Joe Curran

Skye Crofter. Slave to three border collies, fold of Highland cattle and a hill of cheviot sheep. Supports Scottish independence.

[Sir Norman of Nowhere. 🏴‍☠️ @Normanjam67]

The first foreign visit I would do as leader of the Labour Party will be to Israel.
Andy Burnham.
Hope, my arse.

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

WHAT IS BEING ASKED FOR AND WHAT IS NOT

This is not a request to ban data centres. It is not an objection to Scotland’s renewable energy advantage, to economic development, or to the AI industry’s existence.

It is a request for five things, all achievable under existing devolved powers, none requiring new primary legislation:

A binding national definition of “green data centre,” with measurable thresholds.

A mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment above a defined capacity threshold.

A national water consumption standard.

An independent cumulative assessment of the full pipeline’s grid, water and climate impact commissioned from outside the bodies currently promoting that pipeline.

A time-limited pause on new approvals above 50MW while that assessment is completed.

Every one of these has already been formally requested.

Every one has already been formally declined.

None of the reasons given for declining survive contact with the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997, with NPF4’s own legal status, or with the fracking precedent.

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

Her piece argues for faster planning, cheaper energy, more infrastructure.

She says nothing about who owns it, who benefits, what communities receive, or what happens when the site is sold.

National AI sovereignty and community democratic accountability are not the same question.

Scotland is being asked to provide the infrastructure for someone else’s sovereignty.

That’s not a strategy.

That’s extraction.
4/4 🧵

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

Confirmed from official sources:
Scotland has 2 Green Freeports,
2 Investment Zones,
4 Enterprise Areas (15 sites), and 1 AI Growth Zone

at minimum 9 low-oversight economic zones across four frameworks.

Every framework shares reduced oversight, tax incentives, and simplified planning pathways.

None has a binding community benefit test, mandatory EIA, or community right of appeal.

The data centre pipeline clusters in or adjacent to these zones deliberately.

One Apatura site in West Lothian is literally named “Freeport.”

The North Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone has five data centre proposals totalling 1,990MW+.

The Forth Green Freeport corridor has at least four more.

The AI Growth Zone was designated by reserved Westminster power no parliamentary vote, no public consultation.

Green Freeports were negotiated by Kate Forbes her signature is on the founding letter and the January 2026 final signing.

The planning pipeline is devolved.

Scottish Ministers can act. They have chosen not to.

Three different levers.

Three different accountabilities

One common result:

communities in the path of this pipeline have no effective right to stop it.

[Christophe Dorigné-Thomson @thomsonchris]

Unmasking the Manipulation of Scotland’s 2014 Referendum. The @UN through its decolonisation mechanisms will prevent such manipulation.
The 2014 Scottish independence referendum has often been hailed by the English establishment as a triumph of democratic expression, a peaceful, decisive moment where the people of Scotland “chose” to remain in the 'United Kingdom'. Yet, this narrative collapses under even modest scrutiny. Behind the ceremonial surface of ballot boxes and televised debates lay a calculated system of structural manipulation: a media environment rigged by state broadcasters, an electoral franchise designed to dilute the Scottish voice, and a campaign of fear orchestrated at the highest levels of government and finance. What occurred was not an equal contest between competing futures, but a managed defeat, engineered to preserve Westminster’s colonial grip on Scotland under the guise of democratic legitimacy. Let's reopen the record to expose how the British state, through psychological warfare, economic coercion, and covert interference, ensured the survival of its shrinking Union by strangling the very principles it claimed to uphold.

[Simon Forrest @SimonForrest11]

Every. Single. Word.
An excellent letter in the P&J by @DickWinchester . 🎯👌

[ScotNews @indyscotnews]

It’s not the property empire, it’s the avarice that’s the problem

I take no pleasure at all in writing this. I do not want to be critical of Roz Foyer. She has done some wonderful work at the STUC and I was regularly singing her praises for having seem… https://t.co/XkbQdvHgOw

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

What’s in it for Iberdrola the Spanish company who own MachairWind?

A government-guaranteed, inflation-linked revenue stream from 2GW of offshore wind.

Their own annual report calls it “delivering shareholder value.”

What’s in it for Scotland?

£25m supply chain fund (UK-wide), up to £500 community grants, and a Community Benefit Fund with no confirmed amount, structure, or legal binding “to be determined over the coming months and years.”

In return: 91 turbines up to 335m high.

Electricity to Kilmarnock and Wales.
Profits to Bilbao.

An irreversible change to one of Europe’s most celebrated Atlantic seascapes.

Crown Estate Scotland leases the seabed.

Iberdrola builds the turbines.

The electricity goes south.

The profits go to Spain.

Alastair McIntosh: “All else is colonisation of the common good.”
Who is this for?

