Craig Murray's Blog, page 66

A Peculiar Request

That request had limited success – many thanks to those who tried. But it did lead my sister Celia to dig out this old photo of us, I think Hogmanay at home in South Queensferry in 1978, and I like it so much I thought I would publish it.

This is a rather strange admin notice. Does anybody have any photos of me when I was a pillar of the Establishment, looking like a pillar of the Establishment? I need some urgently for a TV programme, and I really don’t keep such things – in fact I have very few photos of myself at all.

The problem is we talk in the programme about my role as Ambassador, and previous roles as Deputy High Commissioner to Ghana, Head of the UK Delegation to the Sierra Leone peace talks, Alternate Head of the UK Delegation to the UN Preparatory Commission on the Law of the Sea, etc etc etc and about my work in organising two state visits, and I simply don’t have anything to illustrate any of this. I know there are readers of the blog who knew me in those days, and am hoping someone can dig something up. My friends and family have plenty of photos of me wearing Christmas hats and being silly, but nothing where I am trying to look important.

The programme makers rightly judge I think that without photographic proof people will find it hard to believe this crumpled old figure ever did any of those things.

The contact button top right of the blog reaches me with an email.

UPDATE

Quite a number of people have very kindly sent me the result of internet searches. These are 99% photos taken after I left the FCO. Remember, when I was removed as Ambassador to Uzbekistan Facebook was three months old. For all except the end of my career photos were not electronic and not stored on the internet. Furthermore the need is not just for old photos of me, but photos in context of my career. I have of course been searching diligently myself but not so far found much of any use. I was rather more hoping that the appeal would be read by someone who took a photo personally that they can scan and send me.

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The Arrest of Manny Singh

On Saturday, I was an eye-witness to Manny Singh, organiser of the huge pro-Independence demonstration through Glasgow, co-operating efficiently and respectfully with the police in keeping order and protecting public safety, and in making sure the event was a joyous family occasion, successful and enjoyed by everyone. That included Manny liaising regularly with the most senior police officers in charge of the march. Before I made my speech, I asked him how it was all going and Manny volunteered unasked that the Police had been brilliant. From what I witnessed, the respect was mutual.

It is then extremely perturbing that, two days after the march, Police Scotland arrested Manny for organising an illegal procession, a charge that carries a maximum three months imprisonment. Plainly the orders for this radical change of attitude have come from very high. The defence of this draconian measure by SNP Glasgow councillor and ex-BBC intern Rhiannon Spear gives a clue as to where this is coming from.

Still more of a clue is the astonishing four page attack on Yes supporters that took up the the front and four pages of the Herald the day after the demonstration, in which the SNP’s NATO and monarchy enthusiast Angus Robertson and extreme Cold War Russophobe Stewart McDonald vented their spleen at Independence supporters who dare to take a more radical line. It was very thinly disguised as an attack on online abuse – of which in four full pages not one single example was given by them, let alone any qualitative or quantitative analysis.

McDonald in a lengthy rant in the article makes plain that what he really cannot stand is rather people do not accept his Establishment view, who criticise the BBC, and embrace “conspiracy theories.”

This is the essential background to the arrest of Manny. Now the SNP has a highly ambivalent attitude to Manny’s organisation, AUOB. AUOB is the main vehicle for public pressure for early Independence, while Nicola Sturgeon has embraced a strategy of kicking a new Independence referendum ever further into the long grass, while a national consultation is held, or Brexit plays out, or a citizens’ assembly discusses federal solutions, or whatever else excuse comes to hand.

In terms of electoral success for the SNP, Sturgeon’s strategy is undoubtedly brilliant. The SNP stands unchallenged in the polls at 46%, with the Tories in second place trailing woefully behind on 22%. The SNP is an incredibly successful political machine, and one which can keep the highheidyins in a very comfortable living indeed for life. To say that the SNP hierarchy are very comfortable on the UK gravy train would be a massive understatement. They are in no hurry at all to make a bid for Independence that may put their careers and livelihoods at risk.

The only problem is the wider Yes campaign and the wider SNP membership, who had been under the impression that they were putting their hands in their pockets and donating, and were out there in the cold delivering leaflets, because the SNP was the vehicle for Independence, not just to support Scotland’s very own highly paid ruling political class. These people continually applied inconvenient pressure, both online where their criticisms of the BBC and other establishment pillars were an embarrassment to the comfortably ensconced, and by continual street activity as through AUOB.

