Arabia have every reason to instigate a split between Germany and Russia at this time. Navalny is certainly a victim of international politics. That he is a victim of Putin I tend to doubt.

The UK state is of course currently trying to silence one small bubble of dissent by imprisoning me, so you will not have access to another minor but informed view of world events for you to consider. Yesterday I launched a renewed appeal for funds for my legal defence in the Contempt of Court action against me for my reporting of the attempted fit-up of Alex Salmond. I should be extremely grateful if you can contribute to my defence fund, or subscribe to my blog.

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Craig Murray Defence Appeal Renewed

I have today received a bill from my legal team for £60,563.40 in fees to date in defending the contempt of court charge against me for my reporting of the Alex Salmond trial.

In addition to this, I have paid a separate legal fee for a QC to draft a petition for a court to consider whether the accusers’ anonymity should be continued by the courts, given their continued participation in a high intensity public campaign against Alex Salmond and effectively against the verdict of the jury. I have also paid to commission the Panelbase poll proving that my blog was in no way a primary source of information for those who believe they have identified accusers.

In total to date £69,052 has been spent. Which means about £5,000 remains in the pot, and the main trial itself is currently scheduled for 21 January.

The Crown has adopted a policy of simply blocking everything the defence seeks to do: objecting to my witnesses, objecting to my own affidavit, objecting to the release of documentary evidence. In consequence there have been three preliminary hearings. Those who listened to last week’s hearing will know that these have resolved none of the questions at issue. The Crown constantly shifts its ground, or submits draft positions, and has not yet clarified the evidential basis for its charges, while blocking my evidence. They have objected to all of my witnesses being heard, and to the opinion poll being considered.

This has the appearance of what is known in the US as “Lawfare”. My financial resources are drained and there is a huge impact on me in terms of my time taken up – frankly very much worse than I anticipated – and an emotional strain too.

As a reminder, this is the list of documents from the Salmond case disclosure my which defence is seeking to access, and which the Crown is refusing to release.

To be plain, this is material which I know for certain to exist. I am not fishing. The Crown has admitted its existence in forbidding Alex Salmond’s own solicitors from releasing it to anybody, (including Alex). Much of this was kept out of the Salmond trial itself as “collateral evidence”, as I explained here.

The most likely next court hearing is to request the Court orders the Crown to produce this material. In effect, each court hearing costs about £20,000 in legal fees. It is now plain that I need at least double the £75,000 originally raised to get me through the trial. I am really very sorry to have to ask again, but I therefore need to request further contributions to my defence fund at this point.

I am deeply conscious that, the legal battle having caused my blogging output and depth of research to fall these last few weeks, there has been a drop-off in readership and in subscriptions, so I am handicapped in making this appeal precisely by the very legal battle I am appealing to try to fight. I also do realise these are hard times for people. I do not want anyone to give anything if it causes them even the slightest hardship.

I will post updates on progress from this renewed funding appeal. I have asked the lawyers to produce a version of their fee note which can be published.

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The Currency of Absurdity

When is the last time you had a guest inside your home, you gave them a cup of tea and a biscuit, perhaps watched some TV together, and then when they left you thought “Oh, they were nice. I wonder who that was?”.

Apparently it happens all the time. At least, the peculiar operation of the new lockdown policy for most of Strathclyde is predicated on that belief.

Today I may not go and visit my son Jamie in his home in Glasgow. I can however meet up with him in a pub or restaurant in Glasgow, surrounded by dozens of other people, which is, we are told, safer. The main reason it is safer is that, in the event of somebody there having covid-19, the restaurant or pub will have been given our contact details. Whereas if we had met not in the pub but in Jamie’s home, apparently it would have been much more difficult for track n trace people to get the contact details, because obviously, unlike the restaurant, Jamie and I have no idea how to contact each other.

There are two glaring absurdities of this strand of argument.

The first is the presumption that whereas people have imperfect knowledge of who has been in their homes, bars and restaurants have perfect knowledge. Because of course nobody can have given wrong contact details to the pub, by muddle or by ill-will. I would counter that the occasions when people do not know who is in their own home are far rarer than occasions when the pub does not have accurate contact details for everybody in it.

