Two key points the discussion has mostly missed:

1) It has been a bipartisan Justice Department policy for years to attempt to establish that the First Amendment does not apply to non-US citizens

2) Why has the Trump administration chosen Mahmoud Khalil out of thousands of potential victims; about as problematic a test case as can be imagined?

First Amendment Protection

The outrageous arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil by Immigration Control Enforcement is a new front in the widespread attack on free speech on Palestine in the USA. Indeed free speech on Palestine is under severe attack throughout almost the entire western world.

There is no shortage of excellent commentary and analysis on the Khalil case and its multiple ramifications. The characterisation of criticism of Israel as anti-semitism, the fake narrative of a threat to Jewish students, the denial of the right to protest, the attack on academic freedom, these are all aspects of the case which shed a horrifying light on the devastating effect on civil liberties of explicit Zionist control of the political system.

The same can be said of the arbitrary detention, the lack of access to lawyers and the characterisation of dissent as “terrorism”.

But it has not been much discussed that the central legal issue in the case – whether non-US citizens have First Amendment rights or whether free speech only applies to US citizens – is not an innovation by the Trump administration.

That non-US citizens are not protected by the First Amendment was the key issue pursued by Biden’s Justice Department in the extradition hearings of Julian Assange.

Indeed it was the insistence of English Court of Appeal judge Dame Victoria Sharp that the US must confirm that Assange did have First Amendment protection, that led directly to the Biden administration dropping the case and agreeing a plea deal, rather than give the assurance which Sharp requested.

Key paragraphs of the relevant judgment are here

…

…

The British judges took the view that not to apply the First Amendment to non-citizens would breach the principle of non-discrimination (as guaranteed in the European Convention of Human Rights), and I am sure they were right.

This is a very worrying doctrine which the US Executive is attempting to enforce. But Trump did not initiate it – Biden tried it too, on Assange.

Why Mahmoud Khalil?

Thousands of foreign students in the USA have spoken out and demonstrated against the genocide in Gaza. I am sure that amongst them there will be one or two individuals who can plausibly be depicted as jihadist, who may indeed have actual anti-semitic tendencies and who are only in the US on a student visa.

So why pick on Mahmoud Khalil, who is none of these things?

He has a pregnant American wife and is in possession of a Green Card residency. Those factors may conceivably play into the First Amendment argument in his favour, if judges are looking to fudge the issue.

In addition to which, while he undoubtedly was in the leadership group of protestors at Columbia University, he appears to have played a responsible role in liaising with authorities. The cherry on the cake is that he is a former British Government employee, having worked in the British Embassy in Lebanon, on Syrian affairs.

This is where the story starts to become very murky. I was told by Resistance-linked contacts in Lebanon that not only was Khalil not viewed as pro-Resistance to Israel while there, he was believed to be involved in UK government attempts to undermine the Assad regime by promotion of jihadist groups.

Free Palestine TV, which is Lebanon-based, has the same information.

It is important to understand how deeply the UK has been involved in anti-Syrian activity in Lebanon. Training and equipping of al-Nusra/ISIS/HTS units was carried out by British special forces based at Rayak airbase in the Bekaa Valley, who were certainly still there in January after HTS conquered Damascus.

Contrary to some reports, Mahmoud Khalil would not have worked for MI6 in the Embassy. MI6 stations do not employ foreign nationals. He would have worked for the Political and Information Sections, under diplomats who cooperated closely with MI6 or in some instances were active “undeclared” members of MI6.

Middle East Eye describes Khalil’s role in the Embassy as a “programme manager” running Chevening scholarships. I know this programme extremely well. While I have no reason to doubt Khalil did this, it would amount to no more than 10% of anybody’s time and would not require the UK security clearance which the article states that Khalil received.

The simple truth is that anybody working in good faith in the British Embassy in Lebanon can be no friend of the resistance to Israel. Everything the British Embassy do in Lebanon is intrinsically linked to the overriding goal of promoting the interests of Israel, particularly through weakening Hezbollah, and this is especially true when it comes to programmes into Syria running out of Beirut.

So how did Khalil move from British government operative to Palestinian student activist?

And then, why on earth did the Trump regime pick him for its first high-profile deportation?

I can see three plausible explanations for Khalil’s behaviour:

1) He was never pro-British but was infiltrating the Embassy for the Palestinians

2) He was never pro-Palestinian but was infiltrating the protest movement for the British government

3) He was not very political but was moved recently to activism by the genocide in Gaza

Of these, option 3) seems to me the most plausible, though all are certainly possible.

It would be a delicious irony if the Trump regime had arrested a British agent by accident, but this seems to me unlikely. I do not think MI6 would run a Palestinian agent in the USA without informing the CIA – although they may have done if there were a specific concern that the CIA would leak the identity.

If Khalil were a British agent he could have been arrested for protection if there were concerns he had been “made”, or he could have been arrested because the Americans found out and were furious at not being informed. But I do not think these are the likely scenarios.

It seems to me much more probable that a once-complacent Khalil changed his mind and became more – righteously – radical due to the genocide in Gaza.

In which case the motive for choosing him as the target for arrest is very plain. Both the US and UK will be worried about revelations Khalil might make about support to jihadists in Syria from his time working on this in Lebanon. Whisking him into incommunicado detention, whilst maximum pressure is applied to persuade him to keep silent, is then an obvious move.

It is important for freedom of speech and for the rights in general of immigrants in the USA that Mr Khalil is free. It is obviously profoundly important for him and his family. I do not want anything I have written to detract from that.

But the puzzle of why such an extremely complicated target for the test case was chosen, when there exist far lower-hanging fruit, is one that needs to be considered. I hope I have offered some possible lines of thought you find useful.

How to make losing the war in the Ukraine look like a win – this is President Donald Trump’s purpose in presenting himself and his administration as in favour of peace and of cashback to the United States. If he succeeds, he won’t appear to be running away from the battlefield, as the Ford Administration did in Saigon in April 1975, and the Biden Administration in Kabul in August 2021. 

This is a hustle – it is an attempt by a combination of threats and rewards to convert a political and military defeat into a ready money profit;  call the process peacemaking, Trump himself the peacemaker, and the outcome peace. 

Trump believes this will be easier to negotiate with President Vladimir Putin than the military terms for an end-of-war armistice, capitulation by the Ukrainian military, and demilitarization of what remains of Ukrainian territory. About these issues, no US official has had anything certain to say yet. A money-for-peace deal is also simpler to manage than the creation of a new mutual security architecture for Russia, Europe and NATO which was first proposed by the Russian Foreign Ministry in December 2021.  

“Lemme me tell ya wha’ the set-up was,” said Howard Lutnick, one of Trump’s chief hustlers and now US Commerce Secretary. Lutnick has explained that what the plan  is, and what has been and still is expected from Vladimir Zelensky in Kiev. “The President wants peace…Like any great mediator, he’s going to beat both sides down, to get them to the table…We’ve given three hundred billion dollars to the Ukraine. Is it difficult to see what side we’re on. Gimme a break…Let’s go force Russia into a reasonable peace deal….Enough already.”

With Dimitri Lascaris we discuss each of the elements of this hustle as it is being applied to French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and then turned into economic war against Canada.The podcast runs for an hour. We focus on Canada starting at Minute 33:50. Click to view and listen. The Youtube version is here.

For more about Melinda McCracken with whom I first began to love Canada, read this.  

Her memoir of growing up in Winnipeg before Americanization began in the 1950s can be read here

In describing Glenn Gould, the greatest of Canadians and defender against US political pressure campaigns in his time, I misspoke in quoting his defence of his driving. “I suppose it can be said that I’m an absent-minded driver,” he said. “It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.”

This week, on March 2, Chrystia Freeland has claimed she played a “leading role” in the operation to steal the Russian Central Bank’s reserves in February 2022, and then “a key role” in transferring $50 billion of the stolen Russian money to the Ukraine. “I led that charge politically,” she swears, hand on heart.

In this new clip, Freeland is campaigning for Liberal Party member votes to succeed Justin Trudeau as party leader — acting prime minister until the election which must be held within  eight months. 

Freeland misrepresents the financial transfers to the Ukraine and her own role. She claims that $50 billion of the frozen Russian Central Bank reserves has been transferred to the Ukraine but this is false. The $50 billion has been loaned to the Ukraine — $20 billion by the US, €18.1 billion by the European Union, ¥473 billion ($3.2 billion) from Japan, £2.3 billion by the UK ($3 billion), and C$5 billion from Canada. Interest payments on the loan are being paid out of interest earned on the confiscated Russian funds by the Belgian clearing fund, Euroclear.  For the time being, the Russian money is paying loan interest only; Freeland implies that it will be Russian money to pay the $50 billion principal when the loan falls due.

For details of the scheme, read this. In its latest financial report, the Belgium-based clearing house Euroclear reveals how the scheme is making profit for itself and tax revenue for the Belgian government. 

The Euroclear report also exposes another of Freeland’s fabrications. Canada’s finance minister between 2020 and 2024, Freeland claims that very little of the Russian reserves were in Canadian dollars because “Putin knew we were not his pals even before the war.” In fact, according to Euroclear, there were more Canadian dollars in the Russian Central Bank holdings than US dollars.

Source: https://www.euroclear.com/

First published on Substack

I propose a new sociopolitical model that I call Voluntary Democracy. You may reasonably ask how I became arrogant enough to even contemplate doing such a thing.

I am no one or everyone, depending on your perspective. I am a very average bloke with some limited life experience, a modicum of knowledge, and sufficient interest to talk and write about the topic we are about to discuss.

I do not profess to have all the answers or even know what most of the questions are. I am just about as flaky as it is possible for a man to be and am undeserving of your trust which is among the reasons I ask you not to place any in me.

I am merely proposing an idea. My only hope is that you consider it. If I’m lucky perhaps you will question it and, if I’m very fortunate, start expanding on it.

We are going discuss some of the problems with representative democracy which is the political model of state preferred by most people I will refer to a statists. I’ll call this model simply the state.

I was born and live in the the state called the United Kingdom (UK). Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be ruled by a king or his government, but that is the nature of the state. It’s not a choice to be a subject of the state. Though statists claim it is.

Therefore, I will use the current alleged constitutional monarchy, the claimed basis for the UK state, as my test case.

What Democracy Is and What It Is Not

Democracy is a political system first formally established in ancient Greece by Cleisthenes (c. 570–500 BCE). Cleisthenes introduced “sortition”—which is the random selection of citizens drawn by lot. Under his reforms, the Boule (executive) proposed legislation, and the Ecclesia (legislature) would then debate the proposed statute laws and vote on their enactment.

The citizen members of the Boule and the Ecclesia were selected by sortition. Once their work was done, the Boule and the Ecclesia were disbanded. The people would return to their everyday lives. The next time the Boule and the Ecclesia were needed, sortition would again be used and a different group of people selected.

Sortition was also used to form juries, whose citizen members sat in the Dikasteria (courts). The jury in the Dikasteria represented the highest law in the land. Any Dikasteria could overturn the enactments of the Ecclesia. This political system enabled the people to create legislation (statute law) as well as law derived from precedent (case law).

Crucially, Cleisthenes empowered the Dikasteria (the law courts) to overrule (annul) any law that was found to be unjust in a jury-led trial. There were no judges. Magistrates were merely administrators for the court. If the defendant was found guilty, both the judgement (ruling) and the nature of the punishment (sentence) were decided by the citizen jurors.

If the full application of the law (including legislation) did not serve justice, the jury could annul it. The defendant may have technically contravened the law but could still be found not guilty if the jury believed the defendant had acted honourably, without any intent to cause harm or loss (mens rea).

In such a circumstance, it was the law, not the accused, that would be found at fault. Any flawed legislation would be wiped from the statute scrolls and the Boule and the Ecclesia would have to amend or abolish it in light of the Dikasteria’s ruling.

The word “democracy” (demokratia) derives from “demos” (people) and “kratos” (power). Literally translated, it means “people power.” Cleisthenes proposed a governance system whereby the people were sovereign by virtue of exercising the rule of law through jury-led trials. This, and only this, is “democracy” and it has nothing to do with voting or electing anyone.

So-called “representative democracy” is not democracy. In representative democracies the people are permitted to select representatives who make all decisions for them for the next few years. During their rule, the representatives enforce their collective will upon the people.

Representative democracy is based upon the people handing all their decision making power over to a tiny clique of privileged rulers. It is the antithesis of democracy.

We are allowed to elect the legislature, which we call Parliament (Ecclesia). The dominant faction, usually formed from the most popular mob—chosen by those who bothered to vote—then forms the executive. We call this the government (Boule).

Depending on how dominant the ruling mob is—determined by their relative number of parliamentary seats—the executive (Boule or government) can either easily compel the legislature (Ecclesia) to adopt its desired policies (legislation) or engage in some horsetrading with their “opposition” to amend their legislation (policy diktat) prior to its almost inevitable adoption. “Opposition” is a misleading term because the people who actually rule control both the government and the so-called opposition.

The current British government, despite only securing votes from a small minority of the population, enjoys a massive parliamentary majority. The government (Boule) can “whip” its own representative members of Parliament (MP’s) to push through pretty much any policy it likes without bothering to consult anybody.

In the UK’s representative democracy, while statists think they are electing people who will represent their views and prioritise addressing their concerns, Parliament declares itself sovereign over all of the people. Statists actually select their own rulers—of sorts.

Parliament’s claim to sovereignty is false. The British have a codified, written constitution that makes the people sovereign. That doesn’t matter, however, to government as long as the population continues to assume Parliament’s claim is valid.

The advantage of “representative democracy,” from the perspective of the oligarchs who actually rule, is that it allows them to rule in perpetuity. Through lobbying, political party and campaign funding, government partnerships, corruption, coercion and orders issued to puppet MP’s, the vast bulk of parliamentarians represent only oligarchs’ views and prioritise oligarchs’ concerns. Oligarchs aren’t overly concerned about who wins elections.

In the UK’s representative democracy the courts (Dikestaria) are led by the Judiciary. As a Common Law jurisdiction, juries in the UK can still technically “annul” legislation. The judiciary “instructs” juries but never informs them they can annul. Consequently, British juries remain oblivious of their own rights and powers. The judiciary really doesn’t like jury trials in any event, and is working with the government to do away with them if they can.

The state supposedly operates on the comically misnamed separation of powers model. Everyone who lives and works in the UK knows this is total bunk.

The three branches of government comprise of the executive (government or Boule) and the legislature (Parliament or Ecclesia) which together form a single, oligarch controlled rule-making institution. The third branch, the judiciary (courts or Dikesteria), forces the people to comply with the rules and punishes those who don’t. It rarely, if ever, rules against the oligarchs’ rule-making institution and is completely divorced from anything the rest of us might consider justice. The only people who don’t have to obey dictatorial rule are the oligarchs who are above all the rules they impose on everyone else, often because they can buy themselves out of having to comply with any.

This, then, is the state.

Introducing Voluntary Democracy

The problem with “representative democracies” is that they always resolve in kakistocracies ruled by oligarchs. In other words, dictatorships. The people are merely given the illusion of choice through anointment ceremonies called elections where they are invited to crown the next gaggle of kakistocrats who will rule them on behalf of the oligarchs.

I suggest the solution to this is Voluntary Democracy.

Voluntary democracy wouldn’t necessitate reinventing the wheel. The three branches of governance would remain and the process of proposing, enacting, and ruling on legislation would continue.

The executive would be replaced with a body formed of citizens who would be randomly selected by sortition from the whole population and would serve on a temporary or perhaps issue by issue basis. We could call this the Boule or something else. How about “voluntary-executive” perhaps? Let’s use “the Volexec.”

The legislature would be a larger body—selected and serving in the same way—who would then deliberate on and enact legislation proposed by the executive. Again, we could stick with Ecclesia, but let’s use “the Volegis.”

The biggest procedural difference in a voluntary democracy, other than the selection process, would be the abolition of bench trials. All justice would be dispensed by jurors in jury led trials and judges would be replaced by conveners whose only role would be to facilitate proceedings.

The most important difference would be that all juries would be sovereign. Juries and only juries would represent the supreme rule of law in the whole jurisdiction and their only concern would be to ensure justice was served. We shall call these voluntary Dikasteria “the Volcourts.”

Through jury-led trials, these sortition selected groups of citizens—jurors— sitting in Volcourts across the land, would have the united and annexed power to annul any and all legislation and set case precedents wherever they deemed it necessary. In the event of annulment, the Volexec and the Volegis would need to either amend or abolish the faulty legislation accordingly.

There would be no government and no resultant state in a voluntary democracy. Voluntary societies would be jurisdictions without rulers, not jurisdictions without rules. Nor would voluntary democracy necessitate the existence of nations, though people could form them voluntarily and call themselves whatever they liked. Therefore, as we proceed to Part 2 and move away from the UK based example to broader considerations, I won’t reference the concept of nations but rather use “jurisdictions.”

Voluntary democratic jurisdiction won’t be perfect and they won’t solve all our problems. Nonetheless, I think they could resolve many of the injustices we currently suffer. Not least of all by effectively removing oligarchs’ political power.

To realise the promise of a voluntary democracy we would all need to work through a major philosophical shift. Our fundamental belief and value systems would need to change. For example, obedience would no longer be a virtue but rather a failing. Initially, individuals would have to start by learning to think differently. Ultimately, if we wanted to operate voluntary democracies at the macro scale, all of us would need to develop and adopt a new political philosophy. Statists, who form the majority, all currently share essentially one political philosophy so there is no reason why voluntaryists couldn’t do the same and become the majority themselves. We’ll expand on this in Part 3.

So I hope some will be sufficiently intrigued to read Part 2. If not, thanks for voluntarily reading this article.

Please consider supporting my work. I really need your help if I am going to continue to provide the research and analysis that you value on a full-time basis. You can support my work for less than the price of a cup of coffee via my donor page or alternative become a paid subscriber to my Substack. I extend my gratitude to my editor, who has provided invaluable contributions to my articles since October 2021 (but who, for personal reasons, prefers to remain anonymous).

Check Out My Substack

Please subscribe to the Iain Davis RSS feed

Please feel free to share anything from iaindavis[.]com excluding any and all third party content. I use a Creative Commons License. All I ask is that you give credit to the author and clearly mark any changes you make. Please share my work widely. Censorship is increasing and we need to get this information out there. If you value what I do then please consider supporting my work. Many thanks.

Related posts:

Voluntary Democracy – Part 3 Voluntary Democracy – Part 2 Some Call It Conspiracy Theory – Part 1 Some Call It Conspiracy Theory – Part 2

by John Helmer, Moscow
[@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)

The war to destroy Russia has been an evil in which the British, Americans, Germans and French have combined for more than a century now. In the present stage on the Ukrainian battlefield, every weapon and force fielded by the Anglo-Americans and their allies has been defeated; the Ukraine itself, territorially and politically, has been destroyed.

No serious Russian believes this war will be over when the incoming US president claims the personal credit for negotiating end-of-war terms short of the US side’s capitulation.

About men like him and negotiations like his, it was the Irishman Edmund Burke who in his 1770 essay “Thoughts on the Present Discontents” issued this warning: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”* In the present war against Russia, the bad men have combined across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Against them on the information war front, there are very few good men – not one in the mainstream media, almost none in the alternative media.

The power of state repression is only half the reason. The other half is the competition for money. In competing for internet media subscribers, even those tempted to be good will be motivated not to associate, to compete against each other instead, and thereby “fall, one by one in the contemptible struggle.”

In propaganda war, the bad men must convince their paymasters more than their audience that they are winning. Reaching this point today has required a series of confidence-building, warmaking preparations – the putsch in Kiev of February 2014; the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in July 2014; and the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, in March 2018. The official narrative of Novichok, the Russian chemical warfare weapon allegedly used against the Skripals, has just reached its climax in London. A state-sponsored report will be published in a few weeks’ time. It will conclude that President Vladimir Putin had the means, opportunity and motive to kill the Skripals, and is guilty of attempted murder on English soil.

But the forensic evidence which has slipped into the public record from the British intelligence and security services, the chemical warfighters at Porton Down, and the Whitehall staffs advising the prime minister proves the narrative and the indictment are false. Weapon, crime scene, victim, killer, motive – all have been faked. By the Anglo-American and Canadian law standards of reasonable doubt and balance of probabilities, the prosecution of the case against Russia should have collapsed. Except, of course, that in the present state of war,  this hasn’t happened.

The new book, _Long Live Novichok! The British poison which fooled the world_is the lone voice to explain for the time being at least; it is also the only platform to defend Sergei and Yulia Skripal as political prisoners of the British for the past seven years. Because they didn’t die after they had been sprayed with a British poison, they have been kept in hospital under forced sedation and tracheostomy; then held under guard, in isolation, incommunicado. Their telephone calls to family in Russia, made in a hurry and in secret, stopped five years ago.

For the first time the book documents the British presentation in public of the poison weapon itself, revealing the clue of the colour of Novichok. This is the evidence that the murder weapon wasn’t Russian, it wasn’t Novichok at all.

In today’s podcast from Canada, Chris Cook and I discuss the reasons for the failure of Novichok to kill anyone, and its success at brainwashing everyone, or almost everyone.  

The contrast with other media campaigns of resistance to western information warfare is a glaring one. For example, the campaign to defend Julian Assange and free him from a British prison and trial in the US has turned out to have been a popular success. However, Assange himself, his Wikileaks platform, and his London advocates have done nothing to expose the Novichok deception operation. They are good men who have done nothing — their media success has failed to deter or stop the Anglo-American march to war in the Ukraine; Assange’s lawyers are supporters of the war against Russia. Assange’s alt-media reporters have pretended they are the only truth-tellers in the present discontents; their war is against their media competitors.  

For their names; for the truth of the Novichok story; and for the after-life of the Novichok poison in the coming war against Russia, click to listen.

Begin at Minute 31:00. Source: [https://gradio.substack.com/](https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-radio-with-chris-cook-jeremy-c35)

For the introduction to this broadcast, access to the 20-year Gorilla Radio archive, and Chris Cook’s blog, click here and here.

[*] It is usually believed that what Edmund Burke (_right_) said was: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” As a warning against inaction or apathy, it’s salutary, if not quite right. But Burke didn’t say this. Instead, what he wrote was the line quoted in the lead. He then elaborated on how the moral duty of good men should be exercised in action. “It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth,that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of public duty. That duty demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated. When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it.” Read Burke’s essay in [full](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2173/2173-h/2173-h.htm).

by Editor - Thursday, January 16th, 2025

The Genocide of the Palestinian people began 76 years ago. What may be drawing to a close is merely a particularly intense phase in the Genocide.

Gaza is destroyed. 92% of its housing has gone. Its water treatment and sanitation, electricity generation, food processing, farming, and fishing are all now incapable of sustaining much life. Its hospitals, health centres, universities, colleges, and schools are all now destroyed, as are its municipal buildings, waste disposal, road surfaces, drainage channels, theatres, cultural centres, cinemas, cafés.

What is left is 1.8 million cold and starving people, malnourished, soaked, ill-clothed, living in tents and defecating in trenches. Tens of thousands will die in these conditions however fast aid comes – and you can be 100% certain Israeli obstructionism will prevent it from coming fast.

But even if they can be physically saved, the culture and fabric of society are damaged beyond repair. The psychological damage is immense. The institutions of normality that might permit recovery are non-existent.

Nobody really knows the true number killed so far in the genocide. The Palestinian health authorities, run by the elected Hamas representatives, have been scrupulous in giving out numbers only of those officially certified dead following the recovery and identification of their bodies.

Given the almost total destruction of Gaza’s buildings and the unavailability of rescue equipment and the lack of ceasefire for body recovery, I suspect the 46,707 official death toll as of last night (and the Israelis already killed over 80 again today) may prove to be way short of the truth, which could be double or more from unaccounted bodies.

That is without the Lancet study suggesting that 50% again may have died subsequently from wounds. A similar number to the dead are permanently maimed.

The worst effects may not in the long term even be in Palestine at all. The Western world has, in the support of its rulers for Israel as it commits Genocide, abandoned any pretence to wish to maintain the system of international law that had been extended and developed post World War 2. Untold horrors of war may be unleashed as a result in the next decade.

In both the USA and the UK, governments ignored their own senior officials and legal advisers to break the human rights constraints which those nations had imposed upon their foreign policy, particularly with regard to the supply of weapons.

In Poland, France and several other NATO countries, the governments have openly repudiated their duty to enforce warrants of the International Criminal Court.

In the UK, Germany, USA, France and throughout the Western world, there has been a massive rolling back of long-cherished and hard-won rights of freedom of expression and assembly, explicitly to prevent criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.

There has been concerted social media suppression to the same end on all major online platforms, and a seizure of Tik Tok in the USA avowedly because of its failure to repress speech critical of Israel.

The unanimity of mainstream media support for Israel, and the tiny or no space for any dissenting view, has become so established a part of the political landscape it can go unnoticed. But it needs to be highlighted.

In his closing address, the one useful thing Biden said was the correct observation about the USA becoming an oligarchy. The whole world is becoming intensely oligarchic, with an astronomical expansion of the wealth gap between rulers and ruled these past twenty years.

The impunity of Israel, and the decline of international law, is a direct consequence of this. There is a particular truth that encompasses almost every Western country and, interestingly, unites both the Arab and the Western worlds.

That truth is this. The wealthy oligarchic elites who control media and politics are extremely pro-Israel. The people are not.

The gap between the support for Israel among the super wealthy and powerful, and the view of the majority of normal people, really deserves serious study to explain it. Not the least interesting is the fact that not even the almost 100% mainstream media pro-Israeli propaganda has been enough to convince the peoples of the world to support the Genocide, outwith the special cases of Germany and the US religious Zionists.

So, what happens now? Well, I was in Beirut when it was carpet bombed in the hours immediately before the ceasefire here took effect, and I expect Israel to massively bomb Gaza’s tent cities in the next three days.

I have also seen Israel break the ceasefire in Lebanon every single day, and I expect them to do that in Gaza too.

Israel daily breaches the ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon both inside and outside the demilitarised zone. Three days ago they killed 5 civilians. pic.twitter.com/MiAQpZ4AZI

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) January 15, 2025

So long as the USA and Israel designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation, they will claim the right to bomb and kill at any time as a “counter-terrorism operation”, irrespective of any ceasefire agreement. That is their formal position, just as it is their formal position with regard to Hezbollah and the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon.

The Israelis did not start killing Palestinians on 8 October 2023 and they will not stop killing them now.

I expect the ceasefire agreement to go ahead as projected, with occasional Israeli “anti-terrorist” attacks continuing in Gaza. The prisoner exchanges will happen. The Israelis will continually delay and renege on the provisions on aid access and on withdrawal of troops. Palestinians in Gaza will die in large numbers of disease, hunger and poor sanitation.