Nicola has had to make repeated SNP conference speeches and every time been forced to pretend she is interested in pursuing Independence at a future date. Surely, SNP HQ thinking runs, it would be better to take some of the pressure off her by hobbling support for the pesky online Independence supporters and those noisy marchers?

AUOB had applied to Glasgow City Council in September for permission to hold the recent march. As it was a repeat of the entirely peaceful and successful one last year, there was no reason to suppose any problem might arise. Then just ten days before the march, Glasgow City Council called the organisers to a meeting and demanded the start time be moved forward from 1.30pm to 11am because of “potential disruption” and “public order concerns”.

The proposed change was quite openly an attempt to reduce the numbers on the march for “ahem” reasons of public order. The organisers made plain that it was not possible at that late stage to make the change. The march had been widely advertised, coaches had been booked, and people were quite literally traveling from all over Scotland – which of course is what Glasgow City Council were precisely trying to prevent.

A committee of two SNP and one Green councillor, completely ignoring the entirely trouble free experience of the previous year, ruled that the march must kick off at 11am. Manny simply responded that in the interests of free speech, he would ignore the council’s ruling, and he did so, with great success.

The proof of the pudding is of course in the eating. The Council was simply wrong – there were in fact zero public order or safety problems involved in the march, and their pretended concern stands revealed for what it was, a pathetic attempt to hamper free speech and hobble the demonstration of massive public support for Independence. Even the SNP Deputy Leader Keith Brown turned up, though he said pretty well nothing about Independence while introducing the SNP candidates for the Euro elections.

In view that their pretended concerns proved – as everybody always knew – completely unfounded, the councillors involved stand exposed as despicable abusers of the power they were granted by the very people who were marching.

It appears from Ms Spear’s tweet that it is SNP run Glasgow Council – and I would bet after consultation with SNP HQ – who have now doubled down on their stupidity and arbitrary repression by ordering police to effect Manny’s arrest. Well, there are 100,000 of us at least who would happily stand beside him in the dock.

The man who has organised the most successful pro-Indy campaigning since 2014 has been arrested, just for doing precisely that. Yet so far there has been not a single gesture of support for Manny, public or private, from any of the SNP hierarchy. Why do you think that is?

The attempt to hobble and limit the AUOB march, and the extraordinary four page entirely unprovoked attack the next day on “cybernats”, form part of a coordinated effort by the SNP leadership to control the wider Yes movement and subdue the demand for early Independence. They failed with AUOB due to Manny’s courage and integrity – hence the vindictive order for his arrest.

UPDATE

I wrote this before seeing this excellent article from Paul Kavanagh, which makes precisely the same arguments. Paul commands much broader respect than I do across the Independence movement, peculiarly enough because it took him two years longer to spot, or at least speak out about, the problem with Sturgeon and Murrell than it took me. But if you read the comments on his article, you will see that there is massive agreement on this from numerous long term SNP members.

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Huawei Hypocrisy

Theresa May almost certainly sacked Gavin Williamson not just on the basis of a telephone billing record showing he had a phone call with a Telegraph journalist, but on the basis of a recording of the conversation itself. It astonishes me that still, after Snowden and his PRISM revelations, after Wikileaks Vault 7 releases, and after numerous other sources including my own humble contribution, people still manage to avoid the cognitive dissonance that goes with really understanding how much we are surveilled and listened to. Even Cabinet Ministers manage to pretend to themselves it is not happening.

The budget of the NSA, which does nothing else but communications intercept, is US $14.2 billion this year. Think about that enormous sum, devoted to just communications surveillance, and what it can achieve. The budget of the UK equivalent, GCHQ, is £1.2 billion, of which about 10% is paid by the NSA. Domestic surveillance in the UK has been vastly expanded and many taboos broken. But the bedrock of the system with regard to domestic intercepts is still that legal restrictions are dodged, as the USA’s NSA spies on UK citizens while the UK’s GCHQ spies on US citizens, and then the information is swapped. It was thus probably the NSA that harvested Williamson’s phone call, passing the details on. Given official US opposition to the UK employing Huawei technology, Williamson’s call would have been a “legitimate” NSA target.

