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Allegations included whispers about judges being blackmailed by so-called rent boys and a network of gay lawyers conspiring to ensure homosexual men were given a soft touch by the courts.

A BBC Scotland disclosure investigation, “Beneath the Magic Circle Affair”, concluded that Robert Henderson, QC, may have fanned the flames of the conspiracy to hide his and others in the legal profession’s paedophile activity.

Henderson died in 2012, but his daughter Susie waived her anonymity to accuse him and a number of his legal colleagues of sexually abusing her when she was a child.

Susie’s testimony led to the conviction of lawyer John Watt, a close friend and colleague of her late father.

Henderson was well-known in Edinburgh as the lawyer who had spread the rumour of the “magic circle”.

He knew that prominent lawyers and judges with secret gay lifestyles would fear exposure.

Despite homosexuality being legal in the 1980s, it was still largely hidden at the top of the legal world and could do damage to careers.

He never revealed who was on it or what they were alleged to have done, but the suggestion was that he could use it if he needed to.

And according to Henderson’s daughter, he had things he needed to hide.

‘Just the way of life’

His daughter Susie told the BBC her father sexually abused her throughout her childhood.

She said: “He would take me for baths, and he would abuse me in the bath.

“I had my own room and I used to have all these dolls I’d put all round me, thinking that when he came to get me in the night, he wouldn’t know it was me, because he wouldn’t see I was a person.”

And it wasn’t just her father who was abusing her.

She was taken to “parties” from the age of seven where she was abused by some of her father’s friends in the legal world.

“If I let them do it, and I didn’t moan about it, I wouldn’t get the beating as well,” she said. “So it was much easier just to let them do it.

“It was just the way of life. I just presumed every man did that.”

When she came forward in 2014, she told the police the names of the other men. One of them was John Watt.

The judge said John Watt QC committed “vile” crimes of the “utmost seriousness and depravity”

She told the BBC her father took her to Watt’s and said she had to do what she was told.

“Then [John Watt] lifted me up onto the couch, and he raped me. But he said I’d been a good girl, so I knew I wasn’t going to get a beating when dad arrived,” she said.

Police Scotland opened a full investigation into Watt after Susie came forward and they tracked down other victims of his abuse.

In 2019, an arrest warrant was issued for Watt, who was living in rural Oklahoma he was found guilty of five charges against four victims.

Judge Lord Braid told the 72-year-old he had committed “vile” crimes of the “utmost seriousness and depravity” and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Susie said she cried tears of relief at the verdict.

“It was like I’d been believed,” she said.

“That was always my fear that nobody would believe me. I knew that I’d been believed, and that I’d got justice at last.”

Watt’s conviction and justice for Susie and the other victims led the BBC to re-examine his actions and those of Henderson and whether they had used the so-called magic circle to turn attention away from their own activities.

Central to the conspiracy theory about a gay mafia operating in the legal world was Tucker’s list.

Colin Tucker was secretly gay and the rumour spread that when he was charged with embezzlement he had given his lawyers a list of powerful men within the legal establishment who were also homosexual.

It was to be used as leverage during his prosecution.

Tucker’s lawyers were Henderson and Watt.

David Johnston, who was the news editor at Radio Forth at the time, told the BBC the list gained huge notoriety both in legal and police circles.

“People believed the list existed, they believed it was dynamite, and a lot of people acted accordingly,” he said.

Kenny Farquharson, who worked as an investigative journalist for Scotland on Sunday, said the existence of this list was being read as a threat.

“It was, ‘you come for me, and I will expose these people, I will expose their clandestine life, and I will reveal aspects of this world that people didn’t know about’,” Farquharson said.

One of the names said to be on the “list” was a sitting judge, Lord Dervaird.

The judge was married with children but police were made aware of “alleged homosexual activity” that could have risked blackmail. The Sun newspaper was on to the story too and threatening to publish.

Lord Dervaird handed in his resignation and quietly left the bench shortly before Christmas 1989.

The matter, it seemed, was resolved.

But soon, rumours that other judges were also secretly gay and open to blackmail were spreading fast.

