scotlandisdifferent

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...

Remembrance Sunday is a poignant time for my family - my wife's side of the family, that is - because her grandmother lost her only son - my wife's putative uncle - in the First World War, and never recovered from the shock. Owen Griffiths was killed early in the War, and is named on the memorial at Mons. He had three sisters - one of whom was of course my wife's mother - who went on to solid, middle-class careers in teaching and healthcare. But it was the loss of the boy that did for my wife's grandmother. Every year my wife's sister puts on display the family photograph of Owen Griffiths, in military uniform. This is how she described the effect of his loss on her grandmother and her mother: "When she [our grandmother] was dying she just said, according to our mother, I never should have let him go, he was much too young. And she never got over the fact that her only son had died, aged 21, in the First World War. And our mother, who was sixteen at the t...

The memory-failing spouse and I attended a dementia-friendly performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute , by Scottish Opera, a few days ago. It was a matinee, sparsely attended, disappointing no doubt for the singers, but for the audience it meant that there was no audience-intrusion to distract us from the top-notch performance, and the unpretentious simplicity of the occasion was overwhelming. Readers will remember that there are three strands to this opera - the heroic couple Tamino and Pamina, who undergo ordeals, and summon up their courage by playing a magic flute; the nasty flim-flammerie of the Queen Night, whose aim is to plunge all other characters into such despair that they kill themselves; and the earthy clowns Papageno and Papagena, who just want to shack up together and have a million kids. It's all underpinned by a fourth strand in the person of the sorcerer Sarastro, who runs what can only be called a think-tank. This is an institution that promotes the same equal...

If you think this post is going to be a rant about unredeemable bigotry among those that fought under the butcher's apron, think again. We need to be more nuanced than that. My wife and I had an encounter with a non-indy person after the march, two Saturdays ago, as we were coming out of the Mitchell Library (ah, the arcane leisure pursuits of the Byres Road glitterati!). He'd been leaning on the balustrade by the kerb opposite the outside door, smoking, and walked across the pavement to speak to us, a bearded and tidily turned-out man in his twenties. "See this march," he said, making eye contact. No doubt he'd noticed the SNP badge throbbing yellow on my lapel. "Ah don't haud wi' a' that." We raised an eyebrow. "See me, Ah'm a soldier," he said. "Ah wiz sent by Blair and Bush to Iraq, and when I came back, there was no help of any kind for me. Naethin, not from the British Government nor from the Scottish Government. So t...

Dear Seymour, You won't know this, because you decamped to Europe after the Brexit vote, but between the Byres Road and our house, in Glasgow's West End where you and your wife courted by dreeping aff back-court walls, there has now opened a CHURROS BAR to speed the weary WestEnder on his homeward walk from the boozerie. The prices are extortionate! Ten fried doughnut sticks (two portions, five sticks each), wee pot of chocolate sauce, plain cardboard-box kerry-oot ("Sorry, guys, we're closed for eatin' in, it's nearly ten o'clock") - the price for this is NINE PRE-BREXIT SMACKERS, would you believe!? That's nine Maybot vouchers as we speak, or fifty-seven Maybot vouchers by the time we get to next week, and three thousand two hundred and fifty-six point three Maybot vouchers by the time we leave the European Union. Not a problem for us, because we're old and rich - one of us is nearly in the grave, and as for the other one, I'm not always ...

Let's make no bones about quoting and requoting these words of Wee Ginger Dug : The lesson from Catalonia is that independence is about the big issues, the big story. It’s about justice and democracy. It’s about representation and political accountability. It’s about what kind of society we want to live in. It’s about fairness, equality, and giving every citizen an equal stake in the country. These are the stories we need to tell in Scotland if we are to achieve our own dream of an independent country. Tweet and retweet far and wide.

Scotland is different because Scottish people look to live in a more equal and caring society than the one being created by the UK government. That's why I'll be putting the case for voting "Yes" on 18th September.