Just as the ceasefire in Lebanon led to Israel immediately invading Southern Syria, Israel will now increase its activity in the West Bank, suppressing resistance together with its proxy “Palestinian Authority” forces and continually seizing land from Palestinians.

I do not doubt that it is true that the Gaza ceasefire is due to Trump telling Netanyahu to stop. As I continually said, Biden’s attempts to restrain Netanyahu were a complete subterfuge and Biden was absolutely committed to the Genocide.

Trump is very difficult to read. When he was elected in 2016, I believed he was less hawkish in foreign policy than Hillary Clinton. Had Clinton been elected, for example, I am sure that she would have immediately laid waste to Syria, which would have been destroyed like Libya – eventually achieved by Biden.

Trump II had seemed an altogether more aggressive persona than Trump I, particularly as regards the Middle East. Yet Trump II has told Netanyahu to stop the Genocide – confirming incidentally that Biden could have done so had he wished.

Biden wanted Genocide.

The myth of Western support for international law and human rights died in Gaza, along with the myth of Western support for the “two-state solution”. There never was a viable two-state solution and it was those states who were loudest in pretending to support it, who vehemently refused to recognise the Palestinian state.

The “two-state solution” was only ever a cover for Zionism. With Gaza now utterly smashed and its population ruined, and the West Bank almost totally expropriated, the pretence of a “two-state solution” has to be finally killed off.

Israel has lost any moral authority for its continued existence. It has proven itself to be a genocidal entity driven by ethno-supremacism. (A people who believe themselves to be a superior or divinely favoured race are ethno-supremacists, regardless of whether their claim of ethnic homogeneity is founded or not.)

Within 48 hours of the Hamas breakout on 7 October I wrote my first piece about it. Often in retrospect reactions to a major incident are too influenced by the emotion of the moment, but actually I am as proud of this as of anything I ever wrote.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Which is not to say I relish violence, quite the opposite. I am in fact pleased that Israeli prisoners as well as Palestinian prisoners will be returned as part of a ceasefire deal.

While the Palestinian resistance are fully entitled to take as many IDF members and reserves prisoner as they can, I cannot approve of the illegal practice of taking children and other complete non-combatants prisoner – and yes I know the Israelis do it on a much larger scale.

Behaving better than the Israelis should be a permanent guide in life.

Unfortunately, it is not the case that colonial settler, racist states cannot triumph. The white settlers in the USA, Canada and Australia did manage to permanently subjugate and almost extinguish the local populations. I have spoken to some wonderful Arab intellectuals these last few weeks who all tend to take the view that Israel’s ultimate defeat is inevitable because the colonial settler state will never be accepted by the Arab populations. I wish I were so confident.

Where I agree with them totally is that the abolition of the terrorist state of Israel must be the goal, not an accommodation with it.

Israel’s pariah status is now assured for a generation, it is deeply split internally and it is dependent on a parent state, the USA, which is losing its relative power and hegemony. Yet for now Israel is expanding. It occupies significantly more territory than it did two years ago and in Syria and Lebanon it has seized control of vital regional water sources. Israel currently has full military control of over 30% of Syria’s fresh water.

Trump probably supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and more. But that does not of necessity mean he supports either the expulsion of their populations or an apartheid state. He may see such heavy state interventions as an interference in the freedom of business to make money, and even undesirable per se.

It is impossible to be certain about what Trump sees as the end goal. From this first indication, it is fair to say his influence is, to this point, more benign than feared.

It is all a house of cards. As of today, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon all have leadership which is, broadly speaking, pro-USA and pro-Israel. Will that still be the case in a decade? Because it is the fact on which Israel depends for its existence.

The other point on which Israel relies is the support of Western governments. But throughout the Western world, the electoral and party systems which maintain the neo-liberal consensus and give voters no real choice at elections across issues ranging from economic policy to support for Israel, are fracturing.

This requires an article in itself, but in the UK, France, Germany and countless other states there is a tectonic shift happening with voters demanding a shift away from the tiny window of orthodox policy.

To date, the populist right has been quickest to take advantage of this shift, and of course benefited from mainstream media cooperation. But the fluidity indicates an impending seismic shift in western domestic political alignment.

That coincides with the disillusionment of Eastern Europe with the EU and NATO and the consequent desperate attempts of the NATO powers to subvert democracy in Georgia, Romania and Moldova.

At some stage China will take a more active interest in the Middle East. Once the Ukraine war has concluded, Russia will undoubtedly turn more attention to the Mediterranean again.

The situation is dynamic. I would not know whether to be more surprised if Trump initiated US attacks on Iran or initiated rebooted nuclear talks and the lifting of sanctions. I suspect the latter surprise to be the more likely.

Today there is at least a moment of hope that the horrible deaths and mutilations in Gaza may be slowed. Let us take that for a moment of respite, and feel the sun upon our faces. Then we continue the fight against evil.

———————–

To be blunt, our two months in Lebanon before Christmas made a slight financial loss. I was delighted with the output of four mini-documentaries and numerous short video reports and articles, some of which individually had millions of viewers. But to date the model of reader-sponsored real overseas journalism is not proven nor stable.

If you have not yet contributed financially, I should be grateful if you could do so. If you have contributed, perhaps you could help further by encouraging others to do so. I would as always stress I do not want anybody to contribute if it causes them the slightest financial hardship.

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

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

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

I have now also started a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

Although the massacres in Sudan and Congo are far more deadly than those in Palestine, it’s the latter that I’m going to talk about today. Indeed, this is the first time we’ve witnessed ethnic cleansing live on our cell phones. I’d like to come back to some information that I’ve already covered in various articles, but which some media obviously don’t want to include in their analyses. I would like to tell you that there is no community fatality: this conflict was not provoked by the people of Palestine, be they Jews, Christians or Muslims, but by outside powers who, for a century, have wanted them never to know peace.

Behind the screens, the Prince of Wales (protector of the Muslim Brotherhood) sees God and becomes King Charles III.

The British creation of Israel

To make myself clear, I’ll start by telling you about the United Kingdom. You attended the coronation of King Charles III. You’ll remember that, in the middle of the ceremony, he took off his rich clothes and dressed in linen. His pages set up screens to prevent the audience from being dazzled. When the screens were removed, he had become king. He was then presented with the symbols of his power, the sceptre and globe. What had happened in those few moments out of public view? The Prince of Wales had seen God, like Moses before the burning bush [1]. This explanation probably sounds far-fetched to you, and you wonder how his subjects could believe such a tall tale. In fact, since James VI in the 16th century, British sovereigns have declared themselves kings of Israel [2]. It was against his conception of divine right that Oliver Cromwell overthrew his son Charles and proclaimed the Commonwealth. However, the Lord Protector was equally enlightened, professing that all Jews should be regrouped in Palestine and Solomon’s Temple rebuilt there [3]. In the end, successive dynasties kept this myth alive. They adopted various rites and imposed others on their subjects, such as Jewish circumcision, which was performed in maternity wards on all newborn males in the Kingdom at birth, during the XIX century.

Two years before the Balfour Declaration (1917), which announced the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, a Jewish diplomat and future Foreign Minister, Lord Herbert Samuel, wrote a memorandum on the Future of Palestine (1915). In it, he argued for a Jewish state that would place the entire Diaspora at the service of the Empire. A little later, he specified that this new state should never be able to ensure its own security, so as to be eternally dependent on the English Crown. This is exactly what we are witnessing today. This is the fate that has cursed the people of Palestine.

Lord Arthur Balfour’s declaration was followed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points. In them, he describes the objectives achieved by his country during the First World War. Point 12 is strangely worded, but at the Paris Conference that drafted the Treaty of Versailles, he specified in writing what was to be understood: the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine (and Kurdistan in Turkey). The World War had brought about a rebalancing of forces, so that Washington was now working alongside London in the defense of common interests.

During the interwar period, Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine went smoothly. Arab landowners readily sold some of their land to Jews. However, as early as 1920, Arab terrorists began murdering Jews. Among the murderers was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who was sentenced by the British to 10 years in prison, but never executed. On the contrary, Lord Herbert Samuel (the man who had written that there should never be security in Palestine), who had become the British High Commissioner in Palestine, pardoned him and appointed him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, ostensibly to maintain a balance between the two great local families.

Then came a Salafist (i.e. a Muslim wishing to live like the Prophet’s companions in the 7th century), Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who had already organized a revolt against the French in Syria and became imam in Haifa. He decided to wage jihad, not against the British occupiers, but against Jewish immigrants. Various attacks and pogroms against Jews followed. To maintain civil peace, the British killed al-Qassam, after whom the current Hamas al-Qassam Brigades are named.

The death of al-Qassam had solved nothing. The British, true to their colonial technique of "divide and rule", have always developed with one hand what they fought with the other. In 1936, Lord Willam Peel, at the head of an official commission, assured us that peace could only be restored by separating the Arab and Jewish populations into two distinct states. This is what is known today as the "two-state solution".

During the Second World War, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem became an ally of Chancellor Adolf Hitler. In particular, he rallied the Muslims of the Balkans to join the SS and supported the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". For their part, the Jewish fascists (the "revisionist Zionists") of Ukrainian Vladimir Jabotinsky fought alongside the Axis against the British. The Zionists, for their part, fought on the side of the Allies, while challenging the limits that the British theoretically imposed on Jewish immigration - only theoretically.

Fascist historian Benzion Netanyahu and his son, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Source: Prime Minister’s Office

They met in May 1942 at the Baltimore Hotel in New York, under the chairmanship of David Ben Gurion. They laid down the principles of the future State of Israel. Until now, we have been assured that Ben Gourion was a man of good will. However, he had been Jabotinsky’s companion during the inter-war years, and had spoken out in favor of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. A book, released in Hebrew in Israel two weeks ago and published by a major publishing house, assures that he was kept abreast of the Hungarian Rezső Kasztner’s negotiations with Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann that lasted until the fall of the Reich. Kasztner claimed to buy the escape of a million Hungarian Jews. In reality, he saved only his family and friends. Above all, he extorted 8.5 million Swiss francs in gold (a colossal sum at the time) from wealthy Jewish families in Hungary, making them believe in a possible escape [4]. If the documents quoted in this book are accurate, David Ben Gurion would also be a swindler, having deceived his own people.

The United Nations proposed
• not to divide Palestine (not the "Peel two-state solution") ;
• to establish a republican, democratic and representative regime;
• to guarantee the cultures of the various minorities;
• guarantee religious freedom for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Conferences and negotiations followed in vain. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly (which then comprised only 56 member states) approved the partition plan drawn up by a special commission [5]. It was immediately rejected by all Arab countries.

On May 14, 1948 (two and a half months before the end of the British mandate), David Ben Gurion cut short the discussions and unilaterally proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel. The day after the coup, as the 100,000 British troops began to withdraw, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and North Yemen sent their troops to defend the Arabs of Palestine. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood also sent a group of fighters, under the command of Saïd Ramadan (son-in-law of founder Hassan el-Banna and father of Tariq Ramadan), to join them. At the time, however, none of these countries had an army worthy of the name. They were quickly defeated. The myth of the invincibility of Tsahal was born.

However, as my Lebanese friend Hassan Hamade told me, this narrative is a lie. In reality, the Arab heads of state were already committed to Israel, and the Jews were no more valiant than the Arabs.
In this way, Emir Majid Arslan, the Lebanese Minister of Defense, led his troops without encountering much resistance to Bethlehem, which he liberated. The Lebanese President, Bechara el-Khoury, immediately ordered him to abandon the battlefield, which he refused to do. He dismissed him, but he continued the war as a mere officer. In the end, his troops were not defeated by the Jews of Palestine, but by the "Jordanian" army commanded by a British general, John Bagot Glubb (known as "Glubb Pasha") and a hundred or so British officers. In reality, Jordan had no soldiers, but the Arab Legion, formed by the British during the Second World War, had changed its name to the "Jordanian Army" on the first day of the war, while retaining its British officers. It was the British and Jordanians who saved Israel from the start, just as they saved it again when Iran attacked last month. This war was not an attempt to crush Israel, but the first manifestation of Arab Zionism.

The United Nations, worried by these developments, dispatched a special envoy, the Swede Folke Bernadotte, to recuperate the situation after the Israeli coup and the Arab-Israeli war. As soon as he arrived, he realized that the Special Commission that had drawn up the partition plan was ignoring demographic realities: the Israelis were claiming a territory disproportionate to their numbers, and enjoying the support of Arab Zionist governments that had first pretended to play the role of good offices and then to wage war.

On September 17, 1948, "revisionist Zionists" (i.e. Jewish fascists) assassinated Folke Bernadotte and the head of the UN observers, French colonel André Serot. My maternal grandfather, Pierre Gaïsset, was in the next car. He was unharmed and replaced Colonel Serot in his duties. The assassin, Yehoshua Cohen, was never arrested. Two years later, he became the official bodyguard of Prime Minister David Ben Gourion. The leader of the "revisionist Zionists", Yitzhak Shamir, was immediately appointed head of a Mossad department. He carried out secret actions on behalf of the United Kingdom and the United States throughout the Cold War, from Guatemala to the Congo, and later became Prime Minister (1983-84 and 1986-92).

On November 29, 1948, the Ben-Gurion government, which claimed to be searching for the assassins of Folke Bernadotte and André Serot, submitted an application for membership of the United Nations, accompanied by a letter declaring "that the State of Israel hereby accepts, without any reservation whatsoever, the obligations arising from the Charter of the United Nations, and undertakes to observe them from the day it becomes a Member of the United Nations". Convinced, on May 11 1949, the United Nations General Assembly accepted [6]. Today, in view of Israel’s systematic failure to respect its commitments, several states are calling for its membership to be "suspended".

Operation "al-Aqsa Flood”

Let’s move on to the present day. On October 7, 2022, the Palestinian Resistance, on the initiative of Hamas, launched a vast operation against an Israeli military base and also against civilians. Under international law, the Arabs of Palestine are an "occupied population" within the meaning of the Geneva Conventions. However, they can only attack military targets, not Kibbutz or raves. The aim of the operation was to take military prisoners, and possibly civilian hostages too, in order to negotiate the release of Palestinian hostages in Israel, i.e. administrative prisoners. It is not known how many prisoners and hostages they have taken, let alone how many are civilians and how many are military personnel. According to Hamas, more than 30 officers are being held.

This operation, " al-Aqsa Flood”, has been prepared over the last three years in full view of everyone [7]. Hundreds of kilometers of tunnels were dug using tunnel-boring machines, which could only enter Gaza with the approval of Israeli customs. At least 1 million cubic meters of earth and rubble had to be evacuated under the eyes of the Israeli security services. Several training camps were built and hang-glider training was carried out. Not only did the Israeli intelligence services observe all this, but so did other powers such as Egypt and the USA. Numerous reports were sent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet he did not react. Worse still, he dismissed his Defense Minister, General Yoav Galland, in August 2023, because Galland complained about this lack of reaction in the cabinet. However, given the public reaction to this dismissal, he preferred to reinstate him rather than have to explain the reason.

Israel accused the journalist who published the photographs of October 7, long before the security services intervened, of being a member of Hamas.

The various Palestinian factions (Islamic Jihad, PFLP and National Initiative) were awakened by Hamas at 4.30 a.m. to take part in an operation starting at 6.30 a.m. (i.e. before sunrise). It began with the destruction of all the robots monitoring the Separation Wall. So, from 6.30 am, the alarm was sounded. By 8:00, news agencies around the world were broadcasting images of the attack [8]. However, the Israeli security forces did not intervene until 9.45 am.

From the outset of their intervention, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) applied the "Hannibal directive"; an instruction that orders one to kill one’s own soldiers rather than see them taken prisoner by the adversary. The Israeli government’s casualty figures do not distinguish between attackers and defenders. Similarly, the Israeli government has reported exactions that fighters do not normally have time to perpetrate during a surprise attack. The Mauritian Pramila Patten, UN Special Rapporteur on sexual violence, interviewed victims and witnesses of Operation Flood of al-Aqsa. She concluded that some sexual exactions may have been committed, but that the most serious accusations (notably the castration of soldiers) were not credible [9]. Reports of the beheading of babies were withdrawn after an investigation by Al-Jazeera.

For the moment, the Israeli opposition refuses to address the question of the Prime Minister’s possible role in the organization of this operation. But it must be asked: Benjamin Netanyahu is the son of the fascist Benzion Netanyahu, private secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky (Benito Mussolini’s ally, who died at the start of the Second World War). He has always expressed his admiration for both men.

Benjamin Netanyahu has always supported Hamas as a tactical ally in the fight against Yasser Arafat’s Fateh. However, until 2017, Hamas referred to itself as the "Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood". This organization was restructured in 1949 by the British secret services on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England [10]. In 1950, it became part of the Anglo-Saxon Cold War apparatus. That’s when Sayyed Qutob, the jihad theorist, became its star. Admittedly, in 2017, Gazans who wanted to defend their country joined it, but they demanded that Hamas break with the Muslim Brotherhood and the British. In the end, the two currents coexisted [11]. On October 19, 2022, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received Khalil Hayya, leader of Hamas’s revolutionary current. But he refused to receive Ismaël Haniyeh and Khaled Mechaal, leaders of the Hamas Brotherhood [12]. From an Arab point of view, then, there is not one Hamas, but two. Indeed, throughout the Syrian war, Hamas fought alongside al-Nosra (the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), the IDF and Nato Special Forces, against the Syrian Arab Republic. On December 9, 2012, Hamas elements came to the Damascus suburb of Yarmouk to assassinate leaders of the Palestine Liberation Front (PFLP), including a friend of mine [13].

Not only is it wrong to attribute the October 7 attack to Hamas alone, but it is also wrong to ignore the fact that there are two Hamas. These lies make it possible to present the "Deluge of al-Aqsa" operation as a vast anti-Semitic pogrom, in the words of President Emmanuel Macron, when in fact it was an act of Resistance, as pointed out by Francesca Albanese, UN Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The massacre of Gazans with the Anglo-Saxons

We have witnessed the massacre of 35,000 people, the disappearance under the rubble of 13,000 others, and the serious physical injuries of a further 120,000. Anyone with human feelings can only be horrified. This has nothing to do with the identity of the victims; it’s just a question of humanity.

According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this is just a police operation to arrest the assailants of October 7, but everyone has understood that there is no connection between this attack and the current Israeli operation. It’s all about making life unbearable for the Gazans until they leave of their own accord. This was the program of Vladimir Jabotinsky and his secretary, Benzion Netanyahu. It had been validated by the Nazi negotiator and founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.

Throughout the massacre, and even today, the Anglo-Saxons provide Israel with weapons to carry it out.

However, just as demonstrations against the bloodshed have begun in American universities and are spreading across the country and then to France, the Biden Administration has considered dismissing Benjamin Netanyahu in favour of General Benny Gantz. Admittedly, the decision is not legally his to make, but Washington has a long history of coups d’état and color revolutions. Secretary of State Antony Blinken therefore invited him to "discuss the situation". Benny Gantz accepted, while arranging a meeting with the Sunak Administration during his return trip. But things didn’t go well [14]: Benny Gantz understood perfectly well that Washington was asking him to stop the massacre, which he approved of, but he insisted on informing his interlocutors of his desire to protect his country by destroying Hamas. His interlocutors were taken aback and realized that he was not "a son of a bitch, but our son of a bitch", in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They immediately notified the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. When Benny Gantz arrived in London to meet the Special Security Advisor, Sunak invited himself to their meeting. He tried to explain to a bewildered Benny Gantz that the Hamas "sons of bitches" should not be touched, because some of them are "our sons of bitches". So the Anglo-Saxons didn’t overthrow Benjamin Netanyahu.

The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has come to tell Benny Gantz not to touch our Hamas.

Seen from London and Washington, the massacres of civilians are deplorable, but are merely adjustment variables. As it stands, Israel is an indispensable state. If it were to be pacified and become normal, it would no longer serve any purpose. Like the Republic of Corsairs in the 18th century, Israel enables the most extensive money-laundering operations and serves as a haven for some of the world’s greatest criminals.

An official of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) told me that he was a waiter in the bar of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. One day, he witnessed the arrival of a group of diamond dealers, who had arrived without passing through customs and were being escorted by the military. These men and a few customers exchanged diamonds and cash, then left incognito. This kind of deal could not take place in any other state.

To His Majesty King Charles III,

On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.

You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”

Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.

Your Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is located at the prestigious address of One Western Way, London, just a short foxhunt from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. How delightful it must be to have such an esteemed establishment bear your name.

“One can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners”

It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe. As your noble government has recently declared, your kingdom is currently undergoing “the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century”, with its ambitious projections showing an increase of the prison population from 82,000 to 106,000 within the next four years. Quite the legacy, indeed.

As a political prisoner, held at Your Majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution. Truly, your kingdom knows no bounds.

During your visit, you will have the opportunity to feast upon the culinary delights prepared for your loyal subjects on a generous budget of two pounds per day. Savour the blended tuna heads and the ubiquitous reconstituted forms that are purportedly made from chicken. And worry not, for unlike lesser institutions such as Alcatraz or San Quentin, there is no communal dining in a mess hall. At Belmarsh, prisoners dine alone in their cells, ensuring the utmost intimacy with their meal.

Beyond the gustatory pleasures, I can assure you that Belmarsh provides ample educational opportunities for your subjects. As Proverbs 22:6 has it: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Observe the shuffling queues at the medicine hatch, where inmates gather their prescriptions, not for daily use, but for the horizon-expanding experience of a “big day out”—all at once.

You will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets. His exquisite tenor voice now silenced forever.

Venture further into the depths of Belmarsh and you will find the most isolated place within its walls: Healthcare, or “Hellcare” as its inhabitants lovingly call it. Here, you will marvel at sensible rules designed for everyone’s safety, such as the prohibition of chess, whilst permitting the far less dangerous game of checkers.

“My late friend Manoel Santos…took his own life just eight yards from my cell”

Deep within Hellcare lies the most gloriously uplifting place in all of Belmarsh, nay, the whole of the United Kingdom: the sublimely named Belmarsh End of Life Suite. Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of “Brother, I’m going to die in here”, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison.

But fear not, for there is beauty to be found within these walls. Feast your eyes upon the picturesque crows nesting in the razor wire and the hundreds of hungry rats that call Belmarsh home. And if you come in the spring, you may even catch a glimpse of the ducklings laid by wayward mallards within the prison grounds. But don’t delay, for the ravenous rats ensure their lives are fleeting.

I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king. As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.

Your most devoted subject,

Julian Assange

Matt Kennard sits down with Stella Assange, wife of Julian Assange, to talk about his incarceration in Belmarsh maximum security prison, his case against extradition to the U.S., his persecution by Washington and the state of the UK judiciary.

Betty and Andrew Windsor with the King of Bahrain at the 2019 Windsor Horse Show

Originally published in Counterpunch magazine, 2021

The first article in this series looked at the ‘domestic’ role of the British monarchy, suggesting that they served as a ‘counter-revolutionary backstop’, a feudal remnant kept artificially alive in order to prop up bourgeois rule through the bypassing of parliament and the establishment of rule by decree in the event of serious popular unrest and revolt. In a nation as deeply saturated with colonial wealth and outlook as Britain, however, this is more of an ‘insurance policy’ than an active and ongoing role. In the realm of foreign policy, however – where the revolutionary overthrow of Britain’s colonial proxies is a real and ever-present danger – their role is much more active and visible. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Arab world. 

Following the taxonomy deployed by the legendary Ghanaian revolutionary, Kwame Nkrumah, the Arab states can be divided into two main camps: those which are under the effective control of the former colonial powers and their allies (which he termed ‘neocolonial’ states), and those which are not. In the former camp are states such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE, all of them creations of the British empire and to this day still controlled by the ruling families handpicked by Britain at the height of empire. The consolidation and reinforcement of the relationships between Britain and these families, and the shoring up of their power, is a core part of the role of the British royal family, and much of their time is taken up with hosting and visiting these families. This is especially important at times when their rule is under threat, providing an expression of solidarity at the highest level, an assurance that the British state will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with whatever repression is deemed necessary to hold onto power. 

Whilst this symbolic royal solidarity is offered to leaders of Britain’s neocolonial proxy states the world over, it is the relationships with the ruling families of the Arab world specifically that are considered to be paramount. To understand why this is so, it is essential to appreciate the fundamental importance of Arabia both to the neocolonial system – the channelling of wealth generated in the global South to the western states – in general, and to British economic and political power in particular. 

The Gulf region’s importance to the neocolonial world system derives primarily from its strategic location and its energy resources. Even before the discovery of oil, the region was particularly coveted by the British state due to its proximity to India. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 sent British officials scurrying for control of the Arabian peninsula in order to close the Gulf to the French navy; to this end, the first Anglo-Arabian treaty was signed that year, with the Sultan of Muscat. Others followed soon after, such that the British were virtual hegemons in the region by the middle of the nineteenth century. The thrust of these treaties was always the same – British security guarantees for the ruling families in exchange for British control of their foreign policy, with securing the trade and military route to India the fundamental objective. Urgency was added to this aim in 1911, when Winston Churchill decreed that the navy would switch from coal to oil, meaning that not only British economic strength, but British naval power too, was now dependent on imports from the East (which, since the opening of the Suez canal in 1882, could now make their journey to Europe purely by way of cargo ship through the Red Sea). 

This geostrategic imperative for British control of the Gulf region remains operational today. Three of the world’s eight ‘transit chokepoints’ – narrow waterways through which a large proportion of global trade passes daily – surround the Arabian peninsula – the Suez canal to the Northwest, the Strait of Hormuz to the east, between Arabia and Iran, and the Bab el-Mandab Strait to the west, linking Yemen, Eritrea and Djibouti. Control of these chokepoints is considered crucial, therefore, not so much to British energy security (as the Gulf region supplies less than 4% of Britain’s oil and only 13% of its gas), but to Anglo-America’s ability to control the flow of energy to other countries – in other words, to the leverage provided by such control. The ability to cut off energy supply to whoever it chooses is a key element of western global power. As Bush advisor Zalmay Khalilzad put it back in 1995, “the US position in the Gulf…helps the United States to prevent the rise of another global rival. And should one arise, Washington’s position in the Gulf would be a great advantage.” With East Asia, in particular, increasingly dependent on energy imports from the Middle East, it is easy to see how control of these chokepoints could be used as another weapon in the West’s escalating economic war against China.  

Yet the strategic location of the Arab world is only part of the story. The other key element is oil, and in particular, the link between oil, currency and global power. In his book The City, Tony Norfield identifies the international status of a country’s currency as one of four factors essential to global power, with the status of sterling thus crucial to Britain’s continued imperial role. And the value of sterling fundamentally depends on Gulf oil wealth. 

