Craig Murray, a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, the father of a newborn child, a man in very poor health and one who has no prior convictions, will have to hand himself over to the Scottish police on Sunday morning. He becomes the first person ever to be imprisoned on the obscure and vaguely defined charge of “jigsaw identification”.

Murray is also the first person to be jailed in Britain for contempt of court for their journalism in half a century – a period when such different legal and moral values prevailed that the British establishment had only just ended the prosecution of “homosexuals” and the jailing of women for having abortions.

PRESS RELEASE: Craig Murray to be first person incarcerated in the UK over media contempt case in 50 years, setting dangerous legal precedent for freedom of speech and equality before the law.

pic.twitter.com/lvZSiGEkkm

— Craig Murray Justice campaign (@cmurrayjustice) July 29, 2021

Murray’s imprisonment for eight months by Lady Dorrian, Scotland’s second most senior judge, is of course based entirely on a keen reading of Scottish law rather than evidence of the Scottish and London political establishments seeking revenge on the former diplomat. And the UK supreme court’s refusal on Thursday to hear Murray’s appeal despite many glaring legal anomalies in the case, thereby paving his path to jail, is equally rooted in a strict application of the law, and not influenced in any way by political considerations.

Murray’s jailing has nothing to do with the fact that he embarrassed the British state in the early 2000s by becoming that rarest of things: a whistleblowing diplomat. He exposed the British government’s collusion, along with the US, in Uzbekistan’s torture regime.

His jailing also has nothing to do with the fact that Murray has embarrassed the British state more recently by reporting the woeful and continuing legal abuses in a London courtroom as Washington seeks to extradite Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and lock him away for life in a maximum security prison. The US wants to make an example of Assange for exposing its war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and for publishing leaked diplomatic cables that pulled the mask off Washington’s ugly foreign policy.

Murray’s jailing has nothing to do with the fact that the contempt proceedings against him allowed the Scottish court to deprive him of his passport so that he could not travel to Spain and testify in a related Assange case that is severely embarrassing Britain and the US. The Spanish hearing has been presented with reams of evidence that the US illegally spied on Assange inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought political asylum to avoid extradition. Murray was due to testify that his own confidential conversations with Assange were filmed, as were Assange’s privileged meetings with his own lawyers. Such spying should have seen the case against Assange thrown out, had the judge in London actually been applying the law.

Actually what I found most shocking about that was the peculiar determination of the judges to make sure that, during the three weeks we have to lodge the appeal, I am not allowed to go to Spain to testify in the criminal prosecution for the CIA spying on Assange’s legal team.

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) May 11, 2021

Similarly, Murray’s jailing has nothing to do with his embarrassing the Scottish political and legal establishments by reporting, almost single-handedly, the defence case in the trial of Scotland’s former First Minister, Alex Salmond. Unreported by the corporate media, the evidence submitted by Salmond’s lawyers led a jury dominated by women to acquit him of a raft of sexual assault charges. It is Murray’s reporting of Salmond’s defence that has been the source of his current troubles.

And most assuredly, Murray’s jailing has precisely nothing to do with his argument – one that might explain why the jury was so unconvinced by the prosecution case – that Salmond was actually the victim of a high-level plot by senior politicians at Holyrood to discredit him and prevent his return to the forefront of Scottish politics. The intention, says Murray, was to deny Salmond the chance to take on London and make a serious case for independence, and thereby expose the SNP’s increasing lip service to that cause.

Relentless attack

Murray has been a thorn in the side of the British establishment for nearly two decades. Now they have found a way to lock him up just as they have Assange, as well as tie Murray up potentially for years in legal battles that risk bankrupting him as he seeks to clear his name.

And given his extremely precarious health – documented in detail to the court – his imprisonment further risks turning eight months into a life sentence. Murray nearly died from a pulmonary embolism 17 years ago when he was last under such relentless attack from the British establishment. His health has not improved since.

At that time, in the early 2000s, in the run-up to and early stages of the invasion of Iraq, Murray effectively exposed the complicity of fellow British diplomats – their preference to turn a blind eye to the abuses sanctioned by their own government and its corrupt and corrupting alliance with the US.

Later, when Washington’s “extraordinary rendition” – state-sponsored kidnapping – programme came to light, as well as its torture regime at places like Abu Ghraib, the spotlight should have turned to the failure of diplomats to speak out. Unlike Murray, they refused to turn whistleblower. They provided cover to the illegality and barbarism.

For his pains, Murray was smeared by Tony Blair’s government as, among other things, a sexual predator – charges a Foreign Office investigation eventually cleared him of. But the damage was done, with Murray forced out. A commitment to moral and legal probity was clearly incompatible with British foreign policy objectives.

Murray had to reinvent his career, and he did so through a popular blog. He has applied the same dedication to truth-telling and commitment to the protection of human rights in his journalism – and has again run up against equally fierce opposition from the British establishment.

Two-tier journalism

The most glaring, and disturbing, legal innovation in Lady Dorrian’s ruling against Murray – and the main reason he is heading to prison – is her decision to divide journalists into two classes: those who work for approved corporate media outlets, and those like Murray who are independent, often funded by readers rather than paid big salaries by billionaires or the state.

According to Lady Dorrian, licensed, corporate journalists are entitled to legal protections she denied to unofficial and independent journalists like Murray – the very journalists who are most likely to take on governments, criticise the legal system, and expose the hypocrisy and lies of the corporate media.

In finding Murray guilty of so-called “jigsaw identification”, Lady Dorrian did not make a distinction between what Murray wrote about the Salmond case and what approved, corporate journalists wrote.

That is for good reason. Two surveys have shown that most of those following the Salmond trial who believe they identified one or more of his accusers did so from the coverage of the corporate media, especially the BBC. Murray’s writings appear to have had very little impact on the identification of any of the accusers. Among named individual journalists, Dani Garavelli, who wrote about the trial for Scotland on Sunday and the London Review of Books, was cited 15 times more often by respondents than Murray as helping them to identify Salmond’s accusers.

The polling was conducted by Panelbase as an extra question in one of their standard Scottish opinion polls. I paid for the question but there was no mechanism by which I could affect the results.
Is showed Dani Garavelli as by far the biggest source of identification. https://t.co/sAqY9tbJw0 pic.twitter.com/D1D6o9A7i7

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) February 3, 2021

Rather, Lady Dorrian’s distinction was about who is awarded protection when identification occurs. Write for the Times or the Guardian, or broadcast on the BBC, where the audience reach is enormous, and the courts will protect you from prosecution. Write about the same issues for a blog, and you risk being hounded into prison.

In fact, the legal basis of “jigsaw identification” – one could argue the whole point of it – is that it accrues dangerous powers to the state. It gives permission for the legal establishment to arbitrarily decide which piece of the supposed jigsaw is to be counted as identification. If the BBC’s Kirsty Wark includes a piece of the jigsaw, it does not count as identification in the eyes of the court. If Murray or another independent journalist offers a different piece of the jigsaw, it does count. The obvious ease with which this principle can be abused by the establishment to oppress and silence dissident journalists should not need underscoring.

And yet this is no longer Lady Dorrian’s ruling alone. In refusing to hear Murray’s appeal, the UK supreme court has offered its blessing to this same dangerous, two-tiered classification.

Credentialed by the state

What Lady Dorrian has done is to overturn traditional views of what constitutes journalism: that it is a practice that at its very best is designed to hold the powerful to account, and that anyone who engages in such work is doing journalism, whether or not they are typically thought of as a journalist.

That idea was obvious until quite recently. When social media took off, one of the gains trumpeted even by the corporate media was the emergence of a new kind of “citizen journalist”. At that stage, corporate media believed that these citizen journalists would become cheap fodder, providing on-the-ground, local stories they alone would have access to and that only the establishment media would be in a position to monetise. This was precisely the impetus for the Guardian’s Comment is Free section, which in its early incarnation allowed a varied selection of people with specialist knowledge or information to provide the paper with articles for free to increase the paper’s sales and advertising rates.

The establishment’s attitude to citizen journalists, and the Guardian’s to the Comment is Free model, only changed when these new journalists started to prove hard to control, and their work often highlighted inadvertently or otherwise the inadequacies, deceptions and double standards of the corporate media.

Now, Lady Dorrian has put the final nail in the coffin of citizen journalism. She has declared through her ruling that she and other judges will be the ones to decide who is considered a journalist and thereby who receives legal protections for their work. This is a barely concealed way for the state to license or “credentialise” journalists. It turns journalism into a professional guild with only official, corporate journalists safe from legal retribution by the state.

