scotlandisdifferent

There has been discussion in the blogosphere, and some anger, at the supermarkets' policy of labelling as "British" anything that could conceivably be so called. There are suggestions that this is a deliberate ploy to undermine the independence movement. So, being a good boy who does what he's told, I reacted with anger when I saw the rows of British flags ("flegs" in England) on produce on the supermarket shelves. Then I stopped feeling angry, and wondered whether there really were that many Butchers' Aprons on view. Time to gather some data, it seemed. Fortunately that was quite easy. I do an online shop roughly weekly, using different supermarkets, so when the order comes in I can simply sit it on the kitchen table and count the flegs. This of course means that the data is dependent on what I've happened to buy that week, and that in turn is skewed by my feelings about flegs anyway. ("Do I feel like paying double the price for eggs that don...

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...

That title reminds me of a linguistic joke, so let's get that over with: New student at Harvard, seeing a clearly established student whom he can ask for information: "Say, is this where the library's at? Established student (snootily): "This is Harvard. We don't end sentences with a preposition." New student: "Oh, I'll rephrase my question. Is this where the library's at, asshole?" To the point, now. It's been a long time since the Scottish independence movement has been anything other than murky, unpredictable, unbelievably baffling or just plain hopeless. However, things are beginning to turn the corner, with some upcoming dramatic events:- This coming Wednesday, it is said, Nicola Sturgeon will set out her response to BJ's refusal of the request for a Section 30 order. This either will or will not contain a commitment to an indy referendum this year. It's difficult to see how it will plausibly do that. But if it doesn...

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...

Reblogged from Wings Over Scotland , 8th May 2019. Mac says: Just had my account banned at the Guardian for this posting… I am wondering whats wrong with it. Any clues? My country has sucked the good years from my bones and rewarded me with a brittle poverty in retirement. I paid for bishops and lords I didn’t elect and illegal wars that I didn’t support. I fired expensive missiles at foreign families in a rich man’s oil war. I paid for duck moats for dick wads to control me, and bonuses for bankers to break the fabric of our financial system. I bailed banks that were resold at a loss to me. I watched our political system lord over decades of financial and cultural incompetence. A system not fit for the purposes and needs of a modern world, hampered by ancient tradition, debilitated by class stricture and structure. A system choked by nationalistic pomp and circumstance and run by an ossified establishment. It’s a heavy burden for an ordinary man. As I struggled to secure a roof and ed...

Had an interesting conversation a couple of days ago with an undecided voter. He was behind the counter when I went in to get my monthly top-up of gut-rot spicy proteins, in the shop that his father, a Muslim from Pakistan, set up twenty or thirty years ago, with a strong unique selling proposition that has turned it into a Glasgow landmark. Spotting the SNP badge that's welded to my left shoulder, he said, "Can I ask you about independence?" "Absolutely! In fact, I can overwhelm you with opinionated bludgeoning before you've even got to your first pause!" I said. Or rather, thought. I didn't say that. But I gave a sort of indication. "Breaking up a country is a really serious thing to do," he said. "Heard that one before," I suggested, disappointed that he'd swallowed whole the toxic Yoon slogan of "breaking up the country". "We've been in the UK now for three hundred years," he went on, "and it's...

This claim turned up in comments on The National yesterday, from John Stuart Wilson. Since it's based on data, it needs to be taken seriously: Our largest on-shore private sector employer is the finance industry. It accounts for, directly and indirectly, 1 in 12 jobs. It doesn't want to be located in a foreign country from 90% of its customers. (Ask yourself: how many local authorities and SMEs currently send their monthly pension scheme payments to Belgium to have them managed there?) And it will not accept the loss of a LOLR [lender of last resort] backstop. So independence will cause major job losses in Scotland, as these firms relocate to the rUK. However, there are a few points in the above claim which are not clear: - the Scottish finance industry employs 160,000 people, out of a labour force of 2.6m. This is 1 in 16. Where does the writer get his figure of 1 in 12 from? - the UK-wide finance industry employs about 2m people, out of a labour force of 32m. So the Scottish...