scotlandisdifferent

Yanis Varoufakis, in 'Talking to My Daughter About the Economy', asks why the Australians, when the British invaders came to pillage their resources, destroy their culture, and murder their people, did not retaliate by invading Britain. Why did they not build an ocean-going fleet, load it with soldiers, arms and ammunition, sail it up the Thames, and lay waste to Sussex, Suffolk and the rest of the Home Counties? The answer, of course, is that the Australians were many marbles short of the technology that would enable them to do this. So that means that it was all right for the Brits to do what they did, doesn't it? As a second example of something similar, I recently had a conversation with a Scottish opponent of independence who had run for the hills after the close shave of the 2014 referendum, emigrated to Maine in the USA, and set up her own business designing and marketing household utensils. Ninety-five percent (or some similar and improbably high figure) of Scottish...

There still seems to be a lot of flak going around to the effect that Salmond was charged with so many offences that some of them must have been true. That doesn't follow, of course, and there are three things to be said about it: It's logical nonsense ( fallacy of the undistributed middle ). It's exactly what the conspirators wanted you to think, which is why they dredged up a dozen or more charges out of thin air. Moorov was a Scottish lawyer who formulated the doctrine that witnessing a similar event to the one on the charge-sheet would count as corroborative evidence. So Moorov, or "more of". The fragility - or rather the emptiness - of "Moorov" in this case has been fully debunked by a very angry and upset Craig Murray here . It's a bit long, but enormously worthwhile, and since it's a podcast you can listen to it in bits. Also, some readers of this blog have said to me that they really don't have time for this, it's only politics, a...

Dear Patrick, I can't see why you sent me this. If it's a response to my claim that there's major corruption at the head of the Scottish establishment (and let me repeat, there is), it's tosh. Or to put it another way, I'm sorry to say that I find myself unpersuaded by the points you make: 1. "Police Scotland are operationally independent of Government and cannot be instructed to investigate". Police Scotland allocated 35 officers over two years, and untold public funds, digging  up dirt on Alex Salmond going back ten years. On the basis of what they found, fourteen charges were brought, and on fourteen of those charges Alex Salmond was acquitted. Police Scotland must be either thick as mince or eminently biddable (or both). 2. "This is one of the fundamental principles of our police system." Well, it would be if it was, but it isn't. 3. "COPFS (the Crown Prosecution Service) cannot instruct the police." I didn't say they could....

Dear Derek   Thanks for getting back to me.   Please be assured that, if there’s any credible evidence of criminal activity in Scotland, this will be examined by Police Scotland.   It may be helpful if I explain that Police Scotland are operationally independent of Government and cannot be instructed to investigate – or not to investigate – any evidence of criminality. This is one of the fundamental principles of our police system.   Similarly, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), who are Scotland's prosecution service, are entirely independent of the Police and cannot instruct, or be instructed, by them in these matters.   As you're aware, there is an ongoing and wide-ranging inquiry in the Scottish Parliament into all aspects of the handling of complaints against Alex Salmond, with which the Scottish Government are collaborating. If the Committee conducting the inquiry, which includes opposition MSPs, were to discover a...

  Sick and tired (From Wings Over Scotland, December 20, 2020 by Rev. Stuart Campbell )  Oh just shut up you useless waste of space. He DOESN’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK. You can bleat at him for a thousand years and he won’t listen. You gave him his election and he has a majority and England has chosen its fate and there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop them dragging us down with them because you’ve wasted the last four years whining about it instead of doing the thing we elected you to do, which is put us in charge of our own future forever. Now either get off your worthless coward’s arse and do the only thing that’s actually in your power – a plebiscitary election – instead of grandstanding around the world stage achieving absolutely sod-all except getting your face in the press again, or get out of our damn way and let someone who can do the job take over. (PS that also includes the job of handling the pandemic, which you’re making a pig’s arse of too, but gosh, doesn’t ever...

A parrot walks into a bar and says to the bartender: Bird: Got any nuts? Bartender (curtly): No. Bird: Got any nuts? Bartender (louder): No! Bird: Got any nuts? Bartender (shouts): NO! And if you ask again I'll nail your beak to the bar! [Slight pause] Bird: Got any nails? Bartender: NO!! Bird: Got any nuts? Not quite sure how this fits in to anything, but it must apply somewhere to the bourach that is Brexit and the stramash that is independence.

