Journalists From Scotland

"The only possible explanations are: 1. One of the two is travelling faster than Usain Bolt can sprint. 2. Scotland Yard has issued doctored CCTV images/timeline. I am going with the Met issuing doctored images."

"The problem with the world is there are conspiracies [...] The idea that they don't happen is ridiculous. As an ambassador I have seen the establishment from the inside, the workings of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 with millions in their budgets — what kind of things do you think they are doing? The hands of the British state are all over this. The roots of it were a political conspiracy against Alex Salmond, to destroy both his reputation and career, and why, because he was a threat to the British state, one of the biggest threats in 300 years who had taken the country to the brink of independence."

"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."

"While I am struggling to see a Russian motive for damaging its own international reputation so grievously, Israel has a clear motivation for damaging the Russian reputation."

"[On his early diplomatic career.] You have to realise I never set out to be a hero [...] I was never a great campaigner for human rights. In many ways, I'd always been just as compromised as any other diplomat. When I was working on the South African desk of the London office I had had to send out letters saying we believed that the African National Congress was a terrorist organisation. I didn't think that for a second and nor did anyone else I was working with, but we did it because it was the price of an impartial, depoliticised civil service. The closest I had ever got to any form of stand was by refusing to implement a government directive to persuade the Poles to reduce the size of the health warnings on cigarette packets to conform with EU law."

"[Extract from a blog entry] I am standing to give the voters a chance to reject all the political parties and put an honest man into parliament. I will not put my snout in the trough. I have proved I am not motivated by money by giving up an extremely lucrative career as ambassador on principle, in opposition to our complicity in torture."

"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."

"Blackburn was a very difficult place to campaign – 37% of votes were cast by postal ballot. It's a rotten borough and I don't come from the area and yet I secured 5% of the vote – which was second or third highest for an independent in the election"

"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."

"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."

"[Those who voted "no" in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum are] either evil, or quite extraordinarily thick."

"[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."

"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."

"Another whistleblower that I owe much to is Edward Snowden. I went to Hong Kong in 2013 with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and spent over a week holed up with Snowden in our hotel room in Hong Kong. Whistleblowers are essential to good journalism. They allow reporters to get behind... the walls of secrecy built up by officials and press officers."

"If Julian is to be prosecuted, then there’s a equally good case for the editor and journalists in The Guardian or New York Times, Der Spiegel, El País, La República and all the other organizations involved in this coverage being prosecuted, too."

"There are still 5 million unvaccinated British adults, who through fear, ignorance, irresponsibility or sheer stupidity refuse to be jabbed. In doing so they endanger not just themselves but the rest of us."

"Israel fails to stand up for Ukraine. Reluctant to impose sanctions on Russia. Still allowing flights from Russia but ended visa-free travel for Ukrainians. Stayed silent after Russian airstrike near Babi Yar memorial, where German Nazis killed tens of thousands of Jews in WW2."

"I have clicked to follow you. Please DM your address/contact details so my lawyers can serve legal papers against you for this clear libel and defamation. I’ve instructed the papers to be drawn up now. All those tweeting support for and spreading her tweet will also be served"

"I’ve had my third jab. All Pfizer. And I strongly recommend everybody to do the same. I’ve also seen how well vaccine passports work. I don’t believe in mandatory vaccination but if you don’t get jabbed you need to realise there are consequences on where you can go."

"France has had vaccine passports for sometime now. It has 600,000+ Covid cases. UK has 1m+. Which part of vaccine passports don’t you get. They also encourage younger folks to be vaxxed, where UK is lagging. And, as you say, vax works."

"[England needs] another hundred [[Mohamed Al-Fayed|[Mohamed] Al Fayeds]]. So he comes from the wrong side of the tracks; so does Mrs. Thatcher. Who cares who owns Harrods? It's a department store, not the Department of Defense. He's a great entrepreneur."

"GB News will not be yet another echo chamber for the metropolitan mindset that already dominates so much of the media. It is our explicit aim to empower those who feel their stories, their opinions, their concerns have been ignored or diminished."

"We will puncture the pomposity of our elites in politics, business, media and academia and expose their growing promotion of cancel culture for the threat to free speech and democracy that it is."

"In the run-up to the launch, through the launch, and in the aftermath of the launch – and I think most of you who know anything about it will know you couldn't file the launch under startling success – more and more differences emerged between myself and the other senior managers and the board of GB News. And, rather than these differences narrowing, they got wider and wider and I felt it was best that, if that's the route they wanted to take, then that's up to them, it's their money."

"Russians taking Ukrainian citizens to so called “filtration camps” then relocating them to distant parts of Russia to work for free. In other words slave labour. Straight out of Nazi Germany playbook."

"Britain should follow the French example — and also take note of what other European countries are doing — and penalise the vaccine refuseniks."

"I saw him in the studio treating the microphone like an old friend, chatting away, waving his arms about, and I knew this was how it was done."