This was already true in the immediate postwar era when “maintaining the strength of the pound sterling was an absolute strategic priority for British policymakers… and Britain’s interests in Gulf oil were crucial to London’s success in this regard.” (David Wearing, paraphrasing Steven Galpern.) Back then, taxes paid by British-owned oil companies like BP and Shell in Iran and Kuwait helped finance the government’s domestic spending, whilst the foreign currency they earnt allowed Britain to finance imports without building up a trade deficit, as well as building up reserves which could be used to defend the pound when necessary. They also, of course, allowed Britain to import oil without using up precious foreign reserves; all of which helped keep sterling’s value from collapse. 

Following the oil crisis of 1973, when oil producing states turned to western banks to house their newly acquired petrodollars, however, a new role began to emerge for Gulf wealth. Says Wearing, “As well as direct investment in the British economy and investment opportunities for British industry in the Gulf, Whitehall sought a wider influx of surplus oil revenues into the financial system, whereby recycled petrodollars would play a similar stabilising function to the recently expired Bretton Woods system of managed exchange rates.” By the end of the decade, those banks were the repositories for $154billion of petrodollars. This new source of capital allowed for a fundamental transformation in the structure of the British economy, and a new type of imperialism – neoliberalism. Whereas the imperialism of Lenin’s day had been predicated on the export of capital by imperial states based on a manufacturing economy, this new type came to rely on the import of capital, in turn facilitating the ‘offshoring’ of production to the global South. 

In an excellent article on the blog paradigmchange.net, neoliberalism is described as an economic model that is predicated on a shift “from production to finance” and “based on consumption not accompanied by an adequate level of production…The resulting shortfall in income needed to sustain consumption is then replaced with debt, and the trade deficits are paid for by attracting capital into the City.” Imperialism has always been parasitic, but neoliberalism, based on the influx of consumer goods without any corresponding production of exports, is openly and brazenly so – and Arab wealth is essential to the financing of this parasitism. Whilst the capital imports which finance the debt on which neoliberal consumerism is based comes from all over the world, a significant amount comes from the Gulf. In 2012, UK Foreign Office minister Lord Howell claimed that the (Qatari owned) Shard was “the tip…of a very large iceberg” with “ a significant proportion” of GCC capital inflows “channeled into financial assets.” Kuwait and Saudi Arabia each have around £100billion invested through the City of London, with another £30billion from Qatar. It recently emerged that Gulf wealth is considered so important for Britain’s financial health that the UK government had established a secret Whitehall unit – Project Falcon – to attract investment from the UAE alone. Tony Blair was a lobbyist for the group. Says David Wearing, “on the status of the pound sterling, it is clear that Gulf capital inflows make an important indirect contribution by helping to maintain the strength of the pound, and thus its attractiveness as an international currency. This is because, on the balance of payments, the GCC region plays a very significant role indeed… on these key measures, the Gulf region is not merely important to the UK compared to other leading economies (such as the BRICS) but important even compared to major economies in the global North.” Put simply, Gulf capital shores up the pound enough to offset the potentially destabilising impact of ever growing mountains of household debt. Keeping Gulf wealth flowing into the counting houses of the City of London, then, is an essential prop for Britain’s ailing imperial economy. It is also a key mechanism by which the wealth and labour of the global South continues to be extorted by the West, both through the horrifically exploited and abused South Asian migrant workforce on which all the Gulf economies depend, and through the money paid for Gulf oil from the world’s – and particularly Asia’s – heavily import-dependent energy infrastructure. In other words, the US and Britain’s ability to consume more than they produce is dependent on the threefold process of, firstly, the super-exploitation of Asian migrant labour in the Gulf economies; secondly, the channelling of global South wealth into the Gulf states through oil sales in western denominated currencies; and thirdly, the investment of the income thus gathered into US and British banks. 

Ensuring this wealth continues to flow depends on two things: firstly, ensuring that the ruling families of the Gulf states continue to direct their Sovereign Wealth Funds to invest in the US and Britain, and, secondly, and more fundamentally, ensuring that those families are not overthrown. These two tasks are linked, for, alongside the economic incentives for Gulf investment in London (the Treasury and Bank of England’s commitment to guaranteeing ever rising asset prices through QE and house price manipulation) are the political incentives: bolstering the political and military alliance with the UK to ensure regime survival. And when the economic incentives are waning, as they seem to be daily, it becomes ever more imperative for the UK to ensure that those political incentives – securing the family dictatorships – are made very clear. This is where the Windsors come in. 

One of the problems of the neocolonial era is that those charged with securing British interests abroad – the rulers of comprador global South states – must become masters at decoding the contradictory diktats of the western powers. One day, these gentlemen will proclaim themselves champions of liberal freedoms, willing to slaughter millions of people and burn trillions of dollars at its altar; the next, they will declare themselves as standing shoulder-to-shoulder against terrorism with the most illiberal states the mind can concievably imagine. How is an Arab ruler to know, the next time he feels the need to crush an emerging dissident movement, whether to expect a shower of hellfire missiles for his troubles, or a hearty slap on the back? 

This is when a red carpet at Windsor Palace can be very reassuring, and it is no coincidence that the most frenetic hosting of high level state visits seems to occur at precisely those moments when Gulf autocracies are facing the most resistance from their own people. Over the past ten years, for example, when the Arab monarchies have confronted perhaps the biggest popular threat to their rule since the height of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 60s (when British-created monarchs were overthrown in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Libya), they have met with leading members of the British royal family over two hundred times, with Charles alone undertaking ninety-five such visits. Bahrain, home to the most important British and US naval bases in the region, is a case in point. 

The al-Khalifas, the ruling clan in Bahrain for the past 200 years, originally hailed from Iraq, but were expelled by the Ottomans due to the disruption to trade caused by their frequent banditry. They briefly seized control of Bahrain in 1783 as Persian control began to crumble, but their falling out with the Wahhabi sect, on whom their power had relied, ended their rule twenty years later. It was only the treaty they signed with the British in 1820 – in which Britain guaranteed the family’s reign in return for their obedience to imperial designs – which restored them to power, and has kept them there – latterly with the addition of US support – until this day. Only gaining formal independence from Britain in 1971, the director-general of its state security directorate was a Brit – Ian Henderson, a former colonial official in Kenya – right up until 1998. Like the other Gulf states, their military and security apparatuses remain utterly dependent on US and British support. 

Yet the al-Khalifas’ position has been permanently unstable, due to both their obvious role as a facilitator of subordination to foreign domination and their persecution of the majority Shia population. A major workers’ revolt was crushed by the British in 1965, whilst the newly-elected national assembly was closed down by the Emir after just two years in operation in 1975 due to its demands for women’s votes, the nationalisation of oil resources, and the expulsion of foreign bases. “Since then”, says the author of a recent academic piece on the country, “the rule of the Khalifa family has become increasingly authoritarian.” This growing anti-democratic trend has coincided with an increase in the visible support of the British royal family. In 1979, there was particular anxiety in Britain that the revolutionary wave sweeping Iran would extend to the Gulf Arab states. Thus, within weeks of the Shah’s departure, the Queen was duly dispatched on her first official tour of the region in a clear expression of British solidarity with the Gulf rulers against their people. Bahrain was a particular concern, but the schedule of cosy engagements with the Emir, including horse racing, a banquet at the palace, and a return dinner on the royal Yacht Britannia, would have done much to reassure the Emir that British support for his “increasingly authoritarian” regime was unwavering. In 1984, a “glittering banquet” was organised by the Lord Mayor of the City of London in honour of the Emir of Bahrain, attended by the Duke and Duchess of Kent on the Queen’s behalf; whilst Prince Charles and his wife visited Bahrain two years later to attend a banquet in the Emir’s royal palace in Manama. Here they presented the Emir with the Order of St Michael and St George, the highest honour that can be bestowed for services to British imperialism, neatly symbolised by its insignia of a white child standing on the head of a prostrate Black man. 

But it was in 2011, when mass protests against the Khalifa dictatorship threatened to overwhelm the regime, that British royal support really went into overdrive. The mass movement that had been bubbling away since the mid-eighties broke out onto the streets in an unprecedented show of strength, involving at its height an estimated one third of the population, demanding the most basic political freedoms. The Khalifas brutally crushed the demonstrations, their weakness demonstrated by their dependence on Saudi armed forces to do so. The British government’s response was not only to step up the arms exports needed to shore up the regime, and to invite the country’s interior minister to the British foreign office to gather “lessons learnt from our experience in Northern Ireland,” but also to use the royal family to consolidate the Anglo-Bahraini alliance. In May 2012, King Hamad was a guest of honour at the Queen’s jubilee dinner at Windsor castle, and institutional links between the two families have been cemented by the Windsor and Khalifas’ joint sponsorship of the Windsor Horse Show. This event has become an occasion for an annual hobnobbing between the two heads of state, sharing the royal box and jointly hosting the awards ceremony. Commented the human rights group Reprieve during the 2017 event, shortly after the Khalifas began executing dissidents following a six-month hiatus, “Make no mistake, visits like [the Windsor Horse Show] gift the Bahraini government a royal cloak of acceptability, while the Kingdom mercilessly executes political prisoners and uses torture to extract ‘confessions.” It is a gift which is intentional, and clearly appreciated by the Khalifas; indeed, Hamad skipped a meeting with US President Obama in order to attend the show in 2015. In 2016, Hamad was given the most prestigious seat possible at the Queen’s ninetieth birthday dinner, right by her side. Yet even with the full might of British and US imperialism behind them, the Khalifas have still not been able to stop the Bahrainis’ courageous struggle.   

Bahrain is not an exception; the wheeling out of the royals to bolster British-sponsored regimes threatened by popular movements has a long history. In 1952, as the ousting of the British-imposed King Farouk by Colonel Nasser in Egypt ignited republican sentiment across the region, King Faisal of Iraq was invited to Balmoral, the Queen’s private estate in Scotland, in a demonstration that Britain would stand shoulder to shoulder against these anti-monarchical currents wherever they emerged. It wasn’t enough to shore up Faisal’s rule, however; he too was ousted six years later. 1987 saw the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, the biggest uprising in the West Bank and Gaza since they were first occupied thirty years earlier, lasting until 1993. The Israelis responded with massive violence, including a policy of breaking the bones of child protesters; the royals showed their support for the repression with an official state visit for the Israeli President Chaim Herzog that same year. In 2007, when the Saudi criminal justice system was under unprecedented international scrutiny following the sentencing of two gang rape victims to imprisonment and 90 lashes the previous year, British approval for the regime was signalled by the King Abdullah’s invitation to a state banquet with the queen. “Contacts between our two families have been regular and close,” noted Elizabeth Windsor in her speech welcoming the king, adding that “Many British people have benefited from Saudi hospitality over the years as traders, experts and advisors,” a reference to the British military officers, arms traders, oil men and bureaucrats with whom the Saudi state is riddled. As the Arab Spring began to get under way in late 2010 – and with it, Britain’s twofold policy of using the protests as cover to launch wars against the region’s republican socialist states (Libya and Syria) whilst drowning in blood the peninsula’s anti-monarchical movements, all the region’s Arab collaborators were treated to the royal red carpet treatment: the Al Thanis of Qatar at Windsor castle in October 2010; the Queen in Abu Dhabi the following month; the Emir of Kuwait at Windsor castle in November 2012 and of the Emirates the following year, to name just the visits made by the Queen herself. The relationship with the al-Sauds was and is especially important given the Saudis leading role in facilitating Britain’s genocidal war against the Yemeni revolution.

What I am not saying here, it should be made clear, is that the British royals are somehow sullying themselves by association with these Arab ‘dictators.’ This is all-too-often the implicit line of the British colonial left when, for example, it protests such visits as those outlined above. If anything, the criticism is the other way round – that the real crime of the al-Khalifas, the al-Thanis and the Al-Sauds is their willingness to prostitute themselves and their countrymen to the diktat of the genocidal British state, to do the dirty work of empire.  As for the British royal family, they are no different from their counterparts in the Gulf: an artificial creation of the imperialist bourgeoisie, made up of reactionary feudal remnants on life support whose role is the suppression of democratic freedoms wherever the masses threaten property relations. And yet, as the Yemenis, Bahrainis and Palestinians are proving daily, and as the Iraqis, Egyptians, Libyans and Iranians have long since shown, their days are numbered, all of them, and these childish institutional fantasies will soon reveal themselves as but castles in the sand. Godspeed the day.

Part one: counter-revolutionary backstop

Originally published in Counterpunch magazine, 2021

The death of Elizabeth Windsor’s husband Philip Mountbatten earlier this year prompted an establishment-led frenzy of monarchism across Britain, with wall-to-wall sycophantic TV and radio coverage and Covid public information boards replaced with Philip’s portrait. The standard view of the British monarchy is that they are no more than symbolic figureheads lacking any real power; mere ornaments adorning the British political system. But the truth is that Philip and his family were and are crucial pillars in the maintenance of the class power of the British imperialist bourgeoisie, both domestically and globally. 

To begin with, the Sovereign still has a significant place in the British political system. The government is still known as ‘her majesty’s government,’ there to govern on her behalf. It is she who appoints the prime minister, not just in the UK, but in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and twelve other countries. And it is only by convention that she appoints the leader of the winning party following an election – as Gough Whitlam discovered in 1975 when the monarch’s representative in Australia dismissed him from office, despite his party having won the previous year’s elections, and appointed in his place the leader of the losing party, deeming the winners too radical. In the UK, she has weekly meetings with the prime minister to discuss government business, and her approval is required before any legislation passed by parliament can become law. Whilst it is true that this approval – known as Royal Assent – has been granted to all Acts of Parliament since 1707, what is more commonly withheld is the lesser known ‘Queen’s Consent.’ For bills affecting the Queen’s private interests, as well as those impinging on the royal prerogative powers (executive powers which can be used without consulting parliament), the Queen’s permission must be granted before it can be put to parliament. Such ‘Queen’s Consent’ (or ‘Prince’s Consent’ in the case of bills affecting the Prince of Wales’ private interests) was sought 146 times between 1970 and 2013 according to former government minister Norman Baker. Any bill that might affect the income from the monarch and her son’s private estates, for example (the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster, comprising some of the most lucrative real estate in the London, the Strand, as well as Balmoral and Sandringham) is subject to veto by the Crown. And here, unlike for Royal Assent, the Queen is neither obliged by convention to give her consent, nor to act in accordance with advice from her ministers – she is free to use her discretion. All laws affecting income or land tax, for example, or employment rights, require Queen’s Consent, as did the 2006 Animal Welfare Act, because it granted inspectors the right to go onto private estates to investigate claims of animal abuse. To prevent the bill being vetoed by the Crown, the Labour government agreed that the Windsors’ private estates would be exempt from the legislation – literally putting them above the law. Queen’s Consent even had to be sought for the 2008 Child Maintenance Act as it affected payments to the Queen’s private staff. And the Queen is uniquely exempt from a 1973 Act of Parliament requiring shareholders to identify themselves, allowing her to anonymously hold shares in companies of dubious repute. This exemption may well have been a condition for giving consent to the bill in the first place – we cannot know for sure, because no record is kept of when and how Queen’s Consent is used, and the negotiations go on behind closed doors before the first draft of the bill is ever published.    

    ‘Queen’s Consent’ is not only a tool for the personal enrichment of the Windsors, however. Bills which affect the Royal Prerogative powers (powers exercised on behalf of the monarch by government ministers) also require Queen’s Consent, and in this case, unlike in the case of bills where her personal interests are involved, the Queen will simply give or withhold consent according to advice from her ministers. This allows the government to use the Queen to prevent certain private members’ bills, for example, from even being discussed in parliament. Norman Baker’s excellent book on royal powers, “And What Do You Do?”, from which much of the material for this article was garnered, notes that the Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill in 1999 was blocked after the Queen withheld her consent, as was the 1964 Titles (Abolition) Bill and the 1969 Rhodesia Independence Bill, amongst others. 

But this use of Queen’s Consent is just one way in which the residual powers of the monarch are used by the government to avoid public or parliamentary debate and scrutiny. The Royal Prerogative powers, exercised by government ministers on behalf of the monarch, mainly pertain to foreign relations, and can be exercised without the consultation of parliament. This allows the prime minister to deploy troops and agree treaties without even informing, let alone consulting, parliament. The use of the Royal Prerogative occurs through the Privy Council, a group of current and former members of the government, senior members of the opposition, and senior members of the royal family, including the Queen. Members are sworn to secrecy, and the body has the power to secretly create legislation, known as ‘Orders of Council’. In the first half of 2000, over 250 such Orders were issued, around ten per week – including, says Baker (who was made a Privy Councillor by virtue of his position a junior minister in the Conservative-Liberal Coalition government) “an Order relating to the Saint Helena Act 1833, an amendment to a naval pension scheme, an Order relating to sanctions on Yemen – the sort of thing thing that the Commons ought to have had the chance to debate – and an amendment to the misuse of drugs act 1971, which I knew nothing about despite having been the drugs minister for a year until shortly before.” And these were just those passed in one meeting. Baker broke his oath to reveal this information, but such revelations are highly unusual, and the passage of such laws willo rarely reach the public domain. 

Yet the most important aspect of monarchical power in British politics is not the Windsors’ role in day-to-day government so much as their function as a kind of ‘counter-revolutionary backstop’. Globally, this is an ongoing and active role, as will be explored in part two of this series. In the domestic arena, however, it is more as a potential, a ‘force of last resort,’ should popular unrest ever get seriously out of hand.

Of fundamental importance here is the oath of loyalty sworn by members of the armed forces. This oath commits them to the defence, not of the constitution or the elected parliament, but of the monarch and her successors, and to do so “against all enemies,” including, therefore, domestic enemies – such as, for example, any future parliament that attempted to abolish them. It also commits them to “obey all orders of her majesty, her heirs and successors.” Were, for example, a genuinely radical parliament to be elected in Britain, the armed forces would be a priori committed to support an armed overthrow of such a parliament should the monarch command them to do so. Baker suggests that we “suppose Hitler had invaded England, and suppose Edward the Eighth, with his Nazi sympathies, were restored to the throne as a sort of puppet, a scenario that certainly existed in Hitler’s mind. If the restored Edward the Eighth had called on the armed forces to lay down their weapons and accept a sort of Vichy Britain with him at the head, they may well have done so, whatever the elected government may have thought. I know members of the armed forces who take their oath to the Queen very seriously, and for them this allegiance trumps any democratic considerations. The fact that members of the royal family occupy senior positions right across the military only reinforces this.”

Nor is it only the armed forces who are made to swear such an oath – it is also a condition of entry into the British police force, judiciary, and parliament, as well as (since 2003) British citizenship itself, for those applying for it.  This means that when (and it is indeed a matter of when, not if) the proverbial shit hits the fan in the UK, should the ruling class feel the need to impose military rule and rule by diktat, this oath ensures the army, the police and the entire criminal justice system, will be committed in advance to support such a measure, so long as the Windsors are on board. As Baker has noted, “the Queen herself on her accession took an oath to govern the country and uphold the rights of bishops. Parliamentarians take an oath to the Queen. Nobody takes an oath to uphold democracy.”

The key to understanding the role of the monarchy in a bourgeois society like Britain is to go back to its origins, which lie, not deep in antiquity, but in the tumultuous events of the seventeenth century. There has not been seamless continuity or evolution when it comes to royal power, but rather three distinct major monarchical epochs, separated by violent upheavals. First was the feudal monarchy that existed prior to 1485, in which the monarchy was the head of an aristocratic-ruled state. Second was the monarchy that was established under Henry the Seventh in 1485, at the head of an alliance between the aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie, an era that was decisively ended with the execution of Charles I and the creation of the English republic in 1649. Our current monarchy, under bourgeois domination, took shape between 1660 and 1689, and though it was ushered in with the so-called ‘Restoration’ of Stuart power, when the deposed Charles’ son, Charles II, was invited to take the throne, it was in reality an entirely new institution (as Charles’ brother James II learnt to his cost when he attempted to challenge the new dispensation and was swiftly replaced). The question is – why did this third epoch of monarchism even come about? When the bourgeoisie had so decisively defeated the aristocratic power that the monarchy represents, why did they then re-create the institution? And the answer is – the fear of popular revolution. 

Cromwell had mobilised the masses in his war against Charles I, but their demands – as exploited, land hungry, peasants, and even as small traders and artisans – went far beyond his as a merchant landowner. What Cromwell sought was not the abolition of exploitation, but the extension of the absolute right to exploit, from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, via an end to the aristocratic monopolies on foreign trade and land ownership. Radical trends within the republican movement, however – including, crucially, within Cromwell’s army itself, such as the Levellers – sought genuine social equality – equal access to land, political participation, and a toppling of the very hierarchical pyramid that Cromwell had been fighting for the right to ascend. Cromwell had their leaders executed but the fear of a resurgence remained – and in the late 1650s, when rising prices were leading to growing unrest and agitation, the bourgeoisie reasoned that, though their power seemed secure for now, the time may yet come when they would need to call on the defeated aristocracy to help suppress a renewed popular uprising. And this is what the current British monarchy is: the artificial keeping alive of feudal remnants (along with their symbolic counterpart in the human psyche) as a potential counter-revolutionary ally of an insecure bourgeoisie. 

That this is so can be seen clearly in the waxing and waning of royal privilege over the years. Here, a clear pattern emerges whereby, in periods where the bourgeoisie feel more secure, and less in need of their feudal allies, royal privileges are limited or revoked; whilst in periods of real or potential unrest, they are extended. If the army are loyal to the monarch, the ruling class need to be sure that the monarch is willing to do its bidding. And that costs money. 

In the years following the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution,’ however – when, in 1688, Parliament called on the Dutch King William of Orange to depose King James II and take the crown for himself, on the strict understanding that his position would be subordinate to Parliament – bourgeois rule seemed impregnable. The 1690s saw the formation of the Bank of England, the tearing up of the Royal trading monopolies – heralding a commercial frenzy, especially in the trafficking of kidnapped Africans – and the dispossession of Ireland. With the English merchant class triumphant, they had little need to make concessions to a monarchy that, after all, they themselves had placed into position, and was effectively their mouthpiece. Thus, in 1697, did the Crown agree to surrender even the income it gained from the Duchy of Cornwall. 

This era of untrammelled security did not last long, however. The failure of William and Mary, as well as her sister Anne, to produce any surviving offspring, had led Parliament to pass the Act of Settlement in 1701, decreeing that the Crown would pass to the (Protestant) Hanoverians. Their claim to the throne by virtue of royal bloodline was shaky to say the least – but the newly empowered merchant class were determined to prevent a Catholic restoration, with all the resultant continental political realignments and reversals that would entail. This seemingly arbitrary passing around of the Crown for political convenience was a step too far for many, however, and the Jacobite movement – which called for the continuation of the Stuart monarchy, in line with established hereditary principles – was born. Thus it was in 1721, two years after the third major Jacobite rising, at a time when the schemes of the government were under serious threat from inter-ruling class rivalry, that the mechanism of ‘King’s Consent’ – whereby the monarch gets veto power on any bill affecting his private interests – was introduced. 

Once the threat dissipated, however, the monarch’s fortunes were reversed. In 1745, the Jacobite movement was decisively defeated, and the bourgeois ascendancy seemed, once again, triumphant – and in no need of feudal backup.  Thus, in 1760, did the entirety of the Crown estates (with the supposed exception of the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster) pass into the hands of the state, finally stripping the king of his position as ‘landowner-in-chief,’ the basic tenet of monarchical power since 1066. It was not without some benefit for the monarch, as, along with the estates, he also gave up responsibility for funding the growing costs of the state, which would now be taken on by the government directly. The king also negotiated a hefty annual subsidy from the state coffers, set initially at £800,000 per year and still in operation today, known as the ‘civil list.’ Yet the ban on the monarch’s ownership of private property that accompanied the deal was, by any standards, a reduction in power. It was not to last. 

The earth shattering events of the 1790s – in France and Haiti primarily, but with planet-wide reverberations that continue to this day – struck terror once again into the hearts of the English ruling class, and over the decades that followed, various forms of emergency rule and suspension of liberties became the norm. Lacking the legitimising cloak of liberal niceties, the legitimising cloak of regal bullshit took on a new importance for government. The monarch’s value to the imperilled bureaucracy grew, and the ban on his ownership of private property was lifted. And not only that – an argument was made that the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall were already private estates of the monarch, exempt from the 1760 agreement that surrendered the rest of the Crown estates. The reasoning? They had not been explicitly mentioned in that agreement, and were therefore not covered by them. The compelling legal argument that this was so precisely because, since 1697, the Duchies were already understood to be public assets (their income streams having been handed over at that date) was trampled underfoot by the cavalry charge of the counter-revolutionary war and its need for maximum unity against the Jacobins. Two hundred years later, the income streams from this desperate act of political expediency remain exceptionally lucrative: the holdings of the Duchy of Lancaster alone amount to over half a billion pounds, with annual profits reaching £20 million in 2018, and the Duchy of Cornwall not far behind, including a particular bonanza in 2012 from the auctioning of tungsten and iridium mining rights on Duchy land.  

The pattern continued throughout the nineteenth century. As tumult grew in Ireland, Jamaica and both rural and urban Britain between 1829 and 1831 – resulting in major concessions on all three islands – the Duchy of Lancaster was, in 1830, again exempted from a bill formalising the government takeover of royal income streams. As Baker noted, “with the great reform bill on the stocks, the government did not want to alienate the king unnecessarily.” The same year, the two Duchies also secured an exemption – alone in the country – from the abolition of the feudal practice of landowners taking over the estates of anyone who dies on their land without relatives. This would prove particularly lucrative for George VI, who got a bonanza from all those killed on Duchy land during World War Two, and continues to bring in additional income for the Windsors to this day. 

The Great Reform Act was eventually passed in 1832, successfully breaking the middle class-working class alliance that had shaken the country in previous years. The wealthier middle classes had been enfranchised by the Act, and now happily supported the repression of their erstwhile proletarian comrades. Bourgeois rule was secure, and again the need to buy royal favour declined. In 1842, income tax was introduced for the first time, and the monarch was not exempt. From now on, taxes would be paid not only on royal income – including on the civil list subsidy, and on Duchy profits – but on royal land and property also. This was confirmed in the Crown Private Estates Act of 1862 (during another period when the British ruling class were feeling secure, when the country’s industrial monopoly had birthed a labour aristocracy following the defeat of the Chartists).  The Act was unambiguous: “The private estates of her majesty,her heirs or successors, shall be subject to all such rates, duties, assessments, and other impositions, parliamentary and parochial, as the same would have been subject to if the same had been the property of any subject of the realm.” 

