Journalist, author of Pavel is a Geordie; Black or White, no Grey Areas, Scoop; The Entertainers; Cocktails in Bangkok. Tory hater.
Newcastle Upon Tyne, England
Joined February 2016
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Will Scott retweeted
I read the reports coming out of Manchester this morning and I am genuinely speechless.
Andy Burnham’s old political machine has just been caught secretly intercepting and censoring emails sent by the public to elected politicians.
What were those emails actually about? A resident was asking hard questions about the £55 million in taxpayer loans Burnham handed to Abu Dhabi property developers when he was Mayor, with zero affordable housing requirements.
Instead of letting elected councillors read the concerns of their constituents, unelected bureaucrats quietly diverted the emails straight to the legal department to be buried.
The politicians had absolutely no idea their personal inboxes were being filtered by the state.
The council claims they had to intercept the messages because of potential litigation. It is a complete lie.
Internal correspondence proves the city solicitor asked for this specific resident to be blocked months before any legal threat even existed.
You vote for local representatives to hold the system accountable. But the second a citizen asks where Burnham sent public money in a Gulf state property deal, his political syndicate builds a secret digital firewall to protect the investment.
This is not a functioning democracy. This is a captured corporate cartel running a cover-up for the Prime Minister, and the national media is letting them get away with it in broad daylight.
Will Scott retweeted
Watch this!
This is how the world discovered that #israel had nuclear weapons!!
They are the sickest society on the planet!
"The Vanunu affair"
Will Scott retweeted
“We have archived the BBC’s coverage for three years … We are calling this first part: ‘BBC: The Would Say Files’.”
#ManufacturingConsent
It’s hard to grasp the BBC’s systematic attempt to launder Israeli propaganda until you see the sheer scale of it. Here's a compilation of them doing it at 2x speed.
The latest was on Newsnight on 4 November. When Bernie Sanders called Israel’s government extremist, Victoria Derbyshire answered for it: “And the Israeli government would deny that they are extremists.”
As this video shows, BBC presenters repeatedly do this as guests describe Israel’s crimes: “Israel would say.” “Israel would deny.” “They would reject that.”
We counted 70 of these denials and justifications in 52 aired interviews. The BBC calls this impartiality. But in not one of those 52 did a presenter raise any of these words from Israel’s own leaders:
- “We are fighting human animals.” Yoav Gallant, 9 October 2023
- “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Isaac Herzog, 12 October 2023
- “They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.” Israel Katz, 13 October 2023
- “Remember what Amalek did to you.” Benjamin Netanyahu, 3 November 2023
- Starving two million people in Gaza until the hostages came back might be “justified and moral”. Bezalel Smotrich, 5 August 2024
On 10 October 2023, Tahani Mustafa told the BBC that Israeli forces were not distinguishing civilians from fighters. The presenter replied: “They would reject that.” Mustafa then had to bring up Gallant’s “human animals” herself. The BBC supplied the denial. The guest had to supply Israel’s own words.
That is cherry-picking. The Royal Charter requires the BBC to be impartial, and the public pays for it through the licence fee. In these interviews, it handed its audience Israel’s denials and left out its leaders’ own words, during a genocide streamed live to the world.
We have archived the BBC’s coverage for three years, and we are now counting all of it: 50,000 video clips and many more written excerpts.
We are calling this first part: "BBC: The Would Say Files".
Handing Israel its denials is only one of the ways the BBC launders Israeli propaganda, so we will count every other technique too. Over the next few weeks, we will announce each milestone as we complete the report.
These are the first results, with every clip, quote and source: newscord.org/editorials/bbc-…
Today, we pause to remember the empty rhetoric used by the LP who want to send your sons to die in an illegal war against Russia for Israel and the US and then send your grannies to prison for protesting against it.
🤭
Ok, I didn’t expect a story time on Saturday, but here we go. What I’m about to write is TRUE. It is insane, stupid, and very dumb, but it is true. Earlier today Donald J Trump, the p[resident of the United States, posted that he had offered the job of Press Secretary to Dana White. Well, it was the wrong Dana White… 🧵
But if your grannies are caught parading the community with cardboard, they will go to prison on terrorism charges. The genocide in Palestine, is worth fighting for!
At this time of year, we come together to honour the courage and bravery of the Armed Forces and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.
I want to give my thanks to those who have served and are still serving today. I know you and your families make huge sacrifices to keep our country safe.
My job is to make sure that sacrifice is honoured, both through the way we treat our Armed Forces and our veterans, but also through the country we build for you and for your loved ones.