If you are an unapproved, uncredentialed journalist, you can be jailed, as Murray is being, on a similar legal basis to the imprisonment of someone who carries out a surgical operation without the necessary qualifications. But whereas the law against charlatan surgeons is there to protect the public, to stop unnecessary harm being inflicted on the sick, Lady Dorrian’s ruling will serve a very different purpose: to protect the state from the harm caused by the exposure of its secret or most malign practices by trouble-making, sceptical – and now largely independent – journalists.

Journalism is being corralled back into the exclusive control of the state and billionaire-owned corporations. It may not be surprising that corporate journalists, keen to hold on to their jobs, are consenting through their silence to this all-out assault on journalism and free speech. After all, this is a kind of protectionism – additional job security – for journalists employed by a corporate media that has no real intention to challenge the powerful.

But what is genuinely shocking is that this dangerous accretion of further power to the state and its allied corporate class is being backed implicitly by the British journalists’ union, the NUJ. It has kept quiet over the many months of attacks on Murray and the widespread efforts to discredit him for his reporting. The NUJ has made no significant noise about Lady Dorrian’s creation of two classes of journalists – state-approved and unapproved – or about her jailing of Murray on these grounds.

But the NUJ has gone further. Its leaders have publicly washed their  hands of Murray by excluding him from membership of the union, even while its officials have conceded that he should qualify. The NUJ has become as complicit in the hounding of a journalist as Murray’s fellow diplomats once were for his hounding as an ambassador. This is a truly shameful episode in the NUJ’s history.

Calling all NUJ Members – When a country’s main union for journalists polices the Overton window, you are in a society well on the way to authoritarianism. For four months I have been excluded from the National Union of Journalists and, despite repeated https://t.co/RrdjiXUmmo

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) July 16, 2020

Free speech criminalised

But more dangerous still, Lady Dorrian’s ruling is part of a pattern in which the political, judicial and media establishments have colluded to narrow the definition of what counts as journalism, to exclude anything beyond the pap that usually passes for journalism in the corporate media.

Murray has been one of the few journalists to report in detail the arguments made by Assange’s legal team in his extradition hearings. Noticeably in both the Assange and Murray cases, the presiding judge has limited the free speech protections traditionally afforded to journalism and has done so by restricting who qualifies as a journalist. Both cases have been frontal assaults on the ability of certain kinds of journalists – those who are free from corporate or state pressure – to cover important political stories, effectively criminalising independent journalism. And all this has been achieved by sleight of hand.

In Assange’s case, Judge Vanessa Baraitser largely assented to US claims that what the Wikileaks founder had done was espionage rather than journalism. The Obama administration had held off prosecuting Assange because it could not find a distinction in law between his legal right to publish evidence of US war crimes and the New York Times and the Guardian’s right to publish the same evidence, provided to them by Wikileaks. If the US administration prosecuted Assange, it would also need to prosecute the editors of those papers.

Donald Trump’s officials bypassed that problem by creating a distinction between “proper” journalists, employed by corporate outlets that oversee and control what is published, and “bogus” journalists, those independents not subject to such oversight and pressures.

Trump’s officials denied Assange the status of journalist and publisher and instead treated him as a spy who colluded with and assisted whistleblowers. That supposedly voided the free speech protections he constitutionally enjoyed. But, of course, the US case against Assange was patent nonsense. It is central to the work of investigative journalists to “collude” with and assist whistleblowers. And spies squirrel away the information provided to them by such whistleblowers, they do not publicise it to the world, as Assange did.

Notice the parallels with Murray’s case.

Judge Baraitser’s approach to Assange echoed the US one: that only approved, credentialed journalists enjoy the protection of the law from prosecution; only approved, credentialed journalists have the right to free speech (should they choose to exercise it in newsrooms beholden to state or corporate interests). Free speech and the protection of the law, Baraitser implied, no longer chiefly relate to the legality of what is said, but to the legal status of who says it.

A similar methodology has been adopted by Lady Dorrian in Murray’s case. She has denied him the status of a journalist, and instead classified him as some kind of “improper” journalist, or blogger. As with Assange, there is an implication that “improper” or “bogus” journalists are such an exceptional threat to society that they must be stripped of the normal legal protections of free speech.

“Jigsaw identification” – especially when allied to sexual assault allegations, involving women’s rights and playing into the wider, current obsession with identity politics – is the perfect vehicle for winning widespread consent for the criminalisation of the free speech of critical journalists.

Corporate media shackles

There is an even bigger picture that should be hard to miss for any honest journalist, corporate or otherwise. What Lady Dorrian and Judge Baraitser – and the establishment behind them – are trying to do is put the genie back in the bottle. They are trying to reverse a trend that over more than a decade has seen a small but growing number of journalists use new technology and social media to liberate themselves from the shackles of the corporate media and tell truths audiences were never supposed to hear.

Don’t believe me? Consider the case of Guardian and Observer journalist Ed Vulliamy. In his book Flat Earth News, Vulliamy’s colleague at the Guardian Nick Davies tells the story of how Roger Alton, editor of the Observer at the time of the Iraq war, and a credentialed, licensed journalist if ever there was one, sat on one of the biggest stories in the paper’s history for months on end.

In late 2002, Vulliamy, a veteran and much trusted reporter, persuaded Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA official who still had security clearance at the agency, to go on record that the CIA knew there were no WMD in Iraq – the pretext for an imminent and illegal invasion of that country. As many suspected, the US and British governments had been telling lies to justify a coming war of aggression against Iraq, and Vulliamy had a key source to prove it.

But Alton spiked this earth-shattering story and then refused to publish another six versions written by an increasingly exasperated Vulliamy over the next few months, as war loomed. Alton was determined to keep the story out of the news. Back in 2002 it only took a handful of editors – all of whom had risen through the ranks for their discretion, nuance and careful “judgment” – to make sure some kinds of news never reached their readers.

Social media has changed such calculations. Vulliamy’s story could not be quashed so easily today. It would leak out, precisely through a high-profile independent journalist like Assange or Murray. Which is why such figures are so critically important to a healthy and informed society – and why they, and a few others like them, are gradually being disappeared. The cost of allowing independent journalists to operate freely, the establishment has understood, is far too high.

First, all independent, unlicensed journalism was lumped in as “fake news”. With that as the background, social media corporations were able to collude with so-called legacy media corporations to algorithm independent journalists into oblivion. And now independent journalists are being educated about what fate is likely to befall them should they try to emulate Assange or Murray.

Asleep at the wheel

In fact, while corporate journalists have been asleep at the wheel, the British establishment has been preparing to widen the net to criminalise all journalism that seeks to seriously hold power to account. A recent government consultation document calling for a more draconian crackdown on what is being deceptively termed “onward disclosure” – code for journalism – has won the backing of Home Secretary Priti Patel. The document implicitly categorises journalism as little different from espionage and whistleblowing.

In the wake of the consultation paper, the Home Office has called on parliament to consider “increased maximum sentences” for offenders – that is, journalists – and ending the distinction “between espionage and the most serious unauthorised disclosures”. The government’s argument is that “onward disclosures” can create “far more serious damage” than espionage and so should be treated similarly. If accepted, any public interest defence – the traditional safeguard for journalists – will be muted.

Anyone who followed the Assange hearings last summer – which excludes most journalists in the corporate media – will notice strong echoes of the arguments made by the US for extraditing Assange, arguments conflating journalism with espionage that were largely accepted by Judge Baraitser.

None of this has come out of the blue. As the online technology publication The Register noted back in 2017, the Law Commission was at the time considering “proposals in the UK for a swingeing new Espionage Act that could jail journalists as spies”. It said such an act was being “developed in haste by legal advisers”.

It is quite extraordinary that two investigative journalists – one a long-term, former member of staff at the Guardian – managed to write an entire article in that paper this month on the government consultation paper and not mention Assange once. The warning signs have been there for the best part of a decade but corporate journalists have refused to notice them. Similarly, it is no coincidence that Murray’s plight has also not registered on the corporate media’s radar.

Assange and Murray are the canaries in the coal mine for the growing crackdown on investigative journalism and on efforts to hold executive power to account. There is, of course, ever less of that being done by the corporate media, which may explain why corporate outlets appear not only relaxed about the mounting political and legal climate against free speech and transparency but have been all but cheering it on.

In the Assange and Murray cases, the British state is carving out for itself a space to define what counts as legitimate, authorised journalism – and journalists are colluding in this dangerous development, if only through their silence. That collusion tells us a great deal about the mutual interests of the corporate political and legal establishments, on the one hand, and the corporate media establishment on the other.