Yet even during this period, royal privileges ebbed and flowed in line with the degree of feared unrest. In 1848, proletarian revolution broke out across the continent, and the Chartists planned a march on London. Although the demonstration was ultimately outnumbered by pro-government volunteers, the state took no chances, and shored up its favour with the King through the establishment of ‘Prince’s consent’, extending the existing veto rights over legislation affecting the King’s private interests to his eldest son. No legal justification for this anti-democratic provision was even attempted; threat of revolt demanded royal concessions, the practice was established, and that was that. Again, it is a practice that continues until today. 

In the period 1865-7, near-simultaneous risings again broke out again across Jamaica, England and Ireland. Then, In 1873, the great economic boom which had begun in the 1850s ground decisively to a halt, just when Britain had lost its industrial monopoly to Germany and the USA. The depression lasted until 1896, and a new wave of militant trade unionism amongst the lowest paid broke out. Foreseeing a time when the monarch’s collaboration in the suspension of civil government might be required, the government during this period ramped up the civil list payments, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Writes Baker, “As a result of Albert’s pleadings of poverty they [Victoria and Albert] were given more than they needed to enable Victoria to carry our her constitutional duties, but then hung onto the cash which had been obtained under false pretences and invested it in property.” In 1889, a parliamentary select committee noted that Victoria had siphoned off almost £1 million from her civil list ‘expenses,’ which had been used to purchase the private estates of Balmoral, Sandringham and Osborne (in the Isle of Wight). Philip Hall, in his book Royal Fortune, estimates that a total of £67million has been saved by the monarch from civil list payments over the last five reigns, making the MPs’ expenses scandal look like a parking violation. But the point is, this subsidy has been willingly granted by an insecure ruling class as an insurance policy against (so-called) democracy.  

In the years before the First World War, this insecurity went into overdrive – and so too did the ‘insurance payments’ to the royals. Revolutionary trade unionism was spreading like wildfire across Britain, with major strikes taking place in key industries such as minings, docking, building and transport, many of them successful. The ruling class were terrified: Conservative cabinet minister Leo Amery recorded in his diary at the time that he went to purchase a revolver to arm himself against the revolutionary threat, but found they had all sold out. The value – and so the price – of royal backup thus increased again; already by 1903, Edward VII had wrangled his way out of paying income tax on his civil list payments (despite the existence of very clear laws on the matter), and in 1910 prime minister Lloyd George agreed to exempt the monarch from paying income tax at all. In 1913, this tax exemption was extended to the Duchy of Cornwall. Says Baker, “Despite the fact that the inland revenue had gone into the matter of the Duchy’s status quite exhaustively and concluded there was no case for its exemption from taxes, the government’s law officers, in a very short ruling, and one without any explanatory arguments, disagreed, and that was that.” In 1911, another unprecedented – and legally indefensible – ruling exempted royal wills from public scrutiny. To this day, royal wills are the only wills that can be kept private, enabling the extent of royal wealth to remain forever secret. This means that the amount of wealth stolen from civil list payments can be kept hidden, as can the extent of ‘gifts’ – which must, by law, be turned over to the state when given in connection with public duties – amassed by the monarch and her family. Says Baker, “if it became publicly known how much had been bequeathed, the public might begin to question afresh the level of taxpayers’ support the royal family benefits from, or indeed begin asking how it was possible to accumulate such wealth in their lifetimes without seemingly having any external means to do so.”  The 1911 ruling thus effectively sanctioned the siphoning off of civil list payments for private gain, giving legal cover to what had already become standard practice. Thus, by the time of Elizabeth Windsor’s sister Margaret’s death in 2002, she was believed to have amassed a fortune of £20 million. “Where did Princess Margaret get £20 million from?,” asks Norman Baker, “Even the generous largesses provided by taxpayers through the civil list cannot explain that.” Elizabeth’s mother, meanwhile, is believed to have left a fortune of £70 million, well beyond what she is believed to have inherited herself. And yet her spending far exceeded the £634,000 per year she received from the civil list, her private staff wage bill alone coming to £1.5 million per year. Comments Baker, “What is certain is that the sealing of royal wills does not allow the proper checks to be made to ensure that what properly belongs to the state has not slipped across into private property [of the Windsors].”  

Popular unrest did not cease in the years after the war, and there was genuine fear of Bolshevism spreading throughout Europe following the epic events in Russia. 1919 saw a police strike in Liverpool, the growth of the militant ‘tripartite’ alliance between the dockers, railwaymen and miners’ unions, and the establishment of a workers’ Soviet in Glasgow, prompting Lloyd George to send in the tanks. The price of royal backup appreciated further. In 1921, just as the ‘Geddes Axe’ fell, decimating public services, the Prince of Wales was granted further tax concessions, enabling him to stash away £1million by the time he became King Edward VIII in 1936. In the 1930s, too, as the Great Depression took hold, King George V stopped paying tax on Duchy of Lancaster profits, with his entire tax levy dropped in 1937. Writes Baker, “Overall in the interwar period, royal taxes dropped while those for everyone else rose. This dichotomy became even more pronounced during World War Two.”

The end of the Second World War saw Soviet prestige at an all time high, a powerful workers’ movement (with military experience) across Europe, and anti-colonial insurgencies across the globe, a situation that largely pertained until well into the 1960s. In 1952, when Elizabeth Windsor took the throne, the civil list payments were extended from the monarch and her spouse to their entire extended family, today covering over 40 people. At the same time, the monarch was no longer required to pay tax on her investments. Up until George VI, monarchs had always paid such taxes, although George began the dubious practice of reclaiming it. In 2001, it was calculated that the Treasury had lost out an estimated £1 billion revenue in lost payments on the £200million stock market investment made by the Queen in 1952 alone. Also in 1952, it was agreed that the wages of workers employed on the upkeep of the palaces should be transferred from the monarch to the Ministry of Works, as well as further tax exemptions such as taxes on agricultural profits, a major windfall for the Duchies. 

The era of neoliberalism, however, saw a reversal of workers’ power, and, especially after the defeat of the miners in 1985 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, bourgeois supremacy once again seemed guaranteed. The need for a royal coup seemed far off, and the period saw a corresponding limitation of handouts to the monarchy. In 1992, following a major fire at Windsor castle, the royals were left to fork out their own cash for the repairs, and a year later, Charles and Elizabeth actually started to pay income tax, including on their investment income. The Memorandum of Understanding that initiated this spelt out that this was a purely voluntary arrangement that the could rescind whenever they chose, but nevertheless, the fact it was agreed at all suggested that the royals had become aware that their financial privileges were now at risk. In 2000, the civil list payments were frozen for a period of ten years, with some expenditure previously paid for by government departments now to come out of those payments. This amounted to a real-terms cut, the closest the list had ever come to an actual cut. 

The ‘neoliberal (domestic) peace’ did not last. The buildup to the war on Iraq would ultimately lead to the biggest ever demonstrations in British history, and the biggest backbench rebellion for 150 years. Luckily for the Blair government, the colonial left leadership of the Stop the War movement prevented this anger from being channelled into effective resistance, but such resistance had been a real possibility. Had even a fraction of the crowds that amassed in 2003 stayed for ongoing protest outside parliament, or heeded the anarchists’ calls for direct action at airbases, the situation could have quickly got out of hand. Thus in 2002, the era of containment of royal finances came to an end, and the convention banning the public from viewing royal wills was secretly – and without legal precedent or justification – made into law. Also during this period, some very dubious accounting practices – such as including the wages of 28 members of Charles’ personal staff, along with the jewellery, clothes, horses and bodyguards of his mistress Camilla, as tax deductible – were discretely ‘overlooked’ by the inland revenue. The result was that, by 2012, Charles was paying less than half a million pounds tax on £18 million of Duchy profits; the 1993 Memorandum of Understanding had now been virtually revoked in all but name. 

The 2007-8 financial crisis was the biggest financial crash since the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and triggered a global slump from which the world has still not recovered. The danger of mass unrest suddenly became very real. To add to the fears, the election of 2010 was indecisive, threatening political stability just as economic and social stability was already on a knife-edge. The coalition government that emerged took the opportunity to restore owning-class fortunes through a massive attack on public spending through their flagship policy of ‘austerity.’ Cuts led to riots in 2010 and in 2011 following the police execution of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, at the same time as uprisings across the Gulf threatened the ruling families placed in power by the British. The threat to bourgeois order was as high as it had been at any time since the miners’ strike. Emergency powers suddenly did not seem so unthinkable. 

Thus in 2011 was royal collaboration with such a path ensured by the biggest hike in royal finances since at least 1952. The Sovereign Grant Act finally overturned the 1760 deal with George III entirely, ushering in a massive and ongoing hike in taxpayer payments to the royals. For the first time since that deal, the link between royal fortunes and the Crown Estates was reestablished, with the civil list payments no longer based on an estimate (however fraudulent) of the legitimate expenses of the royals, but instead calculated as a proportion (15%, later increased to 25%) of the income from the (former) ‘Crown Estates’ that had been in effective public ownership since 1760, a massively retrograde step at a time of deepening mass poverty. In the first year – a time of severe wage cuts for the population at large – the civil list payments rose by well over 50% from just under £8million to almost £14 million. Similar rises followed year on year, taking the payment to a staggering £82.8 million by 2019, a more than tenfold increase from the pre-austerity amount. Furthermore, it was written into the Act that these payments could never be reduced, making permanent any temporary good fortune in the value of their estates, and immunising the royals against any collapse in the value of British real estate. The forthcoming auction of windfarm sites on Crown Estate land (which covers hundreds of miles of coastline) alone is likely to produce a windfall of hundreds of millions for the royals. 

    Since the bourgeois monarchy was first established in 1660, then, the pattern has been clear: when the capitalist order is under threat, the stock of the royals – as the ultimate counter-revolutionary backstop and ‘legitimising’ force for the imposition of rule by decree – increases. When the order is secure, it declines. The fact that royal handouts have increased tenfold in recent years, then, should be seen as a sign not so much of a ruling class so powerful it can plunder public funds with impunity, but of one with a desperate fear of the future, and of the masses, and with a total lack of faith in its own ability to rule by consent. Either way, the case for republicanism has never been clearer.

On Monday, Charles III entered Buckingham Palace for the first time as king. It was the British people’s first real chance to greet their new sovereign. Huge crowds thronged outside the gates, letting out deafening cheers every time he raised his hand to wave. His Majesty seemed genuinely touched—and a little surprised.

For decades, Charles has been mildly unpopular with the British public. For half a century, he has been the British media’s favorite punching-bag. Films and television shows about the Royal Family always cast him in a negative light. On a good day, his approval rating hovers around 50 percent.

Yet this anti-Charles sentiment has always seemed a little forced. Britain’s new king is one of the most fascinating men in public life. 

The 70 years he spent waiting to inherit the throne certainly were not wasted. Charles used his family’s wealth and influence exactly as one ought to do. Above all, he has devoted himself to good works. He is not only Britain’s foremost philanthropist, but also her greatest patron of the arts. And he has used his spare time to broaden his own horizons. He has traveled almost constantly, studying with the greatest philosophers, painters, and poets (and polo players) in the world. Once upon a time, we would have called him a renaissance man. 

Charles is the first “high church” monarch since James II. The British aristocracy have always been decidedly “low church.” They prefer simpler forms of worship, more in keeping with the Protestant tradition. Meanwhile, Charles—now Supreme Governor of the Church of England—has one foot in the Orthodox Church. As Prince of Wales, he was known to sneak away from Clarence House to go on retreat at Mount Athos and created a Byzantine-style prayer corner in his private residence.

Still, Charles is firmly devoted to the Anglican Church. He has long served as a patron of the Prayer Book Society, an organization for liturgical conservatives.

Charles is a theological conservative as well. During a trip to Pennsylvania, he opted to worship at a Presbyterian church rather than the local Episcopal cathedral. (The Episcopal Church is a member of the Anglican Communion, whose “Mother Church” is the C of E. It is also the Communion’s most liberal province.) When a layman asked him why, he reportedly said, “You know very, very well why I cannot worship in an Episcopal Church.”

The King is also a follower of the Traditionalist School, a group of scholars and philosophers who are committed to the idea of “resacralization.” As Charles himself explained,

The teachings of the Traditionalists should not, in any sense, be taken to mean that they seek, as it were, to repeat the past—or, indeed, simply to draw a distinction between the present and the past. Theirs is not a nostalgia for the past, but a yearning for the sacred and, if they defend the past, it is because in the pre-modern world all civilizations were marked by the presence of the sacred.

Charles’s affinity for the Traditionalist School explains his novel translation of the title Fidei Defensor. First bestowed on Henry VIII by Leo X (before all the unpleasantness), it is usually translated as “Defender of the Faith”—that is, the Christian faith. Yet Charles floated the idea of calling himself “Defender of Faith”—that is, a belief in the presence of the sacred. 

The idea went over badly, even with Rowan Williams, then archbishop of Canterbury. Usually seen as a moderate, Williams insisted that the monarch “has a relationship with the Christian Church of a kind he does not have with other faith communities.” Happily, Charles dropped the whole business. 

This Traditionalism may also explain his (in)famous love for Islam. This affinity hasn’t made him many friends on the British right. Yet Charles isn’t naïve. He has studied extensively with Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Sufi philosopher who was exiled from Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini. The King understands Islam at its best and at its worst. So, he feels a duty to help “build bridges between Islam and Christianity and to dispel ignorance and misunderstanding.” On the other hand, he has raised millions of dollars to help Christians who are being persecuted by Islamists in the Middle East. 

Charles III is a traditionalist (with a little “t”) as well. To quote His Majesty,

These traditions, which form the basis of mankind’s most civilized values and have been handed down to us over many centuries, are not just part of our inner religious life. They have an intensely practical relevance to the creation of real beauty in the arts, to an architecture which brings harmony and inspiration to people’s lives and to the development within the individual of a sense of balance which is, to my mind, the hallmark of a civilized person.

Charles has spent most of his adult life in his efforts to recreate that balance. In 2005 he founded the Prince’s School of Traditional arts, which seeks to “to continue the living traditions of the world's sacred and traditional art forms.” He also serves as patron of the Temenos Academy, whose fellows include localist Hossein Nasr, Rowan Williams, and the American localist Wendell Berry. 

I think the affinity between Charles and Berry is instructive. Both are traditionalists, though not exactly conservatives. They’re more what my friend Bill Kauffman would call “reactionary radicals.” Both are critics of industrialism, consumer capitalism, and scientism. Both champion agrarianism. They believe that small-scale agriculture (that is, family farms) are the only basis for a stable and happy society. As a matter of fact, Charles has written a couple of books on organic gardening. 

Both are also what we might call Christian ecologists. They’re environmentalists driven less by fear of climate change than by love for God’s creation. As the new king wrote in his book Harmony, “We are not the masters of creation. No matter how sophisticated our technology has become, the simple fact is that we are not separate from Nature. Just like everything else, we are nature.”

The King is no primitivist, however. Charles is also a pioneer of the New Urbanism. Since the 1980s, the King has been the most outspoken critic of modernist architecture in the English-speaking world. And, here, he pulls no punches. “You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe,” he said: “when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.” 

In 1993, he decided to put his theories to the test. Charles hired the architect Léon Krier to build a brand-new community on four hundred acres of grassland outside of Dorchester. The result is the town of Poundbury. 

In Poundbury, all the buildings are designed in the local styles of South West England. Of course, there are no skyscrapers; a “tall” building might be four or five stories tall. Shops and residences are mixed; there’s no hideous business district surrounded by soulless housing units. This also minimizes the need for cars, saving residents time and money while reducing the need for emissions. 

Even the King’s worst critics have been forced to admit that his “feudal Disneyland” has been a triumph. Poundbury is beautiful. It is prosperous. And it proves that life can still be lived on a human scale.

Of course, the King is far from perfect. Britain’s media will be sure to point that out whenever they get the chance—and whenever they don’t. Yet every now and then the press will also shed light on Charles’s virtues. They don’t mean to, of course. Usually, they’re taking a shot at him and the bullet ricochets. Still, these moments have allowed the British people to catch a real glimpse of their new king.

Take the “black spider memos.” For decades, it had been rumored that Prince Charles wrote to senior politicians with the hope of effecting policy changes. The media had long dubbed him the “meddling prince.” Then, in 2015, the Guardian (a far-left British newspaper) convinced a government tribunal to publish the letters in full.

The monarchy’s opponents were thrilled. After all, the British Crown has survived in the 21st century by being purely apolitical. Elizabeth II was content to play a purely symbolic role in government. But not Charles. As king, it was suggested, he would insist upon his right to rule as well as reign. The British people (they said) must choose: monarchy or democracy? Of course, the choice was clear. It seemed to spell death for England’s thousand-year-old crown.

Once the public actually got to read the memos, however, all of that changed. They saw him pleading with Tony Blair not to cut subsidies to beef farmers, and instead to help them develop better treatments for bovine tuberculosis. He urged the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to develop better public housing for low-income families. He shared with the Minister for the Environment his concerns about the destruction of rainforests and the overfishing of sea bass.The media had always sought to paint Charles as a goof and a snob. Yet his letters showed him to be witty, self-effacing, intelligent, and compassionate. The British people were amazed and delighted. For a moment, they loved the prince nearly as much as he loved them. That is who Charles is. He is a good man. And he’ll be a good king, if we let him.

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

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

We thought it would last forever.

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

I am not claiming it as a great socialist document – there were signs of right-wing thought creeping in, like a shift to indirect taxation. But the truth is that the Liberal Party manifesto of 1974 was at least as left as Corbyn’s manifesto. Some of its ideas were far ahead of their time – like the idea that continuous economic growth and increasing consumption are not sustainable or desirable.

Believing in essentially the same things now, I find myself on the far left – without ever having moved!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nationalisation should be done properly, without compensating shareholders. If I had to choose between compensating the shareholders and imprisoning them, I would imprison them. I suggest we do neither.

That is only one sector and only the start. But it is a good start. I frequently pass the Grangemouth refinery and am amazed that all that land, massive equipment, all those chemicals and processes, go primarily to the benefit of Britain’s richest man, Jim Ratcliffe, who is considering buying Manchester United as his latest toy, while his workers protest at another real-terms pay cut.

This obscenity cannot continue forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A specific use of this tool has been the weaponisation of fake sexual allegations against any individual likely to be a threat to the state. You see this in the cases of Julian Assange, Tommy Sheridan, Scott Ritter and Alex Salmond (they tried it on me when I left the FCO but had to drop it because they could not find – despite massive efforts – any woman who knew me who would say anything bad about me).

Those in power know that the portion of the left who identify as feminist, which is almost all of us, are highly susceptible to support alleged victims due to the extreme difficulties of real victims in obtaining justice. This makes sexual allegations, no matter how fake, very effective in removing the support base of anti-establishment figures.

The propaganda narrative against Assange, Salmond, Ritter and Sheridan depends on the idea that at the very moment that each of these men reached the peak of a lifetime’s endeavour and posed the maximum threat to the state, they lost focus, lost their marbles and acted very wrongly towards women, despite no previous history of such behaviour.

It astonishes me that anybody does not see through it.

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

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

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

Similar to the use of gender politics to undermine class solidarity is the weaponisation of accusations of anti-semitism. Just as accusations of misogyny, however false, succeed in alienating left unity, so do allegations of racism.

Here it is not so much that accusations were believed – the conflation of criticism of the crimes of Israel with criticism of Jews per se being all too obvious – as that the attack was so blistering, with the full weight of the establishment political and media class behind it, that people cowered rather than face up to it. The worst example of cowering being Jeremy Corbyn.

One lesson from both the “leaked report” and the Forde report is that Corbyn and his office believed that if they threw enough sacrifices to the wolves, betraying decent people like Tony Greenstein (son of a Rabbi), Mark Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone, then the wolves would be appeased.

Israel is the last large scale project of colonisation by physical occupation of a conquered land by European people. Ukraine and Israel are the two current neo-liberal violence projects, which it is not permitted to criticise. The banning of any nuance of opinion on Ukraine should frighten everybody who is thinking rationally. If you are thinking rationally, try this small antidote to the unremitting propaganda:

The Ukraine war is unusual in the attempt to enforce wartime levels of unanimity of narrative on the population, in western countries which are not only not combatants in the war, but not even formally allied to Ukraine. The United States was a party to the Vietnam War, but it was still possible for Americans to criticise that war without having all media access banned. Today you cannot criticise Ukraine in the state or corporate media at all, and your social media access is likely to be severely restricted unless you follow the official propaganda narrative.

This is the Establishment’s strongest method of control – the labeling of opposing opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation”, even when there is no genuine evidential base that makes the official “facts” unassailable, as with Douma or the Skripals. To ask questions is stigmatised as traitorous and entirely illegitimate, while official journalists simply regurgitate government “information”.

Yet, despite this interwoven system of dampening all dissent from the neoliberal agenda, the Establishment remains terrified of the public reaction to the crisis that is about to hit. The controlled opposition is therefore used to attack actual opposition. Keir Starmer’s banning of Labour MPs from union picket lines is a clear example of this.

We are seeing for the first time in many years an assertion of the rights of organised labour in the face of the massive attack on workers’ real incomes. This is the first time many adults under thirty will ever have encountered the notion that ordinary people are able to defend themselves against exploitation – that is one reason the impressive Mick Lynch has been such a revelation, and is viewed by the “elite” as such a threat.

The Starmer line is that strikes inconvenience the public, which you will recall is the government excuse for banning protest also. Well, of course they do. So does the spiral of real terms wage cuts. The fractured workers of the gig economy are now showing interest in unionising and organising; this is too little and too late to avert the crisis that is about to hit us, but a useful indication of the will to resist.

Popular resistance terrifies the elite and thus must be demonised. The political class is to be protected from insult or contradiction. You may recall in February it was headline news that Keir Starmer was “mobbed” in Whitehall as he walked down the street, by protestors shouting at him over lockdown and over his role in the non-prosecution of Jimmy Savile (and, less reported, in the extradition of Julian Assange).

In fact, nothing happened. Aerial photographs showed that the protestors numbered about a dozen, that they were heavily outnumbered by Starmer’s handlers and the police. The only, mild, violence was initiated by the police. There was no threat to Starmer other than the threat of being verbally opposed by members of the public on subjects he did not wish to be discussed.

This protection of highly paid politicians from the public, this claim that it is extremely bad behaviour for ordinary people to confront elite politicians with an opposing view, is an extraordinary assertion that the people must not challenge their betters.

We are going to see a great deal more of this in the coming crisis. There is currently the most extraordinary manifestation of it in Scotland where the Chief Constable has announced an investigation into people daring to protest against the Tory leadership hustings in Perth.

Read more ...

To sum up.

The 2008 banking bailout gave hundreds of billions of dollars straight to the ultra-wealthy, to be paid for by ordinary people through over a decade of austerity cuts to social services, real terms cuts in pay, and increased taxation. In the current crisis the plan is to advance money in some form to ordinary people, for them to pay off by a further decade of the same.

In neither instance was taking money from those with billions in personal wealth even considered.

The neoliberal phase of super-capitalism has run its course. The gap between the wealthy and ordinary people has become so extreme that, even in the West, ordinary people no longer can afford to live decently. Consumerism has desperately depleted natural resources and accelerated climate change. The policy of perpetual war has finally undermined the world economy to a fatal degree.

The situation is not sustainable, but the global elite have no intention to give up sufficient of their massive wealth to make any difference. They seek to control society through the propaganda model and through increasing state repression of dissent, allied to an assault on “incorrect” thought by censorship of the internet and by populist demonisation. “Left” causes such as identity politics and protection from offence have been weaponised to support this suppression.

There is no democratic outlet for popular anger. The “opposition” parties which people can vote for are all under firm neoliberal, warmonger control. Democracy has ceased to present any effective choice that offers any hope of real change. The revival of interest in organised labour and the willingness of young people to engage in direct action in the field of climate change offer some avenues for activism, but it is too little, too late.

Yet this will not hold. Discontent is now so strong, and public anger becoming so widespread, that change is coming. With no available democratic mechanism for change and a firm clampdown on the development of coherent radical programmes and on radical organisation, that change will initially manifest in chaos.

The Establishment response? They clutch at their pearls, twitch at their curtains and condemn the uncouth masses.

Introducing the Grand Jury

For those of you who have no clue what this is about, you would benefit from this twitter thread breaking the players down:

International Grand Jury investigating Crimes Against Humanity has begun!

Supported by the Berlin Corona Committee @CoronaAusschuss, Day 1 Opening Statements were made on February 5th, 2022

Brief 🧵 on crucial background information pic.twitter.com/2ostsnbCZH

— Remnant | MD (@RemnantMd) February 6, 2022

In brief, four German lawyers with experience in consumer protection and medical legal cases formed an investigative committee in July 2020, with the goal of understanding what events had transpired surrounding the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. They witnessed and broadcast testimony from experts across the globe with a diverse set of knowledge concerned with microbiology, outbreaks, and global interventions.

For a summary of the people interviewed, I discuss in a prior article everyone from Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Catherine Austin Fitts to infamous professor of psychology Mattias Desmet and his discussion of Mass Formation.

After the legal team gathered this information, the Corona Investigative Committee collaborated with lawyers around the world in prosecuting governments for violating their constitutional rights. Unfortunately, they met great resistance.

Most recently, they created a sort of Peoples’ Court, in which they have lawyers from several countries collaborating in a model grand jury.

From Wikipedia:

A grand jury is a jury—a group of citizens—empowered by law to conduct legal proceedings, investigate potential criminal conduct, and determine whether criminal charges should be brought. A grand jury may subpoena physical evidence or a person to testify. A grand jury is separate from the courts, which do not preside over its functioning.

The purpose of a grand jury is to accuse persons who may be guilty of a crime. It is a means for lay citizens to participate in the administration of justice. Watergate, for example, had involvement of grand juries. More recently, the prosecution of Purdue Pharma also developed from grand jury investigations.

The juries are ‘grand’ because they are larger than typical jury trials, about 23 jurors. In this case, however, the jurors are the world. Today, tens of thousands of people watched the livestream.

This is what they heard.

Day 2: Historical Background

Before these proceedings began, my goal was to provide highlights of the Day for people to digest. Lo and behold, the first day was about 6 hours long.

So, I shifted to a less unwieldy approach. I’ll be discussing what I believe to be the most valuable pieces of information presented.

You can watch the full proceedings here.

Alex Thomson

Alex Thomson was an officer in Britain’s national intelligence agency, GCHQ. In one of his roles, he served as the transcriber of Russian and German intel. He also has a decorated upbringing, including boarding school and Oxford University. He is also a journalist and writer.

The perspective Alex provides completely floored me. This account is the ultimate historical backdrop to all that has taken place in recent years, and in decades past.

According to Alex, there is a history that lies behind the post-WWII era of health crises which we find ourselves in. Furthermore, the City of London has readied itself for this very moment with efforts that began in the 1870s. From this time, the consuming cartelization of the world began.

