This is very much worth a watch.
Jim Fitzpatrick reveals new information on how the DUP and Vote Leave worked together in the EU referendum. Did they break the law? And he digs deep into the finances behind the DUP’s record referendum donor in a money trail that leads to Ukraine and beyond.
Yes, I know it’s the BBC, but every once in a while, they come up with something good.
It looks like Vote Leave and the DUP may have been on the fiddle and maybe some people in Northern Ireland and some in New York are going to be looking into it.
Don’t expect any help or encouragement from Downing Street though, as Arlene Foster owns May, lock, stock and barrel.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
BBCiPlayer only works in UK.
On Brexit I see the EU Withdrawal Bill got Royal Assent and so its S12 containing the amended “lack of Scottish Consent” clause became Law.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/16/section/12/enacted
The odds are shortening on my bet that we will be free by Xmas 2018.
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The report is on YouTube, Ben Madigen has the link :
https://eurofree3.wordpress.com/2018/06/27/dup-dark-money-brexit/
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Thanks…
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I’ve added it to the post now. 🙂
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I had read about the CRC , but not the Ukraine connection. I also understand that there was a law change regarding disclosure of donations which was backdated for the UK except Northern Ireland.
Someone is apparently Cooking the books. I wonder if the cover up will be successfull. Stinks as usual.
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NI was exempted because people feared for their lives giving money to either side.
But Arlene wants everything to be the same there as it is in Britain. That’s one thing we could arrange right away… along with abortion and equal marriage.
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So, this is the BBC laying the groundwork to cancel Brexit.
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LOL…
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Hi Kangaroo – what you need to watch the BBC on iplayer is a VPN so you can make it look as if your internet address is in the UK. The one I use is called Private Internet Access, but there are of course others. VPNs what people use when their authoritarian governments try to impose net censorship and are in the habit of snooping on their internet traffic.
“Free by Christmas”. I hope, I wish … it’s grim to even think it, but I hope the Westminster regime commits some more democratic outrages against us, in its usual ignorant, arrogant, incompetent and insufferable manner, to boost support for independence. I thought we might have reached a trigger point with the passage of Clause 15 – we’ll have to say Section 12 now, I suppose – and it may yet prove so.
Then there was the deprivatization / renationalization of the East Coast main line – the “LNER” – in which we Scots are deliberately excluded from its board of management, or whatever they’re calling it; that is naked partisan politics. We all know that if the Unionist parties were in power at Holyrood, we would be represented. I think we should prevent the “LNER” running at all in Scotland until we get a seat on that board; the regime would cave rather than risk a fight. I take the view that most Scottish customers of the railway would understand the reasons for any threatened disruption – and approve.
You’re right, though: the odds are shortening.
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I see Carwyn Jones has been warning the UK government that the way it treats Wales is encouraging support for Plaid. In NI, Sinn Fein want a referendum on reunification…
Brexit is going well…
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Swimmingly… make for the lifeboats, people!
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Damn. Sorry about that, Kangaroo.
It’s about the massive donation given to the DUP to fight for Brexit, most of which they which they used in England in the last days of the campaign when Vote Leave had run out of money.
Oh… wouldn’t that be sweet!
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Oh dear! Yer mon finds a loose thread and gives it a pull and just look what has unravelled so far. How does that quote go (Googles a bit) ah yes, “Oh what a tangled web we weave When first we practice to deceive”.
Is it too much to hope that this might bring down the government? 😉
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In a word…Probably.
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We knew quite a lot of this already, it seems to me, but yer mon has indeed started the thing unravelling. The story about the £425,000 funnelled to the DUP through the Scottish Tories has been around for a good long while, though – here’s a piece about it from Open Democracy dated May 2017: http://tinyurl.com/l8dulao.