[Dat Ugep boy jesam © @Jesamobono]

The Spanish in Mexico part I

[Marwa Osman || مروة عثمان @Marwa__Osman]

I have been asked repeatedly this week whether Lebanon will actually be included in any potential memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States. My answer remains the same, and it always will.

Despite Iran's efforts and genuine intentions to see an end to Israeli terrorism on Lebanese soil, I am a southern Lebanese woman from Khiam. I lived through the reality of occupation, aggression, and war firsthand. I have also spent years studying the history of an entity born from supremacy, colonialism, dispossession, and theft.

The more I witness and learn about its genocidal tendencies and terrorism, the less faith I place in any signed document between any two governments that believe they can somehow restrain or control this cancerous project of terrorism.

I see no lasting peace emerging from pieces of paper. I see the same pattern that history has shown us for decades: wars, massacres, invasions, and, inevitably, Resistance.

If history has taught us anything, it is that no agreement, resolution, or signature ever stopped Zionists from killing, occupying, or stealing. What stopped them were the costs imposed on them. What forced them to retreat was bullets, Katyushas, Kornets, missiles and FPVs... only Resistance.

That is why my trust has never been in signed papers. My trust lies in the ability of people to defend themselves, their land, and their dignity. And that is where it will remain.

[Neale Hanvey🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @JNHanvey]

@MimiAugello @SSalyers2 They turned down a US engineering firm I sourced through industry contacts who wanted to buy and manufacture at BiFab Methil/Burntisland and sold it to H&W whose plan was mothball it and run it down to nothing. All done directly through Sturgeon's office.

[Liberation Scotland Committee @LiberationScot]

Watchdogs of Colonialism: Corporate Extraction and the Limits of Scottish Devolution

Occasionally, as we see another loss to Scotland's economy or yet more resources handed out to neo-extractive globalists, our minds turn to Scotland's economic history: its heavy industrial enclaves (Michael Hechter) the older among us remember, wiped out when no longer needed for Empire; the closure of 'new' substitute industries like British Leyland, IBM, Singer, Motorola, NEC, Timex, Digital and the once-vaunted Silcon Glen's dwindled export output value down 80%; brutal removal of our oil refining capacity to an England without oil; the ethylene plant at Mossmorran shut. Yet in the meantime we see imposed huge private autonomous tax-avoidance zones in the shape of 'freeports' ("Scotland needs a piece of the pie" - a future SNP leader), the land covered in sky-scraping pylons to export energy in a way and at a speed reminiscent of plunder-purpose Indian railroads; our ports closed down and the common good assets on which they sat sold off to international 'operators'; our very stock exchange closed in the teeth of an oncoming oil boom and the forced removal of all financial activity to London; implantation without consultation or consideration of the benefit or disbenefit to Scots of colossal energy-eating data centres.

What we are seeing is the ongoing plunder of 'corporate colonialism' applied to England's Scottish colony, with the 'Scottish Government' and its agencies providing, as Professor Alf Baird has explained, the role of Aimé Césaire's 'watchdogs of colonialism'.

The term refers to Césaire's conceptual framework in Discourse on Colonialism (1950), applied as a political critique of Scotland's relationship with corporate power.

Césaire argued that colonialism is not simply political and cultural domination, but is fundamentally an economic system of extraction and plunder - its true purpose. The colonising power installs local institutions that appear to serve the colonised population while in reality function to protect and facilitate the extraction of wealth by outside interests. He called those who administer this system on behalf of capital the coloniser's watchdogs (Scottish Government), local enforcers of external power.

Corporate colonialism is where a foreign state - the colonising force - is corporate capital (energy companies, landowners, developers, financiers) which extract value from Scottish resources, land, and labour, with profits flowing elsewhere.

Scotland's natural resources (oil, wind, water, land) generate enormous wealth, but this wealth is not retained by Scottish communities; it is extracted by corporations, often with public subsidy.

There is a reality to be seen when it comes to how Scotland is governed. The Scottish Parliament is an institution which owes its existence to nothing more than an ordinary Anglo-British law; one which, despite the finest of 'straight-bat' British assurances, is as impermanent as Prof. Mark Elliot identified in his 2020 article, "The United Kingdom’s Constitution and Brexit: A ‘Constitutional Moment’?" (available online). The Scotland Act is the product of a Westminster parliament which had the shocking arrogance to subordinate the Treaty of Union to this run-of-the-mill Westminster statute (hint: not possible; it makes of the Scotland Act a legal absurdity). Yet - and this is extremely important - Scottish ministers and every member of that parliament only enter its portals by swearing allegiance to an English monarch. All this to say, what hope for the interests of the people of Scotland - the Scottish Crown - when members of the Scottish Parliament have sworn fealty not to them, but to another, English, Crown - of which the English monarch is the embodiment. His (and his Westminster parliament's) interests are sworn to come first.