Everything that we see unfolding in modern history, points back to the period of 1870. At this time, the British elite instantiated several revolutions concerning the containment of productivity, and prevention of the growth of intellectual property among the native people of the Empire, and its competing nations.

These include revolutions in:

• Education
• Intellectual Property
• Healthcare
• …and Governance

The City of London - the Square Mile

The central node of the Commonwealth is the City of London - henceforth referred to as The City. This square mile at the heart of Greater London, is home to about 9000 people. It also happens to be home to the families of the British Elite.

The City and the Church of England are the only two institutions that have endured every constitutional revolution in the British Isles with their wealth and privileges intact.

The City still has legal status independent of all the boroughs of London. Its privileges date back to the Magna Carta, approximately 1215. Its self-government has never been challenged. Its power has varied across time, but peaked at around the 17th century, during which it challenged the Crown for absolute dominance - thereby having power over a huge portion of the Earth. The City went as far as abolishing the Crown for about a decade.

The British Cabinet Office is the repository of Crown prerogatives. When lay people think of the Crown, they think of the Monarch. In practice, however, this is merely a front. Since 1870, the financiers of political parties are those who pull the levers of the “Crown.”

The City even has a designated seat in Parliament, entitled the Remembrancer. The sitting Monarch of Britain does not have such a privilege.

The model of government which Britain has exported to the Commonwealth includes a Privy Council which governs in the name of the Crown. For example, here is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau swearing an oath to the Crown & Privy Council:

In Britain, however, Parliament and government departments are merely consulted. There is a veneer of separation between the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of government. As concerns the new Crown and The City, this is merely a show - well documented in the 1873 book entitled The English Constitution.

the dignified parts of government - the show - the attractive parts do have a purpose, but only to attract national support to the working parts behind the scenes.

The City, thus, can be likened to a deep state.

A New Britain

The modern era of Cartelization began around 1870. Up until this point the might of the British Empire and navy was largely unchallenged. The British elite realized they would rapidly face competition from foreign entities.

Starting from the mid-19th century, British foreign policy was primarily concerned with making allies with rivals of the past (France & the Ottomans) in an effort to prevent the future rise of a Russio-German alliance.

Unfortunately for Britian, there was another threat to the West. Namely, the rise of intellectual productivity and the democratization of innovation called the United States.

These changes in the global landscape brought about an existential crisis for Britain. Thus, The City’s trade model had to adjust.

The City adopted a model in which true wealth was to be found in ownership of the mind and body. This model of the world provided the added benefit of preventing the productive class from outproducing and overthrowing their bosses.

Thomson adds:

It is the consistent finding of allied researchers and commentators, that The City and its soft power institutions (BBC, Academia, & Church) continue to regard the battle for the mind as their top priority. Health is regarded merely as a subset of that broader battle.

MINDSPACE

Mindspace is a termed used by The City. It was formalized in the British Cabinet Office’s 2010 publication: Mindspace: Influencing behavior through public policy

MINDSPACE is actually a mnemonic for a checklist. The purpose of this checklist is to guide development of policy to influence behavior.

…we set out nine of the most robust (non-coercive) influences on our behavior, captured in a simple mnemonic - MINDSPACE

• Messenger --| we are heavily influenced by who communicates information
• Incentives -- our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses
• Norms -- we are strongly influenced by what others do
• Defaults -- we „go with the flow‟ of pre-set options
• Salience -- our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us
• Priming -- our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues
• Affect -- our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions
• Commitments -- we seek to be consistent with our public promises, and
  reciprocate acts
• Ego -- we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves

The British elite regard themselves as the world’s leading power in Mindspace.

The purposes of Mindspace are particularly interesting abroad. The City influences other countries by tricking its own population and the elites of other nations to assume the perspective and narrative of The City in place of their own sovereign interests.

It is not a strategy that is formally taught, but is the credo of leading elite families that run The City, and the modus operandi of the Anglo-American tax-exempt foundations & think-tanks (NGOs) that push the agenda of these families upon Western governments.

All this suggests that our political discourse has veered astray. This perspective of forming public policy is a betrayal of the governmental enterprise, in my estimation.

Here are the Elite in question, at the World Economic Forum, opining on the loss of trust…

The World Economic Forum's Great Narrative Conference: "The good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more... the bad news is that the majority of people trusted that elite less..." pic.twitter.com/c4I4zlew1p

— James Lindsay, fun (@ConceptualJames) January 21, 2022

On the one hand, culture evolves by the interaction of humans in enterprise. The evolving culture, then, influences legislation.

On the other, you have a governance structure which aims to mold culture by the inaction of public policy. These approaches to governance can be at odds.

As Alex Thomson put it:

If your mindspace is controlled by the Anglosaxon liberal democratic model, then you are going to find a club with self-interest will run the world, even in areas such as healthcare. People will wrongly assume that their best interests are kept at heart.

These MINDSPACE tactics, however, must appear to be legitimate. Otherwise, people get suspicious and resist.

Even if people agree with the behaviour goal, they may object to the means of accomplishing it. The different MINDSPACE effects will attract different levels of controversy.254 There are several factors that determine controversy:

Degree of conscious control. As noted, MINDSPACE effects depend at least partly on the Automatic System. This means that citizens may not fully realise that their behaviour is being changed – or, at least, how it is being changed. Clearly, this opens government up to charges of manipulation. People tend to think that attempts to change their behaviour will be effective if they are simply provided information in an “above board” way - people have a strong dislike of being “tricked”. This dislike has a psychological grounding, but fundamentally it is an issue of trust in government. A lack of conscious control also has implications for consent and freedom of choice. First, it creates a greater need for citizens to approve the use of the behaviour change – perhaps using new forms of democratic engagement. Second, if the effect operates automatically, it may offer little opportunity for citizens to opt- out or choose otherwise; the concept of “choice architecture” is less use here. Any action that may reduce the “right to be wrong” will be very controversial. Of course, some traditional attempts to change behaviour are not explicit (as noted in the „Salience‟ section, some incentives are effectively invisible), and these have attracted controversy. But they rarely attract the charge of „manipulation‟ because they are based on conscious actions to supply and register information, rather than relying on unconscious reactions.

By influencing the cultural institutions of authority, they can capture the peoples’ mind.

Implications for Western Democracy

In the Commonwealth & coastal jurisdictions (e.g. NYC), we are trained by the soft power institutions of The City to think we are in control of our destiny. The strength of The City’s model is the ability to operate at arm's length. To persuade people that what they wanted before, is not what they want now.

Consequently, the MINDSPACE is the most powerful weapon that Britain can wield. The British establishment has not fought fairly since about 1870. Most of the revolutions it hoped to bring about, were all in place by the post-WW2 era.

Thomson continues:

The sovereign power of The City is learned by most by the time they are in boarding school, let alone matriculants of Oxford & Cambrdige. According to this understanding, the rest of the British empire does not have self-determination.

The City owns the population’s body, mind, & soul.

From The City’s perspective, its livestock are not performing in a manner which they deem competitive on the world stage.

Usage of the term livestock is explicit. Up until the 1990s, boarding schools used it to describe the British population. This revolved around the idea that people were cattle, and that their place in the world was under the direction of the Elite.

In effect, the City of London (and its US hub, Wall Street) is battling with the American experiment of self-determination, intellectual productivity and the democratization of innovation. Whilst simultaneously competing with the East.

We are witnessing the evolution of a meta Civil War. Not within a country, but within the western hemisphere. A war which will determine which ethos within the West will rise to contend against the slavish productivity of the East.

I, for one, believe in the American experiment.

Freedom is good for the Soul.

In my second week in Saughton jail, a prisoner pushed open the door of my cell and entered during the half hour period when we were unlocked to shower and use the hall telephone in the morning. I very much disliked the intrusion, and there was something in the attitude of the man which annoyed me – wheedling would perhaps be the best description. He asked if I had a bible I could lend him. Anxious to get him out of my cell, I replied no, I did not. He shuffled off.

I immediately started to feel pangs of guilt. I did in fact have a bible, which the chaplain had given me. It was, I worried, a very bad thing to deny religious solace to a man in prison, and I really had no right to act the way I did, based on an irrational distrust. I went off to take a shower, and on the way back to my cell was again accosted by the man.

“If you don’t have a Bible,” he said, “Do you have any other book with thin pages?”

He wanted the paper either to smoke drugs, or more likely to make tabs from a boiled up solution of a drug.

You cannot separate the catastrophic failure of the Scottish penal system – Scotland has the highest jail population per capita in all of Western Europe – from the catastrophic failure of drugs policy in Scotland. 90% of the scores of prisoners I met and spoke with had serious addiction problems. Every one of those was a repeat offender, back in jail, frequently for the sixth, seventh or eighth time. How addiction had led them to jail varied. They stole, often burgled, to feed their addiction. They dealt drugs in order to pay for their own use. They had been involved in violence – frequently domestic – while under the influence.

I had arrived in Saughton jail on Sunday 1 August. After being “seen off” by a crowd of about 80 supporters outside St Leonards police station, I had handed myself in there at 11am, as ordered by the court. The police were expecting me, and had conducted me to a holding area, where my possessions were searched and I was respectfully patted down. The police were very polite. I had been expecting to spend the night in a cell at St Leonards and to be taken to jail in a prison van on the Monday morning. This is what both my lawyers and a number of policemen had explained would happen.

In fact I was only half an hour in St Leonards before being put in a police car and taken to Saughton. This was pretty well unique – the police do not conduct people to prison in Scotland. At no stage was I manacled or handled and the police officers were very friendly. Reception at Saughton prison – where prisoners are not usually admitted on a Sunday – were also very polite, even courteous. None of this is what happens to an ordinary prisoner, and gives the lie to the Scottish government’s claim that I was treated as one.

I was not fingerprinted either in the police station or the jail, on the grounds I was a civil prisoner with no criminal conviction. At reception my overcoat and my electric toothbrush were taken from me, but my other clothing, notebook and book were left with me.

I was then taken to a side office to see a nurse. She asked me to list my medical conditions, which I did, including pulmonary hypertension, anti-phospholipid syndrome, Barrett’s oesophagus, atrial fibrillation, hiatus hernia, dysarthria and a few more. As she typed them in to her computer, options appeared on a dropdown menu for her to select the right one. It was plain to me she had no knowledge of several of these conditions, and certainly no idea how to spell them

The nurse cut me off very bluntly when I politely asked her a question about the management of my heart and blood conditions while in prison, saying someone would be round to see me in the morning. She then took away from me all the prescription medications I had brought with me, saying new ones would be issued by the prison medical services. She also took my pulse oximeter, saying the prison would not permit it, as it had batteries. I said it had been given to me by my consultant cardiologist, but she insisted it was against prison regulations.

This was the most disconcerting encounter so far. I was then walked by three prison officers along an extraordinarily long corridor – hundreds of yards long – with the odd side turning, which we we ignored. At the end of the corridor we reached Glenesk Block. The journey to my cell involved unlocking eight different doors and gates, including my cell door, every one of which was locked behind me. There was no doubt that this was very high security detention.

Once I reached floor 3 of Glenesk block, which houses the admissions wing, we acquired two further guards from the landing, so five people saw me into my cell. This was twelve feet by eight feet. May I suggest that you measure that out in your room? That was to be my world for the next four months. In fact I was to spend 95% of the next four months confined in that space.

The door was hard against one wall, leaving space within the 12 ft by 8 ft cell for a 4 ft by 4 ft toilet in one corner next the door. This was fully walled in, to the ceiling, and closed properly with an internal door. This little room contained a toilet and sink. The toilet had no seat. This was not an accident – I was not permitted a toilet seat, even if I provided it myself. It was a normal UK style toilet, designed to be used with a seat, with the two holes for the seat fixing, and a narrow porcelain rim.

The toilet was filthy. Below the waterline it was stained deep black with odd lumps and ridges. Above the waterline it was streaked and spotted with excrement, as was the rim. The toilet floor was in a disgusting state. The cell itself was dirty with, everywhere a wall or bolted down furniture met the floor, a ridge built up of hardened black dirt.

A female guard looked around the cell, then came back to give me rubber gloves, a surface cleaner spray and some cloths. So I spent my first few hours in my cell on my knees, scrubbing away furiously with these inadequate materials.

The female guard had advised me that even after cleaning the cell I should always keep shoes on, because of the mice. I heard them most nights in my cell, but never saw one. The prisoners universally claim them to be rats, but not having seen one I cannot say.

A guard later explained to me that prisoners are responsible for cleaning their own cells, but as nobody generally stayed in a new admissions cell for more than two or three nights, nobody bothered. Cells for new arrivals will be cleaned out by a prisoner work detail, but as I had arrived on a Sunday, that had not happened.

So about 3pm I was locked in the cell. At 5.20pm the door opened for two seconds to check I was still there, but that was it for the day. There I was confused, disoriented and struggling to take in that all this was really happening. I should describe the rest of the cell.

A narrow bed ran down one wall. I came to realise that prison in Scotland still includes an element of corporal punishment, in that the prisoner is very deliberately made physically uncomfortable. Not having a toilet seat is part of this, and so is the bed. It consists of an iron frame bolted to the floor and holding up a flat steel plate, completely unsprung. On this unyielding steel surface there is a mattress consisting simply of two inches of low grade foam – think cheap bath sponge – encased in a shiny red plastic cover, slashed or burnt through in several places and with the colour worn off down the centre.

The mattress was stamped with the date 2013 and had lost its structural resistance, to the extent that if I pinched it between my finger and thumb, I could compress it down to a millimetre. On the steel plate, this mattress had almost no effect and I woke up after a sleepless first night with acute pain throughout my muscles and difficulty walking. To repeat, this is deliberate corporal punishment – a massively superior mattress could be provided for about £30 more per prisoner, while in no way being luxurious. The beds and mattresses can only be designed to inflict both pain and, perhaps more important, humiliation. It is plainly quite deliberate policy.

It is emblematic of the extraordinary lack of intellectual consistency in the Scottish prisons system that cells are equipped with these Victorian punishment beds but also with TV sets showing 23 channels including two Sky subscription channels (of which I shall write more in another instalment). The bed is fixed along one long wall, while a twelve inch plywood shelf runs the length of the other and can serve as a desk. At one end, up against the wall of the toilet, this desk meets a built-in plywood shelving unit fixed into the floor, on top of which are sat the television and kettle next to two power points. At the other end of the desk, a further set of shelves are attached to the wall above. There is a plastic stackable chair of the cheapest kind – the sort you see stacked outside poundshops as garden furniture.

On the outside wall there is a small double glazed window with heavy, square iron bars two inches thick running both horizontally and vertically, like a noughts and crosses grid. The window does not open, but had metal ventilation strips down each side, which were stuck firmly closed with black grime. At the other end of the cell, next to the toilet, the heavy steel door is hinged so as to have a distinct gap all round between the door and the steel frame, like a toilet cubicle door.

Above the desk shelf is fixed a noticeboard, which is the only place prisoners are allowed to put up posters or photos. However as prisoners are not permitted drawing pins, staples, sellotape or blu tak, this was not possible. I asked advice from the guards who suggested I try toothpaste. I did – it didn’t work.

There is a single neon light tube.

The admissions unit has single-occupancy cells, of which there are very few in the rest of the jail. All the prison’s cells were designed for single occupancy, but massive overcrowding means that they are mostly in practice identical to this description, but with a bunk bed rather than a single bed.

The prison is divided into a number of blocks. Glenesk block had three floors, each containing 44 of these cells. Each floor is entered by a central staircase and has a centrally located desk where the guards are stationed. Either side of the desk are two heavy metal grills stretching right across the floor and dividing it into two wings. Within the central area is the kitchen where meals are collected (though not prepared), then eaten back locked in the cell.

The corridor between the cells either side of each wing is about 30 feet wide. It contains a pool table and fixed chairs and tables, and is conceived as a recreational area. There are two telephones at the end of each wing from which prisoners may call (at 10p a minute) numbers from a list they have pre-registered for approval.

The various cell blocks are located off that central spine corridor whose length astonished me at first admission. I did not realise then that this is a discreet building in itself rather than a corridor inside a building – it is like a long concrete overground tunnel.

I should describe my typical day the first ten weeks. At 7.30am the cell door springs open without warning as guards do a head count. The door is immediately locked again. At 8am cereals, milk and morning rolls are handed in, and the door is immediately locked again. At 10am I was released into the corridor for 30 minutes to shower and use the telephone. The showers are in an open room but with individual cubicles, contrary to prison movie cliche. At 10.30am I was locked in again.

At 11am I was released for one hour and escorted under supervision to plod around an enclosed, tarmac exercise yard about 40 paces by 20 paces. This yard is filthy and contains prison bins. One wing of Glenesk block forms one side, and the central spine corridor forms another; the wall of a branch corridor leading to another cell block forms a third and a fence dividing off that block a fourth. The walls are about 10 feet high and the fence about 16 feet high.

In the non-admissions, larger area of Glenesk block the cells had windows with opening narrow side panels. It is the culture of the prison that rather than keep rubbish in their cells and empty it out at shower time, the prisoners throw all rubbish out of their cell windows into the exercise yard. This includes food waste and plates, newspapers, used tissues and worse. At meal times, sundry items (bread, margarine etc) are available on a table outside the kitchen and some prisoners scoop up quantities simply to throw them out of the window into the yard.

I believe the origin of this is that this enclosed yard is used by protected prisoners, many of whom are sexual offenders. Glenesk house has a protected prisoner area on its second floor. “Mainstream” prisoners from Glenesk exercise on the astroturf five-a-side football pitch the other side of the spine corridor. (For four months that pitch was the view from my window and I never saw a game of football played. After three months the goals were removed.) New admissions exercise in the protected yard because they have not been sorted yet – that sorting is the purpose of the new admissions wing. New prisoners therefore have to plough through the filth prepared for protected prisoners.

At times large parts of this already small exercise yard were ankle deep in dross – it was cleaned out intermittently, probably on average every three weeks. Only on a couple of occasions was it so bad I decided against exercise. After exercise getting the sludge off my shoes as we went straight back to my cell was a concern. I now understood how the cell had got so dirty.

After exercise, at noon I collected my lunch and was locked back in the cell. Apart from 2 minutes to collect my tea, I would be locked in from noon until 10am the following morning, for 22 hours solid, every single day. In total I was locked in for 22 and a half hours a day for the first ten weeks. After that I was locked in my cell for 23 hours and 15 minutes a day due to a covid outbreak.

At 5pm the door would open for a final headcount, and then we would be on lockdown for the night, though in truth we had been locked down all day. Lockdown here meant the guards were going home.

Now I want you again to just mark out twelve feet by eight feet on your floor and put yourself inside it. Then imagine being confined inside that space a minimum of 22 and a half hours a day. For four months. These conditions were not peculiar to me – it is how all prisoners were living and are still living today. The library, gym and all educational activities had been closed “because of covid”. The resulting conditions are inhumane – few people would keep a dog like that.

It is also worth noting that Covid is an excuse. In September 2017 an official inspection report already noted that significant numbers of prisoners in Saughton were confined to cells for 22 hours a day. The root problem is massive overcrowding, and I shall write further on the causes of that in a future instalment.

The long concrete and steel corridors of the prison echo horribly, and after lockdown for the first time I felt rather scared. All round me prisoners were shouting out at the top of their voices. That first evening two were yelling death threats at another prisoner, with extreme expressions of hate and retribution. Inter-prisoner communication is by yelling out the window. This went on all night into the early hours of the morning. Prisoners were banging continually on the steel doors, sometimes for hours, calling out for guards who were not there. Somebody was crying out as though being attacked and in pain. There were sounds of plywood splintering as people smashed up their rooms.

It was unnerving because it seemed to me I was living amongst severely violent and out of control berserkers.

Part of the explanation of this is that for most prisoners the new admissions wing on first night is where they go through withdrawal symptoms. Many prisoners come in still drugged up. They are going through their private hell and desperate to get medication. I can understand (though not condone) why the prison medical staff are so remarkably bad and unhelpful. Their job and circumstances are very difficult.

On that first evening I was concerned that I did not have my daily medicines, and by the next morning my heart was getting distinctly out of synch. I was therefore relieved to receive the promised medical visit.

My cell door was opened and a nurse, flanked by two guards, addressed me from outside my cell. She asked if I had any addictions. I replied in the negative. I asked when I might receive my medicines. She said it was in process. I asked if I might get my pulse oximeter. She said the prison did not allow devices with batteries. I asked if my bed could somehow be propped or sloped because of my hiatus hernia (leading to gastric reflux) and Barrett’s oesophagus. She said she didn’t think that the prison could do that. I asked about management of my blood condition (APS), saying I was supposed to exercise regularly and not sit for long periods. She replied by asking if I would like to see the psychiatric team. I replied no. She left.

I was taken out to exercise alone, with four guards watching me. I felt like Rudolf Hess. In the lunch queue I met my first prisoners, who were respectful and polite. The day passed much as the first, and I still did not get my medicines on the Monday. They arrived on the Tuesday morning, as did the prison governor.

I was told the governor had come to see me, and I met him in the (closed) Glenesk library. David Abernethy is a taciturn man who looks like a rugby prop and has a reputation among prisoners as a disciplinarian, compared to other prison regimes in Scotland. He was accompanied by John Morrison, Glenesk block manager, a friendly Ulsterman, who did most of the talking.

I was an anomaly in that Saughton did not normally hold civil prisoners. The Governor told me he believed I was their first civil prisoner in four years, and before that in ten. Civil prisoners should be held separately from criminal prisoners, but Saughton had no provision for that. The available alternatives were these: I could move into general prisoner population, which would probably involve sharing a cell; I could join the protected prisoners; or I could stay where I was on admissions.

On the grounds that nothing too terrible had happened to me yet, I decided to stay where I was and serve my sentence on admissions.

They wished to make plain to me that it was their job to hold me and it was not for them to make any comment on the circumstances that brought me to jail. I told them I held no grudge against them and had no reason to complain of any of the prison officers who had (truthfully) so far all been very polite and friendly to me. I asked whether I could have books I was using for research brought to me from my library at home; I understood this was not normally allowed. I was also likely to receive many books sent by well-wishers. The governor said he would consider this. They also instructed, at my request, extra pillows to be brought to prop up the head of my bed due to my hiatus hernia.

That afternoon a guard came along (I am not going to give the names except for senior management, as the guards might not wish it) with the pillows, and said he had been instructed I was a VIP prisoner and should be looked after. I replied I was not a VIP, but was a civil prisoner, and therefore had different rights to other prisoners.

He said that the landing guards suggested that I should take my exercise and shower/phone time at the same time as other mainstream new admission prisoners (sexual offender and otherwise protected new admission prisoners had separate times). I had so far been kept entirely apart, but perhaps I would prefer to meet people? I said I would prefer that.

So the next day I took my exercise in that filthy yard in the company of four other prisoners, all new arrivals the night before. I thus observed for the first time something which astonished me. Once in the yard, the new prisoners (who on this occasion arrived individually, not all part of the same case), immediately started to call out to the windows of Glenesk block, shouting out for friends.

“Hey, Jimmy! Jimmy! It’s me Joe! I am back. Is Paul still in? What’s that? Gone tae Dumfries? Donnie’s come in? That’s brilliant.”

The realisation dropped, to be reinforced every day, that Saughton jail is a community, a community where the large majority of the prisoners all know each other. That does not mean they all like each other – there are rival gangs, and enmities. But prison is a routine event in not just their lives, but the lives of their wider communities. Those communities are the areas of deprivation of Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is a city of astonishing social inequality. It contains many of the areas in the bottom 10% of multiple social deprivation in Scotland (dark red on the map below). These are often a very short walk from areas of great affluence in the top 10% (dark blue on the map). Of course, few people make that walk. But I recommend a spell in Saughton jail to any other middle class person who, like myself, was foolish enough to believe that Scotland is a socially progressive country.

The vast majority of prisoners I met came from the red areas on these maps. The same places came up again and again – including Granton, Pllton, Oxgangs, Muirhouse, Lochend, and from West Lothian, Livingston and Craigshill. Saughton jail is simply where Edinburgh locks away 900 of its poorest people, who were born into extreme poverty and often born into addiction. Many had parents and grandparents also in Saughton jail.

A large number of prisoners have known institutionalisation throughout their lives; council care and foster homes leading to young offenders’ institutions and then prison. A surprising number have very poor reading and writing skills. The overcrowding of our prisons is a symptom not just of failed justice and penal policy, but of fundamentally flawed economic, social and educational systems.

Of which I shall also write more later. Here, on this first day with a group in the exercise yard, I was mystified as the prisoners started going up to the ground floor windows and the guards started shouting “keep away from the windows! Stand back from the windows” in a very agitated fashion, but to no effect. Eventually they removed one man and sent him back to his cell, though he seemed no more guilty than the others.

By the next week I had learnt what was happening. At exercise the new admissions prisoners get drugs passed to them through the window by their friends who have been in the prison longer and had time to get their supply established. These drugs are passed as paper tabs, as pills or in vape tubes. There appears no practical difficulty at all in prisoners getting supplied with plentiful drugs in Saughton. Every single day I was to witness new admissions prisoners getting their drugs at the window from friends, and every single day I witnessed this curious charade of guards shouting and pretending to try and stop them.

My first few days in Saughton had introduced me to an unknown, and sometimes frightening, world, of which I shall be telling you more.

Vaccinated vs. unvaccinated case rates in the United Kingdom, from the latest UK Health Security Agency vaccine surveillance report:

a.image2.image-link.image2-928-1456 { padding-bottom: 63.73626373626373%; padding-bottom: min(63.73626373626373%, 928px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-928-1456 img { max-width: 1456px; max-height: 928px; }

Yet again I had to draw this graph myself, and yet again, the UK Health Security Agency wants you to know that these rates are extremely, totally, absolutely unadjusted. They just don’t know precisely why or how.

As I noted on Twitter, it’s emerged that UKHSA inserted all of their ill-advised disclaimers after coming under fire from the Office of Statistics Regulation, a regulatory body which periodically complains about statistics published by the British government.

OSR director Ed Humpherson met with UKHSA hours before they published their Week 43 report, demanding they do something about these awkward graphs. They responded by ditching the graphs altogether and calling every last number unadjusted. This failed to satisfy him, so in the days afterwards he issued this unbelievable open letter.

Dear Jenny,

COVID-19 vaccine surveillance statistics

Thank you for the constructive meeting on Thursday 28 October to discuss the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) COVID-19 vaccine surveillance statistics. We focused on the risk that the data presented on rates of positive cases for those who are vaccinated and those who are unvaccinated have the potential to mislead – and indeed we noted that these data have been used to argue that vaccines are ineffective.