Assange and Murray are not only telling us troubling truths we are not supposed to hear. The fact that they are being denied solidarity by those who are their colleagues, those who may be next in the firing line, tells us everything we need to know about the so-called mainstream media: that the role of corporate journalists is to serve establishment interests, not challenge them.

jonathan-cook.net

By Joe LAURIA

Craig Murray, an ex-British ambassador and blogger, has been sentenced to eight months in prison after being found guilty in March of contempt of court during the 2020 trial of former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond. He was given three weeks to turn himself into police, pending his appeal. Judge Lady Dorrian issued the sentence, she said, despite Murray’s health issues.

Murray faced up to two years in prison and unlimited fines.

Murray must surrender his passport making it impossible to travel to Spain on May 20 to testify in the case of UC Global spying on WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuador embassy in London. The court heard that remote arrangements to testify to the Spanish court would have to be made.

Murrray was charged with contempt for allegedly revealing the identity of four anonymous accusers indirectly; of writing about the exclusion of two jurors in violation of a court order and of allegedly prejudicing the case in Salmond’s favor. There was no pronouncement of guilt on the latter two charges. Salmond was acquitted at trial of 13 sex charges in March 2020.

Murray was found to have contravened an order by the Crown prosecutors to stop writing about the matter. Representatives of the Crown say Murray was warned of this in January 2020 and in August 2020.

Murray was charged in April 2020 with writing two articles on his website that led to the alleged prejudice in the Salmond case and to possible “jig-saw” identification, despite a court order of anonymity, of the women who alleged sexual assault against Salmond. The accusers’ identities were to remain anonymous by order of Lord Justice Clerk Lady Dorrian, who presided over both Salmond’s and Murray’s trials.

The 1981 Contempt of Court Act applies to “a publication which creates a substantial risk that the course of justice in the proceedings in question will be seriously impeded or prejudiced.” In the sentencing hearing on Tuesday, which Consortium News had direct access to online, Dorrian called Murray’s contempt “grave” and on a “substantial” scale.

“Action in clear violation of the court even in a coded way needs to be treated as contempt in a grave way,” she said.

“He knew of jigsaw identification and relished in revealing it, thinking it was in the public interest,” she said. “In this he failed.”

We’ll be live-tweeting on this thread from the Sentence Appeal Court for the case of former UK Ambassador @CraigMurrayOrg, starting at 10.30am BST. pic.twitter.com/MoZy3YX7G8

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) May 11, 2021

Explosive Testimony

Murray testified in his case that he had evidence of a scheme against Salmond that involved Sturgeon’s chief of staff.

Murray’s sworn testimony outlined the alleged plot to silence himself and to apparently prevent Salmond from reentering politics.

Murray’s affidavits, if true, exposed deep corruption and collusion between the SNP, Crown prosecutors, Police Scotland and parts of the mainstream media.

Citing unnamed, insider sources that he says were in a position to know, Murray testified under oath that the sex crimes allegations against Salmond were an orchestrated attempt to destroy Salmond’s political career by rivals inside the Scottish National Party.

Murray testified that after reading of the allegations against Salmond in August 2018 he “made no attempt to discover the identity of the civil servant involved, but I did make strenuous efforts to discover who had leaked the story to the media.”  After conferring with his contacts he “discovered with a high degree of certainty that the leaker was Liz Lloyd, Chief of Staff to Nicola Sturgeon.”

Murray testified that he called in an article for the sacking of two civil servants found in Salmond’s judicial review to have abused the process and that “if Nicola Sturgeon failed to act against them, it might indicate that she was herself involved in the campaign of false allegation against Alex Salmond.”  Sturgeon’s spokeswoman accused Salmond of “spinning false conspiracy theories” to deflect attention from the accusations, even after he was acquitted.

After this article appeared Salmond asked to meet Murray at the George Hotel in Edinburgh. “Here, for the first time, he told me that Nicola Sturgeon had been behind the process designed to generate false accusations against him,” Murray testified.  He said that Salmon won his judicial review case because, “It was on the day that witnesses from Nicola Sturgeon’s private office were due to give evidence as to her own knowledge and involvement, that the Scottish Government suddenly conceded the case rather than have this evidence heard.”

Murray went on:

“Mr Salmond further told me that there was a massive police operation underway to try to get accusers to come forward against him. This was going to ludicrous lengths. He showed me an email from one woman to him, in which she stated that she had been called in and interviewed by the police because many years ago Alex Salmond had been said by another person to have been seen kissing her on the cheeks in a theatre foyer. The woman stated she had told them it was a perfectly normal greeting. She wished to warn Alex of the police fishing expedition against him. He understood that over 400 people had been interviewed by the police.”

Murray testified that he asked Salmond what the motive against him could be. “Alex replied that he did not know; perhaps it lay in King Lear. He said that he had genuinely intended to quit politics and had lined up a position as Chairman of Johnstone Press, which had fallen because of these allegations. But he had retired from the party leadership before, and then come back, and perhaps Nicola had concluded he needed a stake through the heart,” Murray said.

Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party (SNP) came up one seat short of a majority in last week’s Scottish elections, but with eight Green Party seats will have a majority to call for a second independence referendum. She remains as first minister. Salmond’s Alba Party failed to win any seats.

In his testimony, Murray said that a source who had been present at a meeting with Sturgeon and some of her ministers told him that multiple charges had been brought against Salmond so that if just one conviction could be won Salmond would be destroyed as a sexual predator.

Armed with this information, Murray testified that he was faced with a dilemma. He wrote:

“To expose that it was Nicola Sturgeon who masterminded the conspiracy against him would be a real blow to the Independence movement. But to watch a plot to imprison an innocent man potentially for the rest of his life unfold before my eyes was also horrifying. Particularly as the most cynical part of the plot, to use the court anonymity granted to accusers of sexual abuse, to disguise who was actually behind the allegations, appeared to be working.”

“The Crown can release salacious detail about attempted rape while lying naked on top of somebody in bed, and the media can echo this to the heavens. But from that moment, nobody can publish anything to contradict the Crown without being in contempt of court. It seemed to me that, in these circumstances, the Crown ought to have been a great deal more restrained in the amount of salacious detail it was making available. Certainly, there was nothing in what was happening which would contradict the information I had been given of the Crown Office being party to a political plot to destroy Salmond.”

“In or around March 2019, and from time to time over several months thereafter, I became aware of information tending to show that senior members of the SNP had sought improperly to involve themselves in the Salmond case. This included meeting with women to urge them to make or persevere with complaints to the police, coordination of complainers and their stories, liaison with the police over charges and attempts to persuade individuals other than the complainers to come forward as witnesses to allegations, which attempts were unsuccessful.”

The Trial

High Court building in Edinburgh. (Scottish Courts and Tribunals.)

The Crown alleged in Murray’s one-day trial on Jan. 27, conducted entirely online and observed by Consortium News, that identifying characteristics Murray provided in his articles could be pieced together to reveal the identity of four of Salmond’s nine accusers, all of whom on March 10, 2020 were ordered to remain anonymous.

The prosecutor, Alex Prentice QC, advocate depute for the Crown, told the court Murray’s writings, as well as reader comments on his site, allegedly led to a “risk of prejudice” in the Salmond case, even though he admitted prosecutors never warned the court until after the Salmond trial was over. Murray’s articles in question were published in August 2019 (“The Alex Salmond Fit-Up”) and in January 2020 (“Yes Minister Fan Fiction.”)

Lady Dorrian, who is leading the tribunal in Murray’s case, asked Prentice why the court was not informed before Slamond’s trial of the possible prejudice by Murray’s writings. “If the Crown was of the view that these articles pose a substantial risk to the proceedings it seems strange that the Crown did not take any action at that time, or even bring it to court?” Dorrian asked.

“I accept that,” Prentice replied. “There were a number of considerations, but the Lady is right and I recognize that is a factor the court can take into account in assessing this.”

Dorrian replied: “I understand that material written after the order may attract a certain shading in conjunction with an earlier article. My difficulty is that those earlier arguments could breach an order that wasn’t issued until March 10.”

“At the time it didn’t apply, but [the articles] are still available so they can be taken into account,” Prentice argued.

Lady Dorrian also challenged that putting identifying characteristics of an unnamed accuser in a search engine would bring up different results over time. Prentice maintained that Murray’s writings must be seen together, not in isolation, acting as “magnet” to draw together “needles in a haystack” to identify the anonymous accusers.

