Journalists From Scotland

"Public opinion is broadly on our side, and the Social Democrats in particular believe that Europe will never work without Britain. So far, so good. But the real question is how hard the West Germans can fight for our interests against possible French resistance. And here, to begin with, there is a fearsome difficulty which forms the very foundation of the Grand Coalition. That astonishing alliance between Right and Left, between men as far apart politically as Willy Brandt and Franz-Josef Strauss, rests heavily on the basis of better relations with France. ... And if Bonn now quarrels with Paris over British, entry, its justification would be destroyed. Strauss, Rainer Barzel, Freiherr von Guttenberg and the other right-wingers might well then withdraw their support for Willy Brandt's Eastern policy and demand a return to cold-war rigidity. This may prove a fatal weakness, if France takes a strong stand against British entry. The Government can afford an argument, or energetic persuasion on our behalf, but not a head-on collision."

"Conservatism, it should not be necessary to say, is the creed of social unity and is entitled to say so. When the horse obeys the rider’s touch on the reins, that is – for a conservative – unity. When the horse proposes a trot back to the stable, at a moment when the rider proposes a canter to the battlefield that is divisiveness and in the ensuing contest of wills the rider may fall off. One cavalry unit has, for the moment, ceased to exist. It ought to follow, but apparently does not, that when a right-wing government contrives to heighten social divisions rather than to obscure them, its adversaries should be hugely entertained and encouraged."

"In the East, you have to buy a Polish paper to find out what is going on in the world. In the West (with few exceptions), the Press is as outward-looking and reflective as any on earth. The East is shabby, the West is bright. In the West, chance acquaintances tend to measure their words and celebrate with decorum. But in the East, there is a vivacity and alertness, almost a wildness when drinks and music are added, which seems more Slav than German. As a by-product of Communism, meant or unmeant, this lust for experience in thought and deed is something which burns all over Eastern Europe and which has not left the Germans unaffected. To some extent, the East Germans have come to share the mental attitudes of the "Socialist camp" as a whole, and to that extent, their approach to the fact of being German has been modified. This does not mean that, given half a chance, many of them would not pack the smart new tartan suitcases now on sale in the Democratic Republic and come West; they would, and candid supporters of the Ulbricht way of doing things admit it. But even those who find the climate intolerable — one unhappy museum attendant gestured at his Egyptian mummies and growled: "At least they were free when they were alive" — often take the basic social policy of their State for granted and confess to fears that life in West Germany might prove insecure and lonely."

"There is fairly general agreement that the career advantages of 'the tie' are decreasing fast. In merchant banking, the Army, the foreign service, they survive, but in many jobs the boss has no special taste for public-school boys. In some, he would even hesitate to hire them. This problem is now much more the problem of Oxbridge advantage. Some feel that the blow must be directed not at the public schools but at their connection with "the educational establishment", the staffing of universities. The public-school values might be lost, but are they valuable? Those, who believe in them feel that they train the individual to take responsibility, that they teach a sense of the public as opposed to the selfish interest. Those who have their doubts say that these values are not really individualist but collectivist, the values of a conforming and separate upper crust which only add up to the techniques of tact needed by any authoritarian group. Modern society needs real individualists, moral independence and adaptability, of a kind which the old training for an Army officer or district officer did not have to provide. And there is the objection, growing out of a peculiarly English brand of socialism, to any total environment which takes moral training out of the hands of the family and' offers it to an institution. There are signs, anyway, that the current demand for boarding school education has less and less to do with those traditional values, more and more to do. with plain social success. One headmaster says that parents' motives in sending sons to his school are "basically snob"."

"All the same, conservatism still eludes satisfactory definition even as an aim. If it were just a style, as some writers seem to assume, the Soviet regime would qualify without difficulty, but all states which endeavour to avoid political change will not be allowed by the nouveaux philosophes of the right, wherever in the world, to be conservative. ‘Rightism’ will not do either: the Nazi programme of destroying an entire social order and its institutions, though supported initially by many German conservatives, drove some of them in the end to conspiratorial resistance."