The second is that the group in the pub has only had to give a single contact for the group, not everybody’s contact details. So actually track n trace is precisely as reliant on the host or organiser knowing everyone else’s contact details in the pub or restaurant as they would be had the meeting been in the home.

The third is that if someone of the 100 people in the pub through the course of that day and the next had later tested positive for covid-19, Jamie and I would have to be track n traced had we been there. Whereas if we had never been to the pub at all, but just had a quiet cup of tea in his home, we would never have come in potential contact with covid 19 and had to be traced. And if either he or I had been the carrier, that is 98 less people who would have had to be contact traced if we hadn’t been forced to meet in a pub rather than at home.

The Scottish Government’s other argument for it being safer to meet in a pub than at home is that pubs and restaurants have social distancing and hygiene measures in place, whereas homes do not.

This is perfectly true. Just like airports have runway lights in place, but homes do not. Because planes do not land in homes. If I visit Jamie in his flat, there will probably have been a total of three or four people in that flat all week. As opposed to visiting a pub or restaurant which has a total footfall of hundreds through that space. It is patently untrue that the risk of contracting coronavirus is higher in the private than in the public indoor space. I am perfectly capable of washing my hands without a pub sign telling me I have to. Contact with the traces of 600 less people is a large advantage to nullify by a sign and some sanitiser.

The truth is that the ban on people visiting homes in and around Glasgow, while the pubs, restaurants and shops are all open, is simply absurd from any practical standpoint.

The underlying truth is, that what the Scottish Government is seeking to say is that there appears some indication of spread of covid-19 through people holding parties – raucous parties with drinking and dancing, and loads of people attending, some of whom the host does not know who thus cannot be contacted – in the Glasgow area. In that specific situation, the arguments of the Scottish Government do make sense. Yes, there is obviously a chance of spreading coronavirus at such party gatherings. Yes, there may be people at such gatherings who cannot subsequently be traced.

But what percentage of occasions when people enter other people’s homes, is for the purpose of such a party? It is not an easy question to answer. My best shot would be about 1 in every 5,000 visits to enter someone else’s home is for a party of that description.

Simply to ban the other 4,999 home visits on entirely spurious grounds that people do not know who is visiting them, and that they are insanitary, is an absurd example of taking a sledgehammer to crack a grain of pollen. Ban parties. Ban indoor gatherings of more than ten people, or people from more than two or three households, however you wish to define it. There are plenty of situations where the law already defines parties – they are banned in plenty of tenancies, and the law is very used to having to judge what is disorderly.

Auntie Jean visiting Auntie Effie for tea is not the problem here.

A situation where I can visit with my son in a pub, but not in his home, is stupid to the point of surreal.

But what is truly worrying is the adverse reaction I received in the early hours of the morning on Twitter to pointing this out. An absolute avalanche of tweets arrived in reply, each one parroting exactly the two Scottish government arguments – that pubs have better visitor contact details than homes, that pubs have better social hygiene than homes. These are arguments which the world’s dimmest marsupial would perceive as rubbish given ten seconds independent thought, but they were trotted out as religious liturgy by the faithful:

https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/1300940041900957696

Now few people can be happier than me at the much greater public trust in Holyrood than in Westminster on handling covid-19 (although that dim-witted marsupial would have done a better job than Boris Johnson: at least they would be unlikely to be primarily focused on making hundreds of millions in corrupt contracts for their mates). The trust that Nicola has built up is a very good thing, and hopefully she intends to spend that credit in the cause of Independence in the near future.

But people should never trust politicians – any politician – too much. When it reaches the stage that people react angrily and defensively to any criticism of government measures, that is not healthy for democracy. One problem is that fear is a very powerful tool for a politician. Fear of coronavirus is such that heavy-handed, blunderbuss measures will always be supported, even when like this Glasgow lockdown they make no sense in detail.

I perfectly understand why people might wish to shut down their critical thinking faculties in this coronavirus situation and put absolute faith in an authority they trust. I have myself refrained from any criticism of lockdown measures before now, because I recognise that those in charge are grappling with complex problems to which there is no perfect answer, and with better access to facts than I have. But I still reserve the right to point out the absolutely absurd.