Murray’s counsel, John Scott argued before the tribunal that Murray’s response to the Crown’s letter in March was to seek press accreditation to cover the Salmond case, which he was denied. Instead Murray relied on the reporting of other journalists to write analyses of the trial. Murray had redacted the names of the anonymous accusers, Scott argued.

On the jig-saw matter, Scott said “it is clear that he was aware of the names of the complainers and his sworn evidence is he was aware of them before the court order, but that it would not be responsible journalism to name them. …If he had wanted to do what the Crown says he did he could have done so.”

On the issue of prejudicing the trial, Scott said that if the Crown was “worried about the case they ought to have brought this to the attention of the court. … It is too late after trial. …  They can’t wait to see how it developed and after acquittal then say there was prejudice.”

On the matter of the juror, Scott said Murray’s article only speculated on why the jurors were excluded and did not report the actual reasons. The Crown called Murray’s speculation  “bizarre and unfounded,” while at the same time saying it violated the prohibition on mentioning the actual “issues raised by the Advocate Depute” in support of removing the the jurors.

Accusers’ Identity

Murray’s attorney told the court that mainstream media had reported details of the accusers. The BBC reported, for instance, in April: “The women who made the allegations against Mr Salmond included an SNP politician, a party worker and several current and former Scottish government civil servants and officials.”  In his affidavit, Murray testified:

“If they genuinely thought my article might influence a jury, given they were well aware of the article and wrote to me about it, the Crown Office had an obvious public duty to act before a trial to prevent that evil. I would have happily turned up in court and argued my case. To wait until long after the trial, after it is far too late to avert the evil they purport to be concerned about, and then make that allegation against me, is plainly pointless and vindictive and, again, sinister.”

Murray may have been a Crown target for the contempt conviction because he was among few writers defending Salmond and was vindicated by Salmond’s acquittal. Murray’s writings and his affidavits also revealed the troubling evidence of a conspiracy against Salmond, possibly including Scotland’s top political leader.

Murray has been a thorn in the Establishment’s side since he blew the whistle on Britain’s acquiescence of torture in Uzbekistan in 2002. He later testified about it to a parliamentary committee.

Since then, Murray has been a fierce advocate for his friend Julian Assange, the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher, whom the United States is trying to extradite from Britain. Murray’s accounts of Assange’s extradition hearing appeared on Consortium News. Murray is also a strong supporter of Scottish independence, which the British establishment vehemently opposes.

consortiumnews.com

After the four-year interregnum of Donald Trump’s “Cirque du Stupide,” America’s foreign diplomacy should be undergoing a total facelift. Returning to the stodgy “business as usual” foreign policy of the past is not the answer. As the Biden administration began to nestle into office, there was a familiar refrain in press releases from the Department of State, otherwise known as “Foggy Bottom.” These included such old ditties as “The Secretary and the Foreign Minister discussed ways to strengthen cooperation with allies and partners to address the [blah . . . blah . . . blah].” Or, if that was not monotonous enough, the White House returned to old form with read-outs like the following: “President Joseph R. Biden spoke today with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom. The President conveyed his intention to strengthen the special relationship between our countries and revitalize transatlantic ties, underscoring the critical role of NATO to our collective defense and shared values.”

News to Team Biden: The year is 2021, not 1951. Whatever “special relationship” the United States had in the past with the United Kingdom, that has long been overtaken by events, including the practical inevitability of Scotland becoming independent and rejoining the European Union and Northern Ireland being an effective part of a customs union, minus the rest of the UK, with the Republic Ireland. It would seem the old “special relationship” has devolved to new political entities.

It would do the State Department and White House well to reinvent the mechanisms of diplomacy. There is as much a need for Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Biden to be on the phone with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon as there is for vapid phone conversations with England’s own version of “Trump,” Mr. Johnson.

There may be 193 member states of the United Nations, but around the world, newly-devolved regions, provinces, and areas – well over 100 – are taking on the trappings of statehood or autonomous status and more are planned. More than a handful of these autonomous entities even have their own ministries of foreign affairs or, as they are alternately known, ministries of international cooperation. That fact, alone, should change the face of modern diplomacy and a new subset of that discipline, known as paradiplomacy, as well as the very essence of statecraft. Nevertheless, it will be like pulling teeth to convince the State Department, so rooted in the traditions of the 19^th century, to update its old and stale act.

As the result of information gathered by the Japanese intelligence service, the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, or “Naichō,” in the 1990s, Japan is in the best position economically to deal with post-Brexit northwestern Europe. Japanese companies, at the urging of the government in Tokyo, began investing in and currying favor with the Celtic regions of Brittany, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland at a time when Washington only viewed London and Paris as the centers of political power in that particular part of Europe. For the Japanese and their early recognition of paradiplomacy, the regional Celtic capitals of Rennes in Brittany, Cardiff in Wales, Dublin in Ireland, Belfast in Ulster, and Edinburgh in Scotland became just as important as London and Paris. According to French intelligence specialist Roger Faligot’s book on Naichō – “Naisho: Enquête au cœur des services secrets japonais” – the Japanese reaped more than Celtic goodwill from their pioneer outreach to Celtic regions like Brittany, which has demanded increased autonomy from France. A French DPSD military intelligence report issued in the 1990s stated: “Attention is drawn to the fact that the Japanese are particularly interested in questions of research and development in the electronic field, especially activity a few kilometers from Bruz (Brittany), the headquarters of CELAR, the center of French electronic and information warfare.” By thinking outside of the standard diplomatic box, Japan achieved not only good will and economic inroads from the Celtic regions, but a handsome intelligence dividend in Brittany.

Unfortunately, for the recycled Obama and Clinton administration foreign officials the Biden administration is slotting into State Department, National Security Council, and Defense Department positions, it will be Madeleine Albright and Susan Rice style diplomacy. Under Obama, that took on embarrassing dimensions as Obama personally weighed in on Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum, urging Scotland to remain within an unevenly ruled United Kingdom dominated by England. Obama, again, interfered in British domestic politics in 2016, urging the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union by rejecting Brexit. Had Obama remained neutral in the 2014 referendum, Scotland may have very well remained in the European Union as an independent nation. Failure to recognize current realities and cling on to arcane notions of “special relationships,” “traditional alliances,” and “shared bonds” will ensure Biden’s foreign policy will be mediocre to disastrous.

To prove that the Biden foreign policy team is looking behind and not ahead, Blinken had a phone call on January 27 with British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. However, there was no contact with Scotland’s External Affairs Secretary Michael Russell, who has been more active with his Celtic counterpart in Dublin in reaching a post-Brexit accommodation with Ireland and Northern Ireland than Blinken’s friends, the Tories in London. Ireland responded to Scotland’s outreach by opening a Consulate General in Edinburgh. It is commonplace for Irish and Scottish government ministers jointly attending St. Patrick’s Day and St. Andrew’s Day events in each other’s capitals.

Autonomist governments bypass national capitals daily to deal with one another directly. The as yet unrecognized Republic of Somaliland has found a strong diplomatic and political supporter in the government and parliament of Wales. The United States continues to insist that Somaliland is part of Somalia, a country it has not been associated with for thirty years. The United States recognizes Somalian President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed “Farmaajo,” a former taxi driver and registered Republican from Buffalo, New York, as holding authority over Somaliland. Even the presidents of the self-governing states of Puntland and Jubaland in Somalia do not recognize Farmaajo as president of their country. Meanwhile, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Turkey have opened Consulates-General and the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Taiwan have opened diplomatic offices in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland.

Other autonomous governments are adopting, to their maximum extent, the principle of “in foro interno, in foro externo.” That equates to using all the powers delegated to a government internally to project itself externally. Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Catalonia, Flanders, Wallonia, the Basque Country, Åland, Faroes, Corsica, and Okinawa are effectively using this principle to create their own unique foreign policies.

The Biden administration has displayed initial deluded and antiquated thinking when it comes to foreign policy. It should be remembered that Biden’s Senate career began when Mao Zedong was still in charge in China, a war with the U.S. as a main participant continued to rage in Southeast Asia, a country called the United Arab Republic was the center of political activity in the Middle East, white rule and apartheid was the name of the game in southern Africa, and right-wing dictatorships ruled throughout Latin America. Those who live in the past will never be prepared to face the future.

Imagine the courage and fortitude, borne of desperation, it requires to embark on a do or die attempt to cross the sea in a dinghy from a land where you’ve already been met with the fist of fury rather than the hand of friendship, to another land where more hostility and rage awaits your arrival.

