First Minister, the SNP's Alex Salmond

Britain's hard-line Dictators Exposed

Intrepid whistle-blower and the UK's ex-Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, today makes a searing indictment of Tony Blair's arrogance, ill manners and anti-democratic nature.

In 'Blair is no Democrat', Craig Murray illustrates how Blair's contemptuous refusal to congratulate Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party (SNP) on its historic victory in becoming the (albeit minority) government of Scotland hides more than a tyrant.

Many, including myself, believe the SNP victory would have been much greater if Blair and his cronies in the Scottish Office hadn't sabotaged the recent election by ignoring the several warnings they were given by producing a complicated ballot paper. As a result of this (very likely deliberate) de facto rigging of the election as well as several other electoral improprieties, including missing postal votes, well over 142,000 of the electorate in a small country of under 5 million were effectively disenfranchised.

Having first tried to frighten the Scottish electorate into not supporting the SNP, Blair's reaction since has been to maintain not only a cold silence but to avoid his own duties of governance by not inviting Scotland's new First Minister, Salmond, for a meeting.

"This," writes Craig Murray, "shows a profound contempt, not just for the SNP, but for Scotland and the Scottish Parliament. More than this, it shows a profound contempt for democracy. Blair is only in favour of it when it gives the "right" result - ie the one he wants. That has been evident in Iran and Palestine. It is now evident in Scotland."

"Blair and Brown are also showing just how unpleasant New Labour in Scotland have become. They still refuse to acknowledge that they lost Scotland after fifty years of dominance. Blair and Brown's failure to congratulate Alex Salmond on his victory is a denial of all the politenesses and decencies that are necessary to the smooth running of a democracy, and which are understood by democratic politicians everywhere. They are showing both their nastiness and their pettiness."

Nasty and petty they certainly are. Corrupt, venal and, we may add, a party responsible for a collective war crime for which their leader stubbornly refuses to accept responsibility.

And if the bad-tempered defensiveness of their media spokespeople is anything to go by, Blair's Nu Labor is a party desperately frightened that the hard lesson in Scotland may well augur something far worse for them in the future.

It may well do. And if it does they will have no one to blame but themselves.

Far from being socialists, the Labour Party was built upon the foundations of reformism, ie. a hopelessly optimistic belief that it was possible to reform capitalism into a more benevolent creature. From the time of Roosevelt's New Deal through to Keynes and the concept of Welfare State capitalism it looked like the reformists could be right.

But all that was brutally ended with the Friedmanites and the monetarists who, under Thatcher and Reagan, began the wholesale dismantling of public ownership, the systematic destruction of public services and the handing-over of national assets at knock-down prices to private market forces.

The ruthless, cold war mentality of the Reagan-Thatcher Axis and the huge surge of military spending it hid became not only an essential part of the ideology of the Atlanticists in all Britain's political parties but embedded itself in the very culture of Anglo-American societies.

Naturally, this process was all along promoted enthusiastically by capital's media whores who themselves have become increasingly embedded as the propagandists for the USUK's new imperialism. Using euphemisms like 'neo-liberalism' the media has and will continue to play an active part in promoting the ruthless economics of the much harsher, totalitarian version of corporate capitalism we face today.

The more Blair and his abortion of a Nu Labor promote this ugly dystopia the more out-of-step they become with their people. In spurning them, Scotland rejected an entire agenda of betrayal and warmongering.

"It should not be forgotten that key to the SNP's victory was their profound opposition to the War in Iraq and to Trident nuclear missiles, and their replacement. The SNP showed what happens when a genuine choice on these issues is given to voters. That is a huge threat to the conservative establishment in the UK, and explains Blair's arrogant hostility."

The hostility towards the SNP's victory from both Labour and the so-called Liberal Democrats underscores the deep commitment of the leaders of these two Atlanticist parties, as well as the Tories, to not only obediently toe Washington's line but to actively promote its belligerent, unipolar imperialism.

