scotlandisdifferent

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...

We linguists very much like the item immediately below because it's so beautifully put together, with spelling and wit and everything. So as a wee linguist myself, I've pinched and posted it here. It comes from Wee Ginger Dug on 2nd November, second comment . Lucky Molly, with her clear-headed Mum!   Molly's Mum (@SNPsoosie) says: November 2, 2020 at 6:53 pm Boris Johnson has completely lost control of the pandemic in Englandshire now, if he ever had it before. Asked in the Commons what the plan was for coming out of the new lockdown, he said Englandshire would be coming out of lockdown, regardless of whatever happens, on December 2nd, for that is the date he hath spoken. He added that the R is currently above one, only a teeny weeny scientific bit, and hopefully, having waved some of Dominic’s entrails about, it will come down a eeny spleeny bit to just under one, but even if it doesn’t then the lockdown will endeth regardleth. All haileth Borith for he is the slayer of th...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

What is going to happen with the indy ref? And why did Theresa May call the 2017 general election? Theresa May didn't call the 2017 general election to strengthen her majority - she already had a working majority of 17 seats. And she didn't call it to weaken Labour - Labour was weak enough. In fact, that was the problem. Labour's job - from the Conservative perspective - was to contain the SNP in Scotland, and Labour wasn't doing that. But Scottish independence on the back of Brexit would be a disaster for the Conservatives, since the loss of Scottish resources could lead to the annihilation of the neo-liberal dream. So they needed to get into Scotland, win the seats that Labour wasn't defending, demolish the SNP, and squash the independence movement for ever. They threw at it money and data: data to identify target voters, and money to inundate them with leaflets. And they nearly succeeded: the SNP lost more than one-third of its seats (21 out of 56), its vote-shar...

Had to get this up as soon as possible - stunning performance by Ian Blackford. (Ignore the wrong video for the first 20secs - IB can still be heard as voice-over.) The interviewers' questions are pedestrian, poorly researched, and out of date with any current realities - pretty much the same as the UK government's handling of the Brexit negotiations, really - but IB's responses are pithy, informative and challenging. Share widely. Do it now!

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 ...

Wow, this needed to be said, and here it is! This is a statement on the Catalonian referendum issued on 25th October 2017 by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights. I show the link above, but I quote the statement in full anyway at the foot of this post. The statement makes four main points, exposing the logical fudges used by those who support the Spanish government. These points are also highly pertinent to the Scottish situation, and we need to think of ways of addressing them. The four main points are: The right of self-determination belongs to the people, not the state, and the state cannot take it away. The right to self-determination overrides the principle of territorial integrity. Using force, making a referendum illegal, and annulling autonomy violate international covenants on civil and political rights. Dialogue and negotiation are the way forward. The constitutional settlement for Scotland violates the first of these four points: we can...

Craig Murray says it all, doesn't he?: "I do not recognise Brexit Britain as the country in which I was born and raised. The UK has become a nasty and mean-spirited place, and the sooner it is broken up the better." (See context).