Then imagine that no matter the hostility that awaits you at the end of this perilous voyage, it pales when compared to the horrors you managed to escape in your country of origin, horrors borne of the conflict, chaos and societal collapse underwritten at least in part by the foreign policy of the very country you are trying to reach for asylum and sanctuary.

To witness news crews from the BBC and Sky News sailing around some of those trying to reach British shores in these dinghies is to witness the funeral of the UK as the beacon of decency, human rights and civilisation it’s proponents have long extended themselves in arguing it is. Now, in this time of toxic Brexit nationalism, the mask has been ripped off to reveal the ugly face of a state whose brutality and barbarity is entrenched in its very DNA.

There is no flag big enough to cover the shame of the hysteria that’s been whipped up by the army of bigots who’ve poisoned our politics in recent years, chief among them Nigel ‘pint and fag’ Farage. He’s so unpleasant that it wouldn’t be a surprise to find that even his own shite can’t stand him. Competing with him in the toxicity stakes is a government of privately educated thugs, with Home Secretary Priti Patel in particular doing a great impression of a woman whose preferred perfume is poison. Her announcement of the appointment of a Clandestine Channel Threat Commander to tackle this ‘invasion force’ of desperate migrants and refugees is straight out of a spoof Bond movie.

Interesting to note in the midst of this current crisis that the baton as Leader of the Opposition (the real opposition that is) has over time been passed from Piers Morgan to Man Utd’s Marcus Rashford and now to the Twitter account of Ben & Jerry’s UK. One twitter thread in opposition to this rancid government’s war on dinghy-borne refugees from this account has done more to ruffle its feathers than Sir Keir Starmer and his desultory shadow cabinet has done in all the time they’ve been in post.

Hey @PritiPatel we think the real crisis is our lack of humanity for people fleeing war, climate change and torture. We pulled together a thread for you..

— Ben & Jerry’s UK (@benandjerrysUK) August 11, 2020

Migration and migrants have for far too long been a grotesque distraction from the real enemy without and within in Britain. Those are billionaires from across the world whose preferred destination is London, where the living is easy and ill gotten gains are turned into welcome donations to the Conservative Party, and a political and media establishment that has succeeded in putting the cruel into Cruel Britannia. Over 65,000 excess deaths in the UK during Covid-19 due to the criminal negligence of this execrable crew who are currently in power, and the worst recession just announced of any G7 country.

And if this isn’t enough to have you choking on your cornflakes, the government’s furlough scheme ends in October with Brexit set to materialise just two months later.

But just we head for a hard Brexit with no parachute, we are also thankfully headed for the sundering of this prolonged experiment in colonialism and mercantilism. The most recent YouGov poll at this writing reveals for the fourth poll running a decisive majority in support of independence in Scotland. With another YouGov poll revealing that a majority of Britons have no sympathy for the migrants trying to reach the UK across the Channel, we now have it confirmed that Scotland and England are two distinct countries with distinct and different cultural values and sense of national identity.

With this in mind, let Brexit Britain take the bigots and let an independent Scotland take the migrants.

As the man said, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at.”

End.

medium.com

There is no unifying influence being exerted by the central government in London, which is obsessed with severing all ties with the EU. Indeed it was reported that Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared yet again that the finalisation of Brexit would mark a moment of “national renewal,” after which the UK would be “a great European power, and truly global in our range and ambitions.”

Yet on June 24, when the Guardian newspaper interviewed David Sassoli, the president of the European parliament, who had been video conferencing with Johnson and the presidents of the European commission and European council, Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, he said “we are very worried because we don’t see great enthusiasm from the British authorities and we don’t see a strong will to get to an agreement that satisfies all parties.”

The Europeans’ reaction to London’s posture is entirely understandable, because the government of the UK (as we may still refer to it, for convenience) is inflexible concerning the UK’s negotiating stance, which is uncompromisingly superior and appears to stem from the belief that Britain is the more important party and the EU must therefore bend to its will. The government in London ignores the fact that it was the UK that demanded to leave the European Union and that the EU therefore owes it nothing.

Originally, it was possible there could be an extension of the Brexit transition period beyond December 31, 2020, meaning that negotiations could continue until mutually-beneficial compromises were reached, but on June 15 the British side pulled the plug and declined to extend the transition. The result of that decision is that if there is no agreed solution by the end of this year, there will be a “no-deal” Brexit and all agreements will be annulled. Unfortunately, it is apparent that the government could not care less about this outcome and that many British citizens are unaware of the consequences, which promise to be calamitous.

The conviction that Britain can be “a great European power” is the base, the essence, of the strange manifestation of national superiority that has led the UK to its present parlous condition. But it has to be realised by Britain that it is a middle-ranking economic and military “power” whose recent performance concerning control of the Covid-19 crisis has given no cause for optimism. As The Economist headlined on June 20, “The British state shows how not to respond to a pandemic. It faced difficult circumstances. And has so far failed to rise to them.” The response to a no-deal Brexit will be equally lamentable.

The Financial Times notes that the UK has “the Brexit delusion of taking back control” but that the European Union had “no significant influence over the UK’s spending on (or policies towards) health, education, housing, pensions, welfare, infrastructure, culture or, for that matter, defence and aid.” In short, the absurd nationalistic slogans that encouraged the British people to distrust and even hate the European Union had no basis in fact, but were designed specifically as part of the Vote Leave campaign in order to whip up antagonism towards a valuable trading partner.

Independent international analyses have shown that post-Brexit consequences for Britain will be economically damaging. For example, the RAND Corporation’s assessment is that “The failure of the UK to achieve an open trading and investment with the EU post-Brexit would have negative implications for the UK and EU” and if there is a ‘no-deal’ then “trading under World Trade Organisation rules would reduce [the UK’s] future GDP by around five per cent ten years after Brexit, or $140 billion, compared with EU membership.” This is fair warning of disaster, one would think, especially when the chief executive of the UK’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders told the BBC on June 23 that “It is vitally important that the government achieves its ambition, which is a trade agreement before the end of the year” — but if there is no deal, then UK car manufacturers could not afford to pay import tariffs on foreign components, as the cost would be more than their profit margin.

The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association Fact Sheet is concise in stating that “The impact of a no-deal Brexit on the automobile industry would be potentially catastrophic. There is no other industry that is more tightly integrated than the European automotive industry, with highly complex supply chains stretching across Europe and production relying on ‘just-in-time’ delivery.” Chaos looms. And not only in the massive car manufacturing and distribution industry, but right across the board.

The UK publication The Week points out that, for the moment, trade between the UK and EU is tariff-free, “But the Confederation of British Industry predicts that no-deal would mean that 90% of the UK’s goods exports to the EU would be subjected to tariffs.” On June 17 the British Parliament’s research and information service published ‘Statistics on UK-EU trade’ which among other things stated that “the EU is the UK’s largest trading partner. In 2019, UK exports to the EU were £300 billion (43% of all UK exports).”

In spite of the black clouds of impending doom, the government in London continues to ignore the imminent economic catastrophe, and is spending 40 billion pounds (50 billion dollars) on building four Dreadnought nuclear weapons submarines. It is notable that studies by the independent Nuclear Information Service indicate that the UK defence ministry’s (MOD) estimates are incorrect and that the true cost is in the region of £172 billion, but no matter the number of billions the stark fact is that Britain cannot afford to indulge itself in operating a nuclear weapons force and should concentrate on solving its enormous economic problems. The country’s government is existing in a world of fantasy in which, for example, the defence minister announced that “wherever I go in the world I find that Britain stands tall.” He believes that “Brexit has brought us to a moment. A great moment in our history. A moment when we must strengthen our global presence, enhance our lethality, and increase our mass”, which is not only a delusion but a most dangerous military mindset. (And imagine the hysteria if such a policy had been declared in Moscow or Being.)

The British government should concentrate on uniting its own country, engaging with the European Union in order to maintain existing favourable trade agreements, and cancelling the grandiose and preposterously expensive nuclear submarine project. It owes this to the British people who are watching their country reeling in disorder and facing a dreadful decline.

Craig MURRAY

There will never again be a route to Scottish independence deemed legal by Westminster. The 2014 referendum will never be repeated. The U.K. will never willingly give up a third of its land, most of its fisheries, most of its mineral resources, its most marketable beef, soft fruit and whisky, most of its renewable energy potential, a vital part of its military including its primary nuclear base, its best universities in a number of key fields including life sciences, its ready pool of intellectual and professional talent. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is for once honest when he says keeping the Union together is his top priority. It is the top priority of the entire British Establishment.