We will give our Armed Forces the funding and equipment you need to keep this country safe, as well as the good housing, training, and support you deserve. This is a world where once again it’s become necessary to stand up for our values and stand alongside our allies.
Our memories of those who went before us give us strength to know we will never be cowed in the face of threats or aggression. And together we will build a country we are proud to serve, and a future that remembers and honours those who fought for our freedoms.
A Britain worth fighting for.
Will Scott retweeted
I am in a long line of antizionist Jews who political opponents try to make people hate.
But I wont be quiet, not on criticism of Israel, nor on tackling the extreme wealth and poverty pay that both the Tories and now Labour have overseen in office.
🇬🇧 “Is it now the Labour position that a genocide is not racist?”
Green Party leader Zack Polanski confronted Conservative and Labour politicians at the London Assembly on Thursday after Conservative Susan Hall introduced a motion condemning the Greens’ decision to define Zionism as racism.
Hall called the Green Party’s position “abhorrent” and argued it threatened Jewish Londoners.
Polanski, who is Jewish, accused Hall of weaponizing antisemitism and challenged Labour members over their government’s continued military support for Israel amid the genocide in Gaza.
The Assembly passed Hall’s motion 19–3, with just the three Green members voting against it.
Will Scott retweeted
In 1942, a drunk German officer sat at dinner and bragged about the Jewish woman he had selected from the brothel the Nazis had forced open in town. He said her name out loud. The Tunisian Arab sitting across from him stayed calm, smiled, poured more wine, and finished the meal. Then he drove the officer home, sped through the dark streets, and knocked on a door close to midnight. That night, he hid 25 people for four months. He never spoke about it again.
His name was Khaled Abdul-Wahab. He was 31 years old, a wealthy Muslim Tunisian who had studied art and architecture in New York and spoke fluent German. Nazi officers trusted him. They invited him to their dinners.
Tunisia was the only Arab country directly occupied by Nazi Germany during the war. Jewish families were pushed from their homes. More than 5,000 Jewish men were sent to forced labor camps. Yellow stars marked every chest.
That December night in the coastal town of Mahdia, Khaled listened as the officer boasted. The woman he named belonged to a family Khaled had known all his life.
He left immediately. He drove through the night. He knocked on their door at midnight.
Pack nothing. Come now.
He gathered 25 people — mothers, fathers, cousins, and children — and drove them nearly 20 miles to his family farm, hiding them inside the olive press, stables, and storage buildings.
This was not one brave act. It was four straight months of courage.
He fed them while supplies grew scarce. He kept babies quiet. He trusted his servants to stay silent. When German soldiers arrived to count Jewish families, the hidden people pinned yellow stars onto their clothes and stood motionless. When the soldiers left, the stars came off again.
One night, a drunken soldier wandered onto the farm and discovered them. An eleven-year-old girl hiding under a bed watched him laugh and threaten to kill everyone there. Then Khaled appeared. She remembered him her entire life as a guardian angel. He calmly walked the soldier outside, took away his weapon, and sent him off the property.
Nobody on that farm died.
In May 1943, British forces liberated Tunisia. All 25 people returned home alive.
Khaled went back to a quiet life. He married, raised daughters, painted, and worked in government service.
He never told anyone what he had done. Not his wife. Not his children. No one.
He died on September 4, 1997, at the age of 86. His story was buried with him.
Ten years later, his daughter Faiza was sitting in a café in Paris reading a Sunday newspaper when she came across an interview with an American historian describing a Tunisian Arab who had hidden 25 Jews in 1942.
The historian mentioned her father by name.
She was 45 years old and had never heard the story before.
She contacted the historian. One of the children saved on the farm had left behind 83 pages of testimony before her death. Every detail matched.
“I rediscovered my father,” Faiza later said.
Khaled was nominated for Israel’s highest honor given to non-Jews who saved Jewish lives. He would have been the first Arab to receive it.
The committee declined, saying he had not risked his own life enough.
Faiza answered with a line history should never forget:
“My father opened his home to Jews. They did not open theirs to us.”
Today, the 25 people Khaled saved have hundreds of descendants living across Israel, France, America, and Tunisia. The little girl hidden beneath the bed grew up, moved to Paris, and built a family of her own. None of them would exist if Khaled had stayed silent that night.
He had everything to lose. He acted anyway. Then he spent the rest of his life saying nothing about it.
The world nearly forgot him twice. Now you know his name.
Will Scott retweeted
US State Department statesman George F. Kennan, who was fluent in German and Russian, “who knew Russia best,” testified against Bill Clinton’s proposed NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, stating it would be “the most fateful error of US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.”