"The emergence of Dr Kiesinger, Inoffensive and charming in his own person, is another sign of paralysis within the Christian Democrats [of ]. Deadlock between the party leaders at Bonn was too hard, personal hatreds too hot, for any of the men at court to stand a chance of succeeding Chancellor Erhard. So a satrap from the provinces was called. For those who called him, foreign reactions to his less-than-immaculate past counted far less than the fact that in West Germany Dr Kiesinger is respected, popular and uncommitted. Dr Kiesinger is 62, with the step of a statesman and the looks of an actor. As Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, he has been solidly successful gathering Christian Democratic support from the Swabian Hills and the clean new factories around Stuttgart. Since 1945 he has made no political blunders. And yet, with all his qualities, there is something missing. He is handsome, but placid. He is the nineteenth-century orator of golden eloquence, rather than the twentieth-century master of the mass rally or the fireside chat. He is an elegant debater, but thin-skinned when it comes to unkind heckling. Everybody likes him, but nobody seems to be afraid of him. Dr Kiesinger seems a tittle too nice to lead the riven Christian Democrats as firmly as they must be led. He is no fighter. He is 'Gentleman George,' or, perhaps, Ferdinand the Bull."

"[Following Murray's comments ("That things happened in the USSR...") cited above] Murray is seriously maintaining that its an open question whether British communists did all they might have done in denouncing these abominations."

"There were no emails in 1978. Word processing meant dictating copy to stenographers; each newspaper had a phone booth in a gloomy corridor for this purpose. The [[w:Morning Star (British newspaper)|[Morning] Star]]s chief stenographer was an implacable Bolshevik called Doris. The 80-something comrade was hard of hearing with arthritis in her fingers, leaving her bereft of any qualification for her role beyond ideological rectitude. I had no chance of keeping an exclusive as I bellowed my scoops at a pace Doris could keep up with. Eventually I persuaded management that an infusion of youth was required in the stenography department, and a new typist was engaged. Dictating to her for the first time, I began my story, as so often in those days, with "Premier Thatcher...". I was stopped at that point. "How do you spell that?" she asked. "Which word?" I said. "Both." Give thanks for automatic spellchecks too."

"There is nothing in the imperial record as chilling as the systematic extermination of the great majority of Europe's Jews."

"[During the 2017 general election campaign] Andrew Murray is a member of the Labour Party and he is an official at Unite, and he is temporarily helping us with the campaign."

"Next Tuesday is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin. His career is the subject of a vast and ever expanding literature. Read it all and, at the end, you are still left paying your money and taking your choice. A socialist system embracing a third of the world and the defeat of Nazi Germany on the one hand. On the other, all accompanied by harsh measures imposed by a one-party regime. Nevertheless, if you believe that the worst crimes visited on humanity this century, from colonialism to Hiroshima and from concentration camps to mass poverty and unemployment have been caused by imperialism, then [Stalin’s birthday] might at least be a moment to ponder why the authors of those crimes and their hack propagandists abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others. It was, after all, Stalin’s best-known critic, Nikita Khrushchev, who remarked in 1956 that "against imperialists, we are all Stalinists"."

"[Israel is a "white settler state"] To ask Muslim community leaders to tackle "extremism" effectively when every night you can see on television a Muslim child being pulled lifeless from the rubble caused by the operations of the bloc of the USA, Britain, Israel and other white settler states like Canada and Australia is asking a lot."

"The Salisbury attack is something we got wrong. When it happened, I thought, "Well, probably there's Russians behind this, because of the use of novichok." I just thought it was Russian gangsters — some business interests, and so forth. I didn't think the Russian state was behind it. And we were wrong. The evidence that's emerged since is overwhelming. We misread that. I still think that the line Jeremy was trying to follow, which is, "Get the evidence first and then state sanctions, and so on, rather than the other way around," is a defensible position. You don't run into saying "This is Putin's responsibility" when you haven't produced the evidence of it. In fact, this evidence has now been produced. Had we known then what we know now, we'd have taken a different view, I think. We just didn't think the Russian state would be so stupid and brazen as to do something like that — to carry out a poisoning attack on British soil. I know, given the Litvinenko precedent perhaps we should have done but that never really got sorted out so clearly . . . Up until then we'd still ha[d] a quiescent PLP. We were doing all right in the polls. That started bringing all the doubts about Jeremy and the leader’s office to the surface again."