We welcome the changes you have made to the Week 43 surveillance report, published on 28 October. It is also very good that you are working closely with my team and with the relevant teams in the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The UK has backed itself into publishing some less-than-useful numbers. Now the office responsible for this publishing will have to work closely with a gaggle of political commissars, responsible for cleansing official discourse of anything that might be “used to argue that vaccines are ineffective.”

Because he appears to be a genuinely stupid man, Humpherson spells this point out explicitly:

It remains the case that the surveillance report includes rates per 100,000 which can be used to argue that vaccines are not effective. I know that this is not the intention of the surveillance report, but the potential for misuse remains. In publishing these data, you need to address more comprehensively the risk that it misleads people into thinking that it says something about vaccine effectiveness.

Emphasis mine. The next time somebody tells you that UKHSA reports show substantial protection against severe outcomes, draw their attention to Ed Humpherson’s letter. He thinks these numbers don’t tell you anything about anything. This is the first step towards not publishing them at all.

This is not just about the choice of denominator. It is about recognising that the comparison of case rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated groups is comparing datasets with known differences – including, potentially, the greater propensity of people who are vaccinated to come forward for tests. So the data reflect a behavioural phenomenon, not just a feature of how well vaccines work. I do not think your surveillance report goes far enough in explaining this crucial point.

Emphasis mine again. Humpherson has no idea what behavioural factors might be at issue. He is just throwing random ideas at the wall, here. And notice how he slithers from what is “potentially” true to totally unqualified and unsupported assertions about is true (“the data reflect a behavioural phenomenon”). Maybe the higher unvaccinated death rates also “reflect a behavioural phenomenon“ and are “not just a feature of how well vaccines work.” As long as we are allowed to speculate baselessly, let’s do it in both directions.

He goes on to voice the old and tired complaint about the NIMS data. He wants UKHSA to use ONS population estimates instead. While the former might well understate the case rate among the unvaccinated, the latter is sure to overstate it, but Humpherson doesn’t care.

One possibility would be to only publish rates in the vaccinated population, which are known accurately, but I recognise your concern that you are already publishing rates for both groups.

Confirmation yet again of the obvious: They are only publishing these numbers because they locked themselves into doing so early on, when they looked good.

The alternative would be to use the ONS population estimates, which are used in the main coronavirus dashboard but which may be flawed for some age groups, as you have pointed out. … In the meantime, you should consider setting out these uncertainties more clearly, including by publishing the rates per 100,000 using both denominators, and making clear in the table, perhaps through formatting, that the column showing case rates in unvaccinated people is of particular concern.

That column is of particular concern because Humpherson doesn’t like the numbers in that column. He doesn’t care about the other columns because those numbers are neutral or pleasing to him.

And he closes with this:

I recognise that you want to maintain transparency and consistency, but these qualities should not be at the expense of informing the public appropriately.

Remember, always, that all Corona statistics are propaganda.

The UKHSA have issued a separate set of disclaimers on their website. Every line is fairly hilarious. And the Office of Statistical Regulation provides their own wall of text, where they show that if you understate the unvaccinated population with ONS numbers, indeed you can get the unvaccinated case rate to go up. Humpherson and his crack team of statistics regulators just love the ONS numbers, but UKHSA don’t like them so much. This is because UKHSA actually have to compile minimally plausible tables and for this they are unworkable. From p. 15 of the Week 44 report:

When using ONS, vaccine coverage exceeds 100% of the population in some age groups, which would in turn lead to a negative denominator when calculating the size of the unvaccinated population.

In April and June of 2020 I wrote about something I referred to as LOKIN 20. In a series of articles I was among those in the so called “alternative media” who tried to highlight that lockdowns and other response measures, created by the Coronavirus Act, increased the risks to the most vulnerable.

This was entirely contrary to the rationale we were given for these new laws and subsequent policies. The response was promoted to the public as a “plan” to protect the most vulnerable. It was certainly a plan but increasing, rather than decreasing, the risks appears to have been the objective.

I reported the removal of the safeguards put in place following the Shipman Inquiry and Francis Report (Mid Staffs). I pointed to statistical evidence from the Office of National Statistics and the concerns raised, by people like Professor Carl Heneghan and David Spiegelhalter, that a dangerous withdrawal of healthcare was contributing toward unnecessary increased mortality among the most vulnerable.

I am not claiming any great insight or deductive powers. I was just one, among many others, in the inappropriately named alternative media who were reporting the obvious dangers inherent to government policy.

It is important to stress that the increased mortality risk from the policies, rather than COVID 19, was abundantly clear at the time. Many people tried to warn the public but they were widely dismissed and labelled as “COVID deniers.”

A year later a number of mainstream media (MSM) articles have emerged confirming, what appears to have been, a policy that would inevitably maximise the risks to the most vulnerable.

As usual, the possibility of deliberate policy intent is never broached in any of these MSM pieces. Their reports uncritically cite statements by politicians and consistently assume that these policies were mistakes and promote the notion that lessons need to be learned.

Speaking in June 2020 about the high risk discharge of 25,000 vulnerable patients into care setting, where they received neither medical care nor adequate social care, the former Health Secretary and chairman of the Health Select Committee, Jeremy Hunt, was unquestioningly reported as saying:

It seems extraordinary that no one appeared to consider the clinical risk to care homes despite widespread knowledge that the virus could be carried asymptomatically”

Leaving aside the clear scientific proof that there is no such thing as asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence suggests that these were neither mistakes nor failures. Yet all we see from the mainstream media is a free pass for the politicians and a blanket refusal to ever question their deceitful statements.

We face a huge sociopolitical problem. Despite the mountain of historical and contemporaneous evidence that governments can and do intentionally harm us, it seems we are collectively incapable of grasping the reality of democide.

We wrongly assume that every policy is intentionally benign.

We must overcome this flawed and naive belief. Until we recognise that there are those within government, and its wider partnership networks, that wish us ill we will remain unable to address the threat they pose to all of us.

The Coronavirus Act

The UK government not only created the legislation to enable healthcare providers to increase the risks to the most vulnerable, they fully understood those risks. They had previously identified them in training exercises and had extensively modelled those risks.

Contrary to Hunt’s statement, there were many in the UK government who did “consider the clinical risk to care homes.” When the claimed pandemic arrived, rather than respond to limit and reduce the known dangers, the government, of which Hunt is a leading member, appeared to intentionally exacerbate them.

Section 14 of the Coronavirus Act removed the crucial NHS obligations under the NHS (standards) Framework. The NHS did not have to comply with clause 21(2)(a) and 21(12) of the 2012 Regulations.

The NHS no longer had a duty to assess a patient’s “eligibility for NHS Continuing Healthcare” before discharging them. In addition, no relevant body needed to have any “regard to the National Framework.” It is important to recognise what this meant within the context of a supposed global pandemic.

On 19th March 2020 the HCID group of Public Health England and the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) unanimously agreed to downgrade COVID 19, from a High Consequence Infectious Disease, due to low mortality.

The UK government issued instructions to the NHS that they must discharge as many patients as possible on the same day.

With no duty to assess a patient’s continuing healthcare needs, the government set very unsafe assessment criteria and compelled hospitals to discharge them. Unless they were in intensive care, receiving oxygen, on intravenous fluids or imminently close to death, the government decreed:

Every patient on every general ward should be reviewed on a twice-daily board round to determine the following. If the answer to each question is ‘no’, active consideration for discharge to a less acute setting must be made.”

This is worth reiterating. During an allegedly unprecedented health crisis the UK government removed the NHS duty to assess a patient’s health status (and conditions) before discharging them from hospital. They then issued instructions compelling the NHS to discharge as many patients as possible.

The government and the NHS accepted that this would mean discharging patients with an active COVID 19 infection into the community. COVID patients, and people with a range of potentially life-threatening conditions, were shipped into care settings where other vulnerable adults, who may not not have had any infection, were supposedly “shielding.”

There is no doubt that untested and COVID 19 positive patients entered the care system via this route. Both during the first and second “waves.” It is entirely reasonable to suspect that this policy, combined with others we are about to discuss, caused the said “waves.”

An August 2020 study by the Queen’s Nursing Institute found the following practices commonly operating in Care Homes during the spring 2020 outbreak. We should note the element of compulsion:

Having to accept patients from hospitals with unknown Covid-19 status, being told about plans not to resuscitate residents without consulting families, residents or care home staff…..21% of respondents said that their home accepted people discharged from hospital who had tested positive for Covid-19…..a substantial number found it difficult to access District Nursing and GP services….25% in total reporting it somewhat difficult or very difficult during March-May 2020.”

On January 11th 2021, during the alleged second wave, The Care Quality Commission stated:

These settings are admitting people who are discharged from hospital with a COVID-positive test who will be moving or going back into a care home setting.”

Even a few isolated voices in the mainstream media pointed out what they referred to as culpable neglect. Some of the UK’s leading charities for vulnerable people including the Alzheimer’s Society, Marie Curie, Age UK, Care England and Independent Age contributed toward an open letter to the UK government. Written on 14th April 2020 they highlighted a litany of policy “failures:”

Instead of being allowed hospital care, to see their loved ones and to have the reassurance that testing allows; and for the staff who care for them to have even the most basic of PPE, they are told they cannot go to hospital, routinely asked to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders.”

The policies operated both by the NHS and the care homes, as a consequence of Coronavirus Act’s “legislative easement,” did not protect the most vulnerable. Rather they maximised their clinical risk. Not just of COVID 19, but of every condition that rendered them vulnerable in the first place.

From the 17th March 2020 the NHS were discharging vulnerable patients into care homes without assessing their “eligibility for healthcare.” On 2nd April 2020 the NHS combined this with instructions that care home residents should not be conveyed to hospital. On the 6th April they issued guidance to GP’s which stated:

All patients should be triaged remotely.. Remote consultations should be used when possible. Consider the use of video consultations when appropriate.”

So-called “first wave” mortality peaked on the 11th of April and the UK government published its COVID 19 Action Plan on the 15th April. This seemingly insane policy agenda was deemed “necessary” by the UK state to create “capacity” in the NHS:

The UK Government with the NHS set out its plans on the 17th March 2020 to free up NHS capacity via rapid discharge into the community and reducing planned care…..We can now confirm we will move to institute a policy of testing all residents prior to admission to care homes.”

There was no commitment to improve the situation from the UK government, just a plan to move toward one. We know from the observations of the CQC that they continued these high risk policies during the subsequent virus “waves.” There is no evidence that any of these policies were designed to reduce the risks of the most vulnerable. They all, consistently tended to increase them.

It is not tenable for politicians to now claim that they didn’t know what was happening. They constructed and enabled all of the policies that made this dangerous negligence possible. Nor is it credible to simply blame the medical profession. The widespread use of Hospital Trust gagging orders (non disclosure agreements) was also in place.

Doctors who did speak out were disciplined or sacked. This was systemic policy initiative which physicians were expected to abide by.

Once the vulnerable were trapped in abandoned care homes, which were knowingly understaffed, the remaining, unprotected staff were then left to deal with both their own safety fears and the mounting mortality. The government decided this was an opportune moment to suspend all safety inspections in both hospital and care settings.

This was supposed to “limit infections,” although every other decision they made appeared to increase them. Yet again, ending inspections raised the mortality risk for the most vulnerable.

At the same time, Do Not Resuscitate (DNAR) notices were being attached to vulnerable people’s care plans, often without their consent or even their knowledge.

This coincided with a massive increase in orders for the potentially life-ending medication midazolam.

Midazolam

In March 2020 the NHS purchased the equivalent of two years worth of supply. French suppliers were then given regulatory approval by the MHRA to sell additional stock to the NHS. This was then distributed for out of hospital use in the community.

This benzodiazepine (midazolam) is a sedative/anaesthetic that suppresses respiration and the central nervous system (CNS). The British National Formula (BNF) recommends its use for sedation of anxious or agitated terminally ill patients using a mechanised syringe pump in doses of 30–200 micrograms/kg/hour. It is not recommended for conscious sedation in higher doses due to the following risks:

CNS (central nervous system) depression; compromised airway; severe respiratory depression.”

Therefore a frail, eight stone (50 kg) adult could receive an initial dose of up to 2.5mg followed by a total incremental dose of another 2.5mg over a 24hr period. The purpose of this would be to ease their anxiety and agitation if they were experiencing the frightening sensation of intense respiratory difficulty.

Midazolam becomes a conscious anaesthetic for use in intensive and palliative care when given in higher doses. The British Association for Palliative Medicine recommend:

Start with 2.5-5 milligrams – if necessary, increase progressively to 10 milligrams – maintain with 10-60 milligrams / 24h in a syringe pump”

Ten milligrams is twice the BNF recommended dose to ease anxiety (for an 8 stone vulnerable adult.) Therefore it is extremely concerning that NHS Clinical Guideline for Symptom Control for patients with COVID-19 recommended 10mg of Midazolam for patients with “distressing breathlessness at rest.” This risks a rapid deterioration of the symptoms causing them that distress.

Gosport Scandal

Police are still investigating an estimated 15,000 deaths that occurred at Gosport War Memorial Hospital between 1987 and 2001. An inquiry has already found that at least 456 people’s lives were “shortened” through the unwarranted use of unnecessary medication.

Many suspect that the true figure is in the thousands. The independent panel into the malpractice at Gosport War Memorial Hospital found:

There was a disregard for human life and a culture of shortening the lives of a large number of patients by prescribing and administering “dangerous doses” of a hazardous combination of medication not clinically indicated or justified…they were, in effect, put on a terminal care pathway…The risk of using them in combination has been consistently documented in the BNF. In particular, it has long been known that when given together, opioids and midazolam cause enhanced sedation, respiratory depression and lowered blood pressure.”

This report was published in September 2018. In 2020 the NHS treatment guidelines for COVID 19 patients, who were deemed to be “agitated,” was:

Start with Morphine 20mg and Midazolam 20mg”

This is precisely the mechanical syringe combination used at Gosport War Memorial to “shorten” thousands of peoples lives.

There are numerous reasons to suspect that the huge increase in midazolam ordered by the NHS, with the full knowledge of the government, was intended for this purpose.

In April 2020 the Health and Social Care Committee, chaired by Jeremy Hunt, heard submissions from medical professionals as they considered the government response to the global pandemic. In Q377 Dr Luke Evans (MP fror Hinckley and Bosworth) asked then Health Secretary about NHS provisions for “a good death.” This is medical shorthand for assisted dying or euthanasia. Dr Evans (MP) asked:

The syringe drivers are used to deliver medications such as midazolam and morphine. Do you have any precautions in place to ensure that we have enough of those medications?”

To which Matt Hancock replied:

Yes. We have a big project to make sure that the global supply chains for those sorts of medications [are] clear. In fact, those medicines are made in a relatively small number of factories around the world, so it is a delicate supply chain and we are in contact with the whole supply chain.”

Hancock was clearly referring to the huge midazolam order and MHRA approval of the French supply chain. The UK government had already passed the Coronavirus Act, removing the NHS Framework duties, and had ordered them to discharge patients en masse. The NHS had instructed care homes not to send sick patients to hospital and GP support from the care homes had effectively been withdrawn.

Jeremy Hunt was chairing this discussion. For him to claim two months later that no one had “appeared to consider the clinical risk to care homes” smacks of vile obfuscation. The best we can say about this statement is that he was wrong. We now have the documentation which shows that the clinical risk in care homes was very carefully considered and the withdrawal of care was planned.

Cygnus

In 2016 the UK government ran Exercise Cygnus. The training scenario was prepared by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London (ICL). It simulated a flu outbreak and was a Command Post Exercise (CPX) designed to test the UK’s pandemic preparedness. Nearly a thousand key officials took part from central and local government departments, the NHS, public health bodies from across UK, as well as local emergency response planners.

Some of the Cygnus Report recommendations were implemented in response to COVID 19 and others not. For example, it recommended legislative easements.

The Coronavirus Act certainly eased the legislation surrounding the death registration process and the NHS duty of care. The legal requirements for inquests, post-mortems and cremations were also relaxed.

Exercise Cygnus also highlighted a number of deficiencies. It identified inadequate numbers of critical, general and acute care beds, which the government then proceeded to reduce further; it warned that whole sections of the NHS may have to be shut, which is exactly what the government did during the “pandemic;” it highlighted that the most vulnerable could be denied care, just as they were, and that the health service would have to be set on a war footing just to be able to cope.

These were warnings not policy suggestions. The UK government’s adoption of some of the Cygnus recommendations and determination not to address Gygnus alarms appears to have been their policy response to COVID 19.

COVID 19 healthcare strategies were seemingly set in 2016. The Cygnus scenario, modelled by Ferguson and ICL differed from their COVID 19 “models” only by virtue of being based upon influenza rather than a coronavirus.

Perhaps this explains why Exercise Cygnus was kept secret, reportedly for reasons of “national security.” When the report was released, after being exposed, it was heavily redacted and all the names of the senior officials involved were hidden.

The official explanation for this is that it was just too terrifying for the public to withstand. We might ask, terrifying for whom? Using the media to terrorise the public during the alleged pandemic was recommended by Spi-B (SAGE.)

It is reasonable to assume that many of those redacted names would have been people working for Ferguson’s ICL team and current members of SAGE. If so, this indicates that those involved in planning the response to COVID 19 not only understood what the risks were, they then provided the claimed “scientific” justification for policies which they knew would increase them.

One of the senior officials involved in Cygnus reportedly said:

These exercises are supposed to prepare government for something like this – but it appears they were aware of the problem but didn’t do much about it.”

Again, we see the assumption that everything must be explained away as error or unfortunate oversight. This stretches credibility beyond breaking point when we understand that Gygnus ultimately produced a plan to deny healthcare during a pandemic. This policy of increasing the risks of the most vulnerable was evidently operating during the first alleged pandemic wave. It also seems likely that it continued beyond that point.

Based upon the Cygnus conclusions, in September 2017, the NHS Surge and Triage briefing paper was made available to senior health and government officials. It discussed something called population triage:

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update to Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and the Chief Scientific Advisor (CSA) on continuing refinement of the knowledge and understanding behind the potential decision that may be required in a future extreme pandemic influenza scenario to move to a state of population triage across the country…”

Population triage means the potential denial of healthcare:

The majority of the detail in this paper will not be replicated in any publically available documentation…Difficult decisions will be needed about maintaining patient access to care…There is significant discussion in the paper about ceasing or changing care to patients in the HRG (Healthcare Resource Croups)…Patients would be assessed on probability of survival rather than clinical need and higher level services would no longer be provided…Total excess death rate would be in excess of 7,806 per week of the peak of the pandemic if all these services were stopped…So in the peak six weeks of a pandemic…46,836 excess deaths could be expected”

Between 7th March and 8th May 2020, there were 47,243 excess deaths in England and Wales. According to the Cygnus predictions, this was slightly higher than the numbers envisaged to result directly from the withdrawal of healthcare.

However, nearly all of these deaths were attributed to COVID 19. We should ask where, in the claimed COVID 19 mortality figures, the anticipated deaths from the denial of healthcare are.

In November 2017 a number of English stakeholders also met to discuss the a pandemic briefing paper for Adult Social and Community Care. This too was a product of Exercise Cygnus. Once again the intention was to keep the report secret.

The majority of the detail in this paper will not be replicated in any publically available documentation.. Whilst demand will increase, capacity, which is already under pressure because of recruitment challenges, will also reduce because of staff absences.. Adult social care will have an increased role in supporting rapid discharge from hospital. In a severe pandemic, only those services that are life-critical will be maintained.. More patients could be supported by a greater focus on telecare/tele-monitoring.”

It is known, from the reports of the CQC and national charities and other NHS documents cited in this article, that primary healthcare was withdrawn from care settings and the community. The staff shortages identified in 2016 became chronic and then severe during the pandemic. This was entirely predictable and was a known outcome of the track and trace and self-isolation polices of the UK government.

The briefing paper spoke about which services could be “reduced or deferred.” Crucially these included assessment of care needs, mobility support, personal care support, maintaining family connections and access to medical treatment.

During the “first wave” approximately 25,000 vulnerable people were discharged into care homes to face the extremely high risk environment created for them by the UK government. At the same time potentially life ending drugs were being liberally prescribed.

This was the COVID 19 policy response and we were told the intention was to “protect the most vulnerable”. All of it was predicted on the assumption that hospital were struggling to cope with the “surge” in COVID 19 patients. According to the UK government, patients needed to be discharged to free up capacity in the NHS.

At the height of the so called first wave, on the 13th of April 2020, the Health Service Journal reported that hospital bed occupancy was at a record low, with 4 times more beds available that usual for the time of year. There were 37,500 available beds.

The HSJ stated that the reason for this spare capacity was the discharge policy operated by NHS at the behest of the government. What they didn’t mention is that these figures show the high-risk discharge of the most vulnerable people in our society was entirely unnecessary.

You may not like it but is not “unthinkable” that this was deliberate, coordinated policy designed to increase the mortality statistics. Many have questioned the claimed severity of the alleged pandemic. If you wish to give the impression of a high mortality disease then you need the deaths to back up your claim.

It is feasible that all of these risk heightening factors happened to perfectly coalesce to increase mortality, but is it plausible? A refusal to contemplate the possibility of an intentional act does not rule it out. Only a thorough, truly independent investigation can.

Conclusion

While this system was in operation, the UK government encouraged widespread adoption of the Clap for Carers, often referred to as “clap for the NHS.” During lockdowns, as the whole nation was told to self isolate indoors and avoid all unnecessary congregation, between the 26th March and the 28th May, we were “allowed” to simultaneously congregate on the streets and show our appreciation by clapping, banging pots and pans and ringing bells.

Meanwhile vulnerable people were being discharged into unsafe care homes where access to medical care was withdrawn and essential social care removed.

Clapping for this was obscene.

The government clearly used this ploy both as a distraction and as propaganda. This does not suggest that doctors, nurses and carers do not deserve our support. Any medical professional or carer who blows the whistle is almost certainly making a career ending decision.

Given the evidence we have discussed, if we consider ourselves to be responsible citizens who live in a democracy, it is unconscionable for us to simply ignore what appears to have been a deliberate and illegal government policy of large scale euthanasia in the UK.

We must seek answers from policymakers and malfeasance in office must be prosecuted wherever it is identified.

You can read more of Iain’s work at his blog In This Together

It’s said that, when asked why he had escalated America’s military campaign in Vietnam, US president Lyndon Johnson pulled down his trousers, whipped out his male member, and said “That’s why!’

I have no idea if this is true, but it’s quite plausible. For LBJ, Vietnam was nothing if not a test of manhood. As he told his biographer Doris Kearns: “If I left that way and let the communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward … an unmanly man, a man without spine.”

It’s perhaps too harsh to say that 58,000 Americans died so that LBJ could feel like a man. But there’s something to it. And as I detailed in my 2006 book Military Honour and the Conduct of War, LBJ is hardly unique. Throughout the ages, war – like international politics generally – has been powerfully influenced by the search for honour, and perhaps even more by the desire to avoid dishonour.

One you realize this, a lot of international politics suddenly makes sense. Modern Westerners tend to be a bit uncomfortable with the language of honour. It sounds a bit archaic. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not relevant – just that we’re not very good at recognizing it in ourselves. A case in point is the incident last week when a British warship sailed through what Russia claims are its territorial waters off Crimea. But before we get onto that, we first need to take a little diversion into academic theory.

Honour, as Aristotle put it, is “the reward for virtue.” What virtue consists of is something we’ll come onto in a moment, but the key point is that honour comes from displaying virtue. Honour also comes in two forms – external and internal, otherwise expressed by words such as prestige, reputation, face, etc. in the first instance, or like conscience and integrity in the second. Seen this way, honour is, according to a well-known definition, the worth of a person in his/her own eyes as well as the worth of a person in the eyes of others. Either way, it’s a measurement of worth. But of the two forms (internal and external) the first is the most important – the reason one wants to be considered worthy in the eyes of others is because it makes you feel worthy in your own eyes. Ultimately, honour is all about feeling good about yourself.

Another way of looking at honour is to divide it into two other types. The first is absolute, and is often associated with female honour. This type you either have or you don’t – you’re pure, and so honourable, until you aren’t and you’re not. The second type is relative and competitive – or “agonistic” in the technical jargon. This type is traditionally associated with male virtues – strength, courage, prowess, and so on. Honour of this type has to be perpetually defended, lest one loses one’s relative position. It requires one both to challenge others and to defend oneself any time one is challenged.

This latter type of honour tends to flourish where governance is weak, and people or institutions feel that they need to exert themselves in order to survive. This gives it an instrumental purpose. But it also tends to get detached from this purpose. Strength, courage, prowess etc are considered important in the sense of being necessary to defend against threats. Because of that, societies tend to promote them as virtues, rewarding their display. The result is that people internalize them and feel a need to display these virtues even when it’s not appropriate. Because virtue and worth have become associated with strength, courage, prowess etc, showing strength, courage, prowess, etc becomes almost an end in itself – or at least, a psychological necessity to avoid the sense of shame that comes from failing to live up to the standard of virtue.

The result is a lot of utterly unnecessary conflict, as individuals, including state leaders, feel the need to challenge one another and respond forcibly to anything that is perceived to be a challenge.

Which brings us on to the shenanigans of the Royal Navy last week off the coast of Crimea.

In a recent post, I speculated as to what inspired this particular piece of foolish derring-do. Now we have an answer, courtesy of some waterlogged Ministry of Defence documents found abandoned behind a bus stop in Kent. In these, anonymous defence officials predicted that the Russian response to a British incursion into Crimean waters might be fairly forceful. But they also concluded that this was no reason not to direct the British warship HMS Defender to sail through the waters in question. Were that to happen, said the documents, people might get the impression of “the UK being scared/running away.”

At which point, I hope, the connection with what I said earlier becomes clear. One might imagine that the Russian-British spat was a matter of high principle or national interest. In reality, it’s about not wanting to look cowardly.

In effect, the Russian annexation of Crimea was a “challenge” to the West. As such, the logic of honour requires a response. Failing to face up to the challenge by sailing around Crimea would have meant ducking the challenge, and as such was unacceptable. The fact that the Russians might respond forcefully made meeting the challenge even more essential. If there was no chance of a forceful response, there wouldn’t be any cowardice in failing to meet it. It was precisely the possibility that things might turn violent that made the escapade necessary.

This seems strange, but the logic is entirely in keeping with the perverse incentives provided by the honour code. The possibility that an incident might escalate into war isn’t a reason to back off; it’s actually all the more reason to press on.

The thing about this, though, is that the challenge in question was purely imaginary. It existed in the minds of the Royal Navy, but not anywhere else. People weren’t actually going to think that the British were a bunch of cowards if they decided to sail from Odessa to Georgia by some other route. In fact, nobody would have noticed, let alone cared.