At a US Senate hearing in 1997, Kennan declared that NATO’s eastward expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries would once again divide Europe and rekindle the Cold War. Kennan’s final, departing words, "Don't meddle in the Ukraine."
Disregarding Kennan’s warning, during election year 1996, eyeing the Eastern European emigree vote in northern Illinois and Indiana, Bill Clinton campaigned on expanding NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland - which became members in 1999.
Continuing NATO enlargement in 2004, George W. Bush added Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia - and in 2008 at the NATO summit in Bucharest - asserted that “Ukraine has a roadmap to NATO.”
As Kennan predicted, the Cold War reignited after 1999 and is the root cause of the war in Ukraine: NATO's encroachment into the Russian borderlands, and the West's refusal to listen to or address Russia's legitimate security concerns.
Displaying the strategic patience of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping: “Hide your strength, bide your time,” Russia is preventing NATO and its proxy #Ukraine army from defeating, harming Russia. And, as Barack Obama pointed out, “In its own neighborhood, Russia enjoys escalatory supremacy."
Did Yugoslavia have the right to exist @BBCNews ?
A little long winded but an essential read for those ignorant of China.
Americans have just cast their ballots, and now voters in Beijing are heading to the polls today. How do two very different political systems approach elections, political representation, and democratic participation?
Many years ago, when I was studying at Cornell, I had a roommate for one semester who was an exchange student from the Netherlands.
His uncle was the deputy prime minister of the Netherlands at the time.
So, naturally, our dorm room had no shortage of political discussions. Unfortunately, neither of us had the authority to settle any of them at the beginning.
He knew relatively little about China, yet he had quite a few preconceived notions about the country, particularly its political system. And he's passionate.
On Friday and Saturday nights, after the lights went out in our dorm, we would often lie in our beds and engage in heated but friendly debates that sometimes lasted late into the late night.
While other college students spent their Friday nights partying, we spent ours debating in the dark. Not exactly the typical college experience, I know.
Like many others, he was skeptical about how elections worked in China.
I explained to him that deputies to the people's congresses at the county, county-level city, municipal district, township, are directly elected by citizens aged 18 and above who are entitled to vote. Representatives at higher levels are also elected, through an indirect electoral process.
I also pointed out something about China's political representation that he hadn't realized: all 55 ethnic minority groups have representatives in the National People's Congress, with special arrangements to ensure representation even for groups with very small populations.
I asked him: "Can the US Congress guarantee that every ethnic minority group has a voice of its own in the national legislature?"
Silence fell over his bed. And if you knew how much we loved arguing, you'd understand how unusual that was.
I continued:
If, under one political system, everyone formally has an equal vote, yet certain groups consistently struggle to achieve adequate representation, while another system specifically guarantees political participation for smaller ethnic groups through its allocation of seats and institutional arrangements, how should we understand what democratic representation truly means?
Through our countless late-night debates, some of his assumptions about China gradually began to shift.
Years later, our friendship had outlasted our disagreements-and his connection to China had taken a turn neither of us could have imagined. Two years ago, he married a Chinese woman.
And he invited me to their wedding! I guess China had found a more persuasive ambassador than me.
Of course, marrying a Chinese woman does not mean that he has to agree with everything about China. But I firmly believe that when someone truly gets to know China and its people, the China they come to see is often very different from the China they once imagined.
Today, I found myself thinking once again about my former Dutch roommate.
Because it is election day in Beijing for a new term of deputies to the people's congresses at the district and township levels.
Well before election day, both my local community and my workplace had both contacted me to ask where I intended to register and cast my ballot.
I could also clearly sense that Beijing has placed considerable emphasis this year on encouraging and organizing voter participation.
According to figures released by the Beijing municipal authorities, by late October 9.57 million voters have registered and been confirmed as eligible to vote in this round of elections.
More than 13,000 polling stations have been established across the city. Voters will elect 4,898 deputies to the new district-level people's congresses and 11,137 deputies to the township-level people's congresses.
On this very day, one polling station in particular attracted considerable public attention: the Huairentang (Hall of Cherished Benevolence/怀仁堂) polling station in the Zhongnanhai (中南海) electoral constituency of Beijing's Xicheng District.
Huairentang was once the residence and office of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who wielded the real power in China during the final years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).
In 1900, when the Eight-Nation Alliance occupied Beijing, Marshal Alfred von Waldersee, the commander of the allied forces, unceremoniously chose Huairentang as his residence. The building was subsequently destroyed in a mysterious fire. Some accounts suggest that the blaze was accidentally started by Waldersee's cook.