"[Asked about Murray's alleged "Stalinism"] I don't believe that Andrew is anything other than a democratic socialist and member of the Labour Party like me."

"He is a person of enormous abilities and professionalism, and is the head of staff of Unite the union. To manage a very large union and a large number of staff takes special skills, and Andrew has them."

"Hitler is uniquely excoriated because his victims were almost all white Europeans, while those of Britain (and other classic colonialisms — French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian and Wilhelmine German) were Asian, African and Arabs. That Hitler's regime is seen as the most bestial of modern times is not of course objectionable. What needs to be confronted is the view that the crimes of other great powers of the last 150 years or so, being less lurid than those of the Nazis, can therefore be subject to a more nuanced judgment, in which the deaths of millions of people on the one hand can be offset against the construction of railways on the other. The British Empire was almost certainly responsible for more human deaths, albeit over a considerably longer period of time, than Hitler was."

"Our party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People's Korea clear."

"For the Labour Party, the exclusion of the revolutionary trend in the movement paved the way for the unchallenged domination of the right wing and locked the party ever more firmly into class collaboration and reformism. [...] In that sense, the decision to reject communist affiliation paved the way for the whole miserable litany of Labour-led disasters from 1931 to 1979."

"[Following Murray's comments ("That things happened in the USSR...") cited above] Mr Murray believes that British communists in the 1930s were justified in backing the Great Terror, the Moscow Trials and the Ukraine famine."

"That things happened in the USSR which were inexcusable and which ultimately prejudiced Socialism's whole prospect is today undeniable. Whether Communists in the capitalist world could or should have done more than they did is much more contentious."

"The Foreign Office cleared the speech, but not without an acrimonious struggle over its content. During the dispute he panned one of his superiors in the FCO's eastern department, for questioning whether the number of political prisoners in Uzbekistan had increased. According to a British official familiar with the correspondence, he wrote: "I understand that you might find this fact politically inconvenient. If you wish me to omit it, then say so. But don't pretend it isn't true." He attacked his superior for his "sadly cautious and above all completely unimaginative" censures, and attacked the "classic public school and Oxbridge influenced FCO house style", as "ponderous, self-important and ineffective". The speech began to take on a life of its own. Kofi Annan raised its contents during a meeting with Uzbekistani president Islam Karimov. It became a serious thorn in Tashkent's - and Washington's - side. Murray's confrontational style pressed it further into the flesh. In the build-up to the Iraq war, he could not contain his fury at the "double standards" being practised by Washington. He wrote to his superiors in London on the day in which he watched [[George W. Bush|[George W.] Bush]] talk of "dismantling the apparatus of terror" and "removing the torture and rape rooms" in Iraq, pointing out that "when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to effect the relationship and to be downplayed in the international fora ... I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan.""

"[I]n 2002, some months after MI6 sent its advice, the recently arrived British ambassador to Uzbekistan inquired urgently of the Foreign Office what its legal justification was for receiving information from Islamic dissidents who had been boiled alive to produce it. Craig Murray records his astonishment on being recalled to London to be told that the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, had decided that in the 'War on Terror' we should, as a matter of policy, use intelligence obtained through torture by foreign intelligence services. A follow-up memo from a Foreign Office legal adviser in March 2003 explained that it was not an offence to do so. How sound was this advice legally? Morally, there is no question. But what of the encouragement to torture resulting from our enthusiastic receipt of information?"

"I can say from my own dealings with Murray that he is an approachable and compassionate man, who has become a hero in Uzbekistan. Two colleagues from PEN, the writers' organisation whose Writers in Prison Committee I chair, have just returned from Tashkent full of praise for him, describing how he has become virtually the only source of assistance for desperate families whose relatives have been tortured or disappeared."

