In reference to this article we ran on Saturday, here’s (courtesy of several alert viewers) a timely piece from this week’s Scottish Catholic Observer.
Click the image to read it at full size.
I make videos. The written word is not my weapon of choice. But “Better Together” have left me with no alternative. Let me explain.
I’m a recently-retired video producer. Another recently-retired video producer (aka ‘the wife’) and I decided to make a series of films about how the grassroots of the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns were bringing their respective messages to the people of Scotland.
We kicked off by covering Yes Garnock Valley and West Kilbride’s public meeting in Kilbirnie. We contacted the local organisers who were very happy to have us come along, even providing us with a private side room where we could get ‘sound bites’ from the speakers, Dennis Canavan, Shona McAlpine and Alex Bell. Everybody was most welcoming, and frankly they couldn’t have been more helpful.
We’ve released the speeches and the Q&A in their entirety, warts and all, so that anybody interested can listen to the arguments and make up their own mind.
Our next foray into citizen video journalism was to have been the Better Together East Ayrshire launch event on November 1st at the Burns Monument Centre in Kilmarnock. That was where things started to go pear-shaped.
When you’re a full time carer, managing to get out for an hour or so to the local branch of Morrisons to get the weekly shopping counts as ‘quality me time’. It allows me to stock up on favourite munchies and comfort food. I like a wee slice of Kirriemuir gingerbread, slathered with butter. The other half enjoys a thick slab of it in a bowl, covered in Devon custard with a dollop of double cream. Bugger the cholesterol.
But the other day there was none in the usual aisle, just a pile of Christmas cakes.
I asked a guy stocking shelves where they’d moved it to. He apologised, and told me there wasn’t any in stock. All the ordering is done by Head Office down in England he said, and they’d sent instructions that no more would be ordered until the New Year in order to make space for piles of Christmas cake. In October.
Who eats Christmas cake in October anyway?
“There’ll be nae books or pencils fur Our Lady’s High School if the SNP gets in here.”
I heard those words first-hand at a door in Motherwell some years ago. But let me give you some context first. Lots of people reading this in parts of Scotland will have no idea about what I’m about to describe here so I’d better establish my credentials and provide some background.
We’re really, really sorry about that headline, on several levels.
But wait until you see what this one’s about.
Oh, I was irritating when I was 15.
On our way to school, my friends would stop at Ian’s Newsagents and scatter their pocket money on the counter to work out how many fizzy cola bottles and packets of Space Raiders they could get. I’d do the same, but mine would have a copy of The New Statesman thrown in too.
Hello, I’m Andrew. Rather than follow my desires and mingle with the true believers at the Yes Scotland meeting in Penicuik last night, I decided to expand my horizons and instead attended the launch of Better Together Musselburgh at the Brunton Hall.
My first surprise was to discover that the meeting was being chaired by a neighbour of mine. I sloped off to the back of the hall to keep a low profile.
If there’s one phrase that has long bedevilled the Liberal party and its descendants, it’s ‘home rule’. What are we supposed to understand by it? And perhaps more to the point, what do modern Lib Dems understand by it?
If you go back in Liberal history to the time of the great William Gladstone, ‘home rule’ meant something. It meant the principle of self-governance for Ireland, with certain powers reserved to Westminster.
Gladstone’s idea of home rule was very similar to what we now call Devo Max. And when Gladstone stood up for this principle and fought to drive it through parliament, he was attacked in terms we recognise only too well today.
Dear Margaret,
I have quite the conundrum. I wonder if you could help me with it.
My Scots-born best friend moved to Beijing in 2005. She previously spent a year studying in Canada, but when she came back I found no traces of latent Canadianism.
Over the last few years she has learned to speak Mandarin quite competently. She also works for the EU. That could be another nail in her coffin, right?
For those of you who – inexplicably and frankly rather hurtfully – STILL don’t follow us on Twitter and may therefore not have heard the news yet on your gramophones, this evening’s Scotland Tonight promises to be a real treat.
Not so much for the fact that they’ll be referencing our poll, but because they’ll be doing so as the jumping-off point for a discussion between Dennis Canavan (chairman of Yes Scotland) and Ian Davidson MP, on the subject “Are undecided voters in the independence referendum more socialist, more republican, & more green?”, which should be like watching Rab C Nesbitt give David Bowie fashion tips.
We’re going to be in a frenzy of activity today writing posts for tomorrow, when we’ll be releasing the data from our second Scottish opinion poll. So things will be a little quiet until then – we suggest taking a few minutes to have a scroll down the page and catch up with anything you might have missed during the week.
First, though, if you didn’t catch The World At One on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, you might want to have a listen to this short interview it conducted with the First Minister.
Anyone tuned into the state broadcaster’s TV or radio current-affairs output couldn’t have failed to pick up the theme – programme after programme invited Mr Salmond on, and then demanded he credit the UK government for saving the Grangemouth petrochemical plant from closure, despite its involvement having been minimal.
(Curiously, non-BBC sources didn’t press the same angle.)
We were pleased to note that the FM adopted the more combative style he’s deployed with interviewers recently (also seen on last Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show), slapping down Edward Stourton in a polite but stinging manner we suspect might be getting increasing amounts of use over the next few months.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