During the Republican era, Huairentang became a venue for presidential receptions and official ceremonies. In 1949, it hosted the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a landmark gathering that helped lay the groundwork for the founding of the PRC. It subsequently became an important venue for meetings of senior CPC leaders.
Chinese President Xi cast his ballot at the Huairentang polling station in Beijing's Zhongnanhai leadership compound. Xi presented his voter registration card and was handed a ballot after officials verified his eligibility. He then marked his choice and dropped the ballot into a box.
Xi said electing deputies to people's congresses was essential to the functioning of China's people's congress system and a major event in the country's political life. He added voters should be ensured to elect representatives they are satisfied with.
All of this brought back memories of the many debates I used to have with my Dutch roommate. In fact, China's electoral system has a number of features that deserve closer examination.
The first is a basic question: How are deputies to China's people's congresses actually elected?
China uses a combination of direct and indirect elections. Deputies to people's congresses at the county level, including those in urban districts, counties, autonomous counties and cities without districts, as well as deputies at the township level, are directly elected by voters.
Deputies to people's congresses at higher levels, including cities, provincial regions and the NPC, are elected indirectly through people's congresses at the next lower level.
The second concerns political representation: China's electoral law explicitly seeks to ensure that deputies do not come exclusively from a narrow political or social elite. China's Electoral Law of the National People's Congress and Local People's Congresses stipulates an appropriate number of deputies from females, the grassroots, particularly workers, farmers and intellectuals.
It even provides for representation of returned overseas Chinese in the congresses in areas with significant populations of returned overseas Chinese.
In direct elections, the number of candidates must exceed the number of seats by between one-third and 100%. For example, if three seats are available, there must be between four and six candidates.
In indirect elections, where deputies are elected to the next higher level of people's congress, the number of candidates must exceed the number of seats by between 20% and 50%. Thus, an election for 10 seats would require between 12 and 15 candidates.
Looking back, the question my Dutch roommate and I debated most fiercely was not really whether China's political system was better or worse than those of Western countries.
It was something more fundamental:
Is there only one legitimate model of democracy, or can democratic participation and representation take different institutional forms?
Will Scott retweeted
After a banking scandal left 3 million unable to access their money, the people of Paraguay filled the streets, dragged their corrupt politicians out of Congress, and forced the president to resign. Protests, strikes, and revolution are the only way to stop the ruling class and restore power to the people.
Will Scott retweeted
Hilarious from Tim- and deadly serious. All that needed to be said inside court he says before arrest: . « It’s democracy on the line. It’s freedom of speech on the line. » Thank you Tim.
Will Scott retweeted
BREAKING - ARRESTS
Former government barrister Tim Crosland is among those arrested at the Supreme Court while holding signs mirroring the words of Sarah Helm, wife of the National Security Adviser to Andy Burnham.
The court is hearing an appeal over the Palestine Action ban.
Will Scott retweeted
Bill Still’s Masterpiece
“The Money Masters: The Secrets of the Federal Reserve” 1996
How International Bankers Gained Control of America.
The History of The Rothschild Dynasty.
Will Scott retweeted
Let's be precise about what the Epstein network actually was.
Not a "sex scandal." Not a tabloid story about a weird billionaire and his famous friends. Not a trafficking case in the sanitized, clinical language that makes it sound like a logistics problem.
It was a blackmail infrastructure for the ruling class.
Epstein didn't accumulate powerful men by accident. He accumulated them by design.
The private island. The private jet logs. The hidden cameras. The underage girls.
This was an intelligence operation.
A systematic, decades-long project to compromise the people who run governments, banks, media companies, universities, and courts.
And when he was arrested the second time, when it was finally impossible to make it disappear:
He died in federal custody.
Suicide, they said.
In a cell where the cameras malfunctioned.
With guards who had both fallen asleep.
After his previous suicide attempt had already put him on watch status.
The medical examiner hired by his brother found evidence consistent with homicide. The official medical examiner ruled it suicide.
And the name list, the full, unredacted list of everyone Epstein brought to that island and those houses and those parties, remains sealed.
Protected by the same judicial system that is supposed to protect you.
This is not a conspiracy theory.
The documents, the flight logs, the depositions, the testimony, all of it is real, much of it is public, and what it shows is a power structure that protects itself from accountability at every level.
The people on that list run your country.
They run your media.
They run your courts.
They are still running everything.
And they will call you a "conspiracy theorist" for noticing.