"[First sentence refers to George Galloway] At least the Respect MP refrained from naming Assange's alleged victims. No such restraint for Craig Murray, a former British diplomat, who denounced one of them by name on Newsnight, violating the British legal scruple that holds that a woman who may have suffered the trauma of rape should at least be granted basic privacy."

"The petitioner deliberately set out to publish information likely to lead to the identification of the complainers and did so [from paragraph 80 of the original source]."

"[The then Nadira Alieva] The next day she was walking past a nightclub and saw an advert saying "dancers needed". "It was basically a brothel," she said. But she was earning £150 a month. Then, one April night in 2003, Murray walked in. "It was my turn to dance and I could see this man, very English-looking, with a half-smile, looking at me," she said. "He wasn't sporty-looking or handsome and I wasn't interested. I just wanted my tip. But the manager said you mustn't refuse him, he's the richest man in the place." After chatting for a while, Murray suggested that she quit the club and become his mistress. "I told him, 'You're not the first to offer', and I left." The next time Murray returned to the club, it was Alieva's day off so he gave another girl £50 for her phone number. Flattered, she agreed to a date. Although she knew Murray was married, they were soon an item. "I'd gone out with diplomats before but Craig was different," she said. "He'd take me to official dinners and parties and introduce me to people. People were shocked as they knew I was a dancer but he didn't care.""

"This is an enormous abuse of human rights. The abuse of process in refusing both a lawyer and the right to remain silent, the inquiry into perfectly legal campaigning which is in no way terrorism-associated, the political questioning, the financial snooping and the seizure of material related to my private life, were all based on an utterly fake claim that I am associated with terrorism."

"My experience of British airports being discouraging recently, I went by public transport from Edinburgh to Belfast. Arriving very late in Belfast due to the storm, I missed the last train to Dublin. Not wanting to stay in Belfast, I flagged down a taxi in the street and asked the driver to take me to Dublin. He did not wish to, so late at night. Then we realised we had worked in the same bar in Aviemore 45 years ago. I have always believed life is governed by forces we do not know."

"Her body invited sex while her eyes screamed, 'Save me.'"

"The Paston was an old-fashioned grammar [school] that was trying its best to be an independent school [...] It felt as if the teachers were still fighting the second world war, and once a week we were all made to dress up in military uniform and become cadets. Either I skipped school or refused to take part, so I was frequently suspended."

"Mr Murray is a serial "just saying" conspiracy theorist. When the Russians poisoned the Skripals in 2018, for example, Murray pointed a finger at the Israelis and suggested a British government cover-up. At the moment his big issue is the conspiracy he alleges to "fit up" the former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond on sexual assault charges (Mr Salmond was acquitted). In the past he has accused me and other Jewish writers of being "Zionist propagandists" for the sake of "available riches"."

"I didn't really volunteer to fight the British police state, it came after me. But here we are, and here I am, in Switzerland seeking the protection of the United Nations."

"[As the British Ambassador in Uzbekistan.] At the same time that I was receiving word from Uzbek citizens about the gruesome affronts to their humanity, I was also getting CIA intelligence on Uzbekistan, under the U.S.-U.K. intelligence-sharing agreement. This information — fed to the CIA by Karimov's security services — revealed the same pattern of information as those forced confessions. And it was a pattern that was false, often demonstrably so. One piece of CIA intelligence named a Muslim terrorism suspect with alleged links to al-Qaeda, except I happened to know that the person in question was a Jehovah's Witness, not a Sunni Muslim extremist. Another gave a specific location for a terrorist training camp in the hills above Samarkand, a spot I knew was empty. The CIA was apparently well aware that it was getting material drawn from torture. At my request, my deputy confirmed this with the U.S. Embassy. She reported back to me that she had been told that the United States did not see a problem "in the context of the war on terror." (I immediately reported this back to Britain in a top-secret telegram.) And both the CIA and the British intelligence service, MI6, were accepting and using this intelligence in their assessments, despite its highly questionable validity."