Dear Nicola, I'm looking at your St. Andrew's Day appeal for funds, and I have to say I have some issues with it. Let's have a look at them. Your top line says that this is an appeal for the "Holyrood 2021 Election Campaign Fund". So the donations are ring-fenced. But you'll know that £700,000 raised by two earlier ring-fenced appeals didn't appear in the party's financial accounts, leading to suggestions of criminal false reporting. Can you assure me that the new funds will be properly accounted for, and can I believe you if you do? The top line also means that this letter sets out the basis on which I'm to donate. It's not the election manifesto, but it's a precursor of it: it presents your side of the bargain, the offer in return for which I'm to give you money. And it isn't impressive. I'm looking for indy in the first line, since that's the first item in the party's constitution, but indy isn't there. Wh...

Update, 26/09/2020: The joke at the foot of this post, the pseudo-graph from pseudo Kevin Hague, has been picked up and republished by Munguin's Republic , a lovely site with stunning nature pics, a strong but unencumbering commitment to Scottish independence, and jokes. Thanks, Tris, and best wishes in the ongoing struggle. IT'S TIME for a brief look at GERS, the "Government Expenditure and Revenue in Scotland" report. The usual narrative is: • Scotland has a deficit, because it spends more on public services than it raises in taxes. • The UK funds that deficit by giving money to the Scottish Government (the "fiscal transfer"). This means that Scotland sponges on the UK. • An independent Scotland couldn't fund that difference. All nice and clear, then - and all nice and falsely spun. Let's look at those falsehoods. Firstly, deficits are normal: all countries in the world have deficits, bar a handful of tax havens. What matters is whether a country...

No, not that Alex. Alex Prentice, of course, the prosecutor in the Craig Murray contempt-of-court case. Craig is proposing to bring forward individual witnesses who say they couldn't identify any anonymised witnesses from reading Craig's blog. The prosecutor wants to rule this evidence inadmissible, on the grounds that the individuals are too few to make a difference: "...the state of knowledge of a limited number of individuals cannot assist in the central issue [of 'likelihood']...". This is an unfortunate argument for the prosecutor to have used, because it concedes the point that likelihood is measurable: if these individuals are too few, there must be a number that is not too few. Further, Alex Prentice has to decide what that number is, because he's going to need it. He's going to need it to deal with the second implication of his argument, which is his presumption of guilt: these numbers are too few, he implies, to show Craig's innocence. Bu...

Craig Murray is facing trial for publishing information "likely to disclose the identity" of persons involved in the Alex Salmond trial (they have statutory anonymity for life). What a can of worms that word "likely" is! Longman's dictionary defines it as "can reasonably be expected [to happen]". Reasonably, that's the word. Craig wants to bring in two pieces of evidence: first, evidence from people who read the mainstream-media accounts of the trial, and were able to tell from those accounts who the anonymised persons were; and second, parallel evidence from people who read Craig's blog and were not able to tell who the anonymised persons were. The prosecutor has asked the Court to disallow these two sets of evidence, but the reasons he gives don't meet the point. Moreover it seems clear that he's intentionally missed the point, so that he can muddy the waters. He can't be so thick as to have merely got it wrong. Likelihood - as ...

As immediate fall-out from the Alex Salmond trial stitch-up, the commentator Craig Murray is being prosecuted for saying that the Alex Salmond trial was a stitch-up. The grounds for the prosecution are that, by saying that the Alex Salmond trial was a stitch-up, he committed contempt of court. Contempt-of-court cases are heard not by a jury, but only by judges, and carry a possible sentence of two years in prison. The first step is a procedural hearing, scheduled for Wednesday 10th June at 10:00 a.m. This hearing will be on line, and therefore open to anybody with an internet connection. But you need to apply for access. Please do so - it's important that as many people as possible know what was actually said in court, because the mainstream media and the judiciary will try to stamp on anything they see as threatening, and what Craig Murray has to say undoubtedly fits that bill. You can apply for access by emailing judicialcomms@scotcourts.gov.uk . And please circulate this to fri...

My last post has been met with incredulous hostility by some commentators, hostile incredulity by others (all in personal communications), so I need to flesh it out a bit. To provide continuity with the previous post, I thought of heading this one "Where it's really at, asshole", but since the skeptics were my friends I've forborne to do this. The first point in my previous post - that Nicola Sturgeon would either commit or not commit to an indyref this year - was not controversial (how could it be? - it covered all possibilities). In the event, NS's response contained many fine words and high aspirations, but you should always listen to the small print. What she actually said was, " it is still my hope [that we can get an indyref in 2020]". That doesn't sound like commitment to me. My second point - that SNP policy is based on the belief that indyref without a Section 30 order would create too much hatred and division to be sustainable - attracted ...