Former Prime Minister David Cameron only agreed to the 2014 referendum because he thought the result would humiliate and kill off Scottish nationalism. Support for independence was at 28 percent in the polls at the time he agreed.

Westminster had the most enormous and horrible shock when support for independence grew to 45 percent during the campaign as many people for the first time in their lives heard the real arguments. The Whitehall panic of the last week of the 2014 referendum campaign is not something the British Establishment ever intend to repeat.

Trident submarine leaving its base on River Clyde, with Scottish Highlands village of Strone in background.(bodgerbrooks, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

There is a charmingly naive argument put forward by some that, if support for independence can be grown to 60 percent in the opinion polls, Johnson and Westminster will have to “grant” a referendum. This is the opposite of the truth. If support for Independence is at 60 percent, the very last thing that the Tories will do is agree a referendum they will lose. Their resistance will be massively hardened. Remember, the Tories could have zero Tory MPs in Scotland and still have a majority of 73 in Westminster. There is no political damage for Johnson in unpopularity in Scotland. In England, his anti-Scots stance is very popular with a core support base of knuckle-dragging, ill-educated racists.

The “intellectual justification” for this stance was trailed by Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on TV: Irrespective of the wishes of the majority in Scotland, the U.K. has a duty to stop Scottish Independence, to prevent anarchic secessionist forces being unleashed across Europe; he named Italy, France and Spain.

Westminster will never agree to another referendum, and the more we look like winning it, the less they will agree to it.

Nor is there a route to a “legal” referendum through the courts. If a court rules that a consultative referendum is legal under the current Scotland Act (which it might well be), then the Tories will simply pass new legislation at Westminster to make it illegal. They have already done this at Westminster to overturn Scottish parliament decisions, and the U.K. Supreme Court have already made clear that the sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament cannot be challenged.

Scotland can become independent, but becoming independent is, without doubt, going to be illegal in terms of U.K. law — which is to say Westminster law. There will not be a route to Independence agreed with Westminster.

Westminster Has No Right

If you believe in Scottish independence, you believe that the Scottish nation are a “people” within the meaning of the UN Charter, and thus have an inalienable right of self-determination. That means that Westminster has no right, by legislation or by any other means, to prevent the Scottish people from exercising their self-determination.

I am sorry, but this is the fact: If you believe Scotland should only move to independence in a Westminster-approved process, you do not really believe in Scottish Independence at all.

Nicola Sturgeon campaigning in rich SNP territory, Kirkintilloch. (Ninian Reid, Flickr)

Which brings us to Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party and first minister of Scotland. Her much-trumpeted speech on the way forward following Brexit was disgraceful in explicitly stating that any referendum must be held with Westminster agreement, and that any referendum held without Westminster agreement could be “illegal.” She used the words “illegal” and “wildcat” to denigrate the idea of Scotland acting without Westminster permission.

Even the most loyal to Sturgeon of all major independence bloggers, such as James Kelly and Paul Kavanagh, could not support Sturgeon on this point.

“Toom Tabard” as King John was derided, with his crown and scepter symbolically broken and with a blank coat of arms as depicted in the 1562 “Forman Armorial,” produced for Mary, Queen of Scots.(Wikimedia Commons)

What Sturgeon said amounts to an explicit acknowledgement of U.K. sovereignty over the Scottish people as both legitimate and immutable. She is accepting that the Act of Union did permanently alienate the right of self-determination. Sturgeon should heed the tale of  Toom Tabard as to what respect English rulers show to Scottish leaders who accept their authority. Her speech reinforced my view that she really is much too comfortable in her role of colonial governor.

And yet…

Constitutional Convention

When Sturgeon started talking about calling a constitutional convention I first scoffed, thinking she was merely fulfilling my prediction that her “plan” would be to start yet another talking shop. But then I was astonished when she outlined the potential membership — the elected representatives of Scotland sitting together, constituting MSPs, MPs, (former) MEPs and council leaders.

I have explained at length over the last two years my proposal for a route to Independence that would lead to recognition by the international community. Donald Tusk,the former president of the European Council, today confirmed all I have been saying about the enormous sympathy there will be in the EU towards welcoming Scotland back, now the U.K. has switched status to third country state. (I knew Donald Tusk reasonably well when I was first secretary of the British embassy in Warsaw in the 1990s and he was an out-of-office politician the same age as me. I should like to think I had an effect!)

But the heart of what I was proposing is this, as I put it in December 2018:

“The Scottish Parliament should then convene a National Assembly of all nationally elected Scottish representatives – MSPs, MPs and MEPs. That National Assembly should declare Independence, appeal to other countries for recognition, reach agreements with the rump UK and organise a confirmatory plebiscite. That is legal, democratic and consistent with normal international practice.”

Or as I put it again two weeks ago:

“We should assemble all of Scotland’s MEP’s, MP’s and MSP’s in a National Assembly and declare Independence on the 700th Anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath, thus emphasising the historical continuity of the Scottish state. The views and laws of London now being irrelevant, we should organise, as an Independent state, our referendum to confirm Independence, to be held in September 2020.”

Debating chamber of Scottish Parliament. (Colin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Please do read the articles linked if you have not already done so. They explain how Scotland can legitimately become an independent nation without regard to U.K. domestic law.

Now, until Sturgeon’s speech, I had never seen anybody else but me put forward the proposal that the way forward is via an assembly of all MPs, MSPs and MEPs, giving the triple legitimacy of democratic election. Sturgeon has enhanced this by adding council leaders.

There is a huge difference between an assembly — or convention — of elected representatives, and an appointed one of the great and the good. This new assembly proposed by Sturgeon is very different indeed in that respect from the convention of the same name that helped formulate devolution.

Now I do not think for one moment that Sturgeon has convened this convention to declare independence. But an assembly of Scotland’s MPs, MSPs, MEPs and council leaders will have a clear independence majority numerically and a massive Independence majority intellectually. It will have an extremely strong claim to be a properly representative assembly whose members each have a democratic mandate. The French Revolution was of course similarly precipitated by constitutional innovation convening a National Assembly combining the different Estates, and that assembly was swept along by fervor to take proto-revolutionary measures which went far beyond the initial positions of any of its members.

The dynamic of a new constitutional body whose members feel they command legitimacy, should not be underestimated. The convening of this body will be a real constitutional innovation. We need to make sure, that like that French National Assembly, they can clearly hear a huge mob outside their windows, demanding radical and speedy change.

CraigMurray.org.uk via consortiumnews.com

Nationalism in different shapes and forms is powerfully transforming the politics of the British Isles, a development that gathered pace over the last five years and culminated in the general election this month.

National identities and the relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland are changing more radically than at any time over the last century. It is worth looking at the British archipelago as a whole on this issue because of the closely-meshed political relationship of its constituent nations.

Some of these developments are highly visible such as the rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) to permanent political dominance in Scotland in the three general elections since the independence referendum in 2014.

Other changes are important but little commented on, such as the enhanced national independence and political influence of the Republic of Ireland over the British Isles as a continuing member of the EU as the UK leaves. Dublin’s greater leverage when backed by the other 26 EU states was repeatedly demonstrated, often to the surprise and dismay of London, in the course of the negotiations in Brussels over the terms of the British withdrawal.

Northern Ireland saw more nationalist than unionist MPs elected in the general election for the first time since 1921. This is important because it is a further sign of the political impact of demographic change whereby Catholics/nationalists become the new majority and the Protestants/unionists the minority. The contemptuous ease with which Boris Johnson abandoned his ultra-unionist pledges to the DUP and accepted a customs border in the Irish Sea separating Northern Ireland from the rest of Britain shows how little loyalty the Conservatives feel towards the northern unionists and their distinct and abrasive brand of British nationalism.

These developments affecting four of the main national communities inhabiting the British Isles – Irish, nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland, Scots – are easy to track. Welsh nationalism is a lesser force. Much more difficult to trace and explain is the rise of English nationalism because it is much more inchoate than these other types of nationalism, has no programme, and is directly represented by no political party – though the Conservative Party has moved in that direction.

The driving force behind Brexit was always a certain type of English nationalism which did not lose its power to persuade despite being incoherent and little understood by its critics and supporters alike. In some respects, it deployed the rhetoric of any national community seeking self-determination. The famous Brexiteer slogan “take back control” is not that different in its implications from Sinn Fein  – “Ourselves Alone” – though neither movement would relish the analogy.

