Edinburgh’s extradition court has been the scene of a drama played out across several episodes, demonstrating certain common factors among Europe’s enemies, and the deep historical roots of a challenge facing all European patriots. (This story is also available in Spanish translation – Haga clic aquí para obtener una traducción al español de este artículo.)
For weeks past (and weeks to come) Spain has been in constitutional deadlock, after democracy’s circus handed the balance of power to a tiny party – Junts – whose entire raison d’être is to break up the country.
Junts (‘Together for Catalonia’) has just seven members in Spain’s Parliament (the Cortes), but that gives them a decisive position, which in practice they intend to use to extract a deal from the country’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
Junts will demand an amnesty for its subversive leaders who were convicted of sedition due to their illegal declaration of Catalan independence in 2017 and the consequent constitutional crisis in Spain. These convicted criminals have in some cases been exiled in Belgium for several years, including party leader Carles Puigdemont and other members of his former regional government.
They include Clara Ponsatí, whose story tells us a lot about the connections between Catalan subversion and the international fake ‘left’.
Ponsatí was teaching in Scotland at the University of St Andrews before her brief tenure as education minister in Puigdemont’s seditious Catalan regional government. In 2018 and 2019 she was the subject of European Arrest Warrants issued by the Spanish Supreme Court.
Consequently Ponsatí had to appear several times in the same Edinburgh court where Vincent Reynouard has recently been contesting extradition to France.
There is one important difference. Vincent Reynouard is accused of something which is not a crime in Scotland (or anywhere in the UK). Ponsatí is accused of sedition, which most certainly is a crime throughout Europe and throughout the civilised world.
While many lawyers (even in ‘political’ cases) do not necessarily share the ideological stance of their clients, Ponsatí had Scotland’s most notorious political lawyer – a man who is himself proud of committing Scotland’s most infamous act of politically-motivated criminal vandalism.
This is Aamer Anwar, son of Pakistani immigrants. He first moved to Glasgow as a university student, and swiftly became active in far left politics, as one of the main organisers of the ‘Anti-Nazi League’, dominated by the UK’s main Trotskyist group, the Socialist Workers Party.
Anwar remains proud of leading a gang of criminal vandals who in 1993 smashed the memorial stone that had been placed on the spot where Rudolf Hess landed on his 1941 peace mission. The late Colin Jordan described the events that followed.
Unsurprisingly, the fake ‘radical’ Anwar and his gang were protected by the office of the Lord Advocate, head of Scotland’s legal establishment and a member of the Conservative government who were in theory Anwar’s enemies. The Lord Advocate’s office prevented any prosecution of Anwar and his gang for their blatant acts of criminal damage and trespass.
Similarly, the Scottish legal system protected Anwar’s client Ponsatí, rejecting repeated Spanish efforts to have her extradited. Ponsatí remains a fugitive from Spanish justice, and is among those for whom her extremist party Junts are seeking amnesty as a condition of their support for a new left-wing coalition government in Madrid.
Rudolf Hess remains an icon of the true Europe. Aamer Anwar (now a member of the fake ‘nationalist’ SNP) and Clara Ponsatí are appropriate symbols of today’s degraded Europe. Unsurprisingly, Aamer Anwar will be celebrated by the BBC in a multi-part television series to be broadcast soon. Despite his overt Marxism and pride in his record of criminal damage, Anwar is a close friend and political ally of today’s ‘Scottish’ First Minister, Humza Yousaf, who shares similar family roots in Pakistan.
In 2017 far-left students succeeded in getting Anwar elected Rector of Glasgow University, in succession to the Kremlin agent Edward Snowden. Yet within a year there were complaints featured in The Times that Anwar had broken his campaign promises and had failed to hold a single surgery at the university.
The Catalan independence movement led by Puigdemont and Ponsatí traces its political roots to the CDC, the first Catalan ‘nationalist’ party of the post-Franco era. CDC’s founder Jordi Pujol, who dominated Catalan politics for decades and is now aged 93, amassed tens of millions of dollars in overseas bank accounts controlled by his family, and is regarded as one of Europe’s most corrupt politicians.
Puigdemont and Ponsatí can also trace their political lineage to the ultra-violent collection of separatists, anarchists and Marxists who were responsible for some of the worst crimes in Spanish history during the summer and autumn of 1936. The left-wing coalition they are now seeking to recreate in Madrid will include an even more left-wing Catalan party, Esquerra Republicana (‘Republican Left’) directly descended from the murderous gangs of 1936. Esquerra‘s MPs – like those of Junts – include numerous convicted criminals; and the proposed coalition will also include two Basque separatist parties, whose leading figures include terrorist murderers.
Among the worst of those criminals is Arnaldo Otegi, who from a young age was an active Basque terrorist with ETA, closely linked to the IRA.
Madrid and Edinburgh are now at the frontline of the battle between a degraded and decadent ‘democracy’ and the traditions of European civilisation. Aamer Anwar and his client Clara Ponsatí stand on one side of that divide; Vincent Reynouard stands on the other.
We shall find out on 12th October in Edinburgh whether the Scottish legal system (which supported the seditious criminal Ponsatí and her Marxist hooligan lawyer Anwar) still retains respect for civilised values. And we shall find out in November whether Spain has fallen to a government that includes convicted terrorists.
If so, they will deserve the same description that Britain’s Conservative leader Bonar Law applied to traitors in London during 1913-14 when they were engaged in similar squalid deals. Bonar Law said that he did not regard that cabinet “as the constitutional government of a free people. We regard them as a revolutionary committee which has entered by fraud upon despotic power.”
Twenty years after Bonar Law, in his speech founding the Falange, the great Spanish patriot José Antonio Primo de Rivera (himself to be murdered by Marxists in 1936) similarly detested the corrupt horse-trading that had displaced political principle in the Spanish Republic.
Though himself an election candidate, José Antonio said he was standing “without faith in the system or respect for it”. He compared the tired, mainstream political atmosphere to “a tavern at the end of a dissipated night.
“…We are not going to fight over the tasteless scraps of a scruffy banquet with the regulars. Our place is outside, we are only passing through.
“Our place is in the open air under the clear night, arms in hand, beneath the starry firmament. Let the others continue with their feasting. We, standing outside in tense, fervent and secure vigilance, already feel in our gut the joy of the coming dawn.”