I was particularly struck by what the woman from the (Nornirish) Electoral Commission said about transparency: the EC had wanted transparency in funding going back to the beginning of 2014, but the Westminster regime said no. I seem to recall that there was another referendum held in 2014…
**FREEMAN RANT ALERT** **AVOID INTENSE BOREDOM BY IGNORING THE FOLLOWING**
It must be so uncomfortable for the Westminster regime and the Brexiteers to learn – sorry, to have to cover up the fact that they already knew – that the Brexit campaign in particular, and the Tories in general, perhaps, received significant funding from that great friend of liberal democracy and human rights, Vladimir Putin – because make no mistake, if Putin’s puppet regime in Kyiv was involved in multi-million-dollar corrupt dealings with Western companies, Putin knew about it at least, or – much more likely – personally ordered, authorized or approved it. Those people, headed by Yanukovich, those cronies, were Putin’s people, they worked for him, they worked on his orders, and the scale of the corruption was staggering. You don’t get to be a Russian or Ukrainian oligarch if you don’t do what Putin tells you – as we know, more than a few ex-oligarchs have had to run for their lives, basically, for incurring Putin’s displeasure.
Just as a reminder, Yanukovich was ousted from power in Ukraine in February 2014, so some of the subject matter of that welcome piece of proper investigative journalism from the BBC predates the Brexit referendum by quite a long way – though not too far. The doings – misdeeds, malfeasances – of the Clarkston-based white-collar criminal Richard Cook – must be properly investigated by the judicial authorities here and tracked back not just to early 2014, but as far back as the trail leads. There is quite obviously a prima facie case for Cook to answer; he should have been jailed before now, it seems to me.
Maybe some bright-eyed young investigative journalist will check whether the impossibly fragrant – sorry, flagrant – fly-tipper Cook has his grubby paw-prints on any PFI deals here in Scotland. (“Fly-tipper” – what is the world coming to when a dewy-eyed young independentista like myself can bring himself to not only agree with Jim Murphy, but even to be mildly amused by something he says?) Underhand dealings to win yourself loadsamoney every year for a generation through shell companies subcontracting out to build – oh, shoddy primary schools that fall down occasionally, say – that must be a very attractive prospect for some people. There’s no point trying to distinguish between Scottish Labour and Scottish Conservatives in that, far too many of them have far too great a love for backhanders. And what a shame we here in Scotland didn’t get our Barnetted equivalent of Arlene’s billion-pound bung. Maybe we’re too honest or something.
The Brexit thing is all part of the old KGB guy’s game plan: destabilize the West by corrupting its democracy, boosting the forces of ethnonationalism through Europe and the US, installing a favourable regime in Washington led by a man who is beholden to him, getting that stooge to suddenly make nice with a guy he’d theretofore been calling “Little Rocket Man”, ordering him to call off the USA’s joint military exercises with South Korea, just as the old Soviet Union and now Russia always wanted… that’s win, win, win for Putin. Helping install fascist or fascistic regimes in European countries as well – just what the kleptocrat-in-chief ordered – more icing on more cakes.
The obvious question for us here in Scotland is why – if my analysis and suspicions are correct – our pal Vlad would want to take a punt on helping promote Better Together rather than our own independence campaign – it seems a funny way to go about weakening the UK, at first blush.
Let me just be very clear about one thing: before I or anyone else spins off into the outer reaches of the tinfoil-hatted twilight zone, we need much more investigation, we need many more data points, many more provable facts.
So – why might Vladimir P support Better Together … Well, the SNP, the political party of the Scottish independence movement, does not have a track record of deliberately pauchling the financial returns for its campaign spending. The Tories, on the other hand, most definitely have form for that, and their love of money goes hand in hand with a lack of social conscience. VP might target that under the rubric of promoting corruption among the UK’s political class and opening them up to blackmail over it if they eventually turn out to be influential persons of interest.
The dirt the Russians collected on Trump while he was in Moscow to ogle the contestants at his repellent Miss World pageant in their dressing-rooms back in the day – could not have been collected with an eye to obtain leverage over Trump as POTUS. They do all kinds of kompromat as standard operating procedure.
Better Together: that could also just be as simple as the crook Cook diverting just a little bit of the dirty money he was laundering into a cause close to his heart. Payment for his services, maybe. In the greater scheme of things, Scotland is small beer for the likes of Putin; in Russian the whole UK is referred to as England – Angliya – anyway, and if any Russian dirty money was spent by Cook on Better Together propaganda in 2014, it would be no more than what the Americans call chump change to an operation like Putin’s. A very small price to pay for having a useful idiot in Clarkston to help foment real trouble elsewhere.
I do wonder if the aforesaid Cook ever went to Kyiv as part of that used-railway-track money-laundering scheme. If he did, the footage from the spy cameras in his hotel room there might make fascinating viewing.