The great power of the pro-Brexit movement, never really taken on board by its opponents, was to blame the very real sense of disempowerment and social grievances felt by a large part of the English population on Brussels and the EU. This may have been scapegoating on a grandiose scale, but nationalist movements the world over have targeted some foreign body abroad or national minority at home as the source of their ills. I asked one former Leave councillor – one of the few people I met who changed their mind on the issue after the referendum in 2016 – why people living in her deprived ward held the EU responsible for their poverty. Her reply cut through many more sophisticated explanations: “I suppose that it is always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner.”

This crude summary of the motives of many Leave voters has truth in it, but it is a mistake to caricature English nationalism as simply a toxic blend of xenophobia, racism, imperial nostalgia and overheated war memories. In the three years since the referendum the very act of voting for Brexit became part of many people’s national identity, a desire to break free, kicking back against an overmighty bureaucracy and repelling attempts by the beneficiaries of globalisation to reverse a democratic vote.

The political left in most countries is bad at dealing with nationalism and the pursuit of self-determination. It sees these as a diversion from identifying and attacking the real perpetrators of social and economic injustice. It views nationalists as mistakenly or malignly aiming at the wrong target – usually foreigners – and letting the domestic ones off the hook.

The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the world. It can only be ignored at great political cost, as the Labour Party has just found out to its cost for the fifth time (two referendums and three elections). What Labour should have done was early on take over the slogan “take back control” and seek to show that they were better able to deliver this than the Conservatives or the Brexit Party. There is no compelling reason why achieving such national demands should be a monopoly of the right. But in 2016, 2017 and 2019 Labour made the same mistake of trying to wriggle around Brexit as the prime issue facing the English nation without taking a firm position, an evasion that discredited it with both Remainers and Leavers.

Curiously, the political establishment made much the same mistake as Labour in underestimating and misunderstanding the nature of English nationalism. Up to the financial crisis of 2008 globalisation had been sold as a beneficial and inevitable historic process. Nationalism was old hat and national loyalties were supposedly on the wane. To the British political class, the EU obviously enhanced the political and economic strength of its national members. As beneficiaries of the status quo, they were blind to the fact that much of the country had failed to gain from these good things and felt marginalised and forgotten.

The advocates of supra-national organisations since the mediaeval papacy have been making such arguments and have usually been perplexed why they fail to stick. They fail to understand the strength of nationalism or religion in providing a sense of communal solidarity, even if it is based on dreams and illusions, that provides a vehicle for deeply felt needs and grievances. Arguments based on simple profit and loss usually lose out against such rivals.

counterpunch.org

A measure of just how tumultuous and fast moving politics has now become in the U.K. is that a Labour Party conference in Brighton that had taken on the character of a Shakespearean drama — complete with a challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership over Brexit and an aborted attempt to unseat his deputy, Tom Watson, over his unending plotting and scheming – was quickly overshadowed by the Greek tragedy that unfolded at the same time in the country’s Supreme Court in London.

Johnson’s Judicial Caning

For it was here that Boris Johnson, who’d flounced into Downing Street with no mandate and a Churchillian flourish just a few weeks ago, pledging to “finally deliver Brexit” for the British people and free them of their EU chains, received a judicial caning that has placed him on course to being the shortest serving prime minister in the country’s history.

Euripides himself could not have imagined such a vertiginous fall from grace.

Presiding Judge Lady Hall, Sept. 24, 2019. (YouTube)

With the astoundingly unanimous approval of all 11 Supreme Court justices, presiding Judge Lady Hale described Johnson’s actions in suspending (proroguing) Parliament for five weeks with the consent of the Queen as “unlawful, void and of no effect.”

Not since Oliver Cromwell went toe to toe with King Charles I in the mid-17^thcentury has there been such a hard-fought constitutional battle in Britain over whether, in the last analysis, the country is to be ruled by executive fiat or by parliamentary democracy.

We all know how Cromwell’s struggle with Charles I turned out, but if they should ever forget (hard Brexiteers here take note) all they need do is go down to Westminster in the heart of London and find Cromwell’s statue outside the House of Commons.

In upholding the primacy of Parliament over the executive, Lady Hale with her Supreme Court did what Cromwell did with a sword and an axe. She did so much to the consternation of Johnson and his hard Brexit acolytes, whose response was on a par with Kenneth Williams’ immortal line in the 1964 British comedy romp Carry On Cleo. To wit: “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”

Johnson’s Defiance

Boris Johnson. (EPA-EFE/MAXIM SHIPENKOV)

Johnson and company responded with stridency and defiance to the ruling, continuing their People vs the Establishment shtick as a way to try and force through a hard, no-deal Brexit with destination disaster capitalism in mind. In New York for the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Johnson spoke glowingly of a U.S.-U.K. trade deal to replace EU membership.  Johnson’s ability to leave the EU at the current Oct. 31 deadline, with or without a deal with the EU, is anybody’s guess.

Leaving without a deal would be in defiance of a law passed earlier this month requiring Britain seek an extended deadline if no deal is in place. However, Johnson’s willingness to even try to leave without a deal reflects the extent to which democracy in Britain is undergoing a stress test of mammoth scale.

The Supreme Court ruling was also met with rage by Britain’s populist right wing press. The  Daily Mail’s  front page ton Wednesday would not have been out of place in the Nazi Party newspaper,Völkischer Beobachter, effectively declaring the 11 Supreme Court judges “enemies of the people.”

Statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the House of Commons in Westminster, London. (Eluveitie, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The immediate consequence of the ruling was Parliament being resumed on Wednesday by Speaker of the House John Bercow. He bore witness to a bravura performance by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox who had signed off on the legalities of Johnson’s prorogation and who took center stage to explain himself to the House.

Rather than fight the rear-guard action of a man whose resignation had, along with that of the prime minister, been anticipated by many in light of the Supreme Court ruling, Cox went on the attack with the force of the Red Army at the gates of Berlin, fighting off wave after wave of attack at the despatch box. It was parliamentary oratory at its finest, and will have done much to restore confidence to the Brexit ranks.

During his opening address to the Commons, Cox announced that the government intends to hold another vote on staging a snap general election, safe in the knowledge that unless a no deal Brexit is taken off the table by Johnson beforehand (and with it an  extension beyond Oct. 31), neither Labour nor the other opposition parties can possibly support it.

This is a crucial precondition given that Johnson, in his capacity as prime minister, enjoys the privilege of setting the date of any such election. With this in mind, clearly it would be in his interests to set that date after Oct. 31 and thus take the U.K. out of the EU without a deal by default.

Johnson appeared later in the evening of this first session of Parliament after the Supreme Court ruling. And just like his attorney general he was in no mind to utter words of contrition despite having been judged to have acted unlawfully. He went on the attack against Corbyn and the other opposition parties, accusing them of cowardice, of blocking the will of the British people, while challenging them to table a motion of no confidence and trigger a snap early general election.

Corbyn’s studied excoriation of Johnson’s conduct and integrity in response, which was only superseded by his chilling vocal exegesis of the Government’s Operation Yellowhammer document, which war-gamed the likely economic consequences of a no deal Brexit. It makes grim reading, predicting chaos at the ports, rising energy prices, shortages of some medicines and medical supplies, and the admission that the those on low incomes will be disproportionately impacted.

Corbyn Survives at Labour Conference

Jeremy Corbyn. (David Holt via Flickr)

Compared to the drama that unfolded in the Supreme Court and the first session of Parliament upon its resumption, the Labour Party’s annual conference was a decidedly benign affair, despite the ructions and political skulduggery that ensued.

The attempt by his allies on the party ruling’s National Executive Council (NEC) to abolish the position of deputy leader, thus rendering Tom Watson powerless, backfired spectacularly; with the outpouring of protest from the Blairite wing of the party and the media compelling Corbyn to intervene to get the NEC to row back tabling such a controversial motion.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, it was quickly followed by the publication of a damning memo recently sent to Corbyn and his team by one of his former’s key aides, setting out his intention to leave his post by the end of the year, while mounting withering criticism of the leadership team.

The Watson imbroglio and the Fisher memo, made it appear that the final Labour Party conference prior to one of the most important general elections in modern British history was destined to go down as one of the party’s most schismatic and shambolic. This was before the attempt by the Remain wing of the party to push through a motion that would have committed the party to a clear remain position on Brexit going into that election.

It amounted to a challenge to Corbyn’s authority, given that he and the party had up till then embraced a position on Brexit of first a general election, followed by a special conference (in the event that Labour won said election) to thrash out the party’s official policy on Brexit as it entered negotiations with the EU. This alongside the pledge to put any deal reached with Brussels to the British people in the form of a second referendum.

