scotlandisdifferent

It's disappointing, for three reasons, to see that the EU has extended the Brexit deadline to October 31st. The three reasons are: It's a compromise between those EU leaders who called for an extension of a year, and those who called for no extension. What do you do when you have opposing extreme viewpoints? You agree at a half-way point. However, that doesn't deal with the underlying issues, which are that one side thinks the UK can get its act together if given time (Donald Tusk), and that the other side thinks that EU should cut its losses and terminate the Brexit process in short order (Emmanuel Macron). The 'half-way' compromise doesn't settle that point (it doesn't even come near to acknowledging it), and the underlying issue bubbles on, underlyingly. The second reason it's disappointing is that the EU, in my view, has misjudged the UK's ability to come to a consensus. The UK - and that means England - doesn't do consensus: it's the...

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 The interviewers' questions are pedestrian, poorly researched, and out of date with any current realities - pretty much the same as the UK government's handling of the Brexit negotiations, really - but IB's responses are pithy,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!

Nice wee comment from Dr Jim on Wings over Scotland recently, about Scottish cultural practices: Damn Scots insisting on being Scottish, they’ll be wanting to speak their own language next, dear God what’ll happen if they decide to drive on the wrong side of the road or do *all* their counting in centimetres Yoon wummin/manny goes into a shop and says can I have 3LBS of Ayrshire potatoes please, the assistant says *It’s aw Kilos noo* Yoon wummin/manny says OK 3LBS of Kilos then It’s the future Trouble is, I can't find this comment on the WoS website. I think it was time-stamped as 12:56pm on 1 March 2019, but there's no post of that date in the WoS archives. But thanks to Dr Jim all the same. It's wrong to think that politicians are more hated now than they've ever been. Viscount Castlereagh was probably the world's leading politician in the first 20 years of the nineteenth century, masterminding the recovery from the Napoleonic Wars, re-establishing the old elite a...

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...

Liked this response of Nicola Sturgeon to an awkward moment. And her self-deprecatory comment about a lot of people wanting to do the same shows a level of self-awareness and public engagement that not many politicians have. Good on the girl. BBC video clip copied, tealeafed and duplicated from Munguin's New Republic . Well done, Munguin!

Overheard a bloke in the pub this evening telling his girl that lower Glasgow life expectancy - 15 years less than the UK average - was traceable from grandparents through parents to children. I don't know whether he was merely quoting this analysis, or actively wanting to promote it, and to my shame I bottled out of asking him, but if it's being used as an explanation of Scottish disadvantage then it's a pernicious interpretation. It means that lower life expectancy is genetic; it's simply part of being Scottish. Scots come from lousy stock, there's nothing they can do about it, and they obviously can't run a country with these short life-spans hanging over them. "Too poor, too wee, too stupid and too short-lived." The study he was referring to seems to be this one . Its key sentence is: Conclusions: Males and females in most of the larger ethnic minority groups in Scotland have longer life expectancies than the majority White Scottish population. Th...