Also on the subject of cui bono, when so much Russian dirty money flows into and through London it might seem at first glance that it would be in your average Russian oligarch’s interest to uphold the status quo over the UK’s EU membership. On the other hand – London is already the money-laundering capital of Europe, and with the UK regime free to ignore European pressure, no one can credibly claim that there will be any clampdown on it. Rather, we can be certain that it would be the reverse: crooked financial dealings are a hallmark of the Westminster Tory regime, and clamping down on them would be tantamount to killing their golden goose.
I am reminded too of something Rupert Murdoch allegedly said in response to a question about why he was in favour of Brexit – something like “When I go to Downing Street, they do what I tell them; when I go to Brussels, they don’t.”
Dear Santa, дорогой Дед Мороз, for Christmas this year, can we please have Scottish independence?
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“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
—from ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail,’ April 16, 1963
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Nae bother. Your Xmas present has been granted. The New Year celebrations are going to be awesome. I will have to come home to celebrate in style as they don’t know how to do New Year here. They start at 7pm on Hogmanay and go home at 12:15am after the fireworks in Sydney.
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Och, the puir wee souls … those Aussies jist dinnae ken how tae throw a pairty.
I just pray I live long enough.
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Worth taking into consideration that if the UK is just the first brick in the wall, Putin stands to regain a large part of his empire if the EU starts to disintegrate.
If I remember rightly, Putin refused Cameron’s request to dis Scottish Independence, when Obama, Australia and the EU chief at the time, were prepared to back him.
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Aye, but the Aussie PM was Tony Abbot a londoner and the goose that gave Duke of Edinburgh a Knighthood. Total dill.
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What a quilt!
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Never let the facts get in the way of a good anti-Russian Rant Tris.
The ex KGB running the UK and the USA – the fiends!
Oh and if we’re talking about installing Fascists just who installed them in Kiev?
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Actually, it’s the facts I’m interested in.
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Trump / Putin: http://tinyurl.com/ydapjt5e
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Yanukovich / Yushchenko / Putin / pauchled elections etc.: http://tinyurl.com/ydapjt5e (Britannica).
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OT, but I’m bursting to share this, it reminded me of Niko’s relationship with Taz for some reason…
[God creating dogs] God: You’re man’s best friend.
Dog: Pretty sexist.
God: No, I mean as in every – … fuck it, you can’t talk.
Dog: … grr…
God: Oh, and chocolate kills you.
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Conan the Librarian,
You are not exactly doing all you can to convert nikostratos. On his comment:
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
—from ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail,’ April 16, 1963”
Well?
Martin Luther King and Nikostratos have the right of that.
You, on the other hand, do not.
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I’ve been talking to Niko online since 2007 and I think I know him better than you.
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Probably your long standing discussion with him absents the possibility that he could have changed his mind? For, he certainly appears to have.
Who know’s?
Perhaps you persuaded him.
🙂
It is so annoying to actually win.
“Take a rain check, and set yourself free”
If I were him, I would find your ire, off-putting, and probably a ‘No’ vote, because you can’t, apparently adsorb your previous enemies into a movement for change..
Not a predictably great way to win hearts and minds, eh! Conan?
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As I have said, I know Niko better than you do. He likes to pull legs and often posts anti SNP rants in execrable grammar simply to wind people up.
Sometimes he succeeds Dougie…
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Typical Conan insults
Yer granny with ner a care .
Never one to play the ball ⚽️ and not the man
Add hominem attack’s
Are his forte .
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Niko, so entrenched, he doesn’t know when I’m giving him a compliment.
In a back handed sort of way.
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Douglas. It’s worked for us for years.
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Douglas.
Niko and Conan have a love hate relationship going back years.
They, in fact we, along with John Brownlie, all knew each other on blogs like “Subrosa” and APW (Spook of Leith) and we have always been rude to each other.
It’s all banter. Niko is rude to everyone, and everyone is rude to Niko. We all respect Taz, Nko’s dog, a lot more than Niko, because we reckon he’s the one of the family with the brains. A bit like Munguin is in my family. 🙂
I’d say underneath the banter we’re all quite fond of each other.
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Perhaps,
But I have read here that Niko has changed his mind on independence. He, now apparently, is in favor of it.
Conan apprears to find that unacceptable.
