When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.
Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.
Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.
But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.
And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.
For many years now, whenever I’ve done one of those “Which Political Party Should You Be In?” online quiz things, it always says that I’m a Green, which is weird because I really hate cyclists. Nevertheless, it was still the result when I did one most recently, just last month.
So I decided that for the first time in my life it was finally time to join a political party.
Her Majesty’s Prisoner No. 157095, or Craig Murray as we still prefer to call him, is a fascinating piece of living evidence of the Kafkaesque country Scotland has become under the despotic rule of Nicola Sturgeon.
Craig has a number of serious medical conditions, one of which causes him frequent dizziness and fainting spells. To gauge their severity (because obviously it’s hard for Craig to judge, given that he’s dizzy and/or fainting at the time), his doctor gave him a device called a pulse oximeter. Depending on the readings from it after an attack, Craig’s life could be in danger and an ambulance should be called.
But because presumably even the Scottish prison authorities realise that it would look quite bad if a political prisoner like Craig died in jail, they did offer him an alternative.
Craig Murray, a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, the father of a newborn child, a man in very poor health and one who has no prior convictions, handed himself over to the Scottish police last Sunday morning. He becomes the first person ever to be imprisoned on the obscure and vaguely defined charge of “jigsaw identification”.
Murray is also the first person to be jailed in Britain for contempt of court for their journalism in half a century – a period when such different legal and moral values prevailed that the British establishment had only just ended the prosecution of “homosexuals” and the jailing of women for having abortions.
We accidentally de-retired for a week last week because the outrage of Craig Murray’s imprisonment couldn’t be allowed to go unremarked. But we’re shutting back down again now, so here’s a fun challenge to occupy yourselves with in what’s left of what’s passed for the summer.
Because the feat described in that picture isn’t an easy one.
For the avoidance of any doubt, this site does not believe that Scotland’s second most senior judge, Lady Leeona Dorrian, is corrupt.
It does not believe that she is acting at the behest of the Scottish Government or the First Minister, even though Lady Dorrian is known to wish to succeed Lord Carloway as the country’s most senior judge when he steps down in the near future and that position – Lord President of the Court of Session – is in the First Minister’s gift.
What this site does believe is that she’s acting out of bias. Lady Dorrian is known to wish to dispense with juries in sexual-assault trials, and it’s our belief – based on observing her conduct during the trial of Craig Murray and her apparent emotional investment in the case – that that’s because she belongs to the sizeable group of people who fundamentally think that all acquittals in such cases are wrongful, and that in essence any man ever accused of rape or sexual assault is automatically guilty merely by dint of having been accused, on the grounds that no woman would ever lie about such a thing.
(Or more frighteningly, that a small minority of accusers DO lie but the false convictions or ruined lives of a few men are a price worth paying.)
Her actions, though – in jailing Craig Murray for eight months for a crime (so-called “jigsaw identification”) which is hopelessly ill-defined and for which nobody has ever been imprisoned before in all of world history – risk doing more to undermine the rights of women alleging sexual assault than any individual ever has before.
Please note the below press release regarding the impending incarceration of former UK Ambassador Craig Murray
[29/07/2021; 15:52 pm; Edinburgh]
Legal precedent will be set tomorrow as Craig Murray will be the first person to be imprisoned on the charge of jigsaw identification in the UK, and indeed in the entire world. Scotland’s second most senior judge, Lady Dorrian, sentenced Murray to 8 months of incarceration following a contempt of court charge for ‘jigsaw identification’ relating to the trial against Alex Salmond.
Wings has been informed this morning by a reliable source that Police Scotland have now progressed their inquiry into the SNP’s “missing” £600,000 fundraiser money from an “assessment” to a formal criminal investigation into the matter, which was first revealed on this site in January 2020. We understand that an official statement to that effect will be forthcoming shortly.
[EDIT 12.27pm: the statement is below.]
”Police Scotland has now received seven complaints in relation to donations that were made to the Scottish National Party.
“After assessment and consultation with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, we will now carry out an investigation.
“Enquiries are continuing and anyone who has any information which may assist with this investigation is asked to contact police.”
We look forward to the eventual outcome and continue our retirement in the meantime. Those still loyal to the party leadership wishing to be reassured that everything is fine and above board and the whole thing is a mad conspiracy theory and a total non-story are directed to Wee Ginger Dug and to the Twitter accounts of Pete Wishart, Mhairi Hunter, Tom Arthur, Stewart McDonald, Tom Gordon and David Leask, as usual.
Alert readers will have noticed that our quasi-regular crayonsmith Slacky The Holiday Boy is off again this week (and indeed next week), so as a special emergency service we bring you something almost as funny, albeit in a rather darker vein than usual.
The punchline, of course, is the last sentence of paragraph 9.
Ten years ago this month I was in a pub called The Porter in Bath with my girlfriend and her family, buying everyone whiskies and gabbling deliriously (I’d been up for over 40 hours at that point) about the significance of what had just happened.
Alex Salmond’s SNP had just broken the Scottish electoral system, winning an absolute majority of seats in a Parliament designed expressly to stop that from ever happening. A total of 72 pro-independence MSPs had been elected, and it was already clear that an independence referendum was going to happen despite the Labour Party’s best efforts. It was impossibly exciting.
This month I sat and watched 72 ostensibly pro-indy MSPs be elected again, but this time with my heart breaking, knowing that they would achieve nothing and indeed had no real intention to even try.