Robert Henderson knew that prominent lawyers and judges with secret gay lifestyles would fear exposure

Lord Hope, Scotland’s most senior judge at the time, had no idea where the rumours were coming from but he decided to end the speculation at a press briefing.

He said he wanted to nail the rumours once and for all and released details of allegations against individual judges which he had looked at and disposed of.”

Rather than quash the rumours the briefing was splashed across the front pages of the press and the quiet resignation of one judge quickly became a story about five.

Despite the headlines, no other judge was ever named and no evidence of wrongdoing was ever found.

At the same time as Henderson was using the “Tucker list” to spread rumours in the legal establishment, Lothian and Borders police were carrying out a seemingly unrelated investigation.

Operation Planet was an investigation into the alleged abuse of young boys recruited into sex work as so-called rent boys and abused by older men.

In all, 57 charges were brought against 10 people on a range of crimes relating to sex with these boys.

In the weeks before the case went to court, it was claimed one of the so-called rent boys in the case was about to testify that the trial judge was one of his clients.

Suddenly, there was a risk that should the case go to court, there could be huge embarrassment for the legal establishment.

The source of the rumour was a lawyer defending one of the accused. That lawyer was Robert Henderson.

Det Ch Insp Roger Orr was given 14 days to pull together cases where the police felt questions were unanswered

After years of speculation, intensified by controversial cases, Lothian and Borders police commissioned a report led by Det Ch Insp Roger Orr.

He told the BBC it was supposed to be an internal report.

“It was an intelligence-gathering operation, essentially,” he said.

“It was never designed to be an investigative report under any circumstances.”

Orr was given 14 days to pull together cases where the police felt questions were unanswered. They included the embezzlement case against Colin Tucker, his supposed list of secretly gay legal figures, and the Operation Planet case into “rent boy” abuse.

Roger Orr’s conclusion was that these cases warranted further investigation.

Despite this, the decision was taken by police chiefs to lock the Orr Report away.

That’s until it was leaked to the Edinburgh Evening News.

Its alleged content led to William Nimmo Smith QC, who went on to become a judge, leading an inquiry into the affair.

In 1993, Nimmo Smith concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in any of the cases noted in the Orr report.

The “magic circle” affair was brought to an end but the stigma of a corrupt Judiciary lingered on since Henderson’s information, which he gave to judge Dorrian for safekeeping was not released to the public. The Judiciary investgated itself and declared there was no substance to the claims it was riddled with corrupt homosexual Judges. An unsatisfactory conclusion given subsquent revelations.

The events unfolded;

John Swinney destroyed the career of fellow Minister Mark Macdonald without informing Sturgeon. Flush with success, he released his hounds on Alex Salmond the day after.

01 Nov 2017: Miss A, (who was also an elected local councillor for the Labour Party) said that James Dornan MSP, her boss, had been contacted by someone, possibly McCann, from SNP Party headquarters

Without consulting her, Dornan sent McCann copies of her private Twitter messages of 26 September 2016. Dornan had retained them for over a year without her knowledge. His underhanded behaviour aptly fit the profile of senior officials of the SNP whose practice is to retain information which they later use to bring to account officers and/or staff who might fall foul of the Party hierarchy.

02 Nov 2017: Mark was ordered to attend a meeting with John Swinney at which Liz Lloyd was present, and was informed that there was ongoing “chatter” among Party members about him in relation to the “MeToo” movement.

03 Nov 2017: Liz Lloyd convened a second meeting with Mark at which she showed him copies of his messages to Miss A. She said a complaint had been lodged against him by, James Dornan, and informed him that his position as a minister of the government was no longer tenable and he would need to resign.

05 Nov 2017: Mark resigned as minister for childcare and early years.

07 Nov 2017: In a weird turn of events, Sturgeon dismissed the notion that Mark should have been forced to resign, claiming that “Some may well have thought it was not serious enough to resign for.”

Swinney and Lloyd acted without Sturgeon’s authority, begging the question. Who was running the Party?

Murrell told the Holyrood Inquiry that Party policy dictated the handling of complaints within the Party was the responsibility of the Party Executive and it did not share case details with any other organisation unless the complaint highlighted a “clear act of criminality”.