From this flows that fact that the Scottish Government, and thence Scottish agencies and institutions, extending to law, senior civil service, academia and press, are watchdogs of the colonial state. While the Scottish Government and its regulatory bodies (enterprise agencies, planning authorities) appear to represent Scottish interests, in practice they facilitate and legitimise corporate extraction rather than question it. They are administrators of the system, not challengers of it.

Regional political autonomy, in Scotland referred to as devolution, has by design no more produced economic prosperity than it confers economic sovereignty. The structures of extraction remain fully operational - and expanding. The Scottish Government manages the conditions under which plunder proceeds, facilitating it, regulating it with indulgence and lending it democratic legitimacy, all of which makes it functionally equivalent to Césaire's colonial administrator class.

[Joe Curran @JoeCurran8K]

@meljomur @gracebrod1e It’s a joke. A stock of laughs. And it’s embarrassing.

[Liberation Scotland Committee @LiberationScot]

Andy, we live in a colonised Scotland. It stares us in the face, this pattern of land ownership right at the heart of it, but we are equally blighted by energy diversion, environmental vandalism, fiscal obscurity, neo-extractivism. Essentially the enclave economics of Michael Hechter.

It's all of a piece. Every metric by which we compare ourselves, be it land ownership/use, economic prosperity, infrastructure development, health, lifespan, crime, addiction, cultural robustness - we come at the bottom of all comparable western countries. Yet our natural resources are second to none - not even to those of the immensely rich Norwegians - who as you well know have carved out their own slice of Scotland.

We were told only in February in a report by the Scottish Government (see tinyurl*DOT*com/2aj7ek67) we are not a colony, that our (constitutionally entrenched!) sovereignty has the curious meaning of nothing at all, and we must ask Westminster for a 'legal' consultative vote on our national destiny. This is an utter nonsense. We are an ancient state, colonised by an obsessively imperial neighbour.

We have three international routes to independence, solidly based on the research of Sara Salyers and Salvo. We at Liberation Scotland - Salvo and the LSC - intend to ensure the world stops missing the mark on this by giving credence to England-as-UK's outrageous and unsubstantiable 'voluntary partnership' narrative.

Where is the SNP in this? Exactly where it is in enforcing your land register. Are we serious about independence - an entirely international matter - or are we not?

[Joanna Cherry KC @joannaccherry]

Keep going. Delighted to see your letters to Crown Office & Police Scotland were informed by independent legal advice from the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. We need more transparency of decision-making in Scotland. If it takes legal action or a Westminster inquiry so be it.

[Joe Curran @JoeCurran8K]

@TheParty1sOver @kacnutt @heraldscotland He was never going to do serious ‘time’ anyway, more’s the pity.

Throwing him into the general prison population, that would be making a statement.

But message will be steal away if connected and we will watch out for you in a very minor inconvenience.

Hope I’m wrong..

[S p r i n t e r @SprinterPress]

Sir Alex Younger, Director of MI6 (the British foreign intelligence service) from 2014 to 2020:

- I think a new era has begun. Where international relations will no longer be determined by rules and representative organizations. They will be determined by the will of individual strong leaders and deals between them. In 1945, at Yalta, a trio of such strong leaders, representing superpowers, decided the fate of small countries. I think Donald Trump views the world in the same way now. And undoubtedly - Putin and Xi Jinping. Europe views the world differently. This is the reality we are entering. And I think there's no way back.
- Why are you talking about this?
- Because the previous reality was unipolar. America had the will and means to assert itself everywhere in the world. That's when what's called globalization and the international security system were born. Now, America is much less dominant compared to others. And it has lost some of its will. It's still a powerful power. It's not worth underestimating it. But America is no longer able to spread its rules across the globe. Now, deals are being worked out and talks are being held about dividing the world into spheres of influence. And the only ones left out are us.
- Europe?
- Yes. And the price of participating in such talks, I'm afraid, is not our "soft power" or values. But fists. And we face a difficult question - where will we get them to participate on an equal footing in these talks?

Let me guess. Nowhere.

[Earth Hippy 🌎🕊️💚 @hippyygoat]

“We are now 716 days into a genocide and yet Israel are allowed to participate in footfall tournaments.
WHY ARE THERE DOUBLE STANDARDS!!!”
-Eric Cantona

[Lloyd Quinan @QuinanLloyd]

Please repost.

[Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 @rahmstorf]

I often get asked: what impacts would a shutdown of the Atlantic ocean circulation #AMOC have? A short overview is found in this expert report. Impacts include e.g. widespread domestic food insecurity in Northern Europe and strain on global food systems.
https://t.co/Mir5KAYvXQ