The banning of meeting in Glasgow except in the presence of a till is absurd.

By all means suspend your critical faculties, but do not turn on those who have not.

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Assange Travesty Continues

The travesty that is Julian Assange’s extradition hearing resumes fully on 7 September at the Old Bailey. I shall be abandoning my own legal team and going down to London to cover it again in full, for an expected three weeks. How this is going to work at the Old Bailey, I do not know. Covid restrictions presumably mean that the numbers in the public gallery will be tiny. As of now, there is no arrangement for Julian’s friends and family in place. It looks like 4am queuing is in prospect.

By 7 September it will be six months since I applied to resume my membership of the National Union of Journalists. I STILL have not the slightest idea who objected, or what the grounds were for objection. I have not heard from the NUJ for months. A senior official of an international journalists’ organisation has told us that he inquired, and learnt that the NUJ national executive has considered my application and set up a sub-committee to report. But if so, why is this secret, why have I not been informed, and why am I not allowed to know what the objection is? I find this all very sinister. At this stage it is not paranoid to wonder whose hand is behind this.

The practical effect of this is that without NUJ membership I cannot access a Press card, and avail myself of whatever media arrangements are in place for the Assange hearing (just as I was kept out of most of the Salmond trial). I have now reached the stage where I would like to take legal action against the NUJ, but the finances are beyond me. I am not going to ask you to donate because we are going to need all our resources for the contempt case against me, which the Crown drags out.

I shall be writing next week about my own case and that hearing earlier this week. I would just note now that the “virtual hearing” is entirely unsatisfactory and unfair on defendants. There was at least one occasion when my QC agreed with a suggestion of the judge when I would have instructed them not to had I been, as I should normally have been, seated near them in court and able to instruct.

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Identity and the Saxe Coburg Gothas

I came across this excellent heat map representation of a large opinion poll on support for the monarchy, sampling 22,000 people all across the UK, taken in 2018 by focaldata.

Red tones indicate net disapproval of the monarchy and green tones indicate net approval. It is worth noting the quite astonishing, and detailed, degree of correlation with this heat map of the Brexit referendum. Annoyingly I cannot find the actual datasets for the focaldata survey.

Among other things, that rather puts to bed the notion of a significant left wing Brexit vote. Brexit voters are indeed mostly highly traditional British Nationalists who love the Queen.

All of which underlines the obvious point that Scotland has a very different political culture to England. It also ought to cast some doubt on the triangulation methodology so favoured by gradualists. I find that speaking to SNP branches is no different to speaking to any other Yes group, in that abolition of the monarchy is overwhelmingly popular, and virtually nobody at meetings is a monarchist. I have never detected any generational difference in this. Scottish Republicanism tends to link in with views on much more radical land reform, which is so desperately needed. A campaign for a Scottish Republic would have majority support. Yet we are told that openly to advocate a Scottish Republic would alienate voters. No it would not, most people would support, and you are not going to convert a great many diehard monarchists to Independence anyway.

I strongly suspect that this extends to other areas, particularly foreign policy. I simply do not believe there is a large well of support in Scotland for UK neo-con foreign policy, nor that it is necessary to support UK foreign policy to maximise support for Independence. Neither Russia nor China is the enemy of the Scottish people. The problem is, that those with the finances to commission opinion polls have every interest in keeping support for such opinions hidden. I have always found the argument that people will only vote for Independence if they think nothing will change rather amusing; if nothing will change, why vote for it?

Anyway, while on the subject of British nationalism, I have a unifying solution to the culture wars question of singing Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia at the Proms. Rule Britannia has no musical virtues and in my view should never be sung or played anywhere; it is a horrible bit of doggerel laced with ugly baroque frills. Land of Hope and Glory however is sung to a genuinely great piece of music. The answer is perhaps something like this:

The truly wonderful Patrick Fyffe is no longer with us, but George Logan is and for £20 I’ll slip on a frock and do it myself.