Mass surveillance works on electronic harvesting. Targeted phone numbers apart, millions of essentially random calls are listened to electronically using voice recognition technology and certain key words trigger an escalation of the call. Williamson’s call discussing Huawei, China, the intelligence services, and backdoors would certainly have triggered recording and been marked up to a human listener, even if his phone was not specifically targeted by the Americans – which it almost certainly was.

Williamson of course is relying on the security services’ secrecy about their methods to maintain his protests of innocence, secure in the knowledge that the recording of him would not be produced. The existence of the recording – of which I am extremely confident – is the only possible explanation for May’s degree of certainty and swift action against one of her very few loyal allies.

All of which of course throws into stark relief the stunning hypocrisy of those who are worried that Huawei will be used for electronic eavesdropping, when they are up to their ears in electronic eavesdropping themselves. One of my heroes is the great Richard Stallman, who put it this way six years ago:

RMS: Well, it’s perfectly reasonable suspicion to me. I don’t think the US government should use operating systems made in China for the same reason that most governments shouldn’t use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them.

RSS: I was just going to bring this up exactly, so I was saying that the NSA recently received notifications about the zero-day holes in advance and [incomprehensible] the NSA and the CIA to just crack PCs abroad for espionage purposes.

RMS: Now, [incomprehensible] that this proves my point, which is that you have to be nuts if you were some other country and using Windows on your computers. But, you know, given that Windows has a universal back door in it, Microsoft would hardly need to tell the NSA about any bugs, it can tell the NSA about the mal-feature of the universal back door and that would be enough for the NSA to attack any computer running Windows, which unfortunately is a large fraction of them.

All the major western tech companies cooperate with the western security services. In Murder in Samarkand I gave the first public revelation that the government can and does listen through your mobile phone microphone even when the phone is ostensibly switched off, a fact that got almost no traction until Edward Snowden released documents confirming it six years later. China is full of western devices with backdoors that are exploited by western intelligence. That the tables turn as Chinese technology advances is scarcely surprising.

Personally I do not want the Chinese, Americans, Russians or British eavesdropping on me, or on each other, and I wish that they would stop. The spy games will of course continue, as they make money for a lot of well-connected people. But for any side to claim moral superiority in all of this is just nonsense.

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AUOB Glasgow

Here is video of my bifurcated speech on Saturday at AUOB Glasgow. In talking to a large crowd you need perforce to yell, and you can’t really get over much more than headlines of ideas. So this isn’t the (hopefully) thoughtful and intellectual Craig Murray you get speaking at an indoor meeting.

It was a brilliant event. Only a small portion of the marchers stay for the speakers, and 80% of the march had not even reached Glasgow Green yet at the time I was speaking. So between those two factors I don’t suppose I was speaking to above 5,000 people. But it is worth saying that I experienced no negative feedback whatsoever, either in audience reaction or from talking to people afterwards, from taking a much more radical line on various issues surrounding Scottish Independence. It is worth saying that the Yes Movement is organic. There is no “official” view, and my take is no more nor less valid than anybody else’s. But it is evidently not unpopular.

As last year, the Yes Bikers arrived midway through my speech, which is thus in two parts. That is my excuse for loss of fluency towards the end. I am sure I had a peroration in my head somewhere, but struggled to find it!

Many thanks to Brian Fujisan for the video. You can also see it on Independence Live but their production has become too perfect! The sound is superb but you don’t get any crowd noise. If you take out the interaction I sound like a lunatic. OK, more of a lunatic.

It is worth noting, as a demonstration of people power, that Glasgow City Council had attempted to mess this march up by insisting it move its start time from 1.30pm to 11.00am, and the organisers simply told them to get lost, with complete success. The same thing happened when last year the authorities told them they could not rally in Holyrood Park, and AUOB replied “stop us”. Like Extinction Rebellion, this is a sign of a popular mood of protest that refuses to be denied.

There are many arguments about the size of the march. My own estimate would be about 90,000. It was arriving eight abreast for three hours. In terms of percentage of Scottish population, this is the equivalent of a million people marching through London. Yet there was an almost complete lack of television coverage. The next day Andrew Marr hosted Ruth Davidson broadcasting unchallenged that there is no popular demand for Independence.

Finally, I had picked up online some accusations about the AUOB organisation and their accounting for the money donated to the marches. I asked the organisers about this, and they readily and at their own instigation gave me complete access to their accounts and records for inspection.