Contradicting Lloyd, Murrell told the Inquiry that the Party had not informed any Scottish Government civil servant or special advisor of a complaint by a Party member against a minister of the Government in the Autumn of 2017. Lloyd lied.

Swinney and Lloyd contravened the ministerial code and should have been dismissed by Sturgeon.

Hamilton, the independent investigator, failed to address the issue, which was surprising given Sturgeon’s previous comments.

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England’s secret services have vetted Blaise Metreweli as the next MI6 chief. She assumed office in Oct. 2025. Her grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, was a Nazi collaborator from Ukraine who defected from the Red Army in 1941, aligned himself with Hitler’s intelligence apparatus, participated in the mass execution of Jews & resistance fighters, & signed his letters, Heil Hitler. Official wartime records from Soviet & German sources identify him as “The Butcher”.

Now his granddaughter was chosen to take control of the British intelligence service just as Scotland’s decolonisation movement is gathering strength. This is not fiction. The appointment & timing are real. Overwhelming symbolism. A descendant of fascist terror will oversee the very agency charged with defending what remains of Britain’s colonial architecture. Scotland will see its national liberation monitored and potentially sabotaged by a person whose bloodline is tied to one of the darkest legacies of 21st-century authoritarianism.

British media have tried to reframe the appointment as a milestone for inclusion and progress! The headlines speak of the 1st woman to lead MI6. Scotland cannot afford this selective amnesia. Metreweli’s agency is not a passive entity. It has long defended England’s colonial rule. MI6 has worked to break many freedom movements

Scotland’s activism is not regional adjustment but a national movement confronting a colonial structure that disguises itself as a union. Metrewell’s appointment is a conscious decision by the English state to reinforce its security apparatus. It’s aim is to block change. The British establishment believes that Scotland’s demand for independence is not a constitutional debate, but a threat to the entire imperial legacy embedded in the internal architecture of the fake ‘UK’.

Metreweli bears no personal guilt for her grandfather’s crimes. The problem lies in the structure she has been chosen to lead. MI6 has never undergone decolonisation. Its methods have changed, but its objectives remain intact. Surveillance, disruption, media manipulation, and psychological operations now target those who speak the language of self-determination. Scotland’s movement is treated not as a democratic project but as a national security risk.

The choice of a Nazi’s descendant to lead this agency cannot be dismissed as coincidence. It reflects an ongoing refusal to confront the violent inheritance of British power. The postwar state absorbed elements of fascism rather than reject them. Metreweli’s appointment fits within this long pattern. The timing reveals the fear. Clear message. The state will use every means available to preserve control.

Scotland’s response must be one of absolute clarity. The world should be told that this is not a matter of local governance. This is decolonisation. The British state does not grant freedom. It prevents it. naming of Metreweli is not about the future. It is about preserving the past, built on domination, silence and erasure.

Scotland has no obligation to wait for approval from those who rule over it. The appointment of The Butcher’s granddaughter to MI6 is a mirror showing what the Anglo-British state is willing to do, how far it is willing to go. Liberation is no longer an aspiration but an imperative. Scotland is an English colony. Decolonisation is essential.

Written and published by a true Scottish patriot, Not me. But I agree with all of it.-

Scotland is enduring the most devastating drug epidemic in Europe. Since 2015, more than one thousand people have died every year from drug-related causes. In 2023, drug deaths climbed to 1,197. Police Scotland reported 1,065 suspected deaths in 2024. The highest figure was recorded in 2020, when the number reached 1,339. Although recent figures suggest a modest decline, the scale remains catastrophic. Per capita, Scotland’s drug death rate is over three times higher than England and Wales and more than fifteen times that of many European countries. No comparable case exists among developed nations.

This is not simply a public health crisis. The devastation is concentrated in working-class areas that were once engines of industrial production. Glasgow, Dundee, Inverclyde, parts of Fife, and Ayrshire have become synonymous with grief and loss. The burden falls overwhelmingly on men aged thirty-five to fifty-four. Nearly all cases involve more than one substance. Heroin, methadone, street benzodiazepines such as etizolam, gabapentin, alcohol, and cocaine are often mixed. In 2023, benzodiazepine deaths more than doubled. Cocaine-related deaths rose to nearly five hundred. New synthetic opioids such as nitazenes and tranquilising agents like xylazine have begun to appear in coroners’ reports.