It they are all playing a silly game, then hell mend them
This is too important an issue to be mediated by chums playing games, or, potentially, morons.
So, has nikostratos actually come around to an ‘independence’ point of view? He certainly said that here a while ago. Is that true? Enquiring minds want to know.
And our friend Conan? Not exactly a useful arbiter.
Just saying.
Reply’s would be useful.
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Douglas: Niko hasn’t been persuaded by Munguin or Conan. He said he was changing his mind because and independent Scotland in the EU was preferable to him to a UK set adrift with no trade partners.
And permanently rules by the Tories.
At least that’s what I understood of it.
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The way I see it is this
A Brexit uk under Tory misrule is a nightmare
To be avoided .
So hard as it is I must
Say rather than put up
With everlasting Tory tyranny if another
Referendum was held I
Would vote yes .
This is not an endorsement of snp governance far from it
Labour alway best but
Brexit uk is one path I cannot follow .
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You need to remember that, once released from the strings that bind SLAB to ELAB or UKLAB, they mighht turn out ok.
If they were putting Scotland first instead of Tory voting SE England, they might be altogether more reasonable.
I was a Labour voter until they became the right of centre party they did, and freankly, although I liked the idea of Corbyn (and Leonard), they still think it is more important for Britain to be a big noise in the world than to feed our kids… and as for Brexit…. Useless. They have disappointed.
If they sort themselves out after independence, I could easily go back to voting for them.
They have to ditch Baillie and Sarwar though… and a few others.
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Right of centre mayhap not so bad
But they went hard right full on almost
Tory .
They started the attack on the involuntary unemployed the sick and disabled .
They turned social security for all into welfare for the deserving poor
(How to define deserving was never made clear )
The Torys took over the open path new Labour created and just pushed it faster and further.
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Without a doubt Niko.
But Mandelson made it clear that the only way Labour could win power was winning votes in the SE of England, and that is what THEY wanted.
What New Labour did to the sick and invalids was simply disgusting.
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That earns a “me too” from me. The point of absolutely no return for me was when the Labour Branch Office in Scotland shared a platform with the Tories in Better Together. Give me a party that returns to Labour’s proper roots in combating exploitation and misery and fighting for the common weal, and I’ll vote for it. After independence.
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Ah, Niko – but when all the many pro-independence Labour supporters and members in Scotland, and all the proper left-wing ones, have given up on Labour in Scotland and defected to the SNP, meaning that all that’s left in the party, pretty much, is a Unionist, Blairite rump… When the UK Labour party rejects the majority vote in Scotland over Brexit, when it wants not just to keep Trident but to go on basing the Trident subs and missiles at Faslane against the will of the majority of Scots… When the UK Labour party’s MPs sit on their hands and abstain while Westminster rips powers away from our Parliament in the face of a vote by all parties at Holyrood except the Tories to refuse consent…
If we have a Scottish Labour Party after independence, it will have to be a very different animal to what we have today. It will have to be far more Keir Hardie and much, much less Tony Blair, far more internationalist in outlook and far less Westminster-minded parochial – and I don’t want to hear any more lip service to the Socialist International unless they mean it.
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Yep. True dat.
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How many would you like Dougie?
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Remember when he promised to “Cut off his tadger” if the SNP won in 2011? He was called Mr Mxyzptlk then Dougie.
http://mypseudepigrapha.blogspot.com/2011/05/hootsmon-headlines.html
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Maybe that’s what’s wrong with him, Conan.
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Maybe tris but I don’t hold a grudge
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I know mate.
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You don’t hold anything when you go for a pee either.
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I don’t want to know how you know that, Conan.
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I just think at this point that I should reassure our gentle readers that, unlike Niko, I have no plans to cut off my tadger either now or for the foreseeable future. In my present state of well-upholstered embonpoint, even lift doors present no hazard, and I do not possess a paper guillotine and have no plans to acquire one.
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I’m sure the readers, gentle and otherwise, are relieved to hear that.
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LOL LOL LOL, Conan.
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trispw,
That was an incredible piece of journalism. The Scottish version of the BBC seem inept at calling people to account. Yet he does. I cannot really understand how a NI commentator can talk truth to power when we can’t.
It makes me wonder whether we accept lies as usual or not? Which is the greatest crime of Unionists.