Looking through their records, I can see no grounds for suspicion. Perhaps people do not fully realise the costs involved in putting on such a huge event – for example stage and sound system hire alone costs £5,000. Provision of substantial numbers of portable toilets (which have to be professionally emptied) is expensive. Permits, advertising and publicity, it all adds up. As a director of two music festivals which include precisely the same lines of expenditure, I can say with confidence that AUOB’s figures look absolutely right to me.

Income is of course harder to audit when it is people chucking coins in buckets. The online crowdfunder took £9,993 and can be verified. The collecting buckets at events are unverifiable – but the £3,108 collected in Dundee and the £6,325 collected in Edinburgh feel right. The income from stallholders at the events appears properly accounted for – that appeared to be the source of some of the complaints. I must say it seems to me perfectly reasonable that those organisations with stalls at the rallies are asked to chip in.

Any organisation which collects cash from the public will always be open to somebody dipping their hand in the bucket, but I see nothing that gives me reason to believe that this has happened. It is perfectly possible that some incident really did occur that led to an accusation flying, but we must also be very aware that the agents of the British state would like nothing better than to throw doubt and dissension into the most successful public manifestation of the Independence movement, by magnifying any incident out of all proportion.

After looking through their accounts and vouchers I am now fully confident that nothing is systematically wrong with AUOB and the money that Yessers had trusted them with.

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BBC Lying Propaganda and the Tory Party Scottish Conference

This is a photo of the Secretary of State for Scotland addressing the Tory Party Scottish Conference (courtesy of Wings). I have analysed this and other photos taken from different angles, and learnt this.

There are only six rows of seats at the Scottish Tory Conference. The front row has 24 seats, the second 26, the third 28, the fourth 32 (sic), the fifth 34 and the sixth 36. That is a total of 180 seats.

How many delegates does a party Conference have, which only has 180 seats? There is, for example, no separate gallery for the media. In this photo there are, including those standing, less than 200 people.

My wife is a film producer. She is completing her first two feature films as producer this year, having previously done a couple of shorts, including one short as director. In supporting her, largely by making the tea, I have picked up a basic smattering of comprehension of camera work.

The BBC coverage has been, systematically and undoubtedly deliberately, utilising shots that create a completely false impression of the numbers at the conference. This has been done by setting the cameras low and well zoomed in, to show speakers above an apparent tight sea of heads and shoulders. Wider shots and higher shots have been quite deliberately eschewed. Any side shots or front shots have again been quite deliberately low set and highly zoomed. A tight zoomed diagonal shot across the hall will get sixty heads densely in it, and create the false impression of a packed crowd.

I want to emphasise the question of directorial choice. These are deliberate directorial choices to make the Tories look good, and deliberately to present a distorted perspective of the size of the audience (and the strength of the Tories) to the viewer. The media are, in effect, deliberately hiding from the viewer how tiny the Tory Conference is.

This is the only audience reaction shot used – twice – by the BBC during their main news item on Theresa May’s speech to the Scottish Tory conference:

This is of course only the visual representation of a much larger con trick in the boosting of Ruth Davidson. The BBC Politics operation in Scotland was devoted all weekend to the return of Ruth Davidson from maternity leave, and she was touted again and again, breathlessly and shamelessly, as a future First Minister after the next Holyrood elections. Not once did any BBC presenter point out that the Tories currently stand at 22% in Scotland, and that Ruth Davidson’s chances of becoming First Minister are, even with full on MSM adulation, much the same as my chances of being Britain’s Next Top Model.

The myth of the free press in the UK is finished. The media is owned by right wing billionaires, or by the Tory state. Look forward next week to hearing how Ruth shot a round of 23 at Gleneagles. While driving a tank.

Finally, here is a statistic to cheer you up. The 1,200 plus Tory councillors who have just lost their seats in the English local elections represent precisely an astonishing 1% of the entire membership of the Tory Party. Not of Tory councillors, 1% of all Tory members just lost their job. That is a very happy thought.

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Venezuela and Binary Choice

When a CIA-backed military coup is attempted by a long term CIA puppet, roared on by John Bolton and backed with the offer of Blackwater mercenaries, in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, I have no difficulty whatsoever in knowing which side I am on.