"The petitioner [Murray] is an intelligent person whose actions were deliberate and calculated. They clearly showed contempt for the court's order and for the rule of law. They created serious risks for the complainers' mental and physical health [from paragraph 82 of the original source]."

"The revelation of the identities of the complainers would be likely to result in considerable abuse and harassment (particularly on social media) against them. There was a real danger that they would be physically harmed [from paragraph 57 of the original source]."

"[Murray seems] to find it difficult to distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact."

"In the Salisbury case, as Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan has shown, the government initially relied on a phrase that they thought could be defended as true but which was intended to cultivate a deception. This is that the nerve agent involved in the case is of "a type developed by Russia" ... The deception was spectacularly successful. The entire mainstream media went along with it. Embarrassingly, many mainstream journalists deluged Craig Murray with abuse and ridicule for raising modest questions about the government narrative."

"I'm an Anglo really, born in England, like Sandy Lyle and Rod Stewart [...] but my father came from this huge Edinburgh family. He was in the forces and was posted down to Norfolk, which is where he met my mum. I grew up down in Norfolk, but I went back up to - and always spent a lot of time in - Scotland."

"This morning, lawyers are acting on my request to prepare a counsel's opinion on the legality of publishing those of Stewart MacDonald's emails which are in the public interest to be revealed. This may take a day or two."

"I came back from Reykjavik on Monday morning [16 October] and I was detained at Glasgow Airport by the police after I came through passport control. They took me into a wee room and they said that I was detained under the Terrorism Act, which was an extraordinary thing."

"[On his posting to Tashkent in Uzbekistan] Unless you've lived in a totalitarian state, it comes as a hell of a shock to see the sheer weight of the police presence. There are four policemen on every bloody street corner. There's 40,000 armed policemen in Tashkent city. There are about the same number of plain-clothes officers from the security services too. Effectively the leadership that was there when the Soviet Union existed is still in charge. They've replaced communist ideology with nationalist ideology whilst maintaining the same power structures."

"Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy. The major political parties are banned; Parliament is not subject to democratic election and checks and balances on the authority of the electorate are lacking. There is worse: we believe there to be between 7,000 and 10,000 people in detention whom we would consider as political and/or religious prisoners. In many cases they have been falsely convicted of crimes with which there appears to be no credible evidence they had any connection."

"I am now happily in the Outer Hebrides. This makes it much harder to send the police to intimidate me because a) they will have to find me b) I shall be too drunk to notice."

"[The emails indicate] the toxic relationships within the SNP group at Westminster, where McDonald regards himself as in a very small minority of Sturgeon loyalists."

"I want to reassure Mr McDonald that his hysterical ranting about being hacked by a state intelligence service, when he appears by his own account to have fallen for a phishing scam the average 12-year-old would see through, is hilariously wide of the mark."

"In reply, I said to them, "When you’re speaking at a big demonstration, like a Stop the War demonstration, it's impossible to know who the others are and often these things go on for hours and personally I don't ever tend to stay around much, I just tend to make my speech and leave." But if they're people I know, like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign or Stop the War, then I trust them as a sensible organisation in terms of who they invite."

"One of our slogans has been "British Bulldog, not Bush's Poodle", which has the advantage of confusing people entirely about the political direction we are coming from. This at least gets them to open the leaflet and read more. It was devised by Edward, who used to work for Saatchi and Saatchi. He claims it appeals to both left and right. It could, of course, alienate both instead. I suppose we'll soon know."

"There is worse: we believe there to be between 7,000 and 10,000 people in detention whom we would consider as political and/or religious prisoners. In many cases they have been falsely convicted of crimes with which there appears to be no credible evidence they had any connection."

"I have obtained access to all of Stewart McDonald's emails, after approaching a number of people to find out who might have them. I had no hand in obtaining the emails nor prior knowledge. I am grateful they have been so generously shared."

"Remarkable correlation between Labour MPs who attacked Corbyn in EDM wanting no investigation into Salisbury before firmly attributing blame, and parliamentary Labour friends of Israel, I wonder why?"