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...

With IndyRef2 announced, the Unionist press (and that's virtually all of it in Scotland) is going berserk. Three consecutive "reader's letters" in yesterday's Metro say: "...Scotland has a large budget deficit..." Too poor. "I urge all of Scotland who want independence to watch the hilarious 1949 comedy film 'Passport to Pimlico'..." [Pimlico is a tiny area of central London which, in the film, declares independence, but gets squeezed back into servitude.] Too wee. "...The SNP wastes hundreds of millions of taxpayers' cash. Scotland needs professionals, not amateurs." Too stupid. These aren't readers' letters, they're artful journalists' propaganda. Counter it by talking to all your friends, and giving them copies of the Wee Alba Book .

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...

David Davis's speech in the UK Parliament on Tuesday evening blows the lid off the Scottish Government's long-term attempts to hide the Salmond stitch-up. He was speaking under Parliamentary privilege, which the Scottish Parliament doesn't have, so all the evidence is now in the open, and freely discussable and publishable. This means that the mainstream media can now report it fully. Be very leery of any outlet that doesn't! The full text of Davis's speech is here . Don't forget that you first read about the stitch-up on this blog.

Three additional shopping loads: Waitrose, 1st December 2020 Union Jack: eggs, mushrooms (2 items). The word "British": chicken, lamb (2 items). Saltire: none (0 items). The word "Scottish": cream (1 item). No mark: bananas, beer, blueberries, bread, broccoli, cake, cheerios, chocolate, cooking oil, fruit juice, grapes, lentils, milk, pears, pilchards, salad, sardines, shortbread, wine (19 items). So for Waitrose, 4 items out of 24 (17%) were marked with Jacks or as "British", one out of 24 (4%) as "Scottish". It seems clear where their sympathies lie. Morrison's, 9th December 2020 Union Jack: beef mince, cream, potatoes (3 items). The word "British": none (0 items). Saltire: eggs, milk, mushrooms, shortbread (4 items). The word "Scottish": milk (1 item). No mark: apples, beer, bread, cake, cheerios, empire biscuits, fruit juice, grapes, halloumi, jam, onions, red cabbage, salad, stock cubes, swee...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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-...

BBC Scotland undermines the independence movement by playing down public support for the SNP. SNP support is massive. Seven out of every ten Scots who are members of political parties are members of the SNP; and in the 2018 Holyrood election, the SNP won half the votes and took all but half the seats: This makes the SNP virtually as large as all the other parties put together, and leaves them fragmented and scrabbling for scraps from the table. So how much time did Scotland's party of government get allocated in BBC Scotland's recent pre-conference interviews with leaders? That's right - the SNP, huge in terms of membership, came third in inteview time. There's an enormous discrepancy there. And if you thought that, despite the shorter time, the treatment would be even-handed, then think again: Massively more interruptions, and massively more hostile comment from the interviewer, for Ian Blackford than there was for Ruth Davidson. There are those who say that this is ju...

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...

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...

IndyRef2.scot is currently monitoring BBC political output in the expectation of showing bias. In my view, the approach they've taken is unsatisfactory - it's aimed at cheering up the troops and inciting hatred of the BBC, rather than winning over doubters by showing the true facts. A recent case concerned Reporting Scotland's news item about data relating to NHS staffing levels. You can read their criticism of Reporting Scotland here ; below is my suggested rewrite. BBC Reporting Scotland : NHS Staffing Levels : Broadcast on Monday 31st July 2017 This news item relates to a consultation initiated by the Scottish government under the title, "Safe and Effective Staffing in Health and Social Care". The government's aim is to introduce a law requiring health boards to maintain safe staffing levels, thus securing patients' protection and defining providers' responsibilities. This is an aim which it would be difficult to disagree with. The consultation is ...

Astounding stuff on BBC Radio Four News tonight: "Scotland's whisky producers see new opportunity in Brexit," were the words headlining the item in the opening overview of stories. Goody, something new and good is happening! What's the new development, what's changed, what's the new opportunity? After 18 minutes we got the detail: 1. David Mundell, Secretary of State for Scotland, has visited a distillery on Islay. Hardly a new Brexit opportunity. 2. Sarah Smith, our BBC Scotland editor, said that the Scottish whisky industry had seen Brexit as unwelcome, but that now "the mood appears to be changing". However, she didn't present any interview in which anybody said the mood was changing, she didn't play any clips of anybody saying it, in fact she didn't offer any evidence of it at all. She might as well have made it up, and given her lack of evidence, the conclusion that she did is pretty inescapable. 3. A Scotch whisky spokesman said tha...