Juan Guaido has been groomed for 15 years as a long-term CIA project. His coup attempt yesterday, which so far appears to have stalled, was the culmination of these efforts to return Venezuela’s oil reserves to US hegemony.

It is strange how the urgent installation of liberal democracy by force correlates so often with oil reserves not aligned to the USA, as in Libya, Iraq or Venezuela, while countries with massive oil reserves which permit US military domination and align with the West and Israel can be as undemocratic as they wish, eg Saudi Arabia. Venezuela is an imperfect democracy but it is far, far more of a democracy than Saudi Arabia and with a much better human rights record. The hypocrisy of Western media and politicians is breathtaking.

Hypocrisy and irony are soulmates, and there are multiple levels of irony in seeing the “liberal” commentators who were cheering on an undisguised military coup, then complaining loudly that people are being injured or killed now their side is losing. Yesterday the MSM had no difficulty in calling the attempted coup what anybody with eyes and ears could see it plainly was, an attempted military coup.

Today, miraculously, the MSM line is no coup attempt happened at all, it was just a spontaneous unarmed protest, and it is the evil government of Venezuela which attempts to portray it as a coup. BBC Breakfast this morning had the headline “President Maduro has accused the opposition of mounting a coup attempt”… Yet there is no doubt at all that, as a matter of plain fact, that is what happened.

The MSM today is full of video of water cannons against “protestors” and a horrible video of a military vehicle ramming a group. But it has all been very carefully edited to exclude hours of footage of the same military vehicles being pelted and set alight with molotov cocktails, and shot at. The presentation has been truly shocking.

In any civilised country, attempting to mount a military coup would lead to incarceration for life, and that is what should now happen to Juan Guaido. The attempt by the West to protect their puppet by pretending the failed military coup never happened, must be resisted, if only in the cause of intellectual honesty.

The resort to violence forces binary choice. I have been and am a critic of Maduro in many respects. I believe the constitutional changes to bypass Parliament were wrong, and the indirectly elected Constituent Assembly is not a good form of democracy. Venezuela does have a rampant corruption problem. US sanctions exacerbate but are not the root cause of economic mismanagement. There are human rights failings. But Chavez made revolutionary changes in educating and empowering the poor, and it is a far better governed country for the mass of its population than it would ever be under a US installed CIA puppet regime. Maduro was legitimately elected. The attempt at violence forces a binary choice.

I know which side I am on. It is not Guaido and the CIA.

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Democratic Triumph for Catalan Separatists

The Spanish General election in Catalonia was a stunning victory for the Catalan Separatists, their best ever election result, achieved despite their leadership being exiled or political prisoners and despite an avalanche of MSM propaganda against them. Four of those elected are currently in jail. The Spanish state has reacted by declaring the two major separatist candidates, Clara Ponsati and Carles Puigdemont, ineligible for the European Parliament elections.

The Catalan Republican Left won the biggest share of the vote, which negates the continued false propaganda being put about Catalonian Independence being a right wing movement. Over 60% of the vote in Catalonia went to avowedly left wing parties.

It is further worth noting that there is a very plain correlation between the geographical location of the 3.6% of the vote that the neo-fascists of Vox gained in Catalonia, and the Spanish occupation garrisons in the country.

You will struggle very hard indeed to learn any of the above facts from British mainstream media; I had to get them all from Catalan sources.

The Guardian has published 55 articles in the last three years boosting Ines Arrimadas, the leader of the Catalan branch of the right wing “Spanish” Citizens Party, including at least three op-eds written by Ines herself. The Guardian has sought relentlessly to portray public opinion in Catalonia as anti-Independence, and Arrimadas as its true representative.

Typical photo from the Guardian of their right wing anti-Catalan pin-up.

Yet in the Spanish General Election, Arrimadas’ party got only 11.6% of the vote in Catalonia. The right wing nationalist Spanish parties, the fascist Vox, the Francoist PP and Arrimadas’ foreign security service promoted Citizens, got a pathetic 20.1% of the vote between all three, in a stunning Catalan rejection of Spanish nationalism.

The Citizens Party started life as an astroturf effort to help counter the left-wing and anti-EU populism of Podemos. To that end it was funded and assisted by the German foreign intelligence service, the BND. It remains a favourite tool of foreign intelligence services, particularly MI6 which of course sees the links between Catalan and Scottish nationalism. Hence the peculiarly active link between Ciudadanos and MI6’s print media mouthpiece, the Guardian.