"Climbing to my mind finds its chief justification as an antidote for modern city life. One cannot sweat and worry simultaneously. The mountain resolves itself into a series of simple problems, unconfused by other issues. Its problems are solid rock, to be wrestled with physically; and in the sheer exuberance of thinking through his fingers and toes as his primaeval fathers did before him the climber's worries vanish, sweated from his system, leaving his brain free to appreciate beauty."

"The strange, other worldly, Alice in Wonderland feeling never quite left me at the difficult places; but it diminished as the day passed, and by the time we had reached the north peak John and I were able to sit with our legs dangling over the drop and agree with Tizzie that one met such nice people on mountains."

"The ground we had covered was easy; but we did not know that, for we had not yet learned that a vast amount of space below one is not of itself a difficulty, and that the difficulty in rock climbing varies according to the presence or absence of holds. To us, the drop was everything."

"They crawled like flies over the face of the Cobbler; and it was not too fanciful to imagine that the mountain might sigh in its sleep, shake a rocky paw free of the heather blanket which surrounded it, and brush the insects off. To us, who had imagined mountain tops to be uninhabited deserts, it was surprising that there should be so much life in this twisted landscape of rock. Here was a society whose existence we had never suspected."

"A precipice, seen by a person who has never had to climb one, is a sadly misunderstood part of the landscape. It is written off, in the mind of the beholder, as so much light and shade set at an angle of ninety degrees to the part of the world where reasonable men may walk, a given area of rock, steep as a wall and impossibly smooth. It is seen as a whole, because no sub division seems possible."

"The scale is so vast and so far beyond his comprehension that the conventional signs of the cliff mean as little as those on the map. Therefore, if he should think of rock climbing at all, it is as a foolhardy sport clear against the laws of God, man, and Sir Isaac Newton."

"The impact of these things and people on our minds was considerable. In the three years since we had left school, many things had happened to make us suspect that the world was a slightly less ordered and restricted place than we had been led to believe. But this was immense."

"The tent door faced the summit. The three pinnacles were gigantic fingers, black against the sunset. Nothing stirred. Arrochar and all its works were out of sight below the skyline, and there was silence."

"Above and beyond were mountains, scarcely touched by the tidemark of humanity at their bases, impervious to pipers and ice cream barrows or to the customers of either, as aloof and untouched as the desert which hems in the airport of Timbuctoo."

"In time (though there was no such thing as time) the handhold gave way to another handhold, and another, and another. A pair of boots appeared level with my face. I pulled myself over the edge and sat panting. Murdo smiled at me, and automatically I smiled back. I turned, and looked over the edge. And then, and only then, did the gears re-engage and the world become the world again."

"It is, perhaps, hard to imagine a collaboration between Virgil and Captain W.E. Johns, a fusion of the Aeneid and Biggles Pulls It Off, but that is how Boris Johnson’s memoir reads."

"Michael Gove and I are probably the last two believers in the divine right of kings."

"He [Gove] evoked a support at least for that position [found in Tetlock's book], Expert Political Judgment, in which portions of that book compare subject matter experts to minimalist statistical baselines like extrapolation. Can you predict simple extrapolation algorithms? And the answer was often no. Gove was raising the point that, where do these guys get off making these confident predictions about the consequences of Brexit? And the best empirical evidence would suggest that probably not materially more accurate than simple extrapolation algorithms."

"I know that within the Tory party the hard Brexiteers are compared to the leaders of the French revolution. I think Gove is Brissot, and Boris Johnson is Danton, and Rees-Mogg is compared to Robespierre. We should not forget that the efforts of these men were not appreciated by the common man they claimed to represent – because they all ended up on the guillotine. So that’s important to remind [them]."

"[Brexit was motivated by a desire to] restore faith in our democratic institutions"

"one of the things we can do is continue to ensure that trees are allowed to survive - rather than by being chopped down by a council which is in thrall to its own officers"

"My view is that what is emblematic of Britain is the welcome that we gave the Windrush generation, the welcome we gave people fleeing Idi Amin in the 1970s, the welcome that we continue to give those fleeing persecution. And now the fact that outside the European Union we can have a truly colour-blind migration policy that, if the British people want to, treats people from the Bahamas in the same way as we treat people from Bulgaria."

"We have a great future outside the European Union and we should be embracing that"

"The new law will reaffirm the UK's global leadership on this critical issue, demonstrating our belief that the abhorrent ivory trade should become a thing of the past. Ivory should never be seen as a commodity for financial gain or a status symbol."

"The creation of national parks almost 70 years ago changed the way we view our precious landscapes - helping us all access and enjoy our natural world. We want to make sure they are not only conserved, but enhanced for the next generation. Are we properly supporting all those who live in, work in, or want to visit these magnificent places? Should we indeed be extending our areas of designated land?"

"[I will] make Brexit work not just for citizens but for the animals we love and cherish too"

"Animals are sentient beings who feel pain and suffering, so we are writing that principle into law and ensuring that we protect their welfare. Our plans will also increase sentences for those who commit the most heinous acts of animal cruelty to five years in jail. We are a nation of animal lovers so we will make Brexit work not just for citizens but for the animals we love and cherish too."

"[There is] no reason Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe should be in prison in Iran so far as any of us know"