There are a few commentators/bloggers who I more or less regularly read. John Greer is still excellent although not as prolific as when doing the Archdruid Report. Dimitri Orlov remains a favourite despite having partially disappeared behind a dollar only paywall. Monbiot has become flakey (see Media Lens), but still writes some good stuff. My current top pick though is Craig Murray.

I was surprised to discover that his blog actually started back in 2002, albeit somewhat intermittently. I first encountered him in 2005 when he took brief time out from his election campaign against Jack Straw in Blackburn to come to the Green Party Spring Conference being held in Chesterfield to take part in a panel discussion on Peace on the Friday evening.

Actually, despite the presence of Ms Lucas MEP on the panel, he stole the show. It was my first conference as a fairly new member. At the time I was involved with a webcasting startup and I had offered to bring along our mobile setup to provide a live streaming feed from the conference and also make it available on the GP website for subsequent viewing.

Matt Wootton^[1], who was the Press Officer on the GP Executive at the time had the vision to leap at the offer and helped me get things set up and organised. The venue had no internet connection and he could only provide an ISDN line or some kind of flakey mobile/dial-up connection so the live webcasting side never worked very well but a few hardy viewers did manage to attach and see it.

Friday was the first day of conference and the Peace Panel was the first session we did. I recently came across the DVD recording I made on the console and I have edited Craig’s contribution and uploaded it to YouTube. You can link to it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsJE47ocVq4&t=3s or this might work as an embedded feed:

It, together with the plenary sessions and a couple of other panel discussions, was available for a while on the GPEW website, but it has long gone from there.

Since then Craig seems to have reinvented himself as an excellent commentator. I strongly recommend his blog. He seems to post three or four times a week which is a lot to keep up with. He describes himself as “Historian, Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist”.