Thus, going back to what I said earlier, the internal aspect of honour is what matters here – it’s all about self-perception rather than the perception of others. What’s driving this is a feeling in the British establishment that their status in the world isn’t what it was. The sense of internal dishonour this provokes makes them feel bad about themselves. And so they incite a conflict in order to boost their self-esteem.

If you have a spare hour, I recommend Bill Moyer’s documentary LBJ’s Road to War. A lot of it consists of recordings of President Johnson’s phone calls with his advisors about Vietnam. What comes out of it is that all concerned knew that escalating the war was a bad idea and wouldn’t succeed. But more important from LBJ’s point of view was that he didn’t want to look weak. And the rest as they say, is history. The lesson is obvious, and its one that the Brits – and everybody else – would do well to learn.

Joanna Sharp

I had not planned to travel abroad this year, especially after the UK government’s announcement in early 2021 that foreign holidays were forbidden. Even heading towards the airport with an intent to go on a foreign holiday could result in a £5000 fine or imprisonment! Surreal.

Where we live in London under a flight path to Heathrow, we notice that although there are fewer flights, they have not ceased completely. So how do people travel? It’s not something I have thought about.

One day at the end of April I receive a message that my elderly father’s condition is critical. Within an hour I am looking at flights back home in Eastern Europe and checking the UK government travel ‘advice’ webpages.

I say ‘advice’ but that word belongs to the past. Today, ‘command’ might be more appropriate. According to the government, only “essential” international travel is permitted for named valid reasons; ‘medical and compassionate’ is the category which applies to me.

I wonder whose compassion this is a reference to: mine, for wanting to be with my sick father, or the government’s for including this as a possibility. Reassured that I can go, it is now a question of buying the plane tickets, checking in and packing, right? Not quite.

Wading through the red tape

Since holiday travel has effectively been banned, the government created intricate webpages full of information on what is and what is not allowed, where citizens cannot travel, and if they must, what documents they need to prepare. So complicated travel advice alone has become that the webpage now includes a step by step flowchart with endless links within each step to be followed.

Getting through this information would take at least a day. It’s like a cross between a maze and a vortex. I soon understand that I cannot buy my tickets until I have uploaded the right Covid related paperwork onto the airline website!

First, I need to fill a Declaration for International Travel (since the 17th May it is no longer required) which asks for personal details including my date of birth, passport number, home address and destination.

The key question is the reason for international travel – and in the actual online questions, the phrase is: ‘What is your excuse for travel?’ My excuse? What kind of language is that? Am I asking a teacher to let me leave the classroom? Am I asked to explain why I haven’t done my homework?

That really shocks me, although I have already noticed my own reaction to the very idea that I need permission to leave the country, as if I was back in Eastern Europe before 1989…I read the following declaration and tick the right box out of the given options.

I hereby declare that my reason for being outside my home to travel internationally is for:

– Work
– Volunteering
– Education
– Medical or compassionate reasons
– Funeral
– Ending a temporary visit (non-UK resident)
– Allowing access to parents with children who do not live in the same country
– Other reasonable excuse – please specify

Next, I am required to sign to ‘certify that the information I have provided is true. I understand that if I provide false or misleading information, I may be issued with a fixed penalty notice and/or a direction to return home or be arrested’.

So, by signing this, and I have no choice not to if I want to get my ticket, I have given the UK authorities permission to arrest or fine me should my excuse to travel turn out to be incorrect. What if my father is not that ill, then what?

But of course, that is not enough. I now need to provide evidence of my father’s illness. How do you do that when the whole of the world is still in lockdown; imagine having to get a doctor’s note on demand. I am still just trying to get a ticket.

I want to travel tomorrow morning, my sister-in-law tells me, Dad is given a couple of days. I ask my brother to send me an email confirming the family crisis, he does that within an hour. He is also trying to copy the notes from my father’s last doctor’s visit and the most recent diagnosis.

Then, still before I buy a return ticket, I need to get a kit of two Covid tests which I will need to take upon return to UK. Another link takes me on to a list of government-approved Covid test providers. A whole list of them, each can be accessed via a separate link. I try a few. They average around £200 each. The cheapest ones are £99 but are sold out.

Why can’t I see any free NHS ones? The ones given out like sweets in schools and local pharmacies? Why are these not available? Why could I not just pick a free one at the airport?

But of course, there is no to answer these questions, I am desperate to leave so agree to this, too. No test, no flight. So, I order one of these almost £200 test kits, get an email confirming the order, upload all the documents and finally I can complete the purchase of my tickets which, as usual, turn out not so low cost after all.

I check in. My boarding card (lucky I had just bought a printer the previous week) says at the top of the page ‘Covid Documentation Uploaded’. So, now I have the boarding card and a pile of printed pages which presumably I will need to show at UK border control in order to prove my excuse for leaving the country is legitimate.

Finally, I download and fill in the compulsory Passenger Locator Form for the destination country that will enable the system to track and trace me. It is nearly bedtime and I now need to pack.

On the go

My husband drives me to Stansted in the middle of the night. An early morning flight, no public transport available but at least it’s quiet and there is no traffic. The airport is still closed; a group of families with young children are waiting for the door to open.

These are not holidaymakers breaking the law to get some forbidden fun. No idea where they are travelling but they look like they are going home somewhere south, southeast perhaps? Turkey, Bulgaria or Ukraine? No idea but they do look like part of the globalised chain of workforce escaping poverty and perhaps the lockdown has pushed them to return. Better to be jobless and poor in your own village. The weather tends to be better and the environment less hostile.

Finally, the doors open. I push the scarf up over my face, my hand clutching a plastic folder with a wad of documents allowing me to leave. It is quiet, no waiting. I go through security, passport control seems non-existent, shops still closed so nothing to stop for. I wonder at which point someone will ask me to see the papers. Ask me what my excuse for leaving is. Strangely, that never happens. I am almost disappointed. I spent about four hours sorting out all that paperwork the night before and now this is not even checked!

Immediately I catch myself: why am I disappointed? Because no one will give me the all-clear? Have I been conditioned to want to be waved through the green light already?

Perhaps that is how normalising oppression works. But of course, there is no need to check, the documents been uploaded and recorded somewhere and someone now knows everything about me, my plans, my reason (“excuse”) for leaving the country. Or perhaps the intimate details of my family crisis; my father’s terminal illness and my attempt to get to him before it’s too late have now just been converted into big data slushing around the corpo-government’s control AI machine, and turned into useful predictions.

I guess this type of authoritarianism does not even need stern looks from border control officials, no need to divulge private dramas in public. Hours of stress of getting the documents turned into a discreet but vital small print on my boarding card; the only visible proof that my travel is acceptable to the corpo-state. It is all so neat, tidy, hi-tech and invisible that we can just pretend that all is just normal.

After all, the airport trimmings look all the same; with adverts, duty-free shopping, same old queues at departure gates and same safety drills on the plane, down to the irritating Ryanair voice thanking us for choosing to fly with them (no one chooses to fly with Ryanair, just like no one chooses to go to the dentist, you do it because you have to and you hope it won’t be too unpleasant).

We can pretend nothing has changed. Except the masks on faces, of course. Slow drinking and eating is my solution. During the flight many noses protrude against the regulations, of course. People do need to breathe.

We land on time. I send a message to my father, anxious, hoping he is still there. He is not responding. I am worried. From the tarmac I can see the arrivals hall is full. There is no way of entering so the crowd from my plane stops outside and waits in the drizzle. I wonder why that is. Is that Brexit or is it that people’s papers are now checked after all?

The queue moves very slowly, twenty minutes after landing I send my father another message saying that I’m still waiting for border control. I have no idea why this is so slow; each person seems to spend a good few minutes at the control desk. Finally, an hour and a half after landing I get into the taxi. As the driver pulls away, I notice a long queue of passengers outside the arrivals hall waiting to get a Covid test. I arrive home and find my father hanging on.

My father’s illness

There is a twist to this story. My father has been treated for cancer but has been still doing quite well and has been planning to spend the summer away from his flat, in the countryside. His sudden deterioration it unexpected to me but I have not had time to think of reasons. I only learnt of this yesterday. But now I am in the flat, taking my shoes off when my brother drops the bombshell: ‘you know, Dad took the vaccine’.

I am shocked. He told me he was not going to, because he found the registration process too difficult, so he decided to stop trying. I was relieved; I had been persuading him that he should not, that being immunocompromised, his system might not cope. I told him what I knew and what I worried about. My brother tells me another family member helped organize his jab and took him there. Jesus. But I am to pretend I don’t know about it; Dad asked my brother not to tell me.

So, I learn that the day after the Pfizer jab he started to feel weak, and within ten days he was prescribed blood thinning injections, a daily drip and he became bedbound. My brother has hired a hospital-style bed and an oxygen machine, set them up in father’s bedroom and organized a private nurse for daily visits. Dad had not wanted to go to hospital: he believed that hospitals were overrun by contagious Covid patients and that going to hospital would mean certain death under a ventilator.

Luckily (I never thought I would say this), unlike the UK, this ex-communist country never managed to build up its own national health service to a level able to deliver comprehensive care, so a secondary private sector filling the gaps exists and is not beyond the means of many people. So here he is, in his own bedroom and getting care at home.

He is happy to see me but asks me not to touch him. I feel sad, guessing he might worry I am bringing contagion. That hurts. I pretend I know nothing about the jab. Later, much later, I remember this moment and think that, he might have wanted to protect me. He knew the jab made him ill and he worried he was fighting vaccine induced-Covid and did not want to give it to me.

He never told me about the vaccine, I never told him I knew.

Sunset in quarantine

Quarantine One: The App

The day after arriving I receive a text message telling me I am now under statute of law obliged to download a particular app and use it during my 10-day home quarantine. I start the download but can’t complete it. Something is stuck and I have no idea how to fix it. I try for a while and then abandon it. I spend most of the time caring for my father who now slips in and out of consciousness.

The next morning I get a phone call but it stops ringing before I have time to answer it. The following day the same happens. I realise this is the local track and trace. They ring but don’t wait for me to answer. Their call is logged, the box gets ticked but the robot or a human cannot be bothered to do the job properly. Actually, it must be a human as a robot would not give up. Good. The tyranny will fail due to human error or sheer laziness.

I don’t know what possessed me but somehow, I manage to complete installing the Quarantine App. The system springs into action. I get a message from the app that I must take a selfie within the next 30 minutes and submit it. I take a selfie from the app which gives me as many times as I like to choose the best shot. I choose the worst shot.

Of course, there is a way to cheat: after doing my selfie I could leave the phone at home and go out for a walk. Trouble is, the selfie demand comes at a different time each day, usually towards the end of the day. But I have no reason to go anywhere, really, I have come here to be with him, and his condition continues to be critical. And at some point, during this journey I decided that I would do everything by the book, just to see what the new normal travel feels and looks like, and what exactly they want us to experience.

Well, here I am, in a 10-day quarantine in a flat with my dying father. We are lucky. I have my brother to get the shopping in and kind neighbours ready to help. We are lucky my father is at home. What would be the point of coming here all this way, only to be stuck in quarantine if he was in a hospital with no visitors allowed? So, all in all, we are lucky.

Difficult days

Days go by, my father’s condition improves a little, I am his nurse, and of course I touch him – he stopped protesting as soon as he needed a glass of water; I continue to take my selfies. We talk, I read to him, feed him, then he sleeps. He dies two days after my quarantine ends. That is good timing.

There is a lot to do now, and I will not be breaking the law trying to organize the funeral…I remember my favourite literature lesson at school when we debated who was right: Creon or Antigone. Even then, I was in team Antigone.

A doctor arrives to certify death. She is nice and takes her time. Talks a little. Does not look like a corporate bot. She is sitting at a coffee table doing the paperwork. For the cause of death, she writes ‘Thrombosis’. I ponder for a bit and then hesitatingly say: ‘Did you know he was vaccinated?’.

Her face changes and she asks: ‘No, when?’ We tell her, ‘Four weeks ago, exactly’.

‘I am not allowed to say anything,’ she says, ‘but I can tell you I have seen a lot lately. A lot!’ We try to encourage her to talk more but she is cautious. I just ask her: ‘Why would a person on cancer treatment be given a vaccine? Surely that had not been done before?’ She looks at me and says: ‘Because they want to vaccinate us all.’ So, she knows.

This kind of conversation would have been typical in the days of strict communist authoritarianism before 1989. You never knew whom you could trust so you just dropped hints and checked for people’s response. In those days careless talk was dangerous, and I am too young to remember the worst times: the Stalinist years when children were encouraged to denounce their parents; many were imprisoned, tortured and killed.

Now the threat is only a loss of income and public humiliation and yet the new order based on lies, fraud and corrupt science is already in place. Everyone is just doing their job. A perfect example of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil in which those, following orders in this elaborate house of cards, often do not even know their active contribution to harm inflicted on others. They do not realise because they refuse to look and to know. They stopped taking responsibility for their individual part in the whole.

There is a small group of doctors in the country who are challenging the official narrative, attempt to offer treatment for Covid patients and warn against the untested ‘vaccines’, particularly now that governments want to jab children. Their voices are censored, the people get smeared, ridiculed and shamed by the professional licensing medical body. The modern-day governance in Western democracies!

Travelling home

As the funeral preparations get underway, I need to organise my return travel. I check the UK government website again. Travelling from an ‘amber’ coded country, I must test negative for Covid within 72 hours prior to departure. Tricky when the flight is on Monday afternoon.

I start to search for UK government-approved tests available in the city. Only a handful provide the specified UK approved antigen test with results in English. They are also open only in the mornings so if I test on Friday morning, I might be testing a few hours too early to fit within the 72 hours.

After hours of online searching, I find one that looks almost right. I pay the equivalent of £35 online and am told to come on the day, without an appointment. The laboratory website provides useful advice, how to prepare for the test. I learn that I should not brush my teeth or use mouthwash on the morning of test. So now I know what to do.

I arrive at the testing centre early, having heard that queues can be quite long. It is, and it is in the street. The lab’s waiting room only allows three people at a time so the rest stand outside. After about an hour it is my turn. I am allowed inside the surgery.

On the right, by the door, a masked man sitting at a desk behind a glass screen is checking my name and the type of test I have purchased. Then, a young tall, man in full white hazmat suit, his face covered, and in protective glasses ushers me to sit on a chair and tip my head backwards.

This is my first Covid test ever and I am terrified. I have rehearsed telling them how sensitive my face feels and asking not to go deep but there is no eye contact, no talk trying to help me feel comfortable, no attempt to put me at ease. He just tells me to tip my head back far.

I just manage to ask him to go into the left nostril as my right one is not straight. He happily obliges and shoves the long stick into my nostril. As soon as the tip enters my nose I feel shock, a feeling of something unnatural, wrong and threatening happening. The area he just touched is too soft, sensitive and the sensation so unfamiliar I involuntarily, and to my own shock, find myself pushing the man’s arm away. He moves back and looks at me, his body language (there is no face available) disapproves of my behaviour.

I say, please don’t go that deep, you already have some but he insists, tells me not to defend myself and does it again. And again, that feeling that a part of me which is vulnerable and should not be touched, gets scraped. He gets his sample and nods for me to go. I am frozen in that chair, unable to move for what seems like a while. I have tears in my eyes, and I am alone with two hazmat wearing robots. No word is uttered as I leave.

I get my negative result within hours. I recover with an old friend. By then I have a splitting headache and my left nostril is moist with a slight leak. The headache lasts for a couple of days but the leak persists for at least ten.

I arrive at the airport early because I have difficulties completing the UK Passenger Locator Form which UK needs from all passengers. I pass through a manned gate with an automatic wrist temperature check. The airport is unusually quiet, and the staff help me identify the problem which stops me from completing the form. The reference number for the double Covid test needed for the Passenger Locator Form is wrong. I ring home and ask my husband to read the reference number off the Covid test kit. Surely it has arrived now. It hasn’t. It looks like the Day 2 and 8 Test I ordered has not been paid for.

I am told I need to buy a new kit if I want to get this flight. I do as I’m told. No form, no flight. I stand next to the luggage drop off counter feeling sweats, and with my hands shaking I battle the website on my phone. Again, all the ‘cheap’ ones are sold out and somehow, at the last minute I manage to make a purchase for £180, get an email, a reference number, complete the form and have my luggage accepted.

I hurry to my gate and make it just in time as passengers are starting to board. I slow down to join the Ryanair herd waiting on the tarmac for the aircraft to be processed before we are told we can travel.

The pavement is marked with lines at 2-meter intervals. Two men behind me are joking loudly that we must stand on the lines correctly, otherwise the virus will jump on us. I turn and smile (no mask, we are still outside) and make eye contact with the fellow humans.

Quarantine Two: Track and Trace

Back home in London, the following day I get my first out of ten phone calls from Track and Trace. Each time a different voice reads the same script.

I am contacting you on behalf of the NHS Test and Trace as you have recently travelled into the UK from abroad. Are you happy to continue in English?”

No idea what would happen if I said ‘no’.

Before we proceed, I need to make you aware that this call will be recorded for training and quality improvement purposes and should just take a few minutes of your time. I can confirm I have completed the necessary data security training and all information you provide today will be stored securely. NHS Test and Trace may need to share your details with other organisations including the Home Office, and further information on data security and privacy can be found on www.gov.uk/coronavirus. Sharing information in the call today means you consent for it to be stored in the ways I have described. Are you happy to proceed with the call?”

I wish I could say, no, I am not. Once or twice I ask how long the data is going to be stored. The caller is not sure and advises me to find this out from the government website. The call proceeds with them checking my year of birth. Then they ask if I have opted into a ‘test to release’ – I frankly don’t even know it is my option, so I say ‘no’.

I later learn that the Test to Release scheme does not replace the compulsory Day 2 and 8 test. The ten-day quarantine can be shortened to 5 days by ‘opting into’ Test to Release for an additional £99. I realise they ask this question to advertise another product!

Can you confirm that you are quarantining at the address you provided on the passenger locator form and will continue to do so for ten days starting on the day after you arrive in the UK.”

So, again, I confirm, yes. What would happen if I said no?

As part of the Covid 19 response you are legally required to take the test on Day 2 and Day 8 and a failure to do so may result in prosecution.”

That answers my previous question…

Has your test arrived? And have you taken or do you intend to take your test?”

Yes.

Then I am asked if I got my test from the NHS or from a private provider. I am confused as I had no option to get an NHS test and I tell the caller. They seem happy with my answer and continue:

If your Day 2 test is positive confirming Covid 19, you do not need to take another test on Day 8.”

I think, on one occasion, I ask how I am expected to post the test if I am not allowed to leave the house. Of course, the assumption is there is someone else in the house, and if I still have difficulties, again, the go-to place is another NHS number. Amazing what they can do these days; they can even pick up your mail for you!

The call continues:

If you develop any of the three coronavirus symptoms which are: a new continuous cough, a high temperature, or a loss or change to your sense of taste or smell, please visit www.gov.uk/coronavirus for further advice. You should not go to the GP, hospital or a pharmacy. If you require medical advice, please ring the NHS on 111 or in an emergency dial 999”.

So here we have the admission of medical malpractice: if I fall ill, I must not seek help from NHS, not even by going to my local pharmacy. I must stay home without help, except of course, if I qualify for 999 ie, a ventilator…

The call continues:

I must advise you that if you test positive for coronavirus or are identified as a close contact of someone who has coronavirus you will be notified by NHS Test and Trace and may be contacted again. Is there anything you would like me to repeat?”

Of course, if someone I sat next to on the (half-empty) plane gets a positive result, my quarantine will stretch to a fortnight or longer! Each time, the call ends with a friendly, youthful, ‘have a great day’. All those who have called me are young voices, all kinds of accents, probably desperate for any job in the current climate. They are trained to stick to the script and any departure from it by my questions seems to trip them up.

And most of them probably think they are doing something socially useful and valuable.

The quarantine DIY tests

The one I have purchased in haste at the airport is a kit with two PCR tests to be administered at home on Day 2 and Day 8. The instructions tell me that the test is run at less than a 30-cycle value threshold.

The first thing to say about the swab is that it is long. It looks like a cotton bud used for everyday use, but on closer inspection it is different. The stick itself is about 12 cm long, that’s 6”, and designed to break off after the sample is collected and put into a small tube provided. The tip itself is 2 cm long, quite thin and covered in almost translucent spiky bristles protruding outwards. It looks a bit like a miniature harsh brush designed to scratch the delicate tissue inside the mouth and nose.

I am told to swab the back of the throat for 3-5 seconds over the posterior pharynx and tonsillar areas but to avoid tongue, teeth and the sides of the mouth. Then I am told to insert the same swab to each nostril about 2 cm deep and to rotate it for 3-5 seconds each time.

The form which I have to complete for each test is yet another mandated opportunity for the corpo-government to harvest my personal data, to store it for as long as it sees fit, yet, as is often the case in abusive relationships I have to (I repeat:) I have to give my consent for all this to happen, and even consent for my possible positive test result which may include my personal details: name, date of birth, gender, home address, telephone number, occupation, place of work, ethnicity and the fact that I have tested positive for Covid 19 to be communicated to Public Health England. Luckily, both of my test results are negative.

Eleven days after arrival in the UK my quarantine is officially over. It takes me a couple of days before I venture outside, I detect a bit of agoraphobia. In the last six weeks I spent twenty days in house arrest. They say it takes six weeks to develop a new habit.

Postscriptum

I doubt very much I will travel internationally any time soon. Not planning to take the experimental Covid jab and so will not be enjoying the privilege of freedom promised to those with the vaccine passport. At the time of writing, it is no longer illegal to leave England but the elaborate hoops and the red tape remain and the government website reminds us that “to protect public health in the UK and the vaccine rollout, you should not travel to countries or territories on the red or amber lists”.

The ‘red and amber’ lists cover most countries of the world and returning from an amber list country will involve three or four tests which could come to £240-£340 per person plus the time spent completing all the online forms.

As to the red list countries; even a short spell there ends in an expensive £1750 per person prison-like stay at an airport hotel, as can be seen here.

So whilst not forbidden, even essential travel has been made into a series of expensive, degrading and time-consuming obstacles. Vaccine passports are being rolled out precisely to convince people they will magically bring freedom back to their lives. Do they not realise, that once they have their passports, the vaccine will need regular boosters?

Those still asleep; trusting the governments and the mainstream media think that easy travel is only temporarily put on hold but once the pandemic is ‘under control’, things will get back to the way they used to be. They do not realise the plan is to make travel an exclusive and rare event beyond reach of ordinary people.

This is done to us not just by the predatory elite class. Disappointingly, the pro-lockdown left continues to cheer these restrictions on and dismiss people’s desire and need to travel, as undeserved indulgence or middle-class privilege (interestingly, unrestricted travel around Europe was, until so recently, one of the main reasons for their fierce anti-Brexit position. What happened to their cherished principle of freedom of movement?). They could not be further from the truth.

They forget that, according to official migration data for the end of 2019, the UK is home to 6.2 million people – that is 9% of the total population – who have the nationality of a different country! And that data does not even include naturalised UK citizens like me, first-generation settled migrants who have close relatives all over the world and that unrestricted travel is an essential means to family life, something which is protected by Human Rights Act 1998.

The irony for those like myself, who grew up in communist Eastern Europe, is that freedom of movement, so taken for granted in the West, the right to travel and to have your own passport at home at all times is what we did not have then. The state set limits on where ‘citizens’, treated like its property, could travel.

For many who experienced those times, even as children, a return to state-mandated travel restrictions will feel like going back into tyranny.

As for my own journey: I will never forgive those responsible and all those lockdown fanatics for stealing my Dad’s, and so many other elderly people’s, last year by locking them up in the prison of fear and isolation, and then for pushing them to take the dangerous experimental jab which – for so many – was the last straw in their already weakened bodies.

Joanna Sharp is an academic living in London.

While you were watching him clown around, Boris Johnson oversaw the overthrow of President Morales in Bolivia, occupied the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen, and organised Turkey’s victory over Armenia. You haven’t heard any discussion of this.

Remember the overthrow of Bolivian President Evo Morales in late 2019. At the time, the mainstream press claimed that he had turned his country into a dictatorship and had just been ousted by his people. The Organisation of American States (OAS) issued a report certifying that the elections had been rigged and that democracy was being restored.

However, President Morales, who feared he would end up like Chilean President Salvador Allende and had fled to Mexico, denounced a coup d’état organised to seize the country’s lithium reserves. But he failed to identify the principals and was met with nothing but sarcasm in the West. Only we revealed that the operation had been carried out by a community of Croatian Ustasha Catholics, present in the country in Santa Cruz since the end of the Second World War; a NATO stay-behind network [1].

A year later, President Morales’ party won new elections by a large majority [2]. There was no challenge and he was able to return triumphantly to his country [3]. His so-called dictatorship had never existed, while that of Jeanine Áñez had just been overthrown at the ballot box.

Historian Mark Curtis and journalist Matt Kennard had access to declassified Foreign Office documents which they studied. They published their findings on the Declassified UK website, based in South Africa since its military censorship in the UK [4].

Throughout his work, Mark Curtis has shown that UK policy was hardly changed by decolonisation. We have cited his work in dozens of articles on Voltaire Network.

It appears that the overthrow of President Morales was a commission from the Foreign Office and elements of the CIA that eluded the Trump administration. Its aim was to steal the country’s lithium, which the UK covets in the context of the energy transition.

The Obama administration had already attempted a coup d’état in 2009, which was repressed by President Morales and led to the expulsion of several US diplomats and officials. In contrast, the Trump administration apparently gave the neoconservatives a free hand in Latin America, but systematically prevented them from carrying out their plans.

Lithium is a component of batteries. It is found mainly in the brines of high-altitude salt deserts in the mountains of Chile, Argentina and especially Bolivia ("the lithium triangle"), and even in Tibet, the "salars". But also in solid form in certain minerals extracted from mines, particularly in Australia. It is essential for the transition from petrol cars to electric vehicles. It has therefore become a more important issue than oil in the context of the Paris Agreements supposed to combat global warming.

In February 2019, President Evo Morales gave permission to a Chinese company, TBEA Group, to exploit his country’s main lithium reserves. The UK therefore devised a plan to steal it.

Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, became president of Bolivia in 2006. He represented the producers of coca; a local plant essential to life at high altitude, but also a powerful drug banned worldwide by the US virtue leagues. His election and governance marked the return of the Indians to power who had been excluded since Spanish colonisation.

• As early as 2017-18, the UK sent experts to Bolivia’s national company, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB), to assess the conditions for Bolivian lithium mining.
• In 2019-20, London funded a study to "optimise the exploration and production of Bolivian lithium using British technology".
• In April 2019, the UK Embassy in Buenos Aires organised a seminar with representatives from Argentina, Chile and Bolivia mining companies and governments, to present the benefits of using the London Metal Exchange. The Morales administration was represented by one of its ministers.
• Immediately after the coup, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) was found to be financing the British projects.
• The Foreign Office had commissioned - long before the coup - an Oxford company, Satellite Applications Catapult, to map lithium reserves. It was not paid by the IADB until after the overthrow of President Morales.

