I’ve had my cataract operation, the op was a couple of days early as there was a cancellation. The recovery period is four weeks, but I already notice a massive improvement in my eyesight. The fog has lifted and I’m now able to read much more comfortably. I’m hugely relieved it’s over.
Right now, there’s a political story which in a country with a properly functioning media would be a massive scandal, but in a Scotland in which the media is obsessed with Peter Murrell’s cruet sets and finding new angles which might imply that Nicola Sturgeon is somehow implicated in her former husband’s embezzlement, has scarcely registered at all.
This is of course the shocking revelation from the French Government’s cyber security agency Viginum that an Israeli company called BlackCore interfered in the recent Holyrood election by setting up fake social media accounts which attacked John Swinney and the SNP. The same company was also found to have similarly interfered in the French local elections when it attacked left wing politicians who have been critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing and illegal settlements on the West Bank. BlackCore also interfered in last year’s New York mayoral election in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the election of Zoran Mamdani, the Democrat candidate who has been fiercely critical of the Israeli Government’s campaign of genocide.
The report from Viginum did not manage to identify who had commissioned or paid for Blackcore to engage in campaigns of electoral interference in foreign countries. However as a private company, BlackCore does not run campaigns of electoral interference in other countries unless someone pays it to do so. It doesn’t do it for kicks. Viginum discovered that BlackCore ran its electoral interference campaigns from a network of servers physically located in a number of European countries, including the UK.
The question then is who commissioned and paid for BlackCore’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to subvert a Scottish election. Just because an attempt to subvert an election proved to be unsuccessful in the end does not make it any less serious. If you march into a bank and present the teller with a note demanding cash while intimating you carry a weapon, you are still committing a crime even if the teller does not give in to your demands.
The reaction in France has been decisive. The French intelligence agency has opened an investigation to find out who commissioned BlackCore to interfere in French elections while the Parisian prosecutor’s office has opened a criminal inquiry which may result in those responsible being charged and prosecuted.
Yet in Scotland neither the overwhelmingly anti-independence media nor the UK Government which has responsibility for the intelligence services appears to have any interest in discovering who is responsible for commissioning and paying a foreign actor to attempt to subvert a Scottish election campaign. We got wall to wall incessant coverage of the Murrell scandal, a scandal whose victims were the SNP and the SNP’s donors and members, but when faced with a scandal which affects the integrity of Scottish election campaigns, the media in Scotland and the British state have next to no interest.
We can be certain that this lack of interest is because the target of BlackCore’s campaign was the SNP. Had someone paid for and commissioned a foreign company to run a campaign of disinformation aimed against an anti-independence party in the recent Holyrood election, the story would dominate the media in Scotland, even eclipsing the Murrell scandal, and no effort would be spared to discover who was behind it, with a plethora of stories insinuating SNP involvement even in the absence of hard evidence.
There are two major possibilities for who is behind this campaign of electoral interference. The first suspect is the Israeli Government itself. The Israeli state is more than capable of mounting a cyber campaign of electoral interference in another country without sub-contracting the activity to a private company, nevertheless it’s still possible that it was responsible. If this were to prove to be the case then the British Government, which is responsible for the intelligence services in the UK, has a lot of uncomfortable questions to answer.
It’s the responsibility of the British Government to keep democratic and electoral processes all over the UK free from attempts at subversion by foreign powers. In this instance it has not only failed to do so, it shows no interest in finding out who is responsible. The logical conclusion to draw from this is that the British Government already knows and the answer is deeply damaging and embarrassing to it. If the British intelligence services do not know who is behind the BlackCore scandal then they are grossly incompetent. It’s far more plausible that they do know, but the British Government doesn’t want attention drawn to the matter as it would be politically toxic if the identity of the perpetrators came out.
The Labour government is stuffed with ministers who are members of the House of Commons Friends of Israel group. An investigation by Declassified UK published in July 2024 just after the general election found that pro-Israel lobbyists have donated to 13 out of Labour’s 25 cabinet members since they were first elected to parliament.
The recipients include Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, foreign secretary David Lammy and home secretary Yvette Cooper. Most of these donations come from Labour Friends of Israel, a group which does not reveal its sources of funding but which was revealed during an undercover Al Jazeera documentary in 2017 to have close relations with the Israeli embassy in London. Other major funders are the pro-Israel businessmen Trevor Chinn and Stuart Roden. The total value of donations to Labour from pro-Israeli sources exceeds £300,000.
Nothing to see here, of course. Look over there! Peter Murrell’s camper van!
The other possibility is that BlackCore was commissioned to carry out its underhand attempt to subvert the Holyrood election by someone within the UK. That would be someone with both a vested interest in the outcome of the Scottish election and an interest in preventing scrutiny or criticism of the UK Government’s support for Israel. It would also be someone who has both the finances to pay for such a campaign and the lack of moral and political scruples to do so. Perhaps, and I’m just speculating here, it would be a party which was alleged to have paid for an army of social media bots to bolster its Holyrood election campaign.
It really is the world’s crappiest whodunnit, isn’t it?
Given the Labour government’s complete lack of interest in the matter, Holyrood should launch an independent investigation of its own. The integrity and honesty of political campaigns in Scotland is everyone’s concern, no matter their stance on the independence issue or which party they support. Hiring an army of social media bots to pretend to be real people who support your party and its policies is fundamentally a deceptive and deceitful act.
After wrestling for hours with PayPal, I have finally compiled a list of the emails of almost everyone who makes a regular monthly donation to the blog and will soon launch the weekly bonus premium email article for those who make a monthly contribution to the blog. I had hoped to launch this this week but unfortunately it will be delayed for a while. There are a number of people whose emails I am unable to find. Some people donate monthly by Ko-Fi, one makes a monthly donation to last year’s GoFundMe fundraiser, a few people make monthly payments directly by bank transfer. I cannot access the email addresses of any of these people and so cannot add them to the new mailing list. If you are one of these folk, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com and I’ll add you to the mailing list.
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