They are, apparently, willing to break the law in order to win.
That anti-democrats should beat Democrats?
That is what I took from the video.
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I don’t know what it is about BBC Scotland.
I agree, they would never have come up with a programme like that. But in fairness, someone (not in Belfast) must have given the red light for it to been shown UK wide.
It makes Cameron look a bit bad…
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‘Green light’?
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What I took from it is that the BBC is laying the groundwork to cancel brexit, or at least hold another referendum on it.
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Given it’s such a big story; given the fact that it seems to affect three of the four nations (NI party, Scottish funder, English campaign) and it was broken by the BBC, why is it not headline news.
Are they trying to protect the idiot prime minister becasue she’s in Belgium at the moment?
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Both nations and one province.
And here’s a thing May could do, if she thinks of it:
Go to town on the DUP over this under a banner of “fighting corruption in politics” – Always a popular thing among the masses.
This takes Arlene down a peg or two, and possibly knocks the legs out from under her, leaving May in a stronger position.
In addition, this calls into question the result of the leave vote, which would open up the possibility of a re-run.
In the re-run, remain wins. Scotland’s trigger for independence goes away.
The EU will be glad that the UK doesn’t actually want to leave, and will allow us to cancel A50 with a few concessions.
—
Don’t know how likely it is for May to go for that, especially if she’s working for higher-ups in the conservative party and has been promised a peerage for being the sacrificial lamb delivering a crash brexit.
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Good roposition.
What would Boris, Jakey, IDS, Govey, Grayling, DR Fox, Adam Werrity, McPile and all the other hard line right wing Rile Britannia nutters do though?
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Fulminate, but no insurrection? The hard right, high Tory Brexiteers must fear that if there is a popular uprising of UKIPpers, Lumpenproletariat (technical term) Tommy Robinson supporters, Loyalist Orange Ludgers and the like, they might well find themselves and all their posh plutocrat pals strung up on lampposts like Mussolini was.
It is difficult to imagine more unlikely bedfellows than Arlene’s mob and high-Tory Anglo-Catholics like – well, Rees-Morgue, I think – and there still are quite a lot of those among high and mighty Tory muck-a-mucks, mugwumps, Lords and Ladies, and general toffs and nobs. (What do you get if you cross a knight with a nob? Oh, never mind.)
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She won, I think…
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This is a bit of American Politics. A hard interview, and a tough response.
It is something lacking in our own media / politicians.
Quite an incredible politician!
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Amazing that it was a genuine question and answer thing instead of the UK shouting match.
Very interesting politician, and realistic too…
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Quite noticeable that Glenn Greenwald didn’t interrupt her! What an incredible difference between the way that BBC
(Scotland) does stuff.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is perhaps the most convincing US politician I have ever heard.
Danny?
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May’s visit to Brussels as seen by the Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jun/28/napping-may-scores-own-goal-in-face-of-belgium-brexit-striker
EU 27 England 0 LOL
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LOL. Brilliant.
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What a superhuman this Putin is.
He has foiled the Trillion dollar US intelligence system – the CIA the FBI, the NSA etc, etc, etc and the entire US political and financial power nexus.
He fooled the population of America into electing his puppet – in effect a traitor – when the aforesaid rednecks thought they were electing a tub thumping, America Firster.
He single-handedly hijacked the UK Brexit campaign and succeeded in his evil design of detaching the UK from the EU by fooling the English and Welsh population.
Truly the Emmanuel Goldstein of his age.
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You forgot his muscles.
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I wonder if he has a white Persian cat and a lair in an extinct volcano?
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Undoubtedly.
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I’ve seen him with his shirt off.
Mind you I think Justin could beat him in a fight. Probably Macron too.
I see Trump has offered France a better Trade Deal if Macron takes them out of the EU!!!
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/29/quit-eu-bilateral-trade-deal-trump-told-macron-us-france-terms
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Justin est plus jeune et sa portée de bras est plus grande; Macron’s a bit wee, though not as wee as Sarkozy…
Oor Nicola could tak him doon wi a weel-placed tartan stiletto heel, but (moves to Kelvinside) Mundell end Johnson would be thurly spifflicated.
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Well I’d sooner fight with Nicolas than Nicola, even if they pronounce the same. And yep, Justin is a big fella.
I’d avoid him.
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Not at all, he had help.
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