Corbyn managed to prevail and defeat this motion, thus solidifying his leadership. It was a key moment – one that had the effect of breathing new morale-boosting energy into the conference as the party reunited around its leader and his nuanced efforts at straddling a most precarious Brexit-Remain divide. It is a divide that has driven a stake into the heart of social cohesion across the country’s regions and constituent nations.

Whither Brexit?

The crisis of neoliberalism (or market fundamentalism) that swept the world in 2008 was in the U.K. compounded by savage Tory austerity. In working class communities battered and bruised most by this mass experiment in human despair, the resulting anger went some way to producing Brexit in 2016. This in turn sparked a political crisis, which in its turn has given birth to the present constitutional crisis.

What can be said with certainty is that any celebration over the Supreme Court ruling as a portent of the end of Johnson’s government is as premature as the confidence of Johnson’s supporters that his hard Brexit stridency will ultimately prevail.

As Cromwell presciently warned: “Do not trust the cheering, for those persons would shout as much if you or I were going to be hanged.” Cromwell, of course, later went on to actually dissolve Parliament and install himself in power as a military dictator.

“History repeats, the first as tragedy, then as farce,” Karl Marx reminds us. Brexit has now taken the UK into the realms of tragedy. We are yet to find out what farce is going to look like.

consortiumnews.com

Brexit has been a fascinating thing to watch. Despite all of the twists and turns, the incomprehensible motions, legal maneuvers and behavior of Prime Minister Theresa “I Surrender” May, for me there’s been a simple through-line to it all.

The EU does not want Brexit and if it were to happen it will inflict incredible damage to the British political system and its integrity.

This is really no different than what happened in Greece in 2015. And it was directed by Angela Merkel than and it is being directed by Merkel today.

The EU’s intransigence in negotiations, aside from it having no other option, is an elaborate bluff to separate and divide the British political class, now that the people have voted to leave.

It preyed on the divisions within the U.K.’s structure, empowering Scottish ‘nationalists,’ the SNP, while offering power to the eternal victim-status seeking Labour leadership. It knew it had a Tory leadership willing to play ball with them to find a way to deliver BRINO – Brexit in Name Only – and a civil service that would provide all the supporting data to gaslight millions.

The hysteria over a ‘No-Deal’ Brexit is akin to the hysteria we’re seeing among the hard-left over Climate Change. So, I found it fitting watching a bunch of bare-assed, self-absorbed British watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside – disrupting Parliament this week.

Both are built on foundations of sand. And both are expressions of the fear that their narratives and political power have peaked and are now on the down side. And when people begin to feel the loss of power and the fear kicks in, they become more desperate and more willing to cheat to win.

Make no mistake, the EU is cheating here. Billions in free advertising for their union is at their beck and call and put into the mouths of MPs, Cabinet Ministers and the media to peddle the worst and most disingenuous arguments against Brexit.

And that pressure is causing real cracks in the British political system.

While Labour, the SNP and the new Independent Group try to paint Brexit as some “Tory psychodrama” for political gains to blame shift their own betrayal of voters the Tories themselves are now fracturing under the pressure somewhat.

From Nick Boles resigning from the party after his ‘Common Market 2.0’ proposal failed to Richard Drax’s mea culpa for mistakenly voting for the May/Merkel Surrender Treaty on March 29^th we’re seeing the effects this is having on everyone.

Some of it is Kabuki theatre to be sure. Boles’ resignation was an obvious stunt meant to shame MPs. Even Drax’s regrets had an air of worry over the voter backlash for betraying the Leave vote.

And look at the results. Arch-Remainer and former Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, who spent months working with EU officials to strategize openly on how to betray Brexit now faces de-selection from his constituents.

That’s what it takes to get rid of these people. The so-called Independent Group resigned from their parties and refused to call by-elections to confirm their seats. This is completely against all political protocol and an insult to their constituents. But what would you expect from an arrogant, self-important ignoramus like Anna Soubry?

The reason the EU’s plan to scuttle Brexit is failing is precisely because of what I saw months ago – the British people want their will, no matter how flawed, respected. And the political class is too consumed with its own self-righteousness that it cannot see this.

The entire process has made a mockery of the democratic institutions that exist across the West.

And that was precisely the effect the EU wanted out of all of this. Because even if they lose the latest Battle of Britain, they win in creating the philosophical case as to why direct representation is a stupid form of government.

The EU is dream arrangement for globalists. It is an unelected leadership mostly immune from the changes in demographics and voter opinions pushing humanity, a base and unruly lot in their mind, towards their chosen outcomes.

By exposing the divisions and corruption of the world’s oldest parliament the EU is furthering the argument for its inevitability in the minds of the younger generation in Britain, setting older, more experienced Leavers against younger, less worldly Remainers.

But it’s not working as well as they expected. The fear campaign has radicalized the hard-core Remain camp. They were always going to be who they are. What it hasn’t done is soften the middle of the electorate. In fact, if anything, they’ve hardened in their stance that they don’t want to be ruled by either Westminster or Brussels.

Now this is music to my libertarian ears, of course, because it highlights what happens when the costs of the political and economic status quo rise above the benefits of it – anger and rebellion.

We’re seeing it in France. We’ve yet to truly see it in Italy. And we’re only beginning to see it in Britain.

The politicians are trying to do the impossible with an angry electorate – betray their wishes and blame the other guy.

Theresa May, in the words of one of my followers, “is acting like a used-car salesman wearing down a mark.”

But her act has worn thin and so has the bullying act in Brussels. And the same can be said for the multiple levels of betrayal of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour.

As we approach April 12^th, May will try her blackmail scheme one more time to satisfy her puppet-masters, this time trying to bring Corbyn into her vortex of failure, while deeper divisions are revealed within the House of Commons and more MPs resign, threaten and whine about the looming catastrophe of ‘extremists.’

The United Kingdom may not survive Brexit in its current form. But many who are pushing for disunion, the Scots, may find themselves surprised when they themselves have to face their voters.

And that would leave the EU wondering what went wrong, as they got everything they wanted – a broken, divided U.K. – and still lost the war.

When Sir Richard Dearlove was Head of MI6, the Blairites adored him as he approved the lying Dossier on Iraqi WMD which led to wars, invasion, the death of millions and the destabilisation which continues to wreck the entire Middle East. Now, as he writes to Tory constituency chairman advocating the hardest of hard Brexits, had they any capacity for self-reflection the Blairites would probably be thinking it was after all not such a great move of Tony to appoint the hardest of hard right nutters to head our overseas intelligence service.

In my last post, I noted how evidence against me was actually manufactured when I opposed the policy of torture and extraordinary rendition. I have explained ad nauseam that, having been in a senior position in the FCO at the time, I know that Blair’s dossier on Weapons of Mass Destruction was a tissue of deliberate lies, and not just an honest mistake; furthermore it is impossible to read the Chilcot report without coming to that conclusion.

The UK has security services which operate dishonestly and illegally. Interestingly, I cannot say that they are currently out of the control of the UK government; the evidence is rather they are willing to engage in every dirty and dishonest trick at the behest of corrupt politicians like Blair.

Dearlove regularly features in the media shilling for maximum Cold War. His letter yesterday on the dangers of intelligence and security co-operation with the EU, as undermining NATO and the UK/US/Five Eyes intelligence arrangements, is simply barking mad. There is no evidence of this whatsoever. He makes no attempt to describe the mechanism by which the dire consequences he predicts will follow. Amusingly enough, although those consequences are dire to Dearlove, to me they are extremely desirable. If I thought that May’s withdrawal agreement would undermine NATO and the CIA, I would be out on the streets campaigning for it.

But there is a very serious point. There is something very wrong indeed with the UK security services, which are most certainly not a force for freedom or justice. That MI6 can be headed by as extreme a figure as Dearlove, underlines the threat that the security services pose to any progressive movement in politics.

If Scotland becomes independent, it must not mirror the repressive UK security services. Furthermore it must be very chary indeed of employing anybody currently working for the UK security services. If Jeremy Corbyn comes to power in Westminster, he will never achieve any of his objectives in restoring a basic level of social justice and equality to society in England and Wales, without revolutionary change in major institutions including the security services.

My own view on Brexit is that the best deal for England and Wales would be EEA and customs union, essentially the Norway option. It seems that the Labour leadership have essentially got that right, but are making a complete pig’s ear of articulating it, presumably because of their desire not to antagonise their anti-immigrant voters.

Scotland demonstrably has a strong and strengthening pro-EU majority and this is the logical time for Scotland to move to Independence, with the assurance of strong international support. I trust the Scottish government is finally going to move decisively in that direction inside the next month.

craigmurray.org.uk