It is impossible to correlate directly from party results to potential referendum results, as a number of parties including Podemos and the Greens hold ambivalent positions on Independence, and a percentage of voters will have a view on Independence which differs from the party they support. For example a small but significant number of Socialist Party supporters of PM Pedro Sanchez, also support Catalan Independence.

Given the thuggish violence of Francoist paramilitary forces against the ordinary voters in Catalonia’s referendum, given the imprisoning and exile of its peaceful leadership, given the extraordinary Madrid dictated barrage of MSM propaganda, the Catalan nationalist victory in the General Election is a wonderful triumph for the human spirit. Now you won’t hear that in the MSM.

GE 2019 results from Catalonia by municipality. Yellow are left wing separatists, pink are centrist separatists, red is Socialist.

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So Where is the Swedish Warrant?

If the Swedish allegations against Julian Assange were genuine and not simply a ruse to arrest him for extradition to the United States, where is the arrest warrant now from Sweden and what are the charges?

Only the more minor allegation has passed the statute of limitations deadline. The major allegation, equivalent to rape, is still well within limits. Sweden has had seven years to complete the investigation and prepare the case. It is over two years since they interviewed Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy. They have had years and years to collect all the evidence and prepare the charges.

So where, Swedish prosecutors, are your charges? Where is your arrest warrant?

Julian Assange has never been charged with anything in Sweden. He was merely “wanted for questioning”, a fact the MSM repeatedly failed to make clear. It is now undeniably plain that there was never the slightest intention of charging him with anything in Sweden. All those Blairite MPs who seek to dodge the glaring issue of freedom of the media to publish whistleblower material revealing government crimes, by hiding behind trumped-up sexual allegations, are left looking pretty stupid.

What is the point of demanding Assange be extradited to Sweden when there is no extradition request from Sweden? What is the point in demanding he face justice in Sweden when there are no charges? Where are the charges from Sweden?

The answer to that is silence.

Sweden was always a fit-up designed to get Assange to the USA. And now they don’t need it, so Sweden has quietly gone away. All the false left who were taken in by the security services playing upon a feminist mantra should take a very hard look at themselves. They should also consider this.

If you seriously put forward that in allegations of sexual assault, the accuser must always be believed and the accused must automatically be presumed guilty, you are handing an awesome power to the state to lock people up without proper defence. The state will abuse that awesome power and fit people up. The Assange case shows us just that. And it is not the only case, currently, as everyone in Scotland should realise.

But there is more. If you believe that any sexual accusation against a person should be believed and automatically and immediately end their societal respectability, you are giving power to state and society to exclude dissidents and critics from political discourse by a simple act of accusation. That power will be used and abused by the security services.

In the case of the allegation in Sweden that did fall through the statute of limitation, the accusation was that during the act of consensual sex Julian Assange deliberately split the condom with his fingers, without consent. I quite agree that if true, it would amount to sexual assault. But the split condom given to Swedish police as evidence had none of Assange’s DNA on it – a physical impossibility if he had worn it during sex. And the person making the accusation had previously been expelled from Cuba as working for the CIA. So tell me again – we must always believe the accuser?

For once, I agree with the Blairites that should a warrant arrive from Sweden that Swedish request should be prioritised for extradition over the US request, not least because rape is much the more serious crime. As the only reason Julian Assange ever claimed asylum was that he saw the Swedish allegations as a ruse to get him into custody for extradition to the US, I would also say that should a warrant from Sweden arrive he should now voluntarily go without further legal resistance, the US extradition point being overtaken.

But do not hold your breath. No warrant is going to come. The states that coordinated so carefully his arrest and detention, timed with the Muellergate release and the demented Ecuadorean government lies about faeces on walls, don’t need the Swedish angle now.

I ask again. Where is the warrant from Sweden? Are there still people who cannot see the Swedish allegations for the CIA ruse that they always were?

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Extinction Aversion

Man made climate change has appeared to me for three decades to be sufficiently proven, and it has that cardinal virtue of a scientific hypothesis, you can see the things which it predicts will happen, come to pass before your eyes, like being uncomfortably hot in your Edinburgh flat on Easter Monday.