Craig Murray's petition to bring in OSCE observers for the next Scottish referendum (which I hope you've all signed - DO IT NOW!) has resurrected the doubts about postal votes in 2014. These doubts solidify, for some people, into the claim that the 2014 referendum was rigged by the UK Government packing the postal vote with "No" ballots, as evidenced by the extraordinarily high postal turnout. This is a consoling narrative for those indy supporters who were gutted by the massive "No" wrecking-ball that crawled out of the woodwork on September 18th to steal the referendum (which many Yessers feel in their bones was in truth a clear victory for Yes) and demolish their dreams. So we need to look at that claim again now. The claim The detailed account of this rigging (the "Dunoon Report") has gained some traction among the Indy community. It was authored by Andy Anderson, Education Officer of the Dunoon Unit of the Democratic Socialist foundation, and...

According to a recent poll, if achieving Brexit meant that Scotland left the UK, then 63percent of Conservative Party members would consider that a price worth paying. This is of course good news for independence. The Unionist narrative for the last decade has consistently been that Scotland lives off England's £14bn annual subsidy, a fiction that GERS was designed to support. In that case, you might ask, why does the UK not just get rid of the scroungers and used the saved cash to paint another slogan on a bus? The reason is in The Answer That Dare Not Speak Its Name: that Scotland in fact contributes so much to the UK economy in natural resources and human skills that, without it, the UK Battleship Galactica would be holed below the waterline and bound for the deep glug-glug. A call to kick out the scrounging Jocks exposes this Unionist hypocrisy, and leaves Unionists with no message. Wee Ginger Dug puts this far more forcefully than I can, so I give you his words: What British n...

Last Sunday, on the day after the AUOB march in Glasgow, the Herald gathered and published comments by three SNP politicians about the conduct of the independence debate. This was a remarkably unprincipled piece of journalism. A four-page front spread, it did two things: it crowded out any mention in that day's Herald of the joyous and sensationally good-natured 100,000-strong march, and it manipulated the three politicans' comments into a narrative where Yes-supporters were portrayed as vigorous abusers of their own side. It's also thrown commentators on Wings Over Scotland (the seriously outspoken pro-independence blog, which Unionists hate and fear in equal measure) into a fury. Fantastic smack in the eye for indy! Herald's job done! However, under the fury with and the contempt for the various participants, there's a serious point which indy-supporters need to consider, namely that our goal is to win the coming referendum. It's true that our goal is indepe...

It's disappointing, for three reasons, to see that the EU has extended the Brexit deadline to October 31st. The three reasons are: It's a compromise between those EU leaders who called for an extension of a year, and those who called for no extension. What do you do when you have opposing extreme viewpoints? You agree at a half-way point. However, that doesn't deal with the underlying issues, which are that one side thinks the UK can get its act together if given time (Donald Tusk), and that the other side thinks that EU should cut its losses and terminate the Brexit process in short order (Emmanuel Macron). The 'half-way' compromise doesn't settle that point (it doesn't even come near to acknowledging it), and the underlying issue bubbles on, underlyingly. The second reason it's disappointing is that the EU, in my view, has misjudged the UK's ability to come to a consensus. The UK - and that means England - doesn't do consensus: it's the...

Nice wee comment from Dr Jim on Wings over Scotland recently, about Scottish cultural practices: Damn Scots insisting on being Scottish, they’ll be wanting to speak their own language next, dear God what’ll happen if they decide to drive on the wrong side of the road or do *all* their counting in centimetres Yoon wummin/manny goes into a shop and says can I have 3LBS of Ayrshire potatoes please, the assistant says *It’s aw Kilos noo* Yoon wummin/manny says OK 3LBS of Kilos then It’s the future Trouble is, I can't find this comment on the WoS website. I think it was time-stamped as 12:56pm on 1 March 2019, but there's no post of that date in the WoS archives. But thanks to Dr Jim all the same. It's wrong to think that politicians are more hated now than they've ever been. Viscount Castlereagh was probably the world's leading politician in the first 20 years of the nineteenth century, masterminding the recovery from the Napoleonic Wars, re-establishing the old elite a...

Response from BBC Scotland: "We couldn't be arsed. Now go away." And this from an outfit that is still recovering from the public relations disaster of messing with Wings Over Scotland's YouTube channel! Oh, well. Mr Ian Small Head of Public Policy BBC Scotland 40 Pacific Quay GLASGOW G51 1AD Dear Mr Small, I'm offended by the enclosed response that I've received from the Editor of "Reporting Scotland", and I think you should be concerned about it too. It's a public relations disaster: she hasn't been sent half the information (two charts), she refuses to read the other half (online supporting data), she makes a cheap jibe at my using the wrong name for the UK-wide broadcaster, and she ignores the main question (which was "Please explain your policy"). In an article in The Scotsman on 20th August, you wrote, "We want to engage, constructively, in dialogue with those who question our journalism or are suspicious of our decision-...