Since 2017, over fifteen hundred babies have been born in Scotland with neonatal abstinence syndrome. These infants are not born to a nation recovering. They are born into a condition of prolonged abandonment.

No explanation rooted in culture or individual behaviour can account for this. The causes are political and historical. Scotland’s current drug crisis is the result of decades of economic destruction, political disempowerment, and cultural erasure. The mechanism is modern. The logic is colonial.

To understand the depth of this emergency, one must turn to the historical record. In 1839, the Qing Empire banned opium imports from British-controlled India. Opium was destroying Chinese society. British merchants refused to stop. The British state responded by declaring war. Gunboats shelled Chinese ports. The First Opium War ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking. China was forced to legalise opium, open ports to British control, surrender territory including Hong Kong, and pay large financial indemnities. The British Crown and merchant class made immense profits while Chinese communities disintegrated.

The Chinese experience of narcotic invasion provides a chilling precedent. Addiction was not an unfortunate consequence. It was the mechanism of subjugation. Sovereignty was broken not only through war but through chemical dependency. Entire generations were disabled while London’s wealth expanded.

In the late 20th century, Scotland followed a similar path. The discovery of North Sea oil in the 1970s should have created the foundations for prosperity. By the early 1980s, annual oil revenues flowing to the British state exceeded £7 billion in direct tax receipts. In 1984–85, North Sea oil and gas revenues peaked at approximately £12 billion in nominal terms, accounting for around 6% of total UK government revenue. Adjusted for inflation, that figure is equivalent to over £40 billion today. Including total production value and associated revenues, the cumulative wealth extracted from Scottish waters now exceeds USD 2 trillion.

I did not write this excellent analysis of the lengths successive Westminster governments went to, to retain Scotland as a colony. It is to be hoped that one day Scots will break away from English control and prosper from their own efforts.

High-ranking officials and close confidants of Nicola Sturgeon shared dozens of messages about the former first minister in a social media group chat, calling themselves the “Vietnam” group.

In one text message, two senior members of staff discussed the need to apply pressure on one of the alleged victims who was expressing reluctance about proceeding with her allegations.

Kenny MacAskill joined others in calling for Scotland’s Crown Office to release the unpublished text messages as written proof. He said: The “Vietnam” group included SNP staffers and members of government, and there has been a great deal of cross talk in SNP circles about the App and text messages and the Crown (office) is aware of it. He continued: the “Vietnam” moniker stemmed from “Operation Diem”, the name of the police investigation. Someone apparently misunderstood Diem to be a reference to a former president of Vietnam.

Peter Murrell, the SNP’s chief executive, husband of Ms Sturgeon and a member of the “chat group”, sent two messages to another member, Susan Ruddick, chief operating officer of the Scottish National Party on the day after Alex’s first criminal court appearance in January 2019.

Message 1: “Totally agree folk should be asking the police questions… report now with the PF on charges, which leaves police twiddling their thumbs. So good time to be pressuring them. Would be good to know Met is king at events in London.”

Message 2: “TBH the more fronts he is having to firefight on the better for all complainers. So CPS action would be a good thing.” (Refers to getting the CPS in London involved).

Murrell addressed the messages in a written submission to the harassment inquiry, stating: “The messages have been presented in a way that suggests a meaning that they do not in reality have. I intended to advise that there were questions that should be addressed to the Police and not the SNP”. Under oath, at the “Parliamentary Inquiry” he was asked if there were any more text messages to any other party official on the same subject. He replied: “No. Not that I’m aware of.”

On the Andrew Marr programme, Sturgon was asked if it was true there were no other text messages of “that nature”. She replied: “There are no messages that are relevant to this committee.”

Her reply implied the existence of other messages, but she had decided that none were relevant to the inquiry. Hardly reassuring.

Conclusion: Events since the foregoing reveal that habitual liar Murrell’s assertions that his motives for pressuring Ruddock were entirely honourable ring hollow. As do the utterances of Sturgeon

The American Constitution, for all its faults, is a good thing and governance arising from it should, if well administered, be a blessing to the people.