Direct action of the illegal kind is a very important weapon in the arsenal of protest. It represents a challenge to the state’s monopoly of force. While it may appear non-violent, in fact by imposing your body into a space and blocking it off, that is an assertion of physical force. What the Extinction Rebellion protests showed this week was the reticence of the Metropolitan Police in dealing with nice, middle class and largely white protestors. That reticence is to be welcomed; the fact that it is not extended to other groups is what is to be deplored. The alternative is to argue for everyone to get beaten up by Plod equally, which is not a sensible line to take.

I broadly support the Extinction Rebellion protest. In terms of gatecrashing climate change on to the political agenda, they have had a good and entirely necessary effect. Their use of what was in effect force, certainly did some harm in restricting the movement of people around London, and in some cases will have impacted the ability of struggling people to earn their living. It also disrupted public transport systems which are a good thing. But these are minor items if you accept that climate change is whirling its way to becoming an existential threat – and that is a premise which I do accept. The disruption is outweighed by the intent to do a much greater good, in terms of the justification of the people doing the protesting. Whether it succeeds in prompting real action by government and achieving a balance of good, is a different question. I fear we have to get rid of the Tories first.

I accept that climate change is a worldwide phenomenon and action in individual states of limited utility. But individual states can inspire by example, not least by showing that a switch to a greener economy can lead to a major stimulation of economic growth. I do not pretend to expertise in green economics. What follows are rather some homely policy nostrums which I believe should form a part of a coherent approach to green policy.

1) Home Insulation

The Tory Government has effectively abandoned and cancelled home insulation schemes; in effect nothing whatsoever is happening. Yet the government’s own plan to reach committed emissions targets by 2050 explicitly depends on one third of all savings being achieved by insulation in Britain’s existing stock of over 20 million very poorly insulated homes.

There is the clearest case here for government action. The aim should be to upgrade 4 million homes a year. Full funding should be provided to local authorities and housing associations for their stock. Householders should face a legal obligation to bring home insulation up to high defined standards – with generous means-tested grants available from central government funds, which should meet 100% of the cost for all those in straitened circumstances, and a decreasing percentage thereafter based on income and wealth. Private landlords should be forced to comply and self-fund up to the value of four months’ rent, with grants available for higher costs. Failure to comply should lead to the landlords’ property being confiscated by the local council, with tenancies protected.

Those are the broad outlines of a policy which would provide massive employment and contribute to a major Keynesian boost for an economy crippled by years of austerity, as well as make a major difference to emissions.

2) Ocean Energy

Wind energy has made massive strides, and to a lesser extent solar and hydro. But disappointingly little has been done to harness the restless energy of the seas. Government support for research programmes into utilising wave and current energy is pitifully small, given the potentially vast and reliable energy resource available, to the UK in particular.

On tidal energy, those objecting to the Severn or Wash barrage schemes on the grounds of effect on wildlife habitat are failing spectacularly to see the wood for the trees. Of course biodiversity is massively important, but we are fighting a battle in which some resources will need to be sacrificed. The Severn, Wash and Swansea Bay schemes do not require substantial technological innovation – they are basically just low head hydro – and should be pushed ahead as urgent projects. Simultaneously major research funding should be given to innovation. I suspect the harnessing of currents rather than waves would be the first to fruition.

3) Aviation Fuel Tax

Cheap flights are the opiate of the people. I cannot buy in to the argument that aviation fuel tax is only viable if everybody does it. Planes landing can very easily be taxed on any fuel they have in their fuel tanks brought in from third countries. If hub passengers transiting are reduced in favour of fuel tax free destinations, I cannot see that as a bad thing. An aviation hub is a particularly undesirable thing to become, from any sensible environmental view.

Flying is a major contributor to pollution and there is far too much of it. The tax free fuel status that makes flights cheaper than trains is ludicrous. Aviation fuel should be taxed at the same levels per calorific value as road fuels.

4) Expand Rail Networks

Nationalisation and re-integration is of course the sensible prelude to any development of rail transport. The UK is chronically behind most of the developed, and even much of the developing, world in terms of high speed rail lines. This needs to be rectified as does the chronic over-concentration of transport resource on South East England. HS2 should run on to Aberdeen and Inverness, not just be confined to the southern third of the UK.