In treating Scotland so contemptuously they are exposed as the cold, hard-line establishment, enemies of democracy they really are.

This Story is now at OpEdNews.com

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Scotland to remain Corrupt Britannia's Colony?

If it was the intention of Blair's venal Nu Labor administration in London to make a mockery of the Scottish electoral process they certainly succeeded. After last week's electoral count fiasco when Data Research Service's superduper electronic counting machines went into meltdown, producing around 142,000 rejected ballot sheets 3.5% of the Scottish electorate were effectively disenfranchised. To that must be added the thousands of postal ballots that were never received on time.

If this kind of shambles had taken place in a third world country, Blair would have been among the very first to shout Foul and to demand a re-election. But not in Britain. Here the silence from all parties, including the Scottish Nationalists (SNP) with their majority of one over Nu Labor, has been ominous.

True, the SNP leader, Alex Salmond, furiously denounced the election result and demanded an independent inquiry. But, eager to become Scotland's next First Minister, he clearly prefers to live in hope of leading a minority government than to reject the fundamentally flawed electoral process which gave his party a measly 47 seats against the corrupt Nu Labor's 46.

The Greens were the largest group which lost out badly. They had hoped to increase the seven seats they had in the previous parliament at Holyrood to nine. In fact, they ended up with just two. And looking at the manner in which their leader, Robin Harper, has been prepared to compromise his party by leaping into bed with the SNP in a 'loose coalition' it seems that everyone in our small country, still under Whitehall's colonial yoke, has lost out to the unashamed all-round use of political expedience.

I am, by nature, an optimist and see progress to be a tediously slow, one-step-forward-two-steps-back kind of evolutionary process. A thing to be considered against the measure of eternity rather than days, weeks or months. To be an optimist, I believe, it's more realistic to set one's expectations low to avoid short-term disappointments.

And living in the Red Pill Matrix world of the many other millions of Her Britannic Majesty's marginalised and disaffected subjects I am tempted to think that the scorn and contempt in which we are held by the wankers who presume to rule over us is now so great they think they can openly defraud and deny our once-in-a-blue-moon right to have our say at the ballot-box by sabotaging even that.

And it is a measure of the sheer arrogance of our southern rulers that, despite this almighty shambles, the man responsible for having organised it all in the first place, the Scottish Secretary of State, Douglas Alexander, simply refuses to accept he screwed up and should resign. True to his elitist nature, Alexander claims the fault must lie with the people. Along with the lies, venality and colonial racism of Nu Labor (it's not just Blair, it's the whole wretched lot of them) Blair's apparatchiks are not in the habit of admitting to making mistakes or resigning when they have.

So, as no apology is forthcoming, must we be left to believe that no mistakes were made after all? That last week's electoral disaster was intended all along? Alexander's stubborn refusal to heed the several warnings he got that he was backing a flawed electoral system can only suggest that he and his bosses in London were so sure of what they were doing that nothing could persuade them to change course.

Nu Labor has been extremely clever to have deceived the British people over the last ten years with its spin, cynicism and an endless series of lies and distortions. In all of this it has been served well by both the state's sycophantic propaganda machine, the BBC, as well as the rest of the corporate controlled media. In that short period of time its quisling Blair has dragged an unwilling country into more wars than the dreadful Maggie Thatcher ever did and by overturning 800 years of constitutional precedents going back to Magna Carta suceeded in accomplishing what even she dared not attempt.

Perhaps it was foolish for anyone of us to have believed that Her Majesty's 21st Century imperialist rulers in London would have allowed quite so easily the people of Scotland their right to exercise their political will. Perhaps we should have recalled corrupt Britannia's past, her brutal treatment over centuries of the Irish and how, by practising a silent, ongoing coup against democracy not only in Scotland but in England and Wales she keeps alive the abortion that is called the United Kingdom.