A corrupt administration that ignores the Constitution encourages people to mimic the leader’s behaviour.

Maladministration is unsustainable, and such a government inevitably fails, leaving a catalogue of disasters for the next government to put right.

A new government, led by someone strong, single-minded, and sworn to uphold the Constitution, might need to introduce a limited form of despotic rule for a period to eliminate corruption.

The American people have very short memories.

The Biden administration was corrupt beyond the pale.

President Trump introduced changes and saved the nation. His reward!!! A kick in the teeth!!!

Westminster controlled Scotland with an iron fist from 1707 through to the 1920s: The only things devolved were contempt, poverty, poor housing and starvation.

Hope of change for the better arose in the early 1920s as a direct consequence of Irish independence, which encouraged debate and activism within intellectual communities. Through this medium discussion evolved in differing ways, leading to an expansion of the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA), which embraced the concept of “home rule” and the recently formed and fast-growing Scottish National League (SNL) which was adamant that independence (as the Irish had achieved) was the only way forward. The political differences between the two groups were fundamental and discouraged any coordinated political activity.

The first sign of positive connection between the SHRA and SNL arose in 1930 when both groups marched together for the first time, in Stirling. The message the parade broadcast was that the SHRA, under the leadership of Roland Muirhead, a Westminster parliamentarian, had given up trying to grow the movement with support of other political parties.

Muirhead and Thomas Gibson, leader of the SNL, met soon after the march and agreed the best tactic to take both groups forward was to form a new political party. But the gap in the aspirations of their supporters was a difficult nut to crack. Would the way forward be contentment with devolved governance or would it be independence and only that? What would the Party’s mantra be?

Discussons between the two sides were protracted and seemingly impossible to resolve. They needed someone to hold their jackets and John McCormack, former member of the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association ( GUSNA) and the Independent Labour Party (IDP) was available and willing to take the task on.

McCormack had been active in Scottish politics for some time and persuaded Muirhead and Gibson to his view that there would be no progress without compromise. They achieved this, agreeing the best thing to do was to unite their supporters under one flag (the saltire) other less pressing matters would be resolved at a later date. A majority of Party members backed the McCormick and Muirhead position that the election of MPs to Westminster provided the best opportunity with the assistance ot the Labour Party, to gain home rule within the Union. The NSP had decided its political future. The nationalist faction went along with the policy in the belief that independence would evolve from a devolved government.

But the new party failed to make an impact. It had no clear policies to offer Scots beyond home rule; campaigning was uncoordinated and mixed messages were promoted by candidates who reverted to advancing views at odds with Party policies.

McComack, a shrewd political operator, knew urgent changes were required to ensure a future for the Party after the Labour Party ended its political friendship with Muirhead, compromising his usefulness.

There was another nationalist cause, the Scottish Party (SP), with policies much in line with those of the NSP. The barrier to linking the two parties was the radical members of the NSP.

McCormack agreed and in 1933 he banished independence activists from the Party.

An election opportunity surfaced, providing an early test for the Parties, who agreed to campaign together. Their candidate did well, gaining seventeen per cent, exceeding anything previously achieved.

The two groups merged in 1934, forming the Scottish National Party (SNP). Barring independence activists from SNP membership had brought harmony to the movement. Home rule within the UK was adopted as Party policy and remained so until the emergence of Winnie Ewing.

In 1982, Robert Harris released an explosive BBC “Newsnight” report broadcasting previously unknown information about events in 1938-45.

The report centred on a former US intelligence officer, Tyler Kent, who, up to 1940 was employed as a diplomat (cyber decoding) in the US Embassy.

In 1940 he was arrested, tried and convicted of violating the British Official Secrets Act (which, as an American citizen, he was not bound to) by a secret court in London.

In an unprecedented act, again decided on, in secret, at the US Presidential level, Tyler Kent’s diplomatic immunity was n removed so that he could be arrested by MI5 and kept secure in a British prison until after the war.

There is no record of his trial, which was held in secret. He was sentenced to 7 years in prison, with no appeal.

He was released in 1945.

Churchill – The Scheming Opportunist Who Plotted Against the Government – Manipulating Events Taking Britain to War With Germany – The Cover Up Exposed