On a wider note, with demand for rail transport buoyant, re-establishment of many Beeching axed lines should be undertaken with a view to a simple containerised nationwide freight distribution system as well as passenger transport. Rail is far more energy efficient than road. The preponderance of road transport is simply the result of perverse incentive from government policy.

Light rail and tram systems should be expanded in cities. Here in Edinburgh, the poor planning and execution of the start of a tram system should not put us off. Trams should be a local service, not fast and stopping frequently, but rather akin to buses, as in Manchester. They should not be confused as in Edinburgh with an express airport service, with very few and inaccessible stops.

5) Encourage Micro-Generation: Abolish Nuclear

The UK had an immensely successful programme of encouraging domestic solar generation through feed in tariffs, so the Tories cut it, as they cut the less successful insulation grants. Generous feed-in tariffs for domestic generation should be rebooted, while technologies such as heat pumps and exchangers should be zero rated for VAT (as should bicycles).

By contrast, the massively expensive nuclear power projects should be scrapped immediately. I lived almost all my adult life under the impression nuclear energy involved some fiendishly clever technology, until I realised it generates from bog standard steam turbines, and the nuclear part is simply a ludicrously complicated, incredibly expensive and devastatingly dangerous way to – boil water.

The real attraction to governments of nuclear power is the precise reason governments dislike micro-generation – nuclear power promotes a massively centralised security state, and links in well to weaponisation. It is the most expensive electricity of all, and should be immediately closed down.

The above represent my own thoughts on possible short term policy responses to climate change. I acknowledge quite freely that it is not my area of expertise and is perhaps insufficiently radical, and certainly insufficiently broad and detailed. It has however focused my mind on the great economic stimulus that can be gained from wholesale pursuit of the necessary technologies at the government level.

I have deliberately concentrated on unilateral measures rather than international negotiation, because I am sceptical there is sufficient will for progress on the latter or that governments around the world intend to stick to commitments. I have viewed it from a UK not a Scottish perspective because action is required immediately, and Scotland starts from a much better place anyway.

That I am thinking on this at all is in a way evidence that Extinction Rebellion achieved their aim from their immediate action, though it is those in power they seek to influence, not random bloggers. I am very sceptical of their declared desire to “negotiate with government”. If David Cameron were still in power, he would undoubtedly “hug a swampie” and make all kinds of green noises, then continue shutting down environmental programmes. Those around Theresa May are quite clever enough to recommend such an approach, as a potential Tory rescuing image as the party otherwise crashes to electoral disaster.

I would recommend Extinction Rebellion to keep blocking the roads and stay clear of the politicians. If they could refine their tactics to concentrate more on direct action against the big polluters and their financial backers, and move away from shocking the public through inconvenience, that might be tactically good for a while. But on the whole, I applaud. Vigorously.

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A Fortnight

This last couple of weeks have seen the build-up to Julian’s arrest, the event itself, and the coordinated campaign of lies and hate that have ensued. Perhaps not coincidentally, it also saw the publication of the breath-taking exercise in state dishonesty that is the Mueller Report. Simultaneously these events brought me into close contact with other good friends, who in different ways are also right now going through very difficult periods indeed, involving state conspiracy and injustice. Despite the heartening interlude of a dash to Rothesay to speak to a full and inspiring hall, I not only found myself working rather too hard on all these matters, I also contracted bronchitis and ended up in bed wheezing and a nasty blue colour. To add to all of which, my family are rightly not exactly chuffed with the abandonment of cherished plans for the Easter holiday and my subsequent disappearance and lack of support to them.

I considered writing today something about Julian’s arrest and Mueller, and starting something on the other issues, but then decided that an auto-biographical piece on my last couple of weeks close to the centre of these events, incorporating the key arguments, may be more powerful in humanising those arguments, and thus reach a larger audience. To write such a piece will necessarily reveal a lot of confidences, and I am going to need to clear it with those involved. It will therefore be a few days before you can see it – and if the key people concerned are not comfortable, it may not see the light of day, and I may have to return to Plan A.

In the meantime I am working up a piece on my reaction to Extinction Rebellion, which I hope to publish today.

In the 13 years of this blog before I accepted subscriptions, one of the main reasons I did not do so was that I feared feeling guilty when I was not producing articles, and feeling obliged to explain myself. That is indeed now happening. Somewhat oddly, I find the process rather liberating, in showing myself as a real and frail person, not some disembodied intellect.

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