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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

RECENT CONVERSATIONS and internet posts have left me with the feeling that the independence argument is in fact won, and the ice-sheet of No that's been stifling the hopes of younger generations is beginning to crack and break up. First up is the dog-walker, whom I reported on earlier , who had a visceral hatred of nationalists because of what they were doing to the country he loved. Leaving aside the question of why loving one's country isn't nationalism, this man is trapped in circular, content-free thinking: - I love my country. - How do we know you love your country? - Because I want it to stay in the UK. That's where it belongs. - How do you know it belongs there? - Because it does. And I love my country. This isn't political or social thinking, this is emotional masturbation. And the problem for these people at the high end of the No scale is that, when faced with facts or concrete thinking, they have nowhere to go: they can only retreat into vitriol. There...

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.