In childhood we always watched the Last Night of the Proms with my mother, and enjoyed it greatly. In those days there was no doubt at all that the patriotic singing was taken with a huge dose of irony. Britain had decolonised almost entirely in a remarkably swift quarter century, and there was a presumption the process would be completed. The state was properly social democratic; all utilities were in public ownership as were all the largest industries. All public provision really was provided by the state, not through profit making private agencies. You could not only go to university for nothing, you were paid to go. Post Suez Crisis, the idea the UK would ever invade anywhere else again seemed wildly improbable, and more importantly, nobody wanted to invade anywhere.

There were still American dictated blights, like the Chagos Islands, but very few were conscious of it. Public discourse was left wing. TV had A J P Taylor, not David Starkey, and Bertrand Russell popped up regularly. The BBC showed Ken Loach and “The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil”.

In these circumstances, some singing of “Wider still and wider Shall thy bounds be set” seemed harmless, given that the exact opposite had plainly been in full train. The promenaders were determinedly silly. One year there was a large banner saying “Eat prunes they make you go”, which we children thought hilarious and became a joke in our house.

I suppose that it was Thatcher and the Falklands War that changed all that, and made British nationalism start to be sinister again, even though most of the promenaders themselves remained the same knowing sceptics. Blair then took it to another level, with his promotion of “liberal interventionism”, the doctrine that bombing BAME people is good for them. That was and is a direct and unreconstructed revival of “liberal imperialism” of a kind that Elgar would recognise and support. Suddenly the Last Night of the Proms went down another notch in the irony scale and up another notch on the jingoism scale, as Blair started to invade countries left, right and centre.

Now with Brexit, Johnson and Farage there seems to be a point of no return where British nationalism is too toxic to be adopted ironically. I am not sure the Last Night of the Proms will survive Scottish Independence. Would they still mark the Imperial nostalgia with the old butcher’s apron from Imperial days? I think it is probably time, absent Patrick Fyffe, or me in a frock, to put this grand old lady to rest.

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What Have We Become?

My friend and mentor the much-missed Gordon Wilson used to run Radio Free Scotland, a pirate radio station supporting Independence. It was broadcast entirely illegally, a crime the state took very seriously in the 1950’s. Some of the others involved were of the group that liberated the Stone of Scone temporarily from Westminster Abbey. That was a serious crime too. One of the most enjoyable evenings of my life, one I remember 40 years later, was a boozy dinner with this whole group at Gordon and Edith’s home in Broughty Ferry.

At the time, the state’s arguments against “pirate radio” included national security and interference with emergency services. The entirely illegal Radio Free Scotland actually gave its address as SNP HQ!

This criminal tendency did not prevent Gordon from becoming leader of the SNP and a very respectable solicitor. So how did the SNP morph from being a party that had a very elastic attitude to obeying the laws which suppressed Scotland, to being a party whose leadership cheerleaders are today, in their scores, defending on social media the imprisonment of a working class, ethnic minority Independence activist for organising an entirely peaceful and successful pro-Independence demonstration that passed off entirely without incident?

A party in government naturally has a different perspective to a party of protest. But how those in authority deal with protest, and particularly protest which does not conform to the neat template authorities may wish to confine it to, is a fascinating study. It is the difference between authoritarian government and liberal government, on a continuum. But broadly speaking deprivation of liberty for peaceful protest is acknowledged as the hallmark of a very authoritarian government.

Thus the Extinction Rebellion protests, which deliberately made no effort to conform to regulation around protests and which were deliberately designed to cause maximum disruption to ordinary traffic in London, resulted so far in no prosecutions pushing for imprisonment for protesting or blocking streets unless criminal damage was involved, and even then I am struggling to find examples of imprisonment. Friends of mine who deliberately participated in avowedly illegal Extinction Rebellion protests have been tried and received small fines.

Similarly, a great number of the Black Lives Matters protests, in the UK and elsewhere, were illegal in the sense of not being pre-planned and following police and council regulation. Some caused deliberate damage to statues etc. Again, I am not aware of any cases of people being imprisoned for organising Black Lives Matters demonstrations.

