scotlandisdifferent

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...

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...

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...

Last Sunday, on the day after the AUOB march in Glasgow, the Herald gathered and published comments by three SNP politicians about the conduct of the independence debate. This was a remarkably unprincipled piece of journalism. A four-page front spread, it did two things: it crowded out any mention in that day's Herald of the joyous and sensationally good-natured 100,000-strong march, and it manipulated the three politicans' comments into a narrative where Yes-supporters were portrayed as vigorous abusers of their own side. It's also thrown commentators on Wings Over Scotland (the seriously outspoken pro-independence blog, which Unionists hate and fear in equal measure) into a fury. Fantastic smack in the eye for indy! Herald's job done! However, under the fury with and the contempt for the various participants, there's a serious point which indy-supporters need to consider, namely that our goal is to win the coming referendum. It's true that our goal is indepe...

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...