Maybe Blair's let's-pretend-at-being-socialists Nu Labor had taken to heart the prediction made by that genuine socialist of old, Scotland's John Maclaine, that Britannia's empire would finally collapse the day that Scotland regained her independence, ending 300 years of imperialistic union. And with that Empire the nuclear colony that Scotland's militarist masters have turned her into.

If what we are now seeing turns out to have been a coup against democracy (and how will we ever know the truth?) surreptitiously planned and intended to look like a cock-up then that must be seen by the rest of the world as proof of how all pretence of freedom and democracy has finally been discarded by our multinational capitalist rulers to be replaced by a planetary, Orwellian dystopia.

Is this Scotland's Prague Spring?

Last Thursday night's election count in Scotland was, as reported earlier, chaotic. A complete fiasco caused by the Nu Labor-controlled Scottish Office and executive. Despite any losses it might have made through the confusion, the Scottish National Party (SNP) narrowly won pole position, as the illustration above shows, to form a government in this country.

Nu Labor (or New Labour as it likes to consider itself) has, over the last 50 years, ruled Scotland and this led it to believe that it has some kind of Divine Right to do so. It was a terrible blow to their misplaced pride to discover that this mystical right has finally been denied it. I have never seen Tony Blair looking quite so shell-shocked as he appeared yesterday on discovering the punishment meted out to him by the electorate on both sides of the border.

With characteristic sour grapes at least one losing Labour candidate is now "considering taking legal action", using the claim he might have lost votes in the spoilt ballot papers scandal. Something for which the very administration, in which he played a leading part, is responsible!

Meantime, the astute, some say charismatic, SNP leader Alex Salmond and his 46 stalwart MSPs are faced with a terrible dilemma. How are they going to become the next government in a Scotland they would like to steer towards independence from England?

Proportional Representation is an electoral system which while producing a clearer reflection of the actual votes cast lends itself to government by coalition. In the past the Atlanticist Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have been quite happy to go to bed with each other. After all, they have so much in common that it is really impossible to distinguish between the two.

In foreign policy, both are quite happy for the UK as it presently is to continue being shafted by NATO and Washington's militarist, unipolar world tyranny. In domestic policy both parties oppose Scotland pulling out of the joke that is the United Kingdom because --and most important-- it would not only end an imperialist Union that was brought about by bribery, betrayal and threat but throw the cosy Atlanticist 'special relationship' between the warmongers in the US and UK into a final disarray.

In this 'special relationship', Scotland is one vast military base and exercise ground for Whitehall's war office, the misnomer that is the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The UK's equally falsely named 'independent' nuclear 'deterrent' is based in the Clyde estuary near Glasgow. Hardly anyone in Scotland approves of its presence there.

But Scots have no choice because all military decisions are made in England by the mandarin descendants of a jingoistic and warmongering past only kept alive by the hollow facade of a cosmetic, United Kingdom. The day that travesty is finally brought to an end through Scottish independence the evil old pretence that masks the imperialism of England's ruling classes will finally come crashing down.

That is why neither the English-controlled Nu Labor or Liberal Democrats will entertain the idea of a SNP-led administration in Scotland. And why they both oppose the SNP's commitment to give the Scottish people the right to make up their own minds about independence in a referendum proposed to be held within the first term of an administration led by it.

So finally we see how Scotland's democratic right, compromised by the electoral scandal for which both Labour and the Libdems are entirely responsible, is now being threatened by the same two whose claim to rule is exposed to the world as a thing of corruption and they as the real enemies of democracy.

Scotland is a small nation of slightly over 5 million folk. But small is beautiful and, in its case, powerful because its destiny in the months to come could bring about much greater changes on both sides of the Atlantic. Let's hope that the SNP's victory does not turn out to be another Prague Spring and Alex Salmond become another Dubcek. If that were to happen the militarist, imperialist forces that will be behind the coup against democracy would be, as usual these days, the London and Washington, DC Anglo-Saxon alliance.


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