As a young man, I took part in the Occupation of the site of the Torness nuclear power station which disrupted its build substantially. Again, nobody was imprisoned. Looking at my own history, I gave speeches to illegal gatherings at Occupy London, both at St Paul’s and at Parliament square. When the Occupy movement took over universities to protest against tuition fees, I spoke to an illegal occupation at Cambridge university. The university hired security staff to prevent my speech, so the students gathered and sat in the foyer and I gave my talk from the public pavement outside the building, over the heads of a row of security staff, projecting through the double doors of the foyer. Again, nobody got imprisoned.

People do however get imprisoned for organising “illegal” demonstrations. Not in western democracies so much, and I think I have demonstrated until now not normally in Scotland nor England in recent times. But I have witnessed people get imprisoned for “illegal” political demonstration, in Uzbekistan and in then dictatorship Nigeria. It happens quite often in China. Alexei Navalny himself has been imprisoned before in Russia for organising demonstrations without a permit, as have many other opposition groups. Bureaucratic violation is the entirely common tactic against the opposition in Russia, where demonstrations are allowed but there is often some “hitch” with the paperwork.

The imprisonment of Manni Singh is inexcusable. The demonstration he organised was joyous, massive and caused zero damage and zero violence. Over 100,000 people took part coming from all over Scotland in an absolutely determined effort to express their desire for Scottish Independence. The large majority, however, were Glaswegians and represented a significant chunk of the population of the city. It was very much a family occasion.

I spoke at the event, as at the identical demonstration the previous year, and was in touch with Manni throughout the organisational period. Manni is very much an auto-didact in politics. There are aspects of his eclectic beliefs, including for example a fondness for the work of Douglas Murray, which are pretty well the opposite of my own beliefs. But Manni is a good man and, as I have frequently explained on these pages, I have never chosen my friends on the grounds they agree with me about everything. It is also true that Manni has since fallen out with All Under One Banner and its current leadership. Personally I like, as in actively enjoy the company of, all of those involved and have been saddened at my inability to bring them back together. None of which should bear any relation to jailing Manni for organising a political demonstration, but all of which has been thrown up as chaff on social media to obscure the issue.

The 2018 AUOB march was massively successful. I was the first speaker, and I have never had such an exhilarating political experience, not even when addressing the massive Stop the War rallies in London. The 2018 Glasgow march introduced AUOB as a massive political force in Scotland, and particularly in Glasgow.

Tens of thousands of SNP members take part in AUOB demonstrations. I have marched on them beside Joanna Cherry, Chris Law, Ivan McKee, and other SNP worthies. But behind the scenes, all is not the harmony that it may seem. Peter Murrell and Nicola Sturgeon are extremely wary of any part of the Yes Movement they do not control. Nicola Sturgeon has been invited again and again to speak at AUOB demonstrations, and has always refused. Even when promised by AUOB that she could choose the other speakers, and ne’er-do-wells like Tommy Sheridan and myself would be rigorously kept away (to which I had agreed).

The official explanation is that as First Minister, Nicola has to represent the entire nation so may not take part in partisan political events. Yet strangely, that did not stop her attending and speaking to either anti-Brexit demonstrations or gay rights events. That an SNP leader can speak at political events but not for Scottish Independence is, ahem, counter-intuitive.

I suspect Nicola finds the company at anti-Brexit demonstrations more to her taste than she would the company at an AUOB march.

What happened with Manni is that Glasgow City Council looked to try to change the start date of the demonstration and bring it forward from 1.30pm to 11am. This was explicitly to reduce the size of the demonstration – there is no doubt about this, they directly said so, and Manni was keeping me informed in real time. And this is the simple truth – the move to hamper the demonstration and limit its size was absolutely initiated, led and followed through by the SNP group on Glasgow City Council. The SNP Glasgow city councillors are very much directed by the Sturgeon inner coterie, particularly commissars Mhairi Hunter and Rhiannon Spear. The SNP was looking to hamper the impact of AUOB in Glasgow, for its own political reasons.