• A few months later, the UK embassy in La Paz organised a seminar for 300 stakeholders with the help of Watchman UK. This company specialises in how to involve people in projects that violate their interests, in order to prevent them from revolting.

  Before and after the coup, the British embassy in Bolivia neglected the capital La Paz and focused on the Santa Cruz region, where the Ustasha Croats had legally taken power. There, it multiplied cultural and commercial events.

  To neutralise the Bolivian banks, the British embassy in La Paz organised a seminar on computer security eight months before the coup. The diplomats introduced DarkTrace (a company set up by the British internal security services), explaining that only banks that used DarkTrace for their security would be able to work with the City.

  According to Mark Curtis and Matthew Kennard, the US did not participate in the plot as such, but officials left the CIA to prepare it. DarkTrace, for example, recruited Marcus Fowler, a CIA cyber operations specialist, and especially Alan Wade, the agency’s former head of intelligence. Most of the operation’s personnel were British, including the heads of Watchman UK, Christopher Goodwin-Hudson (a former career military officer, then director of security at Goldman-Sachs) and Gabriel Carter (a member of the very private Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge who had distinguished himself in Afghanistan).

  The historian and the journalist also state that the British embassy provided the Organisation of American States with the data it used to ’prove’ that the election had been rigged; a report that was later refuted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [5] before being refuted by the Bolivians themselves during the following elections.

  The current situation proves Mark Curtis’s work as a historian right. For example, in the three years since the coup in Bolivia (2019), we have shown London’s role in the Yemen war (2020) [6] and the Nagorno-Karabakh war (2020) [7].

  The UK conducts short wars and covert operations, if possible without the media picking up on its actions. It controls the perception of its presence through a multitude of news agencies and media outlets that it secretly subsidises. It creates unmanageable living conditions for those on whom it imposes them. It uses them to exploit the country to its advantage. Moreover, it can keep this situation going for as long as possible in the certainty that its victims will still appeal to it, it only being capable of calming the conflict it has created itself.

This video provides one of the most erudite and informative looks at Covid-19 and the consequences of lockdowns. It was originally posted on YouTube and was forcibly taken down only 2 hours after posting.

Dr Yeadon's credentials:

Dr. Michael Yeadon is an Allergy & Respiratory Therapeutic Area expert with 23 years in the pharmaceutical industry. He trained as a biochemist and pharmacologist, obtaining his PhD from the University of Surrey (UK) in 1988.

Dr. Yeadon then worked at the Wellcome Research Labs with Salvador Moncada with a research focus on airway hyper-responsiveness and effects of pollutants including ozone and working in drug discovery of 5-LO, COX, PAF, NO and lung inflammation. With colleagues, he was the first to detect exhaled NO in animals and later to induce NOS in lung via allergic triggers.

Joining Pfizer in 1995, he was responsible for the growth and portfolio delivery of the Allergy & Respiratory pipeline within the company. He was responsible for target selection and the progress into humans of new molecules, leading teams of up to 200 staff across all disciplines and won an Achievement Award for productivity in 2008.

Under his leadership the research unit invented oral and inhaled NCEs which delivered multiple positive clinical proofs of concept in asthma, allergic rhinitis and COPD. He led productive collaborations such as with Rigel Pharmaceuticals (SYK inhibitors) and was involved in the licensing of Spiriva and acquisition of the Meridica (inhaler device) company.

Dr. Yeadon has published over 40 original research articles and now consults and partners with a number of biotechnology companies. Before working with Apellis, Dr. Yeadon was VP and Chief Scientific Officer (Allergy & Respiratory Research) with Pfizer.

Transcript:

My name is Dr Michael Yeadon.

My original training was a first-class honours degree in biochemistry and toxicology. Followed by a research-based PhD into respiratory pharmacology; and after that I’ve worked my entire life, uh, on the research side of the pharmaceutical industry – both big pharma and also biotech. My specific focus has been inflammation, immunology, allergy in the context of respiratory diseases (so the lung, but also the skin). So I would say I’m a kind of a deeply experienced inflammation, immunology, pulmonology kind of research person.

I initially became concerned about, the, our response to the coronavirus pandemic towards the middle or back end of April as early as that. It had become clear that if you look at the number of daily deaths versus the date the pandemic had turned. Really, pleasingly, already the wave was fundamentally over, and we would just watch it fall for a number of months – which is what it did. And so I became very perturbed about increasing restrictions on the behavior and movement of people in my country and I could see no reason for it then and I still don’t.

Government’s response to emergencies is guided by the scientific group who sit together under the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies or SAGE. So they should provide scientific advice to the government about what’s appropriate to do. SAGE has got several things wrong, and that has led to advice that’s inappropriate and – uh, not only has had horrible economic effects, but has had continuing medical effects in that people are no longer being treated properly.

SAGE took the view that since SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus that they believed there wouldn’t be any immunity at all in the population. So, I think that’s the first thing. I remember hearing that and I puzzled, because I already knew – because I read the scientific literature that SARS-CoV-2 was 80% similar to another virus you may have heard of called SARS that moved around the world a bit in 2003, and more than that: it’s quite similar, in pieces of it, to common cold-causing coronaviruses.

So, when I heard that there was this coronavirus moving across the world I wasn’t as worried as perhaps other people were, because I figured that since there are four common cold-causing coronaviruses, I figured that quite a lot of the population we’ve been exposed to one of those viruses, and would probably have a perhaps substantial protective immunity. And just to explain why I was so confident everybody knows the story of Edward Jenner and vaccination, and the story of cowpox and smallpox. And that the old story was that milkmaids had very, uh, clear complexions: they never suffered from things like smallpox, that if it didn’t kill you would leave your skin permanently scarred. And the reason that they had the protection was that they were exposed to a more benign, related virus called cowpox.

Edward Jenner came up with the idea that if it’s cowpox that saves the fair maid – he reasoned that if he could give another person an exposure to the cowpox, he would be able to protect them from smallpox. Now, he did an experiment that you can’t do now – and he never should have done it – but apocryphally, or really, or maybe you’re ill, we’re not sure. Edward Jenner acquired some of the liquid from a person infected with cowpox. Relatively mild pustules that then go away. And he got some of this and he – he scraped it into the skin of a small boy and a few weeks later, he obtained some liquid from some poor person that was dying of smallpox and infected the boy. And, lo and behold, the boy did not get ill and that gave birth to the whole field of what’s called vaccination. And vax, the vaccine’s “vac.” It comes from “vaccus,” the Latin name for cow. So, we are really familiar with the principle of cross immunization.

I’ve thought quite a lot about, you know, the vulnerable people in in care homes and there’s an awareness that, even though people really careful using PPE and so on, but that’s only going to go so far in a kind of, hot house environment where people are pretty close together in a care home. So the question I’ve had all year is: once one or two people, you know, got the virus in a care home, why wouldn’t almost everyone get infected? And of course the truth is, they didn’t. And one interpretation of that distinction is that a large proportion of people in the care homes had prior immunity.

At this time of year, about 1 in 30 people have a cold, caused by one of these coronaviruses. And just like the protection against smallpox provided by previous exposure to cowpox, so people exposed to having had a cold caused by one of these coronaviruses they’re now immune to SARS-CoV-2. So, 30% of the population was protected before the start. SAGE said it was zero – and I don’t understand how they could possibly have justified that. There’s a second, and equally fatal, unaccountable error that they have made in their model. The percentage of the population that SAGE asserts have been infected to date by the virus is about seven percent. I know that that’s what they believe and you can see it in a document they published in September called “Non-pharmaceutical interventions” and it says sadly more than 90% of the population is still vulnerable.

It’s unbelievably wrong. And I’m just going to explain why: they’ve based their number on the percentage of people in the country who have antibodies in their blood. And only the people who became most ill needed to actually develop and release antibodies around their body. So, it is certainly true that the people who have lots of antibodies were infected. But a very large number of people had milder symptoms, and even more people had none at all. And the best estimates that we can arrive at is that those people either made no antibodies, or so low amounts that they will have faded from now.

A recent publication on the percentage of care home residents who have antibodies to the virus very, very interesting. This time they were using high sensitivity tests for antibodies and they carefully picked out residents that never were PCR-positive: these are people who never got infected. And they found that 65% of them had antibodies to the virus; they never got infected. So I believe there was high prevalence of immunity in that population prior to the virus arriving. Big story in the media, recently, was that the percentage of people with antibodies against the virus in their blood was falling. Now, this was cast as a concern that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t last very long. Well, you know, anyone with knowledge of immunity would – would just simply reject that. It’s not the way immunity to virus works – that would be T-cells. So, if the antibodies are falling gradually over time – which they have – from spring to present, the only plausible explanation is that the prevalence of the virus in the population is falling, and that’s why the antibody production gradually subsides.

Less than 40% of the population are susceptible. Even theoretical epidemiologists would tell you that that’s too small a number to support a consolidated and growing outbreak, community immunity, herd immunity. So, SAGE says that we’re not even close, and I’m telling you that the best science, by the best scientists in the world, published in the top peer-reviewed journals, says they’re wrong: that more than 60 of the population are now immune, and it’s simply not possible to have a large and growing pandemic.

Really good news, genuine good news, to hear that there’s data emerging from the vaccine clinical trials, and we are seeing vaccines that raise not just antibodies – but they’re also producing T-cell responses. This is great; back to proper science, proper immunology. That’s how immunity to viruses works. So, my surprise though, and it’s just annoying that when we’re talking about, uh, the percentage of the population that’s still susceptible we only talk about antibodies, like seven percent from SAGE. Why are we not talking about the 50% that have got T-cell immunity?

And so you might be thinking if Mike – and Dr Mike Yeadon is telling you these things… – or how come the pandemic isn’t over? Well, this may come as a surprise to you, but I believe fundamentally it is over. The country has experienced almost a complete cycle now of the virus sweeping through the land, and we are at the end of it. London was –was horribly affected in the spring, and somewhere in early April they were experiencing several hundred deaths per day from people dying with similar symptoms in respiratory failure and, uh, inflammation. And at the moment the number of people dying of SARS-CoV-2 in the capital is less than 10. So it’s down by 98, or something like that. And, the reason it’s down, is because there are now too few people in London susceptible to allow the virus to magnify, to amplify, to get an epidemic. And, and they would have been hit by now, because they were the first place hit in the spring. And I think what we’re seeing now in the Northeast and the Northwest would be the dying embers of the spreading out of this virus. And I’m very sorry that it is still true, that a small number of people are catching it, getting ill, and dying.

So why aren’t the media telling us that the pandemic is over? It’s not over because SAGE says it’s not. So SAGE consists of very many scientists, from a range of disciplines – mathematicians and clinicians – and there are multiple committees. But I found to my surprise – and I’m actually going to use the word – horror, that in the spring, all the way through the spring and summer, SAGE did not have on their committee someone who I would call a card-carrying immunologist; a clinical immunologist. I have to say I think that in the spring and summer SAGE was deficient in the expertise it had. They should have armed themselves, you know, with – around the table all the people required to to understand what was happening, and they didn’t do that. People asked me then, “Well Mike, if it’s, you know, if it’s fundamentally over, why are we still getting hundreds of deaths a day from SARS-CoV-2?” And I’ve thought a lot about this. There is a test that’s performed where people have their noses and tonsils swabbed, and then a test (called a PCR test) is performed on that. And what they’re looking for isn’t the virus – you might think it’s looking for the virus, but it’s not. What they’re looking for is a small piece of genetic sequence; it’s called RNA. Unfortunately, that bit of RNA will be found in people’s tonsils and nose not if they’ve just caught the virus, and they’re about to get ill, or they’re already ill. It’s also going to be found if they were infected previously weeks – or even, sometimes, a small number of months ago. Let me just explain why that is.

If you’ve been infected, and you’ve fought off the virus (which most people do), you’ll have broken, dead bits of virus. These are tiny things smaller than your cells, perhaps spread all the way through your airway, embedded in bits of mucus, maybe inside an airway lining cell. And so over a period of weeks or months you bring up cells that contain broken, dead pieces of the virus that you have conquered and killed. However, the PCR test is not able to detect whether the viral RNA has come from a living virus or a dead one (as I’ve just described). So I think a large proportion of the so-called positives are, in fact, what I call “cold” positives: they’re correctly identifying that there is some viral RNA in the sample – but it’s from a dead virus. It can’t hurt them, they’re not going to get ill, they can’t transmit it to anybody else. So they’re not infectious. So that accounts for a large number of the so-called positive cases. These are people who’ve beaten the virus. Why are we using this test that cannot distinguish between active infection and people who’ve conquered the virus?

This test has never been used in this way – and I’ve worked in this field. It’s not a suitable technique it’s a – it’s the kind of technique you would use for forensic purposes, if you were trying to do a DNA test to establish whether or not a person was at the scene of a crime. You would not be doing these tests by a windy, supermarket car parking; what looks like plastic marquee tents; on picnic tables. It’s not suitable at all – and it definitely shouldn’t be done in the way it’s been done. It’s subject to many mechanical errors, should we say, handling errors. If this was a test being used for legal purposes, for forensic purposes like a DNA identity test, the judge would throw out this evidence; would say it’s not admissible. It produces positives even when there’s no virus there at all. We call that a false positive.

As we’ve increased the number of tests done per day, so we’ve had to recruit less and less experienced laboratory staff – and now we’re using people who’ve never worked professionally in this area. What that does is it increases the frequency of mistakes, and the effect of this is that the false positive rate rises and rises. So, if you had a false positive rate of one percent – which Mr. Matt Hancock [British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care] told us was roughly the number they had in the summer – then if you tested a thousand people that had no virus ten of them would be positive, astonishingly. If the prevalence of the virus was only one in a thousand, that’s 0.1% – as the Office for National Statistics told us it was through the summer – then if you use the PCR test only one of them will be positive and genuinely so. But if the false positive rate is as low as one percent, you’ll also get 10 positives that are false.

Some people did say to me, “Well, there’ll be a higher percentage of people coming forward for testing in the community,” so-called “Pillar 2” testing, because they’ve been instructed only to come if they’ve got symptoms. But I call B.S. on that one. I don’t think that’s true. I know lots of friends and relatives who’ve been told by an employer, “Well, you’ve sat near someone who’s tested positive, and I don’t want you to come back to work until you’ve got a negative test.” I’ve seen information from many towns in the North – certainly Birmingham was one; Manchester was another; Bolton – where councils (and I really think they were trying to be helpful) were out leafleting the people of their cities saying, “We’re going to come round and swab you all because we want to track down this virus.” Now once you start testing people, more or less randomly, instead of [those] having symptoms you get the same amount of virus in the population as the Office of National Statistics found which is, at the time was, one in a thousand. And I’ve just told you Matt Hancock confirmed during the summer they had a false positive rate of about one percent. So that means out of a thousand people 10 would test positive, and it would be a false result, and only one would test positive and it was correct.

This test is monstrously unsuitable for detecting who has live virus in their airway. It’s subject to multiple distortions that are worsening as we get into the winter. As the number of tests done per day increase[s], the number of errors made by these overworked, not very experienced lab staff increase[s]. I think it’s not unreasonable to say a best guess of the false positive rate at the moment – what’s called the operational false positive rate is about five percent. Five percent of 300,000 is 15,000 positives. I think some of those positives are real; I don’t think it’s very many. Now, the problem with this false positive issue [is] it doesn’t just stop it at “cases”: it extends to people who are unwell and go to hospital. So people who go to hospital having tested positive – and it could be a false positive, and I think most of them are at the moment – if you go to hospital and you’ve tested positive previously, or you test positive in hospital, you’ll be counted now as a Covid admission.

Although there are more people in hospital now than a month ago, this is normal for autumn. Regrettably, people catch respiratory viruses and become ill, and some will die. I just don’t believe it’s got anything to do with Covid-19 anymore. There are more people in intensive care beds now than there were a month or so ago. That’s entirely normal as we move through late autumn into the early winter: those beds become used. But there aren’t more people than is normal for the time of year, and we’re not about to run out of capacity, certainly at a national level. But I think you know it is going now: if you should now die, you’ll be counted as a Covid death. But that’s not correct; these are people who might have – have gone to hospital having had a broken leg, for example, but they’ll – three percent of them will still test positive, and they’re not, they haven’t got the virus. It’s a – it’s a false positive, and if they die they’ll be called a Covid death – and they are not. They’ve died of something else.

One of the most troubling things I’ve heard this year was Mr. Johnson telling us about the “Moonshot” testing everybody often, maybe every day, is the way out of this problem. I’m telling you it’s the way to keep us in this problem: that number of tests is orders of magnitude higher than we’re already testing now, and the false positive rate (however low it is) will be far too large to accept. It will produce an enormous number of false positives.

What we should do is stop mass testing. Not only is it an affront to your liberty, it will not help at all: it will be immensely expensive and it will be a pathology all of its own. We’ll be fighting off stupid people – mostly government ministers – I’m sorry to say, who are not numerate, and do not understand statistics. If you test a million people a day with a test that produces one percent false positives, 10 000 people a day will wrongly be told they’ve got the virus. If the prevalence of the virus was say 0.1%, like the Office of National Statistics said it was in summer, then only a tenth of that number, uh, 1,000 would correctly be identified. But you can’t distinguish amongst the 11,000 who have genuinely got the virus and who are false positives. Moonshot, I think, will have a worse false positive rate. It’s not fixable, and it’s not necessary either. The pandemic – having passed through the population not only of, of the UK, but of all of Europe – and probably all of the world quite soon – it won’t return. Why won’t it return? Well, they’ve got T-cell immunity. We know this. It’s been studied by the best cellular immunologists in the world.

Sometimes people will say, “Well, it looks like the immunity is starting to fade.” You’ll sometimes see [statements] like that, and when I saw the first headline like this I remember being really quite confused, because that’s not the way immunology works. Just think about it for a moment. If that was how it worked it could kill you. When you had to fight it off, and if you had successfully done that, it somehow didn’t leave a mark in your body. Well, it does leave a mark on your body. The way you fought it off involved certain pattern recognition receptors, and has left you with – as it were – memory cells that remember what it was they fought off. And if they see that thing again it’s very easy for them to get those cells to work again in minutes or hours, and they will protect you. So the most likely explanation is it’ll last a long time.

So I read a bit more about this so-called tailing off of immunity – and I realized they were talking about antibodies. Just incorrect to – to think that antibodies, and how long they stay up, is a measure of immune protection against viruses. I mean you can tell I’m – I don’t agree with this. It says there have been some classic experiments done on people who have inborn errors in parts of their immune system, and some of them have inborn arrows that means they can’t make antibodies, and guess what: they – they are able to handle respiratory viruses the same as you and me. So, I don’t think it’s harmful to have antibodies, although some people are worried about the potential for amplifying inflammation from antibodies, but – but my view is that they’re – they’re probably neutral, and you definitely should not believe the story that because the antibody falls away you’ve lost immunity. Again, that’s just not the way the human immune system works.

The most likely duration of immunity to a respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2 is multiple years. Why do I say that? We actually have the data for a virus that swept through parts of the world 17 years ago called SARS, and remember SARS-CoV-2 is 80% similar to SARS, so I think that’s the best comparison that anyone can provide. The evidence is clear. These very clever cellular immunologists studied all the people they could get hold of who had survived SARS 17 years ago. They took a blood sample, and they tested whether they responded or not to the original SARS, and they all did. They all have perfectly normal, robust T-cell memory. They are actually also protected against SARS-CoV-2 because it’s so similar, it’s cross-immunity. So, I would say the best data that exists is that immunity should be robust for at least 17 years. I think it’s entirely possible that it is lifelong. The style of the responses of these people’s T-cells were the same as if you’ve been vaccinated and then you come back years later to see, has that immunity been retained? And so I think the evidence is really strong that the duration of immunity will be multiple years, and possibly lifelong.

There have been but a tiny handful of people who appear to have been infected twice – now they’re very interesting, we need to know who they are and understand them very well, they’ve probably got certain rare immune deficiency syndromes. So I’m not pretending no one ever gets reinfected, but I am pointing out that it’s literally five people (or maybe 50 people), but the World Health Organization estimated some weeks ago that 750 million people have been infected so far by SARS-CoV-2. That means most people are not being reinfected, and I can tell you why that is: it’s normal. It’s what happens with viruses, respiratory viruses. Some people have – have called for “zero Covid” as if it’s some political slogan. And there are some people I’ve heard calling for it almost every day; they’re completely unqualified to tell you anything.

Something that’s really important to know is that SARS-CoV-2 – it’s an unpleasant virus. There’s no question about it, but it’s not what you were told in spring. We were originally told that it would kill perhaps three percent of people it infected – which is horrifying. That’s 30 times worse than flu. We always overestimate the lethality of new infectious diseases when we’re in the eye of the storm. I believe the true infection fatality ratio of Covid-19, the true threat to life is, the same as seasonal flu.

So there’s no reason why you would want to try and drive Covid to zero. It’s a nonsense – that’s just not how biology is. And all the means I have heard, uh, proposed, as ways to get us there are much more damaging and pathological, I would say, than than the virus itself. It’s simply not possible to get rid of every single copy of the Covid-19 virus, and the means to get you there would destroy society. Forget the cost – although it would be huge – it would destroy your liberty, you would need to not go out until you’ve been tested and have your result back. And I have described how the false positive rate would just destroy it from a statistical perspective. I don’t believe it can be done: it’s not scientifically realistic, it’s not medically realistic, and it’s not what we have ever done.

As the virus swept towards the UK in the – in the late winter and early spring I too was concerned, because at the time we were told perhaps three percent might die. So when the Prime Minister called for a lockdown I wasn’t pleased about it, but I understood that we should try this. But it’s important that you understand, that when we look at the profile of the pandemic as it passed through the population, that it was clear that the number of infections every day was falling. We’d passed the peak quite a long time before lockdown started. So we took all that pain, that locked down pain which was multiple weeks – I don’t remember exactly how many multiple weeks – we took it for nothing. If there was a really important effect of lockdown on the number of people who died, or the rate of it, you should at least be able to order them. Like, these people had locked down, and these didn’t – and you cannot. All heavily infected countries’ shapes are the same, whether they had locked down or not. They don’t work. I don’t know why anyone is allowing you, know you, to be pushed into this corner.

I don’t think we entirely know why it is that some countries were hit harder than others, but I have to say I think scientifically the smart money is on a mixture of forces. One would be this cross immunity. Although China had an awful time in Wuhan, in Hubei province, it didn’t spread elsewhere in the country, and I suspect that meant because a lot of them had this cross immunity. And I think nearby countries, in the main, had lots of cross immunity. So that’s one possibility. The other one, though, is in terms of the severity of what did the virus do to a particular population. We’ve seen devastating effects in countries like UK and in Belgium, uh, France, and maybe even in Sweden, and much smaller numbers of deaths in other countries like – like Greece and in Germany. And you might think, “Well, was that was it something that they did?” And I wish it was true, because if it was something we did we could learn from it and do it and it would work in the future. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that it was anything humans did. The passage of this virus through the human population is an entirely natural process that completely ignored our puny efforts to control it.

So there is this theory – I don’t like the name very much – but it’s called “dry tinder.” If people in a country who are vulnerable for to dying in the winter (usually of respiratory viruses), if you have a very mild winter season, like UK did – we had a very mild seasonal flu last year and the year before and so did Sweden – then what happens is there are larger number of very vulnerable people who are even older than usual, and – and I think that’s why we suffered a rather large number of deaths. It was still only 0.06% of the population, equivalent to about four weeks of normal mortality. But countries that had very severe winters recently, and Greece and Germany certainly had very lethal winter flus in the last two years. I think then, they had a smaller population of very vulnerable people, and that is the main reason why they lost fewer people. It’s not to do with locking down, it’s not to do with testing, or tracking, or tracing. I personally don’t think any of those measures have made any difference at all. So Belgium and UK and Sweden were particularly vulnerable, whereas adjacent Nordic countries – I – I get fed up with hearing about this, uh, idea that they locked down and that’s why it saved them and afraid the other Nordic countries had normal flu epidemics the last two or three years. Sweden, like UK, had very mild epidemics: you can just go and look at the number of deaths, it’s sub-normal for UK and Sweden. And now we’ve got a supra-normal, a larger-than-normal, number of deaths from Covid.

Now there may be other reasons, I’m not saying there are not but I think those two main forces – the amount of prior immunity and the so-called “dry tinder,” what vulnerable fraction of the population did you have as a result of seasonal flu being intense or not – I think that accounts for most of it. And it’s – it’s just hubristic and kind of silly that our government and advisors tell you that doing things that have never worked in the past, like lockdown are going to make any difference to the transfer of respiratory viruses. I don’t believe it for a moment. There’s no scientific evidence behind it and there are much stronger scientific hypotheses that do explain it. You might think that in terms of numbers of deaths – excess deaths – that Covid has produced such a large number that this will be an awful year for excess deaths, but surprisingly not. 2020 is lining up to be about eighth in a list since 1993.

Roughly 620,000 people die every year in this country (UK). They say in life we are also in death – and it’s true, it’s been awful for those who have been personally affected by illness and death, but it’s not particularly unusual in terms of the number of people who’ve died. So one of the things I’ve noticed has happened in – in recent years is that we almost seem to be moving, uh, you know post-science, post-fact as if – as if facts don’t matter. For someone who’s qualified and practiced as a professional scientist for 35 years I think it’s deeply distressing that, I don’t think you should listen to me if I talked about – I don’t know, the design of motorways or something – like, I don’t know anything about motorways or – or how to grow trees better, I don’t know anything about that. But I do know quite a lot about immunology, infection, inflammation, and the way infectious organisms move through a population.

I’ve no other reason for giving this interview other than I really care what happens to my country – and we have to pull ourselves out of this. And I personally believe the way forward is twofold, it’s not difficult. One, we should cease mass testing of the mostly-well in the community immediately – it only provides misleading and grey information, and yet we’re driving policy almost completely based on it. It’s definitely wrong, we should not do it. Use the tests in hospital – I’m not saying don’t test – don’t continue mass testing, and for God’s sake, don’t increase the number of tests. It is a pathology all of its own which must be stamped out by right thinking people. And I’m afraid the people on SAGE, who have provided the modeling, the predictions, the – the measures that should be taken, that their work is so badly, and obviously flawed – lethally incompetent, that you should have no more to do with these people. They should be fired immediately. And the effect of that advice has been to – have cost lots of innocent people their lives from non-Covid causes, they should be dismissed and reconstituted using an appropriate group of skilled individuals – especially avoiding any who might even have the suggestion of a conflict of interest. I think we’re right at the edge of the precipice. I really hope that we can pull back.