The AUOB marches attract Independence supporters from all over Scotland. People come down by ferry and coach from the Highlands and Islands. I have met people on them who travelled all through the night. At the time Glasgow Council decided to bring forward the start time, it was already too late; coaches, ferries and advance train and bus tickets were already booked. We are talking about a march that took nearly three hours to pass any one spot. The chaos and disorder from trying to change the starting time would be greater than the disciplined march proceeding as planned by the organisers. That is the decision Manni took. He started the demo 150 minutes after the Council approved time.

I knew of all these problems in real time, and I made a point of speaking with the senior policeman in charge of the march. Amusingly, I recall they really were “Gold Command” or some such TV thriller designation. “Gold Command” was entirely happy and had no complaints. It had been a peaceful, orderly and very good humoured event. I was told directly.

It was the SNP group on Glasgow City Council who insisted that council officers report Manni Singh to the police and demand action against him. It was not an initiative by the Police, who had been quite happy with the demonstration.

This is a photo of an “illegal” demo in Minsk:

This is a photo of an “illegal” demo in Russia

This is a photo of an “illegal” demo in Hong Kong

This is a photo of an “illegal” demo in Barcelona

and here is a photo of the “illegal” demo in Glasgow organised by Manni Singh:

Have we seen protests from the SNP leadership about the jailing of Manni Singh? No. Yet we have seen vociferous protests from them about the restriction of demos in Russia, Belarus and Hong Kong. What we have seen, throughout Twitter and Facebook and below the line at every Scottish newspaper and pro-Independence website, is dozens and dozens of SNP Sturgeon loyalists lining up to justify the jailing of Manni Singh, indeed in some instances to salivate over the jailing of Manni Singh.

I am not going to post individual examples, but you can find them very easily if you Google search for Manni Singh on Twitter, look through the replies to this tweet from Angus Brendan McNeil, or look through this thread in the National.

It is a simple fact that, on Twitter in particular, the SNP loyalists who are tweeting that Manni Singh should be jailed for “breaking the law” are exactly the same accounts that massively retweeted Dani Garavelli’s articles denying the innocence of Alex Salmond. They also bear an extremely high correlation with those whose primary focus is on issues of sexual or gender identity, in which I include the broad range of feminism, sexual identity and gender rights.

What has happened to the SNP? It has become very comfortable with authoritarianism. It has a claque which operates both on social media and at party conference, which pursues Clinton style identity politics allied to neo-con policy. They have adopted a focus on foreign policy which accords entirely with the NATO agenda. You hear a very great deal from the party leadership about the rights of people in Belarus, Russia and Hong Kong. Yemen, not so much, and Palestine is entirely off the agenda. In fact, among the claque, enthusiastic support for the Israeli Defence Force appears to be a badge of honour.

If you look through the Twitter replies to Angus Brendan MacNeil above, you will see a prominent member of the online claque call Angus Brendan a “Tory” for opposing Glasgow City Council over the jailing of Manni. These are precisely the same people who are ardently pushing for the Hate Crime Bill and criminal enforcement of politically correct speech in Scotland. I have seen them attack great Independence supporters like Brian Cox and Elaine C Smith for pointing out the dangers of the Hate Speech Bill for the arts.

Those who cannot see the jailing of Manni, the Hate Crime Bill, and dare I say the prosecution of me for reporting the defence evidence in the Salmond trial, as symptoms of a serious underlying problem with civil liberties in Scotland today, are closing their eyes. There is a nasty intolerance about the claque running the SNP.

The reasons for jailing Manni being put forward by loyalists all over social media – he started the demo late, he didn’t have insurance, there were not enough licensed bouncers as stewards, he didn’t fill the right road closure form – are PRECISELY the reasons authorities and their loyalists put forward for banning all the protests pictured above. It is what Putin’s supporters say about Navalny.

The vast majority, 99.5%, of SNP members remain very decent and humane people who just want to see Scotland a normal free country. A very great number are realising that something is badly wrong in the party, even if opinion polls are great. Power is not an end in itself. It is only of value if you do good with it.

At the moment, power in Scotland is being abused.

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Manni Singh Jailed for Organising Peaceful Independence Demonstration

My good friend Manni Singh has been jailed for 72 days – an incredibly draconian sentence – for organising an entirely peaceful political demonstration at which I was a speaker, on which there were zero incidents of violence or damage.

The harsh sentence is completely out of line with any recent treatment of peaceful protestors, for example from the Occupy movement or Extinction Rebellion.

People attended the Glasgow All Under One Banner march from all over Scotland. Singh made all the correct applications to hold it to Glasgow City Council. His application was for simply a repeat of the highly successful and peaceful event a year previously. As I reported at the time, it was the SNP group who control Glasgow City Council who ordered the start time be moved forward from 1.30pm until 11am, specifically in order to reduce the numbers on this pro-Independence march. 100,000 people attend AUOB marches from all over Scotland, including the Highlands and Islands, so an 11am start is simply not practical.

Manni went ahead with the original start time in close cooperation with the police. There were no problems whatsoever. Glasgow City Council is not only SNP controlled, it is controlled by a group specifically close to Nicola Sturgeon. It was the SNP on Glasgow City Council who pushed the police to arrest Manni Singh and initiated his jailing, as confirmed here in this tweet from NEC national executive member and Glasgow City Councillor Rhiannon Spear.

Many prominent SNP supporters – including the brilliant writer Paul Kavanagh – are baffled by the SNP’s hostility to the AUOB marches. As Paul wrote at the time of the Glasgow demonstration:

Yet Nicola Sturgeon, who was happy to attend an anti-Brexit march in London, not only didn’t attend the Glasgow event, she didn’t even tweet a supportive message afterwards. Other SNP figures went on social media to criticise the march for taking place. Because apparently demonstrating that there is indeed mass support for independence in Scotland in the face of anti-independence parties and press which insist there is not is a waste of time that could better be spent sticking SNP leaflets through doors, leaflets that invariably get stuck in a bin without being read.

In fact, the last time that the SNP officially supported a mass participation independence event was the rally at Calton Hill back in 2013. That’s simply not good enough. But worse than that, the SNP led council in Glasgow became embroiled in a dispute with the march organisers, and now Manny Singh of All Under One Banner has been charged with an offence under the Civil Government Act. None of this is a good look for the SNP.

Here is a photo of Nicola Sturgeon on that anti-Brexit march in London.

The vicious jailing of Manni Singh shows you just the kind of oppressive society Scotland is becoming under the Sturgeon government. The fact that diehard Independence supporters like Elaine C Smith and Brian Cox have had to come out and oppose the oppressive hate crime bill should tell you something. AUOB is a genuine grassroots, working class Independence organisation. That Independence is the genuine aim of the SNP careerists who try to sabotage it I very much doubt.

The jailing of Manni Singh for a peaceful demonstration should be a wake up call to all those who believe that the Scottish establishment will not jail me for publishing the truth about the trial of Alex Salmond. Precisely the same people are behind the political persecution of me as behind the jailing of Manni. That is why I am extremely keen that you should follow my trial, and dial in to listen to the hearing tomorrow morning. Please read my article from earlier today.

Manni was given the alternative of a curfew sentence which he refused because of his employment as a taxi driver.

You can see my account of the demonstration for which Manni has been imprisoned.

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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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The post Manni Singh Jailed for Organising Peaceful Independence Demonstration appeared first on Craig Murray.

The Great Cover-Up

The greatest cover-up in modern Scottish history is underway. I am not permitted to say more at present. I will however venture to say that this is massively bigger than just the attempt to imprison me, that most of these documents are also being withheld from the Holyrood Inquiry.

In stating they are banning Alex Salmond’s solicitors also from releasing any of the documents, the Crown is admitting their existence.

I have made a redaction to avoid any further accusation of jigsaw identification.

I am EXTREMELY keen for you to follow tomorrow’s procedural hearing where the question of what evidence is permitted will be addressed. That’s tomorrow, 9.45am British Summer Time. The dial in instructions are here.

Dial (+44)-207 660 8149

Access code 137 161 9904

I really do not know why it is a telephone system and not internet, obviously it is the court and not me. Please do listen in. I realise nothing much happened at the last two procedural hearings, but this should be very different. I am very anxious indeed that the powers that be should not get the impression that public interest is waning.

Please do go to the linked page and check their instructions about what you are and are not